Well, that was different! In this show 5 short films were each paired with one piece of performance art (spoken word, dance, song, music) right there in the theatre. Short films + performance art + artist Q&A = Awesome!
In My Heart The Travel Agent, a very short collage of sounds and scenes from subways/metros around the world is incorporated by Isolde N. Barron into a catchy dance number to ATC’s Around the World.
Trans man Kyle Shaughnessy responds to Dyke Pussy, a weird short of little cat figurines, with a powerful demand for respect and desire for his front-facing man-hole. In the Q&A he admits the title of the film is what prompted the angry rant. Something less cisgendered and more inclusive might have led to something tamer and more explicitly political.
After You Are A Lesbian Vampire hilariously deconstructs the romance of vampirism, Swann Barat and Lise Monique Oakley pick up the vampire theme with an eerie drumming number, complete with rich red sheets, black dresses and a mock vampire bite at the end.
No Safe Words is a disturbing collage mixing sports, bondage, muscleboys on Pride floats and frat hazing. Jesse McMass-Sparvier then performs a wordless interpretive dance to the repeated soundtrack. The theme was oppression and bondage, both physical and cultural. However, I don’t think it added anything really new.
In Invitation, Michael V. Smith invites us to get naked with him, and to love our bodies—or at least get a new perspective on them. This one hit particularly hard because my body’s not too different from Michael’s, and I’ve dealt with similar demons. Joel Klein and Karen Lee-Morgan run with the theme of brutal honesty with a funny song urging you to tell everything—everything—to your partner.