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“Radical
Faeries, Repetition, and Return: A Memorylogue”
Independent
Artist
&
Ray Matthews
Performance as Public Practice Program
University
of Texas-Austin
“Wednesday,
September 19th, 2007 (Austin, Texas):
I’ve
convinced my girlfriend, Hazey, that her newly running
Toyota van will be the perfect vehicle to take seven queer
bodies from Austin to Ida.
Four of the seven are making this trip for the
first time. I
feel sure that it will not be their last.
I have seen Ida’s allure work on too many people
to lack confidence in her seductive skills. I
love introducing people I love to Ida—it feels like I am
passing on a chain letter whose promises really do come
true. I am
especially excited to bring Hazey.
Two years into our relationship, this is as
significant as bringing her to meet my parents.
It has been six years since I first stepped into
Ida. I have a
sense of going home, or to a family reunion, an
expectation to be amazed and soothed again.
My route from ‘here’ to ‘there’ keeps
shifting, but the there is always there.
I have been a child and adult accustomed to
migration, making these homecomings, when they happen,
remarkably comforting.
A
quick list of the minimum contents of the van:
1.
1.
t
2.
a clarinet
3.
a typewriter
4.
several wigs
5.
a pink magic wand that makes magic noises
6.
stencil-making equipment
7.
a variety of sex toys tucked into our bags
8.
electronic equipment (laptop, camcorder, cell phone,
ipod)
9.
a plastic pig (By the end of the trip the pig will
grow a moustache and smoke cigarettes out of his butt.
We slide slips of paper with our secrets into its
belly to digest and hold onto.)
We
drive through the night, singing about a whale named
Sarah, curled up on each other.
Somewhere in Texas we make a pit stop at a gas
station called Camp I-30.
We tumble out to stretch our queer, campy bodies
under the glow of the sign.
The universe, even in east Texas, seems to frame
our lives as right tonight.”
Written in the style of a
Ray
Matthews:
is an M.F.A. student in the Performance as Public Practice
program at UT-Austin. She received her B.A. from Bard
College in Integrated Arts/Theatre in 2002.
Her present scholarship uses performance analysis
to examine queer community making, pop-culture icons, and
the integration of theory with practice.
Ray has been involved in several activist and queer
performance projects; she creates both collaborative and
solo work, and she is committed to uses performance to
engage community.
In 2004, she toured with An
Olive on the Seder Plate,
a multimedia performance exploring how Jewish
people wrestle with the Israeli military occupation of
Palestine. Ray is also cofounder and host of CampCamp,
Austin’s monthly queer performance night.
In 2006, Ray was a core artist in “Movable Feast,”
a performance journey that brought over fifty
collaborators together to create a 24-hour performance in
multiple sites in the city of Austin.
Simon
Strikeback
is a born-n’-raised Chicagoan white Jewish trans queer
educator/activist. Since
his teenage years, he has committed significant time and
energy to fights for visibility, equality and respect for
queer and trans people, both locally and nationally. Starting as a Chicago Lesbian Avenger, he was part of the efforts to revitalize Camp Trans (CT) at
the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 1999, and stayed
with the project as a lead organizer until 2005.
In 2003, he moved to a rural queer arts community
in Tennessee and created a workshop entitled “Bringing
Trans Variance/Variants to Traditional Women’s Studies,”
which he has presented nationally at various universities
and conferences. Simon
holds degrees in Women’s Studies and English Literature
from DePaul University, and he is one half of the
performance/filmmaking duet Actor
Slash Model as
well as co-creator and curator of Threat
Level: An Evening of Queer Shorts film series, based
in Chicago.
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