Lama El Homaïssi to Present NOT HAREM MATERIAL at Joe's Pub in October

Join Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) and Joe's Pub on Saturday, October 14 for Lama El Homaïssi's incendiary debut of her solo cabaret, Not Harem Material, which is part of AFI's Beautiful Forms: Queer Art Unbound festival. Lama weaves together storytelling and music to immerse audiences in a multisensory chronicle of her experiences as a Lebanese, immigrant actor in the United States.

 

Beautiful Forms: Queer Art Unbound honors the many diverse and beautiful forms queer identities, art, and allyship can take. Further, this festival acknowledges that queer artists from countries or communities where sexuality, gender identity, and artistic freedom are restricted face heightened levels of persecution, censorship, and forced displacement. Finally, Beautiful Forms champions the rights to create, move, live, and love freely – unbound and without fear.

 

This multidisciplinary, multi-day arts festival is presented by AFI and includes a performance with Bia Ferreira (10/13 at Joe's Pub) and a short film night featuring work from Faraz Arif Ansari and Mehrdad Hasani (11/29 at David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center). Beautiful Forms centers intersectionality, LGBTQIAP+ identities, and allyship, featuring cutting edge artists like Ferreira, (Brazil), Homaïssi (Lebanon), Ansari (India), and Hasani (Iran). Wielding the power of performance and storytelling, Bia, Lama, Faraz, and Mehrdad demonstrate how queer musical, theatrical, and film narratives disrupt dangerous norms and uplift those that venerate free expression.

 

AFI is an organization unwavering in its commitment to promote freedom of artistic expression. To that end, they provide pro bono immigration representation and resettlement assistance to persecuted and censored artists.

Performance Details

Saturday, October 14 at 7PM

Lama El Homaïssi: Not Harem Material

at Joe's Pub

Part of Beautiful Forms: Queer Art Unbound

 

Delivering a performance that is provocative, funny, and touching, Lama El Homaïssi's Not Harem Material reflects on notions of identity, authenticity, and home all while playfully confronting monolithic Middle Eastern tropes in Western media. Lama is an actor, singer, and writer and is currently in residence at the Safe Haven Incubator for Musicians, a residency program run by AFI, Tamizdat and Westbeth Artists Housing, with support from Joe's Pub, and a member of the Joe's Pub Working Group 2022-2023. Lama has previously performed at Lincoln Center (David Rubenstein Atrium and Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse), Club OBERON, and Berklee Performance Center. Her writing has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail and HowlRound Theatre Commons.

About Artistic Freedom Initiative

 

Dedicated to safeguarding the right to artistic freedom, Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) was founded on the notion that artists are uniquely situated to positively and powerfully effect change, provided their voices can be heard. Led by immigration and human rights attorneys, AFI facilitates pro bono immigration representation and resettlement assistance for International Artists who have been persecuted or censored. Since 2017, AFI has provided $4+ million in pro bono legal and resettlement assistance and taken on over 1200 at-risk artist cases. The artists in AFI's network come from 60+ countries and work across 40 creative disciplines. As the only nonprofit in the world dedicated to providing pro bono legal and resettlement services for at-risk artists, our work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, NBC, Gagosian, and New York Magazine.

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