About This Show

An evening of gaiety, mirth and merriment. A good old lineup. Jonah Nigh hosts, the bar is open. Queer All Year 🌈

 

Gladys: Coming Home

Disgraced and rejected by her family as abnormally not girl enough, Gladys Bentley made her way to Harlem at 16. Hot out the box, Langston Hughes described her as, “A perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.” Gladys Bentley was a force to be reckoned with onstage. Offstage her stardom did not shield her from discrimination and persecution. She put her body and safety on the line to live an authentic life of black female masculinity, also known as a  Bulldagger lesbian. Condemnation led her to eventually subject herself to the medical establishment to fix her into becoming “A woman again,” or was that a PR stunt?

Chicava Biography

Chicava is the Creative Director of DuYe Moves, a community arts initiative that offers free dance, wellness and live arts programming as an Organization in Residence on Governors Island. 

Chicava holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College, an Associates in Fashion Design from Parsons and is a proud HBCU graduate with a Bachelor’s in Fashion Marketing from Hampton University.

Lauren Marissa Smith – Chicava’s Director’s Biography

Lauren Marissa Smith is a multidisciplinary director and writer, focused on creating honest, raw, and humorous storytelling that amplifies the interior lives of those on the margins, particularly Black women and girls. Her work explores themes of love, relationships, intimacy, connection, family, and the impact of incarceration, classism, and violence on oppressed communities.

ocean.bound is one vignette in a longer work, untitled vibe (or griefsweet or RIVRROAD).It is a modular show— a series of vignettes—using dance (social dance, martial arts, gestural storytelling), projection, audio design, vocalization and text.

untitled vibe is grounded in crowning in october, or how to change shape while remembering your name, a medicine walk through NYC following waterways (2020-2024), and is instigated by the life and death of my best friend and first dance partner, Javier “Common Knowledge” Santos (and the crumbling American empire, lol).

It is an expression of love grief joy and humor. Sometimes confusion and rage. Hope. Faith. (?!?)

Alicia Raquel Morales is a genderqueer boricua movement artist and cultural organizer living between Brooklyn and Borinken.

Alicia grew up building altars, listening to and making up stories that straddle “real” and unseen worlds, and watching ritual work. They are a child of street dance whose work has been described as “sexy, nerdy and spiritual”

 

 
Big Feelings Crash Things

This duet explores how dance, drag, and dramedy relate to how we navigate the world as queer women. We use our drag king personas, Ryder Steel and The Smokeshow, to reckon with our experiences of toxic masculinity, societal expectations, and the patriarchal system.
Pop culture references, textile sculptures, glam 80s outfits, and homoeroticism all contribute to the storyline, in which two “toxic” men find their way to each other and learn the errors of their ways. Through the absurd we disrupt expectations and uncover the sincere.

Emily LaRochelle and Sarazina Stein are NYC-based dancers and performance artists who met at Bates Dance Festival in 2017 and have been collaborating since. They’ve performed their work at PSNY, Triskelion, Theater for the New City, Wild Project, TADA, HONK!, and in community gardens. Recently, they performed and assistant-choreographed a puppet-theater work at LaMaMa by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater. They’ve performed with Žilvinas Jonušas, Kay Turner, Mindy Toro, and Kathleen Clark and produced a show at Spoke the Hub. They’re in the samba reggae-style drumline, Fogo Azul with whom they’ve performed, including for David Byrne, Spike Lee, and Gloria Steinem.

 

 
“I think about sex when I pray” is a movement-based performance born from what’s it’s like to practice Islam in this moment. It’s about jihad, as an inherently queer pursuit. Running with queerness as a struggle inclusive of questions around expression, gender, and sexuality, this piece pushes ‘queerness’ far beyond anything ‘LGBT’ into something every diasporic Muslim deals with by virtue of living in minority, hypervisibility, and hypersensibility. Queer Jihad begs us to liberate ourselves from US immigration policies, spiritual compromises with billionaires, and the colonization of the West and the Arabization of Islam.

May liberating ourselves help us to liberate each other from the violence of a greedy world hellbent on materialism and an obsession with this body. Ameen.

3issa, or Isa, only speaks English! So, rather than privilege a colonizer’s tongue, he speaks with his body. Find him on Instagram here.