Performing Queer Latin@ Loisaida: A Cabaret (8:00-10:30 pm)
Loisaida has a long tradition of LGBTQ Latin@ artistic expression, experimentation and activism which developed from encounters among racially, ethnically, generically and sexually diverse folks in streets, parks, restaurants, cafes, theaters, galleries, bars, and cabarets. Some of New York City’s most legendary queer Latin@ performance artists pay tribute to this tradition and kick off the Loisaida Center’s 28th Annual Loisaida Festival.
Performances by:
Emanuel Xavier is a poet and performer of Ecuadorian/Puerto Rican heritage and an iconic figure of the Loisaida spoken word and performance scenes. He is the author of the poetry books Nefarious (2013), Americano: Growing up Gay and Latino in the USA (2012), Pier Queen (2012), and If Jesus Were Gay & other poems (2010), the novel Christ Like (2009), and the audio spoken word album, Legendary (2009). He is editor of Me No Habla With Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry (2011) and Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (2008). He appeared on Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry on HBO and has performed in cities throughout the United States, Buenos Aires, Ghent, London, and Paris.
Susana Cook is an icon of the Lower East Side lesbian underground. Born in Argentina, Cook is a New-York-based playwright, performer and director of works in political theater. She has staged 16 original plays, includingHamletango, 100 years of Attitude, Dykenstein, Spic for Export, and Ther Values Horror Show, in venues such as Dixon Place, P.S. 122, W.O. W Café Theater, Ubu Rep, and The Kitchen.
Jorge Merced is an award-winning actor, theatre director, and queer scholar and activist. He is associate artistic director of the Pregones Theater where he has directed plays and performances such as Baile Cangrejero, El Apagón, Blanco, Aloha Boricua, Migrants!, Las facultades, Neon Baby, and Marchers Trilogy and the readings and workshop productions for the Asunción Playwrights Project. His New York directing credits also include Fellini’s La Strada with René Buch, El huésped vacío and The Smell of Popcorn (IATI). As an actor, he is acclaimed for his role as Loca la de la locura [The Queen of Madness] in Pregones’s play based on the writer Manuel Ramos Otero’s short story of the same name, El bolero fue mi ruina [The Bolero Was My Downfall]. He has trained, performed, and directed throughout the U.S. and abroad in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Slovakia, and Spain.
Karen Jaime is an acclaimed spoken word/performance artist and poet, an accomplished scholar, and a postdoctoral research associate (2014-2015)/ Assistant Professor (2015-) in the Department of Performance and Media Arts and the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University. As a performer, she has served as the host/curator for the Friday Night Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe, participated in the spoken word documentary Spit!, and was featured in the Emmy-award winning CUNY-TV program Nueva York. As a poet, Jaime’s work is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, and in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians.” Her critical writing has been published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, in the online journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, e-Misférica, and in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Karen is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Queering Poetry in Loisaida: Language, History, and Performance at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Hosted by: Larry LaFountain-Stokes is a distinguished creative writer, scholar, and performer. He is an associate professor of Spanish and American Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and author of the bilingual book of short stories and personal essays Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails, the performance piece Abolición del pato, and the scholarly study Queer Ricans: Puerto Rican Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. He is well-known for his performance persona Lola von Miramar.
Curated by: Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé is professor of Spanish and comparative literature, and director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails, a book about art and queer Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s, and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. He has been a recipient of the Ford Foundation and the NEH fellowships.
Saturday, May 23 : Reconstructing Queer Latin@ Loisaida in Cinema Literature and Art
This event is on May 23, 2015
Reconstructing Queer Latin@ Loisaida in Cinema
Literature and Art (1:00-5:30 pm)
Loisaida has long been recognized as an international cutting-edge center of creativity and experimentation in the arts and activism. However the contribution of Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists in creating this culture, which has inspired the rest of the nation and the world, has only recently been the object of scholarly study. The Loisaida Center pays homage to two of the founding figures of Queer Latin@ Loisaida art and activism, drag performer Mario Montez (1935-2013) and performance artist Alina Troyano (a.k.a Carmelita Tropicana), divas of queer Latin@ Loisaida cinema and stage, by showing two of their most famous and representative films, José Rodríguez-Soltero’s The Life, Death, and Assumption of Lupe Velez (1966) and Ela Troyano’s Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1996). The viewing of Lupe will be introduced by Yale University film historian and curator Ron Gregg. The viewings ofLupe and Your Kunst will be followed by Q & A with curator Ron Gregg, the artist Alina Troyano, and the director Ela Troyano. A panel of distinguished scholars discussing the state of the research on the contribution of Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists to Loisaida’s cultural and social life will follow the viewings. Curated by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé.
Divas of Queer Latin@ Loisaida Cinema and Stage:
Mario Montez and Carmelita Troyano
1:00-2:00 pm José Rodríguez-Soltero’s The Life, Death, and Assumption of Lupe Velez (1966) (50 mins). Starring Mario Montez. Introduced by Ron Gregg (Yale University)
2:00-2:30 pm Ela Troyano’s Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1996) (27 mins). Starring Carmelita Tropicana.
2:30-3:30 pm Q and A with Ron Gregg, Ela Troyano, and Alina Troyano (a.k.a Carmelita Tropicana).
The State of Research on Queer Latin@ Loisaida: A Round Table Discussion.
3:30-5:30 pm A panel of distinguished scholars discusses the state of the research on the contribution of Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists to Loisaida’s cultural and social life: What have Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists contributed to the culture of experimentation and innovation, social and individual expression that is associated with Loisaida? What have the interactions been between Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists and other queer Loisaida artists and activists? What have the interactions been between Latin@ queer artists and activists and Loisaida artists and activists from other racial and ethnic groups? What have the interactions been between Latin@ queer artists and other Loisaida Latin@ artists and activists? What are the “hidden” or unexplored histories of queer Latin@ Loisaida? Where should we look to recover these “hidden” or unexplored histories? What role or roles have queer Latin@ Loisaida artists and activists played in the cultural, social, and economic transformations of Loisaida from 1970s to the present?
With the participation of:
Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University)is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She is an associate professor of English and Latino Studies at Columbia University, the director of the Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activist archive at Butler Library. Among her books and publications are Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (winner, 2004 CHOICE Award), The Latino Media Gap, and Sovereign Acts. Her films include AIDS in the Barrio, Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican, and Small City, Big Change. In 2005, she was named one of the “100 Most Influential Hispanics” by Hispanic Business magazine, and the United Nations’ Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her in 2008 as a “global expert.” She is also the recipient of El Diario/La Prensa’s annual “Distinguished Women Award” (2010) and Columbia University’s “Most Distinguished Faculty Award” (2012).
Roy Pérez (Willamette University)is an accomplished scholar and poet and an assistant professor of English, American Ethnic Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He received his PhD in English at New York University with concentrations in Latina/o literary and performance studies and is a past fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He has published poems and essays in Glitter Tongue, the Best of Panic! poetry anthology, TheThePoetry, bully bloggers, and FENCE Magazine, and recently adapted one of his poems to film with director Finn Paul. His current scholarly book project, Proximity: Queer Configurations of Race and Sex, examines the function of interracial closeness in the articulation of sexual identity by queer artists from the late-nineteenth century into the twenty-first.
Karen Jaime (Cornell University)is an acclaimed spoken word/performance artist and poet, an accomplished scholar, and a postdoctoral research associate (2014-2015)/ Assistant Professor (2015-) in the Department of Performance and Media Arts and the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University. As a performer, she has served as the host/curator for the Friday Night Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe, participated in the spoken word documentary Spit!, and was featured in the Emmy-award winning CUNY-TV program Nueva York. As a poet, Jaime’s work is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, and in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians.” Her critical writing has been published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, in the online journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, e-Misférica, and in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Karen is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Queering Poetry in Loisaida: Language, History, and Performance at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Larry LaFountain-Stokes (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor)is a distinguished creative writer, scholar, and performer. He is an associate professor of Spanish and American Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and author of the bilingual book of short stories and personal essays Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails, the performance piece Abolición del pato, and the scholarly study Queer Ricans: Puerto Rican Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. He is well-known for his performance persona Lola von Miramar.
Moderated by: Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé (Fordham University)is professor of Spanish and comparative literature, and director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails, a book about art and queer Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s, and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. He has been a recipient of the Ford Foundation and the NEH fellowships.
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