Celebrate World Pride in NYC with LA MAMA SQUIRTS

LA MAMA SQUIRTS - presented by La MaMa, the Tony Award-winning theater in NYC, in association with Helix Queer Performance Network - will gather a collective of exciting voices from New York City's queer performance world, across multiple generations and with deep roots in the community to mark the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with a weekend of performances curated by three trans women, May 31 - June 2 at Ellen Stewart Theatre (66 East 4th Street) in Manhattan as part of World Pride celebration.

Friday, May 31 - Argentinian-American actress and activist Cecilia Gentili kicks things off with an evening of performance and storytelling featuring trans artists Julia Rose, Ash RT Yergens, Auset Bennu (aka AB), and Linda Labeija - depicting Gentili's education about Stonewall while she was in Argentina during the dictatorship there, and what she learned from LGBT culture in the U.S. during those repressive times.

Saturday, June 1 - Curated by NYC born-and-raised Mizz June, and hosted by drag ally Banjela Davis, will feature trans female musicians of color, Olympia Perez of Black Trans Media, Princess Sasha Fierce, and The Violence; along with a live-feed conversation with trans icon Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and a presentation by FIERCE! NYC. "Tonight it's FEMMES FIRST!" says Mizz June.

Sunday, June 2 - Brooklyn drag legend Charlene Incarnate will close the festival with a night of classic musical theater numbers starring an all-trans and non-binary cast featuring, Remy Black, Image Object, Lucia Honey and more. "Broadway musicals become particularly outdated as time has passed," Charlene writes, "but that material from a fraught moment in American history is reinvigorated with the trans bodies who will perform it in 2019 amidst a neo-fascist regime in America."

"For queer people, who often feel without a lineage or a place to call home, La MaMa Squirts stands as a defiant reminder that our stories are important and part of a larger queer history. It also represents the best of what theatre and performance can do - provide a necessary confrontation with mortality and help us understand the possibility of something better." - HUFFINGTON POST.

La MaMa Squirts, an essential part of La MaMa's pride programming for the past 6 years, is part of STONEWALL 50 AT LA MAMA, a festival of LGBTQ+ artists from NYC, Philadelphia, Paris, Italy, and South Korea being presented at the Tony Award-winning theater (66 E. 4 St.) in Manhattan, from May 23-June 30 as part of WORLD PRIDE. Global Gay (June 6-9), 13 Fruitcakes (June 13-16), and Contradict This (June 20-30) are among other highlights during the month-long pride celebration.

La MaMa Squirts is presented in partnership with Helix Queer Performance Network and has invited the queer performance worlds of NYC to perform at Squirts for raucous family reunions that celebrate its legacy of community theatrics, multiple generations of queer genius and the precocious audacity of the millennial mind. Dozens of queer artists from in their 20s to 70s have crossed the stage of this uniquely intergenerational festival.

"So often when mainstream or corporate platforms represent the Stonewall uprising, they downplay or erase the role of trans women -- not just in the riots themselves, but in the radical political culture of that time period," says Helix director Dan Fishback. "But today, as it was then, trans women are at the vanguard of our politics and our culture. Our festival this year celebrates that."

Tickets: $20 / $15 Students and Seniors. -- 10 presale $10 tickets available for each night with promo code 10at10, first come-first served. - For tickets please visit La MaMA's website at www.lamama.org or call 212-352-3101.

CURATOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Cecilia Gentili, originally from Argentina, Cecilia Gentili is a well-known storyteller in NYC. She has also acted in several plays (Jess Barbagallo's "My Old Man" (Dixon Place), Casey Llewellyn's "O Earth" (HERE Arts Center)) and was a guest star in "Pose" (FX) where she payed Ms. Orlando. Gentili found her passion for advocacy working as an intern at the LGBT Center. She headed the Transgender Health Program at Apicha from 2012 to 2016, served as the Director of Policy at GMHC from 2016 to 2019, and currently functions as Principal to Trans Equity Consulting defining policy to the benefit of the TGNC/NB community. She was a contributor to "Trans Bodies Trans Selves" and is a board member at Translatina Network. She is passionate about advocating for her community, specifically for trans women with a Latino background, sex work, drug use and incarceration history.

Charlene Incarnate, has been performing drag in Brooklyn for 6 years. She enacted her gender transition as a performance art piece on New York drag stages (including La MaMa's Squirts 2014), and now her performance work centers around the aggressive, dangerous and inherently political nature of living in a transgender body. In the summer of 2017 she was crowned Miss Bushwig and went on to perform at Lady Bunny's Wigstock in 2018, igniting the headline from Time Out New York "Charlene is taking over the planet"

Mizz June, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and The Bronx, Mizz June, the musical persona of NYC based Actor Julienne Brown- got her start in Musical Theater and Activism. A protégée of luminary public figures Octavia St. Laurent and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, she was the first out Black Transwoman to be a guest cast member on a daytime soap opera ("All My Children"). She has appeared in music videos and, performed on various well-known stages in NYC and around the U.S.

Photo Credit: Yanina May Photography

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