NEEDING IT: solo performance in queer community is a Helix Queer Performance Network workshop reseidency instructed by Heather María Ács and presented at BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange
NEEDING IT was created and developed by Dan Fishback for the The Helix Queer Performance Network and is instructed by Heather María Ács. Through an application process, 8 students were selected to participate in this unique workshop residency where they develop their own material while studying the history of queer performance in NYC and meeting the great queer artists of our day. This event, as part of BAX’s Residencies programming, is a culmination of that work.
2019/2020 NEEDING IT PARTICIPANTS IN ORDER OF PRESENTATION:
Hans
x
Anh Vo
Hannah Assebe
Jah Elyse Sayers
Cata Romo
Eric Lawrence Taylor
Venus Nectar
Technical Direction and Lighting Design: Kelindah Schuster
Sound and Technical Management: Manny Rivera
Stage Management: David Sierra
PERFORMANCES:
los sirenos no lloran agua salada
Deep emotional excavation works to investigate the happily never after often times apart of the narrative of queer love and desire.
Created, Performed, and Conceptualized by Hans
Soundscape: Hans
Music: Falaise By Floating Points; Alauda, La Nana by Maria Jose Llergo & Elisa Prenda
Video: Hans
Special Thanks: La Meira Goldberg, Flamenco scholar, artist, and mentor; Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana; Ryan Rockmore, Flamenco scholar, artist and friend; Suzanne Darrell for her honest criticisms, my comrades at Needing It for their community, and Heather Maria Ács for all their work as a facilitator.
Funding Credits: This work was made possible through the generous support of BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Needing It Queer Artists Residency.
this piece is probably called “x doing all of the things”
Performed by x
non-binary pussy
Written and performed by Anh Vo
Music Producer: Isaac Silber
Funding Credits: non-binary pussy is produced by greenroom and funded by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
untitled (layers)
Performed by Hannah Assebe
ZERO REST MASS
ZERO REST MASS illuminates the labor of Black trans in/visibility and excavates the dark reserves of power that we seek when we call upon light.
Performed by Jah Elyse Sayers
Video shot by Nana Chinara
Special Thanks: Thank you to my cohort for feedback, support and leaning into building together. Thank you to QTPOC community for being. Thank you to my chosen fam for dreaming up worlds and inviting me to make them with you. And thank you to the gleaming glitterbeam who first brought me to a Needing It performance and has helped me love the dark and ancient parts of myself into the light.
Dyke Ancestor
Historical fiction based in Los Angeles between 1942 – 2018. Two sisters, Celia Josefina who is in Heaven, and Maria Elena who is in Hell, are interrupted by a descendant who is calling for advice, and answers to a family secret.
Performed by Cata Romo
Special Thanks: To my community for holding a mystery date, BAX for providing this opportunity, my cohort, and, Heather Maria.
Funding Credits: BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange
Now the lord done said…
Performed by Eric Lawrence Taylor
HottenTHOT
HottenTHOT is a work in progress piece that deals with the question, “How much is a PHAT A$$ worth?”
Written & directed by Venus Nectar
Special Thanks: Julius Powell & Kenny Hahn
Funding Credits: Thank you, BAX!
ARTIST BIOS
Hans
Hans is a dancer and graphic artist from Miami, FL. He holds an MFA from Florida State University with a focus in Dance as a visual/studio art practice. Hans has shared work with audiences at Fountain Art Fair, Art Basel Miami, Frost Art Museum, Bureau of General Services- Queer Division, Dixon Place, been an artist-in-residence with Otion Front Studios, and performed in works by Katy Pyle’s Ballez, the Bill T.Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Pavel Zustiak’s Palissimo Company, and with Luciana Achugar and Mariangela Lopez. His artwork references Sailor Moon, feminist mythology, queer and Latinx culture, sexuality, mental health, and the politics of beauty and the body.
x
x is an Afro | East Asian-Jamaican, first generation USian. As a QTGNC transplant from Miami, FL, x has reconciled their training in dance, theatre, and art history education to apply critical theory to their life and artistic practice. Hir works take heed from wondering about-musings within-performativity, movement, and embodiment. Xe explores themes of identity, trauma, mental health, and lived experiences through evocations of double consciousness and the visceral. Our work manifests as time-based media, participatory installation, experimental dance, mixed media tchotchkes, and paintings. we are thrilled to be in cahoots with amazing föx to launch the artist-human-run entity, underdog ,and to begin their tenure as Artistic Director-Choreographer of {a multi-dimensional performance company}.
Anh Vo
Anh Vo is a choreographer, dancer, theorist, and activist. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality.
Hannah Assebe
Hannah Assebe is an Ethiopian-American visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY by way of Prince George’s County, MD. She has a BFA in Graphic Design from School of Visual arts. She is interested in cultivating conversations around loss of culture and identity amongst the African Diaspora.
Cata Romo
Cata’s work has spanned museums, cultural spaces, and environmental campaigns. Some writing communities they have been a part of include Ms. Fiallo’s Woman of Color writing class at Casa Azul in East Harlem, and Bushra Rehman’s Two Truths class in Brooklyn.
Eric Lawrence Taylor
Eric Lawrence Taylor is an Actor/Writer/Director and graduate of Fordham University. Since graduating he has performed at La Mama, Abrons Art Center and University Settlement. His work spans from movement, and spoken word to music and film. He’s also the founder of the Anti-Capitalist Black Film Collective.
His work consistently explores cultural taboos around Blackness and seeks to uplift its communities into a start of not only self-actualization but transformation. He has collaborated with Afro-centric artists based in South Africa, U.K, and Ecuador in the exploration of this goal. He has also received the fellowship at the Hemispheric Institute and the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship.
Jah Elyse Sayers
Jah Elyse Sayers is a Black genderfluid trans masc creatureboi working at the intersections of environmental psychology, geography, Black queer and trans studies, and Afrofuturism. They frequently work with ideas of belonging, disposability, and temporality, whether they are crafting clocks from scrap metal or researching the ways queer and trans people of color turn pathologized and discarded geographies into sites of home, dreaming, scheming, and liberation. They are currently a doctoral student in environmental psychology at CUNY Graduate Center.
Venus Nectar
Venus Nectar is a Black Jamaican interdisciplinary artist hailing from London. Their current work focuses on the Black body, their ancestors, spirits and hair. Venus Nectar wants to plant you in the flowerbed of their universe and water you with their words. One day they hope to return to their home planet, but until then, Venus will continue to use performance, photography and video to worship their ancestors, archive their Blackness and piss people off.
Heather María Ács, Instructor
Heather María Ács is an award-winning performer, filmmaker, and cultural worker whose work explores queer, radical subcultures, punk/d.i.y. aesthetics, and femme-inine identities. Her company, FemmePower Productions commits to intersectional equity on screen and behind the scenes. Her directorial debut, Flu$h, premiered at the prestigious lgbt/queer film festivals, Outfest LA and Newfest NYC. She is the Co-Founder of Heels on Wheels, a queer femme-inine spectrum, gender-inclusive performance collective, and winner of the LAMBDA Literary Award for Glitter & Grit, a queer performance anthology. She is working-class raised, Appalachian, and mixed-race Anglo-Xicana. She is a university professor and has worked as a teaching artist in under-resourced communities for over 15 years. @FemmePowerProductions | www.heatheracs.com
