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.

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.

Tim Smith-Stewart is a Seattle based interdisciplinary artist. He utilizes text as his primary medium for creating performances and installations. This past summer Tim created BIG TREES STIR MEMORIES LIVE WATER HEALS THEM, an audio and visual installation at the LoFi Arts Festival at Smoke Farm. In February 2014, Tim showcased THE MAILROOM, an installation created in collaboration with Charlie Spitzack at the Art Shanty Project in St. Paul, Minnesota (2014). His work has also been seen at The Seattle Center Next50, On the Boards NorthWest New Works Festival, LoFi Arts Festival at Smoke Farm, Velocity Dance Center Big Bang, and Seattle Fringe Festival.

Anonymous AO uses street art, secret messages and performance scores as a radical means for survival as they combat disaffection with oppressive systems, suicidal ideation, and on overall hopelessness. AO’s secret identity is a means to protect the magical world of momentary poetic ruptures that they have constructed. Tim becomes a conduit to share that expression while maintaining AO’s anonymity. Awaiting Oblivion is a continued collaboration between Tim Smith-Stewart and Jeffrey Azevedo, occupying a thinly veiled line between “real time” and “fictional time.” While AO is constructing street art anonymously across the city, Tim presents a fiction in the theatrical space based on AO’s temporary solutions and correspondence.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Faith Helma is a performance artist and singer/songwriter who has worked with Hand2Mouth for fifteen years, creating and performing in Repeat After Me (2007), Everyone Who Looks Like You (2010) and Something’s Got Ahold of My Heart (2013) among others. She also created the one-woman music-theatre performance Undine (2008), which toured to Seattle, New York and San Francisco. She currently works with people one on one and in groups as a Creative Guide, and if you’d like to book a session you can go to her website: faithhelma.com/workwithme.

I HATE POSITIVE THINKING is inspired by Faith Helma’s aversion to positive thinking on the one hand, and her fascination with life-coaching, hypnosis, and the power of the unconscious mind on the other. It’s also inspired by the curveball of giving birth to her son, and how the tools of creativity and performance helped her survive. By using these tools, Helma will help other people harness their own creative power to dissolve blocks and solve life problems. Specifically the performance will include:
• Semi-coherent rants from about how much “I hate positive thinking”
• Guided exercises and experiments with the audience (for instance, testing one of the main facets of positive thinking by seeing if we can manifest something over the course of the performance)
• Simple songs I have written, like “I’m Awkward, I’m Alive” and “You Can’t Control the Universe, You Can’t Control Your Mind”