The Brick Theater Presents the Trans Theatre Festival 2017
By: BWW News Desk Jun. 21, 2017
The Trans Theatre Festival 2017 FREE Cabaret Preview
See 5-minute excerpts from shows in the festival.
FREE!! Limited seating.
90 minutes
Monday, July 17 @ 8pm Accidental Trans Anthems
Performed by Maybe Burke
A cabaret of songs that you didn't know were meant for trans people! Growing up trans, there haven't always accurate representations of trans people in pop culture and the media. Many queer and trans people have had to find metaphors in stories that weren't intentionally about their lives and their experiences. Join Maybe Burke as they sing songs with messages and themes that can apply to their experiences as a trans person.
60 minutes
Tuesday, July 18 @ 7pm Butch: Give Me That Word
Butch: Give Me That Word is an experimental movement piece inspired by lesbian punk culture from the early 90s and shadows our protagonist Aodhans' fragile masculinity and lingering ennui toward the seeming loss of his femme identity. Where will his elaborate conformist mask of self-denial lead him?
30 minutes
Friday, July 21 @ 7pm
Tuesday, July 25 @ 9:10pm
Thursday, July 27 @ 7pm
Written by Jordan Ho and directed by Katie Looney
Four friends band together to play the English translation of best-selling JRPG, The Four Holy Beats. However, due to slow buffering speeds, our heroes-in-training must wait to "press START." However, that doesn't' mean the game hasn't' already started. Choose Your Character marinates in (esoteric) memes and video game culture, meditating on what it means to have an identity when IRL and virtual realities intersect.
60 minutes
Wednesday, July 19 @ 9pm
Saturday, July 22 @ 10:15pm
Monday, July 24 @ 7pm City/Girl
July 23, 2017
written and performed by Riley Mondragon
City/ Girl is a solo comedy show written and performed by Riley Mondragon, a trans woman from Chicago. It mixes spoken word and sketch comedy to underscore the surprising relationship between the cycle of growth of a young trans woman and the industrious, unyielding nature of Chicago. In its sold-out workshop run in Chicago, it elicited laughs, tears, and numerous conversations about the commodification of female and transgender stories in the media.
50 minutes
Sunday, July 23 @ 4pm
Form Me is an augmented reality performance piece exploring physicality in transness. As the piece progresses their physical body becomes more distorted, covered in the construction and destruction of augments. Form Me is a reclamation of my body, my craft, my transness, and my realities: physical, digital, mental, and anywhere beyond/between.
30 minutes+A talk back
Friday, July 28 @ 9:15pm LAURAS
A postlanguage play about identity, mysticism, and relationships. Toni Kochensparger is a postlanguage poet from Kettering, Ohio, who now lives in Harlem. For pamphlets and performance dates please visit www.missuppity.com.
60 minutes
Thursday, July 27 @ 8:30pm LGNA VGNA
Taking the hyperreal whatever of MTV George W 2nd Term cis princess and smashing it against the real challenges of transfeminine ontology, we ask ourselves and each other: where did we learn this stuff? LGNA VGNA is a dance about writing the past backwards and becoming.
45 minutes
Saturday, July 22 @ 4:15pm
Sunday, July 23 @ 7:30pm
Friday, July 28 @ 11:15pm Madam Silky's
July 23 - 29, 2017
This show is a period piece on what its' like to be trans and black in the 1950s Louisiana just right before the civil rights movement started kicking off. It tells the story of three different young transgender women who have different dreams and what they do to go for their dreams.
45 minutes
Sunday, July 23 @ 2:15pm,
Friday, July 28 @ 7pm
Saturday, July 29 @ 9:30pm Mongrel
July 21 - 29, 2017
Written by Corbin Went
Grandpa's dead. I never met him. Or I did, but I was just a baby. Anyway, he lived on the island, and I kinda want to go to the funeral? My father says it isn't safe, for me. I stand out: pretty white; pretty queer. Then there's family to meet. They'll deadname me, but at least my old name sounds good in an accent. This play is the story of confronting
my trans identity with a cultural heritage that has no language for it. Non-binary, mixed race, maybe that Rastafarian beach bum was right; maybe I am a mongrel.
50 minutes
Friday, July 21 @ 8:30pm
Tuesday, July 25 @ 7pm
Saturday, July 29 @ 7pm my scalp and me
July 29, 2017
written and performed by hallie christine
It's the middle of the night and they can't sleep. Luckily they're not alone. This solo performance of movement and journaling looks at dysphoria, spontaneity, insomnia, and how to ask for help. Can compression feel like an embrace, instead of a bandaged wound? Can the witching hour of anxiety actually let us be alone, together? Come hold hands with your body.
30 minutes
Saturday, July 29 @ 5:30pm Oddity
A "Gender Specialist" is brought in to a secret Victorian-Era medical facility deep within the earth to unravel the mystery of a series of murders and body mutilations which have taken place. As he meets the sole survivor and begins to unravel the mystery and his claustrophobic paranoia begins to overtake him the specialist finds it hard to believe
anything he's told.
75 minutes
Thursday, July 20 @ 9:20pm
Saturday, July 22 @ 2pm
Monday, July 24 @ 9pm Pin* and the Blue Fairy
Pin* and the Blue Fairy, an experimental work in development, presents a new adaptation of Carlo Collodis' The Adventures of Pinocchio alongside the original story of a nonbinary teenager in contemporary South Carolina. Nonbinary Southern artists writer/director noah kat baus and writer/producer Lev Craig introduce a staged reading of the contemporary story, in which the protagonist struggles to reconcile their gender with their class and family identity, apprehensive father, and first relationship. The reading will be followed by a discussion about navigating partner relationships and family identity as a transgender person and the role of drama as a resource for queer youth.
80 minutes
Thursday, July 20 @ 7pm STERILE
This is a piece about exploring human alienation from established institutes. The towering figures dressed as plague doctors poke and prod and look for evidence to prove their hypotheses about what being human is, but totally ignore the humanity of the subject. These elite all argue and talk amongst themselves as they keep pushing their investigations of the "human condition."
30 minutes
Friday, July 21 @ 10:40pm
Sunday, July 23 @ 6pm
Wednesday, July 26 @ 7pm Swaggy: An American Love Story
Co-written by Bre Northrup and Molly Bicks
featuring Bre Northrup
directed by Molly Bicks
"I feel invincible like, nothing is bigger than God. If God's for me, who can be against me?" - Justin Bieber
"I used to freak out at arcades, but now I'm like, whatever." - Justin Bieber
23 years ago a woman saw God on the freeway. He blessed her with a gift. That gift was Justin Bieber.
Born in Canda. Made in America. Swaggy.
45 minutes
Saturday, July 22 @ 8:30pm T(estosterone)
Is testosterone the holy grail of (trans)masculinity, or just another drug? Hormones can be magical, alchemical: gel, rubbed on the chest and arms once a day, can transform a body; a weekly shot can make a life feel, finally, possible. But like any substance, access, quality, and outcome are not evenly distributed, and like any marker of identity, stories that surround it easily become oversimplified, even oppressive. (T)estosterone follows four trans friends as they navigate Planned Parenthood and tell themselves and each other stories that embody the diversity and complexity of real gender processes.
60 minutes
Saturday, July 29 @ 3:30pm The TransGenerational Theatre Project
The TransGenerational Theatre Project is a group of trans and gender nonconforming people of all different ages who come together to create original theatre based on their own ideas and experiences. This year our theme has been resistance. The participants have explored the many ways that the trans community constantly finds unique ways to resist. Join us for a celebration of resistance and the trans community!
90 minutes
Wednesday, July 19 @ 7pm
Friday, July 21 @ 4:30pm
Saturday, July 22 @ 6pm Water, (the most Natural Sculpture)
Water, (the most natural sculpture) is a devised life performance piece developed over workshops by and for members of body language collective, through creative translations with everyday movements, rituals, personal memories and
collective trauma. The workshop and the performance both are practices that center the bodies that dominant narratives reject, disengage or fetishize. In this particular piece, members discuss the importance of water in their lives: physical water, sweat, tears, fluidity, lands, navigation in spaces with connected individual pieces.
90 minutes
Tuesday, July 18 @ 9pm
Wednesday, July 26 @ 8:30pm
Saturday, July 29 @ 1pm The Trans Theatre Festival will play at The Brick (579 Metropolitan Ave at Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn) July 17 - 29 on a festival schedule. Tickets ($20) may be purchased online at www.bricktheater.com or by calling 866-811-
4111.
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