A RADICAL PRIDE OF LOVE

Coinciding with the end of Pride Month, Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte and Philip Treviño curated A Radical Pride of Love – A Celebration of Queer Art at the 14 th Street Y. Their programming gathered three solos of vastly different flavors, highlighting performance’s importance in reckoning multifaceted identities.

Joey Kipp opened with an excerpt of Tracing Lorraine. Like a séance, Kipp channels black, queer playwright Lorraine Hansberry, best known for A Raisin in the Sun. A sound score of sultry jazz tunes and excerpts of Hansberry’s scripts animate Kipp as would a spirit possession. Supplicative postures and bound locomotive patterns carve through a stage sparsely set with a typewriter at the center.

Like a werewolf under a full moon, Kipp lip-syncs “Love Me or Leave Me” – phasing from smiles to snarls and gestures of elegant hands that mutate into claws. His kinesthetic tumult illustrates Hansberry’s struggle to transcend the limited label of writing “negro plays” through painstaking specificity in her characters’ contexts.

She posits that “rebellion rarely knows that it wants to do when it gets through rebelling,” which Kipp takes as a cue to remain in a state of rebellion. Released from Hansberry’s ghost, he pants out his own text alongside a clear recording of a projected manifesto, listing off-kilter juxtapositions of irreverent wordplay, equally self-actualizing in its deprecation.

Hunter Sturgis focused on liberating his expressivity from masculine constraints in HORIZONS. Through a mélange of primarily feminine voices, Sturgis maintains a consistent physicality, melding martial arts and vogue. He begins in flowing black pants and a white button-down, fishnet visible underneath. As the audio cycles, Sturgis removes layers of clothing, as well as the societal expectations they carry, until, to Nina Simone’s “Wild is the Wind,” he becomes the wind itself, nearly nude, wafting through the curtains.

Stuart B. Meyers’ exc. The Garden turned the evening’s theme more inward. Meyers moves with a cybernetic quality, in a continued state of buffering. Spatially aimless, they motorize via slight articulations of an inordinate amount of joints at an increasingly rapid rate.

After a climax of complex coordination, Meyers simmers down to an eerie meditation by Dr. Catherine Shainberg, designed to soothe patients before surgery through breathwork and visualization. Cold and impersonal, yet virtuosically sensual, Meyers invites viewers into a state of self-reflection at the close of an otherwise presentational program.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Jonathan Matthews-Guzman