Highlights: Queer Conscience Festival May 3-9, 2010 (NYC)

Queer Conscience Festival May 3-9, 2010
Center for Performance Research
361 Manhattan Avenue, Unit 1
Brooklyn, NY 11211

After serving as the Festival Director for the 2009 HOT! Festival, a six week, multi-site festival of queer performance and culture, Earl Dax presents Queer Conscience. Part of the “New Voices in Performance” series at the Center for Performance Research (CPR) in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Queer Conscience includes performance, discussions, screenings and other special events that feature artists, activists, and academics whose experiments in queer identity serve as springboards to broader social consciousness. Rejecting the recent commodification of LGBT lifestyles, Queer Conscience looks back to early lesbian and gay activists whose political analysis identified linked sources of oppression, even as it seeks to showcase contemporary cultural productions, activism, and academic writing that offer the promise of queering the future. Indeed, the utopian vision of Queer Conscience rests on creative forms of resistance to oppression and hegemony — forms of resistance that take hold in the imagination and are made concrete in our art, theory, and activism. But rather than seeking a narrow definition, Queer Conscience presents itself as a question, a provocation, a catalyst for dialogue, reflection, analysis, strategizing and action around a host of issues that are of vital importance, not only to LGBT and Queer communities, but to society at large. By queering conventional notions of “conscience” based in religious dogma, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, Queer Conscience anticipates, suggests and seeks to instigate a utopian future.

NEW NORMAL
an installation/presentation/performance by Jeff Hnilicka

Monday, May 3
8:00 pm
Center for Performance Research
Suggested donation $5 – $10

Sick of waiting for the economy to get “better” or “back to normal”? Join cultural worker Jeff Hnilicka to explore emerging models of production. His Luddite presentation will look at these systems’ sustainability and their impact within communities. Audiences contribute to an aggregating collection of histories, dreams, and schemes that will travel this spring with Hnilicka to his projects in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Portland OR, and many points in between.
Jeff Hnilicka is Co-Founder of FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics).

Dirty Dirty Nigga:
Songs of Rebellion Rebirth and Resistance

Tuessday, May 4
8:00 pm
Center for Performance Research
Tickets $10

Queer Conscience is pleased to present performance artist, singer, pianist, composer and provocateur M. Lamar’s new song cycle Dirty Dirty Nigga: Songs of Rebellion Rebirth and Resistance. An hour long thearical song cycle, Dirty Dirty… draws from queer and black histories and art forms to create landscapes of longing and states of radical defiance. Musically Lamar draws on blues and gospel traditions merging them with his rich counter tenor and new classical music leanings to create a singular musical voice and perfomative experience. Projections of image and text add to and echo many of the themes explored in the music.

WRITTEN WITH THE BODY
feat. Kyle Abraham, Miguel Gutierrez
and Richard and Mikki

Thursday, May 6
8:00 pm
Center for Performance Research
Tickets $10

Dancer/choreograhpers Kyle Abraham and Miguel Gutierrez present new solo work on a shared bill with Richard and Mikki, a pair of dancers known more for their work in clubs like Mr. Black and Judy.

Gutierrez’s “Heaven What Have I Done” features costuming by Machine Dazzle.

Description: “I don’t really have anything to say. The performance was self-important and I don’t understand it. Maybe I’m stupid or something but I really don’t know. It looks like everything else I see right now. Sitting in a circle around the performers, them doing things where they are pretending like they don’t know how to dance, some dumb interaction with the audience. It’s the thing to do right now and it’s really uninteresting to me. Really, you haven’t seen performances like this before?” – B. L.