Tragic Bride/Fashion Victim, April 10 2006
Purchase on DVD
The launch of "The Emperor's Premiere" on DVD will happen during Tragic Bride/Fashion Victim, a full installation performance event integrating art and social space while crossing gender divides, exposing interpersonal experimental narratives, and creating spiritual/healing rituals. From the carefully composed invitation to marry and tie the knot to invocations, projected images, meditative spiritual transformations with music, clothes, and performance, to enacted rituals of healing, meditation, and trance-work that carries the spirit onward.
| LIVE Performances | Videos & Visuals | Living Installations |
| Andrew D'Angelo(music) | Stephen Varble(images) | Juan Bentacurth |
| Kalup Linzy(performance) | John Eric Broaddus(images) | Marc Arthur |
| Joseph Keckler & Co(cabaret) | Hunter Reynolds(images) | Devon Gallegos |
| Blk w/Bear(music) | Millie Taylor(animations) | |
| Hawk Kinkaid(spoken word) | Tim Lonergan(video performance) | |
| it/EQ Fashion Show(video) |
with MC's it/EQ (Ethan Shoshan & Carlo Quispe)
and the esteemable duo Jack Waters & Peter Cramer
About the Performances
At the entrance into the Collective Unconscious, JUAN BENTACURTH, a Columbian graphic designer/artist working with self portraits, chickens, and catholic saints, waits for his past lover arriving from Spain after 4 years of separation with the desire to marry him.
Projected animations by MILLIE TAYLOR, enwraps the audience in a fanciful world filled with obsession, playfulness, and eccentric twists, followed by healing meditative video performances by TIM LONERGAN, a Baltimore artist confronting desire and his body in symbolic performances.
Projected images of STEPHEN VARBLE and JOHN ERIC BROADDUS wearing extravagantly crafted costumes known for parading through the streets of Soho circa 1970s.
HUNTER REYNOLDS enacting drag performances through sexual imagery, the queering of the body, and internal desires. Varble, Broaddus and Reynolds performances become a mediation of the healing properties of performance with careful understanding of clothing, nature, and the elements that form their bodies.
Sporatic live performances by MARC ARTHUR and DEVON GALLEGOS enact lost tales banned from the Bible, set to modern queering sexuality.
Music artists BLK w/ BEAR [Washington DC] is the audio-art pseudonym for queer visual artist JS Adams. His audio artworks include both temporal turntable installations and laptop compositions utilizing forced looping technique of altered vinyl recordings and media decay along with manipulated voice synthesis and deconstructive turntablism. RH BEAR [NYC] is bassist for industrial noise rockers BILE with an upcoming collaborative release of electro-acoustic noise and improvisation. During the NYC debut of BLK w/ BEAR, along with RH Bear will create minimal meditative soundscape incorporating recorded clips from everyday travels as a way to construct and build form to chaos.
HAWK KINKAID, sex worker activist involved in various social projects with sex workers and artistic ventures, will read poetry from his life experiences, desires and the world surrounding it.
JOSEPH KECKLER, a hammy depressive, multi-media visual and performance artist, essayist, playwright, actor, divo and chanteur will sing a few songs with a fellow diva, playing with farce and kitch surrounding sex and clothes.
KALUP LINZY, a video and performance artist known for his playful personas around gender, sexuality, race, class, and popular culture, will lead the audience into rapture. Using multi-layered characters and subplots that weave through the works, he constructs powerful critiques of the laws of romance and desire, family and trust, truth and hypocrisy. We the viewers are forced to confront the ways we deal with our own yearnings and acknowledge the dirty little secrets that everyone knows.
ANDREW D'ANGELO, experimental jazz musician known for his intense improvisations and breaking down the walls holding the brain, will bring the audience into a musical trance leaving the body behind, transporting the soul beyond this dimension. PETER CAPELLE has composed electronic score to accompany Andrew.