JGPG Presents Monique Jenkinson (aka Fauxnique) & Marc Kate in GIRL

This first-ever collaboration by the pair who have been partners for many years also marks the debut of the Joe Goode Performance Group venturing into producing and presenting outside artists. Girl is the drag-inflected culmination of Fauxnique and electronic musician Kate's longtime fascination with pairing intellectual rigor and critical theory to popular entertainment forms they adore-including music, contemporary dance and film-and letting fly with provocative and even thrilling results; among other elements and questions, Girl will deftly mine the "final girl" horror movie trope as an investigative tool, all as Halloween and the November mid-terms converge on the horizon.

Girl runs for 6 performances only, October 11-13 & 18-20, 8pm at Joe Goode Annex; Tickets $25-$35 (with a limited amount of early bird tickets available) can be purchased HERE

September 17, 2018, San Francisco- Joe Goode Performance Group is proud to announce its first venture into producing outside artists, presenting Girl, a collaboration between choreographer and performer Monique Jenkinson-in the guise of her drag queen persona Fauxnique-and electronic composer Marc Kate.

"This is a new kind of project in that it is the first from-the-ground-up collaboration that we have ever done, as opposed to him doing music, video or sound design for my projects or me lending vocals to his" says Fauxnique. "It resists the guy-twiddling-knobs-and-lady-dancing, trope, although of course the guy does twiddle the knobs and the lady does dance, but we both do more than that."

Girl includes spoken text that conjures a coming-of-age story and employs singing as a means of channeling among other things, the scream queen, and movement to depict the evolution, victimization and liberation of the heroine, as well as sampling to alter and reframe context and narrative throughout.

True to the pair's love of critical thinking and theory, Girl draws from a number of different sources. These include Viennese Actionism, the short and violent movement in the 1960s that pursued the development of performance art with what the pair describe as "disturbing abandon." In addition the duo also look to horror films, which subject heroines to treatments so graphic and obvious they pass the point of camp humor. "We see the horror movie heroine, or the 'final girl' as a kind of embodiment of the bravery of hope," says Kate. "The heroine in peril must confront and harness her own will to survive." Adds Fauxnique: "That feels accurate as to where we are right now as a culture."

Girl intends to speak to the feminine in everyone with the questions: Who is the girl in you? What could you tell her? "We found ourselves really taken by the work of Carol Clover, who coined the term "final girl" in her feminist reading of horror, Men, Women & Chainsaws," say the pair. "However, this is not a piece 'about' horror or final girls, but rather, uses horror tropes and the concept of the final girl to address the topics of power, fear, violence, control, gender, difference and hope we find so fascinating."

Sound is a prominent feature in the piece as a bodily, choreographic element with composer Kate manipulating his and Fauxnique's spoken and sung vocals in real time and space, as a means of "othering" them. These elements of the score are improvised live in real time. In addition, Fauxnique invokes what she terms, "the visceral, ritualistic, feminist utterances" of Yoko Ono, Diamanda Galás and Meredith Monk.

Girl also marks the debut of the Joe Goode Performance Group in producing and presenting outside artists. "The 'Girl' in question in Fauxnique's new collaborative work with Marc Kate is the girl who lasts the longest in those horror movies that so many people love to hate," says Goode. "This is a genre I know almost nothing about. I'm still watching Doris Day outmaneuver Rock Hudson in those early rom-coms. But I trust Fauxnique will provide an insight into this particular version of femininity, because that's what she does. I have been drawn to her work over the years, because, as a biologically female drag queen, she kind of peers into the soul of what it means to be 'woman'. Often funny and quite frequently harrowing, these performances have stuck with me. Drag itself as a form is related to my aesthetic: the importance of performing identity, gender, and sexuality. She's a precise performer (perhaps that is a product of years of classical dance training); there is nothing accidental in her work. This new piece benefits from the co-presence of Marc Kate, whose music adds a lush and mysterious quality into the mix, and whose wry presence keeps us guessing as to where it will all end."

Both Monique and Marc are longtime fans of Goode's, and have been following him and his work since the early 90s, before either of them were yet living in San Francisco.

"In 1991, when I was a student living in Vancouver, B.C., I attended my first performance by Joe," says Marc. "I was deeply moved by dance that embodied humor and ennui and whimsy and identity with such depth. His 29 Effeminate Gestures was a revelation I'll never forget. I immediately shared my 'I wish you had been there!' experience with my girlfriend Monique, who was studying dance and literature 2,376 miles away at Bennington College."

Adds Monique, "After moving to SF in 1992, I went to see JGPG's work as soon as I possibly could. That piece was Convenience Boy at the Cowell Theater, at the end of a long bus journey out to misty Fort Mason. The work won me over completely. I had never seen performance that so aptly combined dancing and speaking, humor and pathos, joy and smarts. I loved especially the palpable friendship between Joe and Liz Burritt, and loved watching the whole company dance together in their human, earthly, friendly way. I was delighted to learn that the apartment I had moved to was just around the corner from Footwork, where Joe taught class, and I immediately joined, trying to swoop and spiral like Liz and Marit, laughing at Joe's jokes ("Demi plié, Demi Moore...") and prayed one day to work with the company."

What: Joe Goode Performance Group Present Fauxnique & Marc Kate in Girl
When: 6 performances only, October 11-13 & 18-20
Time: 8pm
Where: Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama Street, San Francisco
Tickets: $25-$35 (with a limited amount of early bird tickets available) can be purchased HERE

About Monique Jenkinson/Fauxnique
Monique Jenkinson is a multifaceted artist whose work considers the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable and subversive act. She and her drag queen alter ego Fauxnique (who made herstory by winning a major drag pageant) perform locally, nationally and internationally in a range of contexts from nightclubs to theaters to museums. Most recently, she performed her solo cabaret show The F Word at Harvard ART'S Oberon Theater, engaged in an embodied conversation with Gender Theory pioneer Judith Butler and was in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts. She is currently writing a memoir for Amethyst Editions/Feminist Press. More information can be found at www.fauxnique.net

About Marc Kate
Marc Kate applies cinematic and conceptual approaches to music and audio production. As a response to the tech culture assault on San Francisco (and the world), Kate takes up the tools of the trade - computers and synthesis - and slyly counter-attacks, asserting humanity precisely where humanity is being evacuated. He has released tracks on Loöq, Failing Forms and Dragon's Eye Recordings, composed for choreographers Monique Jenkinson and Keith Hennessy, contributed to the soundtrack of cult horror film All About Evil and produces the podcasts Why We Listen and Scary Thoughts: Horror, Philosophy, Culture. He has composed music for the audio tour of the Clyfford Still room at the SFMOMA, was featured in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Bay Area Now 7 and was an artist in residence at Land and Sea in Oakland. More information can be found atwww.marckate.com

Research for Girl began in residence at Tanzhaus Zürich in 2016, and the production also received generous support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and the Lighting Artists in Dance.

About Joe Goode & JGPG
Joe Goode is a choreographer, writer, and director widely known as an innovator in the field of dance for his willingness to collide movement with spoken word, song, and visual imagery. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, and the United States Artists Glover Fellowship in 2008. In 2006 Goode directed the opera Transformations for the San Francisco Opera Center. His play Body Familiar, commissioned by the Magic Theatre in 2003, was met with critical acclaim.

The Joe Goode Performance Group, formed in 1986, tours regularly throughout the U.S., and has toured internationally to Canada, Europe, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Goode is known as a master teacher; his summer workshops in "felt performance" attract participants from around the world, and the company's teaching residencies on tour are hugely popular. He is a member of the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in the department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies.

Goode's performance-installation works have been commissioned by the Fowler Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, Krannert Art Museum, the Capp Street Project, the M.H. de Young Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His dance theater work has been commissioned by Pennsylvania Ballet, Zenon Dance Company, AXIS Dance Company and Dance Alloy Theater among others. Goode and his work have been recognized by numerous awards for excellence including the American Council on the Arts, the New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), and Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (Izzies). More information at joegoode.org

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