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W H A T ’ S H A P P E N I N G (click on any title for details)
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic disruption began, with the performing arts sector hard hit by shutdowns, losses, and revenue and audiences still lagging significantly today from pre-pandemic levels, even as other sectors of the County’s creative economy are recovering. The Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture has announced 40 awards—totaling $1.2 million—to performing arts organizations, individual artists and producers of new or existing artistic work, including dance, music, theater, and folk and traditional arts. This one-time program, the LA County Performing Arts Recovery Grant, provides support to the sector with funding from the former Ford Theatre Foundation, administered by the Center for Cultural Innovation on behalf of the Department of Arts and Culture.
This award will provide funding for the creation, documentation, and presentation of the evening-length version of BBC (Big Black Cockroach), which will premiere in June 2024 at Los Angeles’ REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater).
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MIXED BLOOD THEATRE COMPANY (MINNEAPOLIS) PRESENTS CRITICAL MASS PERFORMANCE GROUP’S MARIOLOGY
Paul Outlaw joins director Nancy Keystone and ensemble for the next phase of development of CMPG’s current project Mariology, which explores the Virgin Mary as a source of faith and comfort—especially in these harrowing times—and as a weapon of control and colonization.
In a mythical fifth grade classroom, indoctrination gives way to fantasy and rebellion, in a rambunctious spectacle of live music, movement and text. Mariology disrupts ingrained knowledge and inspires imagination about Mary’s roles in systems of gender, power and faith, in order to open possibilities for personal liberation and agency.
Mariology will be opening the 47th season of Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, with three weeks of performances beginning on October 27. For reservations and information, please visit Mixed Blood's WEBSITE.
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Celebrating over 70 years of service to the LGBTQ+ community, One Institute presents Circa, the first and only LGBTQ+ histories festival in the United States. During October (LGBT History Month), the festival will be presented at various venues throughout Los Angeles. On October 3, Circa welcomes Paul Outlaw’s “The Place in Which I’ll Fit Will Not Exist Until I Make It: Eight Black Voices from the Eight Decades of One Institute,” a reading featuring excerpts from writings by and interviews with queer African American luminaries from the 1950s to the 2020s. Their words serve not only as snapshots of queer culture in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, but also as a timeline of our triumphs and challenges.
ONE NIGHT ONLY: Tuesday, October 3 at 7pm>>>>Advocate & Gochis Galleries at the Los Angeles LGBT Center>>>>1225 N McCadden Place, Los Angeles, CA 90028>>>>Click HERE to reserve tickets (free of charge)
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ACCELERATOR: A POWER GROUP IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
Los Angeles Performance Project’s ACCELERATOR builds a community of independent artists that are actively seeking to resource and develop a current project. The cohort meets monthly to deepen their producing resources through guest speakers and engaging with our knowledgeable staff. ACCELERATOR serves as an accountability framework to aim for ten firm proposals or actions towards developing & resourcing each participant’s work.
Invited participants will have a demonstrated commitment to longevity in contemporary performance, be based in Los Angeles, and actively working towards developing a specific performance project.
2023 ACCELERATOR artists: Daniel Corral, Alison De La Cruz, Marsian De Lellis, DaEun Jung, Daria Kaufman, Mireya Lucio, Paul Outlaw, Nina Sarnelle, Selwa Sweidan, Anu Yadav, Chelsea Zeffiro.
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W H A T H A P P E N E D I N 2 0 2 2 ( & 2 0 2 1 )
Painful, crusty: Two seasoned satyrs wrap themselves in a velvet artifice of memory…
DUET is a new devised performance work-in-progress that explores boyhood, maturity and mortality through storytelling, movement, masks and audiovisual media.
Original text, dramaturgy and images: Paul Outlaw and Joe Seely
Masks and accessories: Joe Seely
Media editing: Paul Outlaw
Monday, October 17 at 7:30pm Pacific Time (live and in-person)
Ahmanson Auditorium, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Live Arts Exchange [LAX] Festival Vol. 9 , organized by Miranda Wright and Patricia Garza (Los Angeles Performance Practice) with Alex Sloane (MOCA’s Associate Curator of Performance and Programs), the festival is an electric week-long lineup of all Los Angeles-based artists who create new work in contemporary dance, theater, music and cross-genre performance.
Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs is organized by Alex Sloane with Amelia Charter (Producer Performance and Programs) and Brian Dang (Programming Coordinator).
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WALL BERLINER, WAHLBERLINER is a new theatrical work in English and German for three performers. It tells the story of the self-imposed exile of a queer African American performing artist in West Berlin and and his ongoing relationship with the city over several decades.
Presented as part of IN EXILE. QUEERWEEK22:
“The hard reality of life in Berlin is, at the same time, a wet dream: here the self, lived out freely, constantly encounters alienating labels from the outside, as if being alienated from one’s actual body wasn’t challenging enough. Anyone who, self-confidently estranged from the world, searches for cohesion, will self-evidently be alienated – the never-ending search for security and the question of if it even exists, when escaping from one danger means the next is lying in wait. Alleged and actual safety will be explored in multilingual-speechless and nonverbal ways with performances, dance, parties, theatre, discussions and art exhibitions on queerness in exile and exile in queerness.”
Saturday, September 3 at 8:30pm Central European Time (live and in-person)
Studio R, Am Festungsgraben 2., 10117 Berlin
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QUEER BIENNIAL presents (IN)APPROPRIATE(D)
Saturday, June 4 at 7:00pm (live and in-person)
ONE Gallery, 626 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, CA
Organized by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario
for QUEER DIASPORAS: LAVENDER CITY OF DREAMS.
Inspired by and reflecting on the current state of queerness, gender politics and the rainbow spectrum of identity, the evening’s participants—some of Kuiland-Nazario’s favorite writers and troublemakers*—will be reading a blend of inappropriate, appropriate and appropriated text. Expect some appropriately inappropriate surprises.
*DL Alvarez, Ron Athey, D. Nathan Birnbaum, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Paul Outlaw, Cesar Padilla, Anuradha Vikram
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Getty Villa Theater Lab (Los Angeles), April 30, 2022 at 1 & 4pm, May 1 , 2022 at 2pm
Cassandra knows the future. She can see disasters on the horizon. And no matter what she says or what she does, no one believes her. Her city will fall. Her family will die. And so will she. She could change it all if only anyone would listen. How does one person get the world to hear?
Cassandra shows up as a side character in numerous Greek texts, but never as the central figure. Drawing on the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Lycophron, Quintus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus, New York’s Sinking Ship Productions weaves a wholly original take on her story. Using contemporary language and dynamic physical performance, the piece asks the questions: How do we think about the future? How do we act?
Cassandra, an Agony is an original work-in-progress of physical theater co-created by director Jonathan Levin, playwright Josh Luxenberg, performer Jin Maley and performer/movement director Nessa Norich. With Maley, Norich, Jen Anaya, Anthony Nikolchev and Paul Outlaw.
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Online: READING VENTRILOQUIST SCRIPTS: “THE TALKING AT MONEY”/CONSPIRACY (2021)
LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) presents Paul Outlaw’s performance for the camera for the exhibition NOT I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE– 2020 CE). This is the final episode in a series of five performances and readings from Six Scripts for Not I, the publication accompanying the exhibition. Outlaw selected an excerpt from Darby English’s contribution “The Talking at Money” for this 13-minute two-channel video performance. English’s text features a passage from the 1955 trial of Emmett Till’s murderers. The video was shot in the galleries of NOT I in front of the painting Conspiracy by Edward Biberman.
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Online: GAWDAFFUL NATIONAL THEATER’S THE DOPE ELF FILMS (2021)
Six short films commissioned by The Lab (San Francisco) are viewable free of charge on The Lab’s website, along with writer-director Asher Hartman’s introductory essay and a Zoom conversation with members of the cast, part of The Lab’s ongoing Forum series, an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation.
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Online: PRIDE PUBLICS: WORDS AND ACTIONS (2021)
The ONE Archives exhibition of 28 black-and-white posters with hand-applied accent colors, curated by Rubén Esparza, features the following artists, writers, and activists: ¿LA PREGUNTA?, Derrick Austin, Rocío Carlos, Cassils, Rick Castro, Ani Cooney, Patrisse Cullors, Durk Dehner, Angela Divina, Ramy El-Etreby, Raquel Gutierrez, Peter Kalisch, traci kato-kiriyama, Fernando Lopez), Jennifer Moon, Thinh Nguyen, Paul Outlaw, Pau S. Pescador, Rogelio Ramires, Marval A Rex, Jaklin Romine, Sheree Rose, Irene Suico Soriano, Joey Terrill, Jenevieve Ting, Imani Tolliver, C. Jerome Woods and Yozmit.
In tandem with the exhibition, ONE Archives asked Paul Outlaw and three of the other artists to create an exhibition soundtrack.
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THE LAB SF presents GAWDAFFUL NATIONAL THEATER’S THE DOPE ELF: ORGANIZED AROUND THE EROTICS OF DOING YOU IN (2021)
Disavowal, disgust, dissociation, delectation and death, the slime nectar of change, are the material of a live performance that teeters between a theatrical work and a vigil for theater that can no longer hold our grief. Asking “Why theater now?” Gawdafful National Theater allows for the seepage of the actors’ lived experience into the theater company’s rehearsed text, risking a theatrical experience that cannot be contained.
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For two consecutive years (2020 and 2021), Paul was awarded a Lincoln City Fellowship by the Speranza Foundation!
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L O O K I N G A H E A D:
the full-length premiere at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater)
Los Angeles, June 2024
This project is supported by
a Ucross Foundation playwriting residency (2020)
two Speranza Foundation Lincoln City Fellowships (2020 & 2021)
the inaugural Thymele Arts Incubator Residency (2020)
a FCA (Foundation for Contemporary Arts) COVID-19 Fund Emergency Grant (2020)
the generosity of individual donors
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