Hey, do you live in New York City? Are you free on Friday night? Yeah, this Friday. August 2nd. I’m asking because there’s this really neat thing happening, I think you should go.
Cultural Project’s annual Women Center Stage Festival celebrates female and genderqueer poetry, theatre, dance, music and various other creative arts. This Friday night you’ll be able to attend a very special evening of performance courtesy of poet, performance artist and playwright Staceyann Chin and queer folk-pop duo Anna/Kate.
Staceyann Chin will kick of the event with a work in progress reading of scenes from her new play, “Motherfucker”, followed by a conversation with the audience. Your night won’t peak there. Nope. Straight after, Anna/Kate will perform a song cycle titled “I RUN WITH YOU”, which “explores the perception of dreams, queer and eco- movements, and finding love in the most broken of places” and incorporates text, spoken word and dance breaks.
Here’s everything you need to know:
Women Center Stage Festival @ Culture Project (45 Bleeker)
Friday August 2, 2013
Staceyann Chin’s “Motherfucker” @ 8PM
Anna/Kate’s “I RUN WITH YOU” @ 10PM
$12. Tickets and more info here.
You should go!
I don’t live in New York and it’s making me saad.
While I respect some of Staceyann Chin’s work, I don’t respect the fact that she’s performing at MichFest this year and has made some really disgusting statements about the trans community such this one from 2009:
“The women who have held the torch of feminism when they move forward—the Lisa Vogels, the bell hooks’, and the trans community spaces that purport that genitalia and chromosomal makeup should not dictate whether I want to wear a dress or pants or become a doctor or a nurse, or any of those things—are important. They are building blocks that need to be either broken up and built up—rebuilt so we can move toward a free world because of gender and certainly sex.
I feel we have a long way to go, because of some things that have hindered our progress. I feel like things get complicated every day when I say I’m a woman and I identify as a woman, and I want to drive a truck or I want to dress in male clothing. I feel like the those voices in the transgender camp who posit that if you behave in a male way, then that means you’re male, are wrong. I fight and rally for the right to be anyone I choose to be, and that choice should always be mine to make, and that because I dress a certain way or because I move through the world in a way that you perceive be male, it does not make me.”
To blame the trans community for oppression of gender expression is ‘effed up. To call Lisa Vogel, the person who’s perpetuated the ‘WBW’ policy at MichFest in the same category as Bell Hooks is a joke. So, if you are an ally of the trans community and disagree with the exclusionist policies of Michfest, I would encourage to you NOT see Staceyann Chin.