Curated by Pioneers Go East Collective and presented in partnership with The Center, Out-FRONT! Fest is a new dance, performance art, and film festival championing the voices of LGBTQ+ and feminist artists and their lively exchanges of art and culture. The festival will feature performances and visual works by influential artists who are broadening our conversations around aesthetic diversity, personal storytelling, and intersectional meaning-making. All events and workshops are free.

Schedule:

Thursday, January 12, 2023

8:00pm: The Kitchen Sink Wrangler at the Midnight Rodeo by Symara Johnson - Theater 301

The Kitchen Sink Wrangler at the Midnight Rodeo is an exploration into the artist’s American and West Indian heritage. Johnson uses family lore and American cultural fantasy to create and project a persona that is in conversation with her lineage in the Wild West and the Deep South. In the piece, the rope becomes both a prop and partner as Johnson embodies her cowgirl persona. She uses the rope as a boundary, holding it taut and creating shapes for her body to deftly navigate. She surveils the land around her, responding to her surroundings with playful curiosity. When she begins to lasso, the rope transforms into a mesmerizing and dynamic sculptural accompaniment.

Friday, January 13, 2023

6:00pm: NEXT! Engagement Workshop - Theater 301

Friday facilitator: Arien Wilkerson

NEXT! Workshops is a creative engagement program by Pioneers Go East Collective. Designed for multigenerational participants, these workshops focus on performance and storytelling techniques, including movement practices, creative writing, and interview-based acting. The goal is to create a nurturing learning environment and build stronger bonds within the participants’ community.

6:00pm: Electric Blue, a performance installation by Pioneers Go East Collective - Room 101

Electric Blue is a dance-theater installation inspired by queer literary icon Allen Ginsberg. A meditation on creative agency and censorship, Electric Blue celebrates past and present LGBTQ resilience in pursuit of artistic freedom. Taking Ginsberg’s writing defined as pornographic literature when first published, the collective examines the author’s controversial poetry reflecting on same-sex love and male bonding. Integrating artistic disciplines, the project is devised in collaboration with three solo performing artists: singer/ dancer ALEXA GRÆ, dancer/storyteller Joey Kipp, and performance artist/storyteller Daniel Diaz. The installation and concept are by creative director Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, choreographer Symara Johnson, visual artist Mark Tambella, and designer Philip Treviño.

8:00pm: The Kitchen Sink Wrangler at the Midnight Rodeo by Symara Johnson - Theater 301

The Kitchen Sink Wrangler at the Midnight Rodeo is an exploration into the artist’s American and West Indian heritage. Johnson uses family lore and American cultural fantasy to create and project a persona that is in conversation with her lineage in the Wild West and the Deep South. In the piece, the rope becomes both a prop and partner as Johnson embodies her cowgirl persona. She uses the rope as a boundary, holding it taut and creating shapes for her body to deftly navigate. She surveils the land around her, responding to her surroundings with playful curiosity. When she begins to lasso, the rope transforms into a mesmerizing and dynamic sculptural accompaniment.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

6:00pm: Electric Blue, a performance installation by Pioneers Go East Collective - Room 101

Electric Blue is a dance-theater installation inspired by queer literary icon Allen Ginsberg. A meditation on creative agency and censorship, Electric Blue celebrates past and present LGBTQ resilience in pursuit of artistic freedom. Taking Ginsberg’s writing defined as pornographic literature when first published, the collective examines the author’s controversial poetry reflecting on same-sex love and male bonding. Integrating artistic disciplines, the project is devised in collaboration with three solo performing artists: singer/ dancer ALEXA GRÆ, dancer/storyteller Joey Kipp, and performance artist/storyteller Daniel Diaz. The installation and concept are by creative director Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, choreographer Symara Johnson, visual artist Mark Tambella, and designer Philip Treviño.

8:00pm: 835 Hours of Hope & Despair by Arien Wilkerson with Chloe Newtown and Kwami Windfield - Theater 301

835 Hours of Hope & Despair is a multidisciplinary work reflecting on how gender, labor, queerness, and geographic boundaries have affected creative paths for young queer Black artists. Wilkerson uses critical analysis and comedic “transposition persona” to shape dance celebrating Black, radical, “poz” trans, and non-binary traditions to entertain, share joy, and explore self-awareness. 835 Hours of Hope & Despair features Arien Wilkerson and Chloe Newton, with collaborators working within sculpture, sound, and light/video design. Cultural historian/dramaturge: TK Smith. Featuring text by Cedric J. Robinson, Hortense J. Spillers, Eduardo Cadava, Aaron Levy, Saidiya Hartman, Adrian Piper, and Uta Hagen. Tech and installation design by Wilkerson and Jacob Weinberg.

Sunday, January 15, 2023

5:30pm: 835 Hours of Hope & Despair by Arien Wilkerson with Chloe Newtown and Kwami Windfield - Theater 301

835 Hours of Hope & Despair is a multidisciplinary work reflecting on how gender, labor, queerness, and geographic boundaries have affected creative paths for young queer Black artists. Wilkerson uses critical analysis and comedic “transposition persona” to shape dance celebrating Black, radical, “poz” trans, and non-binary traditions to entertain, share joy, and explore self-awareness. 835 Hours of Hope & Despair features Arien Wilkerson and Chloe Newton, with collaborators working within sculpture, sound, and light/video design. Cultural historian/dramaturge: TK Smith. Featuring text by Cedric J. Robinson, Hortense J. Spillers, Eduardo Cadava, Aaron Levy, Saidiya Hartman, Adrian Piper, and Uta Hagen. Tech and installation design by Wilkerson and Jacob Weinberg.

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

7:00pm: salt and Spirit by Jasmine Hearn - Theater 301

salt and Spirit is a new work by Jasmine Hearn in collaboration with Marýa Wethers, Charmaine Warren, Dominica Greene, Kendra Portier with Nora Alami, Myssi Robinson, and Malcolm X Betts, and additional design by Angie Pittman, Lily Gelfand, and Athena Kokoronis. The piece includes a dance of many myths and a song for stilling with a focus on non-linear storytelling.

8:00pm: COLLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR – transfiguration by ALEXA GRÆ - Theater 301

COLLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR – transfiguration is a surrealist multimedia opera engaging stories manifested through body evolutions. It is a place where messages of trans and queer identity, spiritual downloads, ADHD, Blackness, and magic interact. Negotiating the singular and collective rage, the work opens up Afrofuturistic visions, justice strategies, and fantastical thoughts tethered by escapism to self-regulate. Vocalized joy poems bend genres and arias of longing evoke a grand opera thrust into the multiverse.

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

6:00pm: NEXT! Engagement Workshop - Theater 301

Wednesday facilitator: Jasmine Hearn

NEXT! Workshops is a creative engagement program by Pioneers Go East Collective. Designed for multigenerational participants, these workshops focus on performance and storytelling techniques, including movement practices, creative writing, and interview-based acting. The goal is to create a nurturing learning environment and build stronger bonds within the participants’ community.

7:00pm: Listen to your Mother by Anabella Lenzu - Room 101

Listen to your Mother is a research/choreographic art project by Anabella Lenzu, to capture histories, testimonials, and experiences of immigrant mothers and artists living and working in NYC, in an effort to create dialogue, appreciation, and social support.

8:00pm: COLLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR – transfiguration by ALEXA GRÆ - Theater 301

COLLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR – transfiguration is a surrealist multimedia opera engaging stories manifested through body evolutions. It is a place where messages of trans and queer identity, spiritual downloads, ADHD, Blackness, and magic interact. Negotiating the singular and collective rage, the work opens up Afrofuturistic visions, justice strategies, and fantastical thoughts tethered by escapism to self-regulate. Vocalized joy poems bend genres and arias of longing evoke a grand opera thrust into the multiverse.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

12:00pm - 6:00pm: Short Film Gallery streaming - Room 101

Films

Forbidden by Yasmeen Enahora
The Iranian woman is subjected to limits constraining her from freely moving her limbs, vocal chords + spirit. Forbidden is a translation of movement via film to evolve, expand, transform, and bring into recognition the restriction of women’s rights in Iran in relation to art + movement.

RIFT by Lindy Fines and Greyzone
RIFT  is a collaborative mobile phone film project created with director Lia Bonfilio. In RIFT, a solo woman follows a magical force through portals that beckon her to an unknown society. When she arrives in a transformative, liminal space, she engages in a ritualistic dance of feminine power, forever altering her experience of community.

Cygnus by Cara Hagan
Cygnus is a short screen-dance filmed on location in Battle Lake, MN. Cygnus invites us to revel in the beauty of the sunrise over calm waters as the moon slips behind the horizon. A celebration of the earth, the body, and their kinship (2018).

40 Gestures to Remind You, You’re Still Here by Cara Hagan
40 Gestures to Remind You, You’re Still Here is an experimental performance art piece, and a reminder that holding the precious particles of you in proximity to one another is made easier by holding onto something that has taken shape in the world — something that has mass, texture, color, and other such properties (2021).

Sandia by Angela Schöpke Gonzalez in collaboration with Mario Vircha
With lychees as guides, two people embark on a voracious and gluttonous journey to a space that drowns them, bathes them, and carries them into a timeless universe.

Digital Intimacy by Zach Rothman-Hicks
Digital Intimacy is a part of Gabbing with Gays, an ongoing archive of Emotional Intimacy in the LGBTQIA+ community. This piece, filmed over Zoom during the height of the pandemic, explores the challenges, benefits, and limits of opening up to others in a digital space.

7:00pm: Listen to your Mother by Anabella Lenzu - Room 101

Listen to your Mother is a research/choreographic art project by Anabella Lenzu, to capture histories, testimonials, and experiences of immigrant mothers and artists living and working in NYC, in an effort to create dialogue, appreciation, and social support.

8:00pm: salt and Spirit by Jasmine Hearn - Theater 301

salt and Spirit is a new work by Jasmine Hearn in collaboration with Marýa Wethers, Charmaine Warren, Dominica Greene, Kendra Portier with Nora Alami, Myssi Robinson, and Malcolm X Betts, and additional design by Angie Pittman, Lily Gelfand, and Athena Kokoronis. The piece includes a dance of many myths and a song for stilling with a focus on non-linear storytelling.

Date: Thursday, January 12, 2023 - Thursday, January 19, 2023

Location: The LGBT Community Center - 208 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011

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