Queer [Re]public Festival: Theater of Union ~ Remembrance

Born from The Theater Offensive’s OUT In Your Neighborhood Festival in 2017, the QUEER [RE]PUBLIC FESTIVAL is a vital part of TTO’s next lifecycle and mission, presenting liberating art by, for, and about queer and trans people of color that transcends artistic boundaries, celebrates cultural abundance, and dismantles oppression. This inaugural 4-day festival serves as the culmination of our first 22-month long Emergent Artist Residency and True Colors Residency programs, featuring a series of workshops, staged readings, and dance performances.

This devised performance implements Theater of Union in sustained practice with a cohort of artists. In this originally devised theatrical jazz performance, the Theater of Union cohort explores the intricacies of our ancestries in conversation with our selves and each other in an offering where collectively we find how our stories bring us together. How do our ancestors show us the way to our collective liberation, and how can we bring them with us towards our liberated futures? How do we find healing in the present moment with each other that transcends forced separations of time, place and interpersonal divisions?

The performance will close with a second line, leading us into our Opening Night Reception in the lobby, where we invite our community to celebrate the kick off of the Festival with our artists with snacks and drinks!

Theater of Union is a life-sustaining, world-building pedagogy and praxis that seeks to dismantle systems and our culture of domination with theater as its vehicle. Drawing on anthropological theories and indigenous ways of knowing, this praxis utilizes interconnectedness as survival, a love ethic, and community-based healing as core values for social change to build worlds that are life sustaining through an original theatrical praxis. Theater of Union includes an original thesis that explores the founding texts from which the work is grounded in, a love ethic as pedagogy, an exploration of aesthetics that draw from our natural world, as well as reflections of this work in the past that together encompass Theater of Union as a possibility of life in our current reality of ruin. This work explores the question, "in what ways can our stories bring us together for our collective liberation?

Also check out other Arts events in Cambridge, Theatre events in Cambridge, Festivals in Cambridge.