A keynote speaker at an ecology conference presents her latest achievement — her metamorphosis into a mushroom. A lecture-performance, myco-fantasy, and love story — with wearable sculpture, physical theater and miniature. This work questions humans’ place in the world, and asks what we might learn from the non-human networks growing beneath our feet.
Sarah Finn (she/they) is a multimedia artist who creates live performance, video and film. Using surreal storytelling, video, physical performance, and puppetry, they make worlds where queer and regenerative futures emerge from modern ruins. Her short films and performance works have been presented at festivals across the US and overseas. She was a 2023 recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant and MAP Fund Microgrant, a 2023 Resident Artist at Mabou Mines (NY, NY), and 2023 Resident of Object Movement & Festival at the Center at West Park, (NY, NY). She’s currently pursuing her MFA at SFU’s School for Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, BC. www.sarahkfinn.com @sarah.k.
Collaborators: Celeste Camfield, Woodrow Hunt
Unwinding is a new multimedia performance from Mvskoke sisters Olivia and Celeste Camfield alongside collaborator Woodrow Hunt. Through movement as an offering, live music, and film the performers explore the relations and abstractions between stories of the Alien, Mvskoke stories of beyond the stars, and themselves as family navigating space.
Olivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in the Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection of dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. Olivia’s films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, and others. Olivia was a 2018-2019 Alembic Artist In Residence, CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, and 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant. They were a 2022 NACF LIFT awardee.
Celeste Camfield is a mixed Muscogee artist living on the occupied land of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ (Comanche), Ndé Kónitsąąíí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache), Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos peoples, currently known as Austin, TX. She works in the mediums of movement, film, and, food. She grew up dancing in the Texas Hill Country and studied dance at Marymount Manhattan College. She has studied modern dance in Vicenza, Barcelona, Prague, and at ImPulsTanz in Vienna. She also studied at Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S summer school in Brussels. She is a member of ARCOS, performing with the company since 2019. Celeste has also performed original works with BLiPSWiTCH and Alexa Capareda. She has been creating and performing in experimental dance films since 2019, with screenings in Austin, Camden, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Portland. In 2022, Celeste co-founded Preheat Fest, a film festival that celebrates the experimental on camera.
Woodrow Hunt is an artist of Klamath, Modoc and Cherokee descent. Woodrow was born and raised in Portland, OR. Woodrow’s film practice is focused on documentary and experimental forms. His experimental work explores the functions and relationship between digital video and memory and the ways digital video can communicate issues related to the Native community. His film production company, Tule Films, provides video services to Tribes, Native businesses and organizations, or to projects which collaborate directly with the Native community; many of which are focused on education. His films have screened at the Portland International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, MoMA DocFortnight, and other festivals internationally. His work has been included in the ArtForum print article “Artists’ Artists 2020,” the Boston Art Review, and Hyperallergic’s online articles about COUSIN Collective. Woodrow is a featured artist of COUSIN Collective and was a 2022 Sundance Institute Non-Fiction Intensive Fellow.
“Seers of the Savant Garde” is a mixed media ensemble clown performance that explores themes of occultism, gender-bending, and mask work culminating in a collective seance all while channeling and invoking a whimsical and mystifying exploration of archetypes from the aether.
The Clown Mystics are a newly formed group of clowns and magic makers, dedicated to the art of ritual performance through the absurdity and play of the clown.
Given Davis: co-director, clown dramaturge, performer/musician
Given Davis (he/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, tarot reader, poet, and magic maker in Portland navigating the world in a magical queer Black nonbinary trans masc body. Their creative practice dances the lines between poetry, clown, drag, music, and video art. Given has explored comedy and clowning through stand up, participation in the Rose Festival Character Clown Corps, and Oregon Country Fair performances with Thomas Schroyer and Rick Huddle, and study with master clown Sue Morrison in the Canadian/Pochinko clowning transition. Given is a co-creator of the local queer/trans public access variety show “Magic Night at the Trans Bar with Max and Mars and Given and Urks and Friends!”
Urks Io: co-director, writer, video designer, props lead, performer
urks io (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and queer futurist based in Portland, OR. Primarily working through interactive installation art, experimental video, and performance art filled with irreverent humor, word play, and ecstatic nonsense, urks creates worlds and universes that manifest a radical future of playful, chaotic joy and queer pleasure through lived embodiment. Urks is a co-creator of two web/ tv shows: public access queer variety show “Magic Night at the Trans Bar with Max and Mars and Given and Urks and Friends!” and the in-production psychedelic space odyssey “Friends in Space-Time Story Hour.”
Zai Outlaw: producer, co-director, occult dramaturge, costuming lead, performer/musician
Zai Outlaw (us/we/them) Their background includes training at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, performance with Lucent Dossier, Cirque Berzerk, Fire Groove, and participation in the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Currently aligning themselves in interdisciplinary visual and written arts centered around Archetypes, Hermetic Alchemy and our roots in African Traditional Religions. Zai’s body of work is varied and chaotic spanning traditional theater, dance, busking, music, poetry, film, puppetry, costume design and visual media. We produced the Summer ‘22 PDX installation of Garbage Fest; a multidisciplinary immersive theater experience highlighting artists whose mediums and thesis are waste. Our intention with all actions is to inspire, spark joy, and dismantle the chokehold of colonial western ideals.
A living digression on emergency homeless shelters in Portland, the inescapable labyrinth of immigrant identity, and the confronting the monstrousness of being.
Paul Susi (he/him) is a theater artist, an educator, a writer, social services professional, and an activist, born and raised in Portland, Oregon. As an actor, he has appeared onstage with the NW Classical Theatre Collaborative, Anon It Moves / String House, Shaking the Tree Studios, Push Leg, The Forgery, Island Stage Left, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Vermont Stage Company, Teatro Solo/Boom Arts, as well as in self-produced, original work. In 2018-2019, Paul toured “An Iliad” to over 30 prisons, community centers, places of worship, and theaters throughout Oregon with NW Classical Theatre Collaborative and singer/songwriter Anna Fritz.
Performers: Elby Brosch + Shane Donohue
Seattle’s [self-professed] hottest postmodern, nightlife performance duo. Drama Tops was born with the artistic partnership of Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue. They began making work together seven years ago with the creation of a solo on two bodies. The dynamic between their trans body and cis body has created beautiful moments of frustration, competition, tenderness, and comedy. Drama Tops blends the worlds of nightlife and concert modern dance to create an interesting and unique blend of accessible, funny modern dance.
created by Drama Tops (Elby Brosch + Shane Donohue)
costumes by Drama Tops
Music by Hansen and Bloodhound Gang
Special thank you to Base Experimental Arts + Space and 2 + U for providing us with space to have a residency. Thank you to Erin O’Reilly for helping us always!
A vocal mantra used to engage the audience in a communal earth call that incorporates movement and participation.
Crimson Ravarra, Mychelle Moritz, and Megita Denton aka The Trash Witch Trio are three multi-media artists who intertwine the contemporary, movement, fine arts, and time based mediums to evoke powerful social reverberations.
Megita Denton – director, sound, costume design, co-collaborator of concept, performer
Mychelle Moritz- co-collaborator of concept, actress, muse, performer
Crimson Ravarra – performer, actress, muse
Pearl Lockwood – baritone saxophonist
Amo Reyes (Miau): musician, singer, live artist, video artist, and set designer. Miau is a transdisciplinary artist and musician with an MFA from Portland State. They have performed and shown art nationally both as an artist and as ATOLE.
Krista Catwood (Vera): singer, live artist, video artist, set designer, and choreographer. Vera is a longtime Portland burlesque dancer, drag artist, stage performer, costume artist, and lead singer for PDX band, Ancient Heat.
Drama Informed are a live electronic dance music duo from Portland, Oregon.
Drama Informed are two radical queers envisioning an empowered queer utopia together using an immersive sensory experience.
Drama Informed are two old friends and allies, Miau and Vera, creating space for themselves and others to further discover themselves.
Vera and Miau met as part of Portland’s music scene over ten years ago. After years of supporting one another as fans, allies, and friends, they sparked the idea of Drama Informed during the curtain call of CANELA by ATOLE in summer of 2023.
Have you ever been to the ASStral plane? You know, the place to dream, the place to grow, the place suck your toes until you blow? There’s no shame on the ASStral plane. It’s a place of exploration, transportation, transmutation. Your desires, your fantasies, your big sticky icky wishes can come to life. On the ASStral plane, gorgeous gorgeous girls get their gorgeous gorgeous wings before they fly away. glitch_bitch wants to take you there.
Sarah Turner is a new media and video artist who creates large scale immersive environments and performances through analog media and creative coding. She engages in ritual and contemporary mythologies to augment reality through performative psycho spiritual activations. Turner is the Co-Founder of Mobile Projection Unit, which creates site specific installations around the Pacific Northwest & New York through outdoor projection mapping. Her work has been shown at Portland Art Museum, Wieden + Kennedy, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Portland International Film Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Northwest Film Center, Spaceness Festival, Marfa Open Festival, Laboratory Residency and more. Turner received an MFA at Alfred University in Electronic Integrated Art.
Emma Lutz-Higgins and Tahni Holt dance inside a porous performance space where we are moving within the landscape of attention. We are twinning (across two decades of age), sometime twining, and rocking into ways of seeking, dispersing and disappearing. We commit to residing here, inside the devotional rigour of dancing together.
This is the first iteration of a future performance to-be-performed sometime in 2025 with Luke Wyland (composer) and Jess perlitz (visual artist).
Thank you to Adrian Hutapea, Jenny Ampersand, Vein of Gold, tennis shoes, and our plant kin who so graciously let us move her from Tahni’s house for some days for this cameo. Song credit: Eurythmics, Love is a Stranger.
Emma Lutz-Higgins (b.1993 Montpelier, VT) is a performer, choreographer and teacher residing in Portland, OR. Emma is interested in translation- how “The Dance,” an ever-present phenomena where dance is always happening can be collected and shaped into an organized performance through research into the interiority of her dancers. It is through this concept that she begins every process. Emma hails from Brooklyn, NY where she’s performed at Movement Research, Danspace Project, Live Arts, SLAM, Gibney Dance Studios and The Brick Theater. She graduated from Bard College in 2016 under the mentorship of Bill T. Jones, Leah Cox, Beth Gill, Jack Ferver and Vanessa Anspaugh.
Tahni Holt was born (1975) and raised in what is now known as Portland, OR. Tahni has spent her adult life in service to dance, through performance, teachings, community gathering, on-going collaborations, somatic studies and building organizations. For Tahni dance making is a way to imagine and question and reside in the liminal space, where unraveling is not a marker of failure but one of great power and intrigue. Tahni’s work has been performed throughout the U.S and has received the Barney Award commission through White Bird dance for Sensation/Disorientation (2017), a National Dance Project touring award (2015) and is a USA Artist Fellowship Nominee (2021 + 2015). She is founder and now one of four stewards of FLOCK Dance Center. www.flockpdx.org // w
Once in a Lifetime: Dead People’s Sheets stitches together bed linens from recent estate sales into a massive, hanging structure that invites you to reflect on what we carry and what we leave behind.
Lyndsay Hogland has been channeling quarks and translating interdimensional pillow talk in support of artists and their projects for over 25 years. In 2018, she began to seriously work on her own damn stuff, and in 2023 she exhibited her work publicly for the first time. She’s currently working on a series of interactive installations and performances called Once in a Lifetime that explore how each of us would like to be remembered after we die, and how our answer to that question changes as we age. Dead People’s Sheets is the first installment in that series.
This project was made possible by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
A huge thank you to the Risk/Reward Festival, Dukkworth A. McQuack, Danny Davis, Jonas Nash, Tiona Cage, Charlie Copeland, Jeffrey Arnsdorf, Eowyn Barrett, Julian Blank, and my entire family for all their support.
Hosted by Anthony Hudson/Carla Rossi and Pepper Pepper, this second annual edition opens with drag performances by RiMoan.
Saturday, June 22 at 4 PM:
One drag queen’s story and why she has been single for more than a decade.
Svetlana Trantastic is a drag artist, puppeteer, and storyteller exploring themes of poverty, drug use, loneliness, and dating through humor, music, and dance. Reflections on Loneliness and Independence features parodies and stories of her own as well as collaborations with musical composers Epic Soul and Matt Lohkamp.
Sunday, June 23 at 4 PM:
WITH ADAM STANSELL, SAMARA DRAKE, AND TAYLOR SWITCH
After hearing feedback from fellow queer theater lovers that productions are often quite binary in their presentation, Sonnei Verbena and Alex Hartman joined forces to create The Pansy Agenda to produce original works that emphasize queerness and tell stories that may appeal to a modern audience. In the upcoming dark comedy production, My Roommate, Triggers, the founding duo will step into a more absurdist inspired realm alongside cast members Adam Stansell, Samara Drake and Taylor Switch.
In this show, Sonnei Verbena, a 17 year drag veteran and playwright stars as a wickedly eccentric, overbearing and manipulative clown called Triggers who has opened his apartment up to share a space with Alan Hartley, a passive and newly independent 32 year old who hasn’t quite figured out the importance and power of boundaries, played by musician, playwright and show director, Alex Hartman.
Adam Stansell, an accomplished concert musician has worked behind the scenes in the theater world. He has been interested in stepping further into the performing arts and will make his acting debut as the toxically positive boyfriend, Blake Wheeler. Samara Drake, a local drag queen and theater major who recently starred in The Pansy Agenda’s musical production “Belladonna” will play the role of Ms. Hartley, an absent and self-indulgent mother who is finding freedom a bit late in life. Taylor Switch, another Belladonna star and fabulous drag king brings the bad boy vibes to a pizza delivery boy who is on his last limb. The Pansy Agenda hopes you’ll enjoy this staged reading of our latest work in progress as we expand our repertoire of stories.
Follow us on IG for updates on future shows, including how to get involved in the whimsical worlds we’re building @pansyagenda !
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Painting:
Simran Gleason / Slow Camera Paparazzi
Dark Reflector is the deep-groove, synth heavy, solo project of long-time Portland based multi-instrumentalist Ryan Cross. Composed and performed with analog & digital synthesizers, sequencers / drum machines, live loops, acoustic percussion and piano.
SIRENS, the first EP released March 20th, 2024 was written and recorded while Cross was diagnosed with a stage-4 cancer. SIRENS features six, potent tracks that grapple with mortality, life choices, re-wiring the human condition, and finding light in the darkest of times.
SIRENS was recorded live in Portland, Or. and mixed/mastered by long-time friend and local music staple, Rob Oberdorfer (Badger Music, Ages & Ages, Loch Lomond, The Standard).
Cross’ melodramatic, low-register voice combined with the down-tempo, synth driven compositions has a dark-pop value that is reminiscent of early 80’s wave with a modern trip-hop quality.
https://linktr.ee/darkreflector