DIVERSITY FELLOWS! curate, host, and perform in political variety shows, bringing together local artists in conversation around topics like racial justice, nostalgia, queer world-making, pinkwashing, colonialism, and more! Here is a sampling of past variety shows:
THE 9/11 SHOW!
September 2015
AS220 Black Box
An evening of performance art that honors and/or skewers the newest semi-national Holiday, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. All of the work presented satirically or seriously critiques the state of homeland (in)security since 9/11, and makes connections to how the Arab question sparked by 9/11 is related to larger questions of race, ethnicity, freedom, equality, and social justice.
Featuring: Vanessa Gilbert, Bonky Dolls, Christopher Johnson, Brian 4 Ever, Marleny Luna, Richard Goulis
THE 2015 SHOW!
December 2015
AS220 Black Box
A celebration of holiday cheer which reflects critically on the year that has passed. What it does mean to summon the Chrismakwanzkah spirit of “good cheer and felicitous behavior to all human kind” after a year of #lives (not) mattering, refugee crises, hyperperformative presidential debates, and Hotline Bling? How can we analyze, celebrate, excoriate the events of this year and prepare for a new future? Part year-in-review, part multicultural holiday spectacular!
Featuring: Laurie Amat, Ronald Kevin Lewis, Vatic Kuumba, Umberto Crenca, Diane Exavier, Ben Lundberg + Lehidy Laura Frias
YEAH SHAME?!
June 2016
AS220 Main Stage
An evening of queer alt performance and punk, held as part of the 2016 Queer Arts Festival. Held during Ramadan, and one week after the Pulse massacre in Orlando, the event opened with a queer iftar led by Jawad Anwar. As the anti-corporatization of Pride party, the evening celebrated gay shame, a critique of Pride's movement from activism to party-based consumerism, and its privileging of some bodies over others. Shame is to Pride as Radical is to Liberal. Shame is real. Shame has been programmed into us. But shame can also be a form of resistance:
We shouldn't be proud, we should be fucking angry. We shouldn't be embracing the notion of gay is in happy—we should be mobilizing with queer as in fuck you.
Featuring: Lil Miss Hot Mess, Randy Bush + Bridie Jurasevich, Ronald Kevin Lewis, Bed Death, Fallope + the Tubes, HUSSY
