Queergasm!

SAVE THE DATE!
4TH ANNUAL QUEERGASM!
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PERFORMANCE EVENT

Saturday, April 13th, 2013
6:30pm-9pm Northwestern University
Alvina Krause Studio in Annie May Swift Hall
1920 S. Campus Drive, Evanston, IL

The Queer Pride Graduate Student Association is bringing this year’s Queergasm! home to the Alvina Krause Studio in Annie May Swift Hall on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus. In conjunction with the 6th Annual Queertopia! Conference, QPGSA invites you to come eat, drink, play, and ogle during an evening of performances exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, race and national belonging by local and regional artists. This year Queergasm! will feature NU Performance Studies alumna Rebecca Kling and Chicago-based multi-disciplinary artist Kiam Marcelo Junio, and also include Dirty Grits, Keijaun Thomas, Amanda Stefanski, Ejaz Ali, Oeishik Chowdhury, and guest host misty de berry. and radical drag performer Dirty Grits, among others TBA. There’s no cover, refreshments will be served at 6:30pm, performances begin at 7pm.

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I Am Not A Shemale Stripper
by Rebecca Kling
Photo Credit: Peter McCullogh

Life as a trans person can be tough: discrimination, oppression, bigotry, and hate. It can also be hilarious: oddball conversations, sex graphs, penis-scanning lasers, and chocolate cocks. This piece is about that second list.

Rebecca Kling is a transgender artist and educator who explores gender and identity through solo pieces and educational workshops. Kling takes the position that sharing accessible queer narrative with a wide audience is a form of activism, and that understanding combats bigotry. She has toured her work to colleges, universities, and theater festivals around the country. Tonight, she will be sharing more humorous stories of being trans.

Sewing Station/AmeriKaraoke
by Kiam Marcelo Junio
Photo Credit: Jacqueline Renee Friedberg
I am, among many things, a Filipino immigrant, a US Navy veteran, an Asian American, a gay, male-bodied, genderqueer artist. My work explores the intersection between these three identities and the fluid borders in between. My research into queer theory, Western Colonialism and occupations throughout Asian and Filipino history guide and inform my interdisciplinary art practice. I create a conceptual ecosystem in which my works function in myriad ways, informing one another. The pieces I make through screenprinting, garment design, and sculpture transform from art objects into charged, performative tools which I use in videos, staged photography, and live performances. I value dialogue and community, and my work aims to exist in multiple and intersecting spheres of academia, art market, web, and contemporary queer culture.
Kiam Marcelo Junio is a multidisciplinary artist living in Chicago, IL. His research and art work centers around queer identities, the Filipino American diaspora, post-colonialist Asian American tropes and stereotypes, and military and civilian power dynamics.

Kiam served seven years in the US Navy. He was born in the Philippines and has lived in the US, Japan, and Spain.
www.IAmKiam.com

The Arc of the Lavender Circle is Strong
by Amanda Stefanski
Photo Credit: Mojdeh Stoakley
Enter the ethereal world of Mistress Salome, a siren from the rocky queer islands with a complicated man hating/eating fetish. She’s not singing you to shipwreck (unless you’re into that), but rather towards the beauty of femme self-determination and the possibilities of a world that is accountable to everyone.
Amanda Stefanski is a Chicago based performance artist fiercely committed to the ongoing radical feminist project of creating a world that is accountable to everyone. She embodies appropriations of history, mythology and pop culture in personas to mobilize anti-racist, feminist and queer politics and challenge systems of power, supremacy and normalcy. She is interested in the power of dreaming, transformative justice, collectivity and making sense of the absurdity of oppression in order to dismantle it. She will begin her MFA in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 2013. Email her at acstefanski@gmail.com

Life Lessons: How to Masturbate Like a Man
by Keijaun R. Thomas
Photo Credit: Mariana
In my current series, “Life Lessons: How to be a Man”, I am investigating normative ideas of masculinity and their subversion through the study and research of both habitual and cognitive skills, e.g., visual processing, auditory processing, attention skills, and memory. My live performances and multimedia installations blur the lines between personal, constructed, and fictional truth—where the audience become performers that both occupy, create and co-inhabit the performative space in relation to my own performing body.
Keijaun R. Thomas is currently pursuing his MFA in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He graduated with honors from the School of Visual Arts in NYC with a BFA in Fine Arts.

Dick Size
Dirty Grits
Photo Credit: Jarrod Jones
Dirty Grits is a queer performance artist who focuses on ethnicity, taboos and preconceived sexually identities. His medium is comedy, movement and song. This performance piece challenges the balance or sexual roles in gay culture.

Dimystifying Perversion OR The True De-Perverting
Ejaz Ali and Oeishik Chowdhury
Photo Credit: Self

 

Oeishik is a freelance writer living in Chicago. He is the author of the book titled Tribute to Sam Steward, which is a collection of prose and poetry, paired with contextually related photographs, all connecting Sam’s life to Oeishik’s against the backdrop of society. Being gay, immigrant and dyslexic, he looks at the world more peripherally, taking into consideration minute details that greatly enhance the quality of his writing and the effectiveness of his communication. Learning about gay history and civil rights issues, along with proficient writing, are his passions; he takes them very seriously and constantly strives to learn more as there is no such thing as learning too much.               

Dancing is a natural delight for Ejaz. He finds solace and meaning in rhythm and movement. He has been dancing in the privacy of his bedroom for a long while and he seeks to express his artistic impulses on a stage by performing a sequenced choreography.

Queertopia! and Queergasm! are supported by the following Northwestern University organizations, institutions, grants: The Catalyst Grant and Professional Development Grant from The Graduate School, the LGBT Resource Center, Feinberg’s Queers & Allies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the departments of African-American Studies, Art History, Performance Studies, Philosophy, History, Art Theory and Practice, Screen Cultures and Radio, TV, and Film, and Gender Studies.

Open Call for the 4th Annual Queergasm!
An Interdisciplinary Performance Event

WANTED Butch daddies, flaming outlaws, subversive femmes, leather-loving dammies, androgyne-savants, transgender warriors, radical crips, fabulous kinksters, ex-patriot sissies, diesel dykes, intersex cyborgs, poly-love traffickers, gender-bent mindfuckers, divine bears, and sisters of perpetual indulgence who roam the alleyways, cross borders ‘n railroad tracks, hide in plain sight and beam brilliantly in unlikely places to make performance art, manifestos, rhymes, dance and jest.

WHY? Because we want to know what makes you Queergasm! We want to hear and see something other than mass media-generated mythologies. We want to meet you, hang out with you, converse with you, intrigue and be intrigued by you during an evening of debaucherous, political, satirical, poetical, and philosophical performances.

The loose theme of the night is “We are the perverts our parents warned us about.” We are hoping to pull together a night of thought-provoking performances based around themes of stigma, forced morals, taboo, and our rejection of them.

HOW? By coming together to create an evening of interdisciplinary performance to close the 6th annual Queertopia conference organized by Northwestern University’s Queer Pride Graduate Student Association: http://philevents.org/event/show/3705

WHEN AND WHERE? Saturday, April 13, 2012 @ 8pm, TBD in Chicago, IL.

WHAT we need from you:

  1. Proposal (250 words max for a performance of no more than 10 minutes)
  2. 2 page resume (include one per group member) OR artist/group bio (250 words max)
  3. 6 jpgs from most recent performance(s) OR link to video of most recent performance(s)

DETAILS

  • The evening will consist of 6-8 performances including 2 invited performances by Chicago’s own Rebecca Kling (http://www.rebeccakling.com/) and Kiam Junio (http://www.iamkiam.com/).
  • Artists will be compensated with a modest stipend for their participation.
  • A sound system and bare lights will be available, so plan your tech needs accordingly
  • Performers who have not previously participated in Queergasm! will be given preference over those who have during the selection process.
  • Please email proposals and/or questions to amelia.plunk@gmail.com with ‘Queergasm!’ as the subject.

Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/505390482844784/

Application deadline: CLOSED

Notifications: March 27, 2013

Queertopia! and Queergasm! are supported by the following Northwestern University organizations, institutions, grants: The Catalyst Grant and Professional Development Grant from The Graduate School, the LGBT Resource Center, Feinberg’s Queers & Allies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the departments of African-American Studies, Art History, Performance Studies, Philosophy, History, Art Theory and Practice, Screen Cultures and Radio, TV, and Film, and Gender Studies.

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