Anthony Hudson / Carla Rossi (Portland, OR): Looking for Tiger Lily
Theatre/Drag/Music/Multimedia

Portland's premier drag clown Carla Rossi hosts a semi-one-woman cabaret telling the story of two star-crossed lovers: Weimar Germany and contemporary America. "Carla Rossi Sings the End of the World" compares the whirling, progressive creativity and freedom of 1920s Berlin with America today via a piano-accompanied songbook of Berlin theatre standards (with pianist Maria Choban), and dance support from cabaret girls The Dolly Pops (led and choreographed by Tiffany Slottke). The always-sincerely insincere Carla guides the audience through this doomed romance with a winking eye and trademark banter, provoking us to acknowledge what became of Weimar Berlin and asking the question - could that happen to us? This event was presented with ASL interpretation. 'Carla Rossi Sings the End of the World' is funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Photo by Gia Goodrich

Photo by Gia Goodrich

LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY utilizes song, drag, and video to put a queer spin on ancestral, traditional storytelling; what it means for a mixed-race person to grow up seeing their heritage filtered through white normative media.

BIO

ANTHONY HUDSON is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and filmmaker. He lives in Portland, OR among lush greenery, sprawling gentrification, and a not-mutually-exclusive fear of bridges and earthquakes. Anthony is perhaps best known as Portland’s premier drag clown CARLA ROSSI, an immortal trickster whose attempts at realness almost always result in fantastic failure. Career highlights include Pepper Pepper’s Critical Mascara for TBA (PICA), the Cascade AIDS Project Art Auction, Seattle PrideFest, and Conduit Dance’s DANCE+ Festival, and hosting alongside Coco Peru, Peaches Christ, Jinkx Monsoon, Bianca Del Rio, and more. Anthony & Carla host and program their LGBTQ film series QUEER HORROR bimonthly at the historic Hollywood Theatre, and they recently received their second RACC Artist Focus project grant for the full-length version of LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY, premiering in Fall 2016.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Carla Rossi, Portland’s premier drag clown and (in her words) “ghost of white privilege,” confronts white supremacy and the confusion of “mixed” identities – of living in-between, particularly sexually and racially. LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY forces Carla (but also Anthony) to trace personal and ancestral lines to work through and recreate childhood memories, namely watching Tiger Lily’s “Ugg-A-Wugg” song from Mary Martin’s Peter Pan. While this is technically a “one-woman-ish” show, a large element of the show – the storytelling – comes through with the use of video and slides, inspired by the Power Points Anthony’s father used to give as a Grand Ronde Tribal social worker. His father’s workshops for State social workers taught the importance of the Indian Child Welfare Act and the lived realities of assimilation and intergenerational trauma, and included typical “dad jokes,” pictures of the Chemawa Indian School where he grew up, and his family history within the Tribe.

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