Thank you to everyone for an amazing show in Boston! I really can’t describe what it felt like to perform again with these amazing folks and celebrate 10 years and many miles on the road together. We were also joined incredible Femme Show first timers Neon Calypso and Kathleen Delaney and some fave artists who are more recent additions.

I am thinking a lot about sustainability and what it will take to keep this show going. We’ve moved from a collective-ish model in the early years to really being a one-woman headed organization where almost all of the behind-the-scenes work is done by yours truly. After a weekend celebrating and looking back, I am thinking about what a more community-centered show looks like and wondering if there is energy out there for other folks to get involved and what that might look like.

The Femme Show has received little institutional support or recognition – not from local arts organizations, not from queer organizations. But this weekend, as I came very close to crying during bows while Alicia talked about what it means to create anti-oppressive queer community space, I thought about how important community recognition is. I feel recognized and loved by community here in a way that I haven’t always been able to connect with. It’s powerful, and humbling, and it has refueled me to keep doing this. Maybe not for 10 more years, but who knows?

Friday June 2 and Saturday June 3
7:15 Box Office/Doors, 8:00 PM show
$15 students, seniors, Boston Dance Alliance Members
$20 general admission
http://aqueertimeandplace.bpt.me/
Original dance/theatre from Queer Choreographers Maggie Cee, Grant Jacoby, and J Michael Winward.

Over the past few years producing The Femme Show and GenreQueer, I let my own projects (besides SPPSSM) fall to the wayside. In 2014 I realized that if I was going to continue the Femme Show, I needed to get back to centering one of the reasons I started the show in the first place: My own art.

Since then, I’ve gone back to therapy, performed solo at BarWotever at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London, performed in Peter DiMuro’s Gumdrops and the Funny Uncle, applied for a grant I didn’t get that helped me focus my project, and found a director to collaborate with. The end result will eventually be a full-length solo show exploring how femmes found and connected to butch/femme community in the 1940’s and 50’s.

Butch/femme or fem bar culture was an important precursor to the gay liberation movement that followed. By being visibly queer and taking up public space, femmes and butches alike created space for same-sex loving women to find and support one another in the face of virulent homophobia from the outside world.  “Starting From Femme” imagines and explores the queer past and passions between people who loved,  fought, and created space to be themselves out of sheer necessity and determination. “A Queer Time and Place” features a 20-minute excerpt from the piece. You can be part of the first audiences to see this work! 

More info:
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A Queer Time and Place showcases original work by choreographers Maggie Cee, Grant Jacoby, and J Michael Winward. The three artists draw inspiration from sources including pop culture, history, and queer theory. Audiences will be moved, provoked and entertained by the unique blend of contemporary and modern dance, physical theater, and original monologues. Guest artists include power//PLAY, the collaborative partnership of Claire Johannes and Jordan Jamil Ahmed. With a variety of perspectives represented, A Queer Time and Place celebrates the theater as a space of inclusion. The Dance Complex will provide a fitting venue: as the mission statement reads from its window at 536 Mass Ave, “We welcome you whatever the dance you bring…There are no others here.”