RADICAL ACTS
November 9 - 19, 2022
JACK is back with Radical Acts, a performance festival. Each night features different artists and their interpretation of radical. Radical joy! Radical mayhem! Radical experiments in sound, light, time and language! And radical confrontations with today’s pressing issues. And one more thing, each performance will be staged in the round!
November 9 at 7:30
Courtney Desiree Morris & Dragonfly
(aka robin laverne wilson):Orisha Wedding
Orisha Wedding is a queer re-imagining of the relationship between Shango and Oya, two powerful deities in the Yoruba religion who control the elements of fire, thunder, lightning, wind, and storms. This erotically charged performance ritual, explores what it means to live with fire and love the earth in a moment of climate crisis.
Dendarry bakery:You will be played
You Will Be Played is an interactive concert that invites the audience to play dress up in wearable graphic music scores created by Dendarry Bakery. Each score explores the various uses and politics of play explore various uses and politics of play - playing music, child’s play, the criminalization of play, getting “played” by capitalist forces, and play as an important part of queer discovery.
Asia Stewart: Retail therapy
Retail Therapy is a performance in which Asia Stewart creates a dress made of translucent plastic hangers and clothing donated by the audience. In Stewart's performance, she challenges the capitalist desire to accumulate goods and asks the question, why is it that we collect so many "things."
hector canonge: altibajos (ups and downs)
ALTIBAJOS (Ups & Downs), is a dance-theater performance that calls for reflection on ancestral heritage, cultural integration, and identity politics. In these times of social conflict and inadequacy. Canonge’s allegorical embodiment of transformation and resilience makes a much needed call for radical change.
Yao Zhen Yu 姚震宇 & Kangdeng 康登 (Kally) Zhao:The white pretender(s)
Part sitcom. Part history lesson. Part open rehearsal. THE White Pretender(S) is an experimental theater piece that chronicles the history of “Fake Asians,” aka White people who are obsessed with pretending to be Asian. This play is not just an autopsy of racial capitalism, but also a wild, virtuosic experiment which attempts to radically subvert the White gaze (and, by extension, Whiteness).
Xalvador: I’m going to marry your dad
& Shawn Escarciga: Miss lady salad
Queer performance artists/notable online trolls I’m Going To Marry Your Dad and Miss Lady Salad take you on intimate journeys to the essence from within–which is inevitably cringe. The artists bring together two one acts that highlight internet culture on an IRL stage through music, dance, alt comedy and video. Together they unpack the deeper psyche of today’s current emotional climate.
Han Van Sciver: happy birthday han
when you lose something they say to retrace your steps. A cohesion ritual for healing your inner child, and loving your present flailing self. A coming-of-age spasm packed with unreliable memories, chaotic gay dancing, and a very earnest triangle solo. Created and filmed at Brown/Trinity Rep in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, JACK's Radical Acts Festival will be the first time this work is shared before a live audience.
Ian askew: until other times
You are invited to attend a musical memorial service, a dream confessional, and a slow dance in the middle of the end of the world. Until Other Times is a performance project considering the fabrication of scarcity and how we have come to accept limitations on our bodies, our environment, and our capacity to care for one another.
LYDIA JIALU LI 黎珈璐 & KAI-LUEN LIANG: RYOTATIO 回马枪
Ryotatio 回马枪 is the story of a young girl. She listened to her imagination and generated electricity, love, and revolution in defiance of The Unspeakable. This piece is a love letter to Yaoi, and a battlecry to censorship.
martin gohary:camp 7
Martin Gohary: Camp 7 follows musician Martin Gohary as he finds his identity as an Iranian-American in a post 9/11 world. Alternating between compositions inspired by Martin’s childhood of Persian Classical Music, and the violent torture-techniques used at Camp 7, Martin takes us on a journey of torn emotions in the beauty of Persian culture.
charlene jean, bryanna bradley & Courtney Bryan Devon:SHIT IN THE BLOOD: A BIOMYTHOGRAPHY OF RECIPES
SHIT IN THE BLOOD: A Biomythography of Recipes is a ‘digestion play’ concerned with what is lost due to the demands of assimilation that have been forced onto and seduced Black American and Black Immigrant communities. Devised by Charlene Jean, Bryanna Bradley and Courtney Bryan Devon, and featuring music by Pharaoh Rapture (AKA Myles E. Johnson) and producer Sergio Rivera the piece places generational cultural voids in conversation with digestive tract diseases.
(Cancelled) cesar & emily orling: Egg
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 we will be cancelling this festival performance and refunding all purchased ticket(s). We hope to reschedule Egg at a future date.
EGG is a performance of songs and live ceramics by César Alvarez and Emily Orling that calls up unthinkable thoughts about creative kinship, small town futurism, trans middle age, mediocre parenting, and the ancient unreliable religion of art making.
Fana Fraser: a siren song
Timed in a fantasy paradise where dreams become reality for an extended present moment, this new work dances Fraser’s ongoing exploration of a queer Trinbagonian femmehood.
Nia Calloway:The Great Orgasmic Dance (GOD) or The Earth is Not One of Your Lil Friends
Planet Earth is screaming. Are you listening? A three-act reclamation of body, space, and pleasure told from an eco-feminist point of view. The Earth is a landscape of political warfare, BIPOC bodies and women's bodies are landscapes of political warfare, and god is a landscape of political warfare.
Festival curated by JACK Co-Directors Jordana De La Cruz and Skye E. Kowaleski
Festival Lighting Design by Wyatt Moniz
Radical Acts art work by Nichole Washington