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Reflections 2020
Curated by Alexander Paris
Friday, DECEMBER 18 & Saturday, DECEMBER 19, 2020 at 8PM EST
Each year, La MaMa's Squirts gathers the most exciting voices from New York City's queer performance world, across the generations. In this year's live-streaming Squirts event, emerging artist Alexander Paris curates Reflections 2020--a weekend of queer introspection at a moment of global precarity.
On the first evening - Friday, DECEMBER 18th - Paris will present reflections from a wildly diverse mix of 20 queer artists of multiple generations, genres and aesthetics, including Starr Busby, Staceyann Chin, Anne Cuntyham, Ena Da, Ty Defoe, K8 Hardy, Soo Intoit, Daniel Alexander Jones, Kyle Lopez, Junior Mintt, Jeremy O. Harris, Mthr Trsa, Nicky Paraiso, Richard Perez, Julius (Julie J) Powell, Lorelei Ramirez, Pamela Sneed, Basit Shittu, and Ianne Fields Stewart. Each of them will reflect upon who they are at this historical crossroads, as global fascism attempts to consolidate its grasp, as neoliberalism attempts to reclaim its dominance and as domestic movements for liberation are reshaping the cultural landscape.
The following night - DECEMBER 19th - will reflect upon those reflections, as Paris engages Guggenheim Award-winning performing artist Daniel Alexander Jones in an evening-length, hybrid dialogue/performance about what it means to look within when the outside world brings so much chaos to our doorsteps.
Alexander Paris is a multidisciplinary performer, writer, and occasional existentialist. The work they create normally lives at some intersection of autofiction and surrealism. They enjoy world building, deep honesty, high camp, and mess. In 2019 they had artistic fellowships with the Performance Project at University Settlement and Clubbed Thumb. A reading of their play Suzanne happened as a part of La MaMa's Experiments series. Before the quarantine they were working out new material in the Brooklyn comedy and nightlife scenes. Now, in the middle of the pandemic, they are learning what is most important to them.
For eight years, La MaMa's Squirts: Generations of Queer Performance has been the flagship program of the The Helix Queer Performance Network, and while the festival will continue at La MaMa, Helix reaches its conclusion this year. Founded in 2013 by playwright/performer Dan Fishback, Helix has been a collaboration between La MaMa, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, with Fishback serving as director. At La MaMa, Helix has previously presented seven annual iterations of La MaMa's Squirts, created by Fishback and featuring hundreds of queer artists over the years. Initially invited by Nicky Paraiso to help bring a new generation of queer artists to La MaMa, Dan Fishback conceived of La MaMa's Squirts as a healing space to mend fractures in queer community across age, race, gender and class. At the helm of the festival, Fishback ushered in a new chapter of queer abundance at La MaMa, akin to its early years, in which the stage was open to queer artists often overlooked by major institutions. Unlike many other downtown arts festivals, La MaMa's Squirts placed an emphasis on young artists of color who were developing work outside of the MFA industrial complex, and outside of white-dominant queer art scenes that historically favored the work of thin, white, cisgender men.
While Fishback curated the series through 2017, subsequent curators included Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Linda LaBeija, Shannon Matesky, Cecilia Gentili, Charlene Incarnate and Mizz JUNE.
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