PIONEERS GO EAST

Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Remi Harris, Philip Treviño, and more jointly curated as PioneersGo East Collective Out-FRONT Fest 2025 with as much vigor as the selected artists provided.

Showing at Judson Memorial Church and BAM, Out-FRONT centered radical queer and feminist voices in spaces known for championing such themes. Blaze Ferrer and Stuart B Meyers held down the queer fort with Dick Biter and the garden, respectively, in a program that ranged from aggressively flamboyant to internally tumultuous to a three-sided house.

The fuzz of Alex Romania’s guitar appropriately cut into the evening’s welcome
statements. He emerged on Judson’s platform donning a heavy metal headbanger’s wig, adding distorted phrases to Jeff Aaron Bryant’s music. Gradually, Romania’s cronies enter –choreographer Ferrer and Joey Kipp. They cement Romania’s appearance as a uniform, wearing the wigs, jockstraps and confetti filled sweaters. Romania has another thing the others don’t – a strap-on dildo. Already the power dynamic is queered, having the choreographer in a submissive role to Romania.

Kipp and Ferrer dance backup in your face, alternating between thrashing waves of
movement and tense stillness. The dramaturgical setting wavers between gym class and a mosh pit where only effeminate male energy is allowed to unleash its full suppressed rage. Cones strew the floor, covered in glitter and hot glue as a stand in for drops of semen. They are not to be moved; when Romania’s hair accidentally drags one across the stage, it is placed exactly where it was amid the tumult.

Between an arc that goes from licking temporary tattoos on each
other to inserting butt plugs with streamers on them, there are moments of undecipherable text, derived from Fiona Apple’s 1997 VMA speech. In showing so much, Dick Biter also shows what you miss when you are physically unable to pay full attention to things often ignored.

I first saw Stuart B Meyers’s thegarden at Pioneers Go East’s A Radical Pride of Love last June. Initially a solo of speedy micro-articulations to a meditation to ready one’s body for surgery, Meyers more sternly casts themself as the patient, dressed in more convincing hospital clothes. The biggest change was adding an entire system of harsh lighting, by Connor Sale, to the ground, which shine at different speeds, catching Meyers in expectant agony. The wires of the lights physicalize the imagined garden, trapping Meyers in the very imagery that is supposed to soothe them.

EYE ON THE ARTS NY — Jonathan Matthews-Guzman