You're invited! Good Grief, Horseshoe Crab: A Night of Queer Performance & Holiday Activation
J.R. Uretsky
Hello, Queers!
I am very excited to share an upcoming performance at the RISD Museum. It's a free night of queer performance and fun!
Emceed by poet and queer sweetheart John-Francis Quiñonez, Good Grief, Horseshoe Crab: A Night of Queer Performance & Holiday Activation is a one-night special event featuring performances by Providence weirdos Eli Nixon and J.R. Uretsky.
Thursday, October 19, 2023
7-9 PM
RISD Museum, Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium
Free
Masks encouraged
The auditorium is located on the ground floor of the Chace Center and is fully accessible.
Are you a local professor? Eli and I would love to join your class to promote this event! Please get in touch with us if you are interested!
More information about the performances and performers.
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A Suitcase Theater Proposal for a New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs
Eli Nixon is proposing a floating holiday to use whenever we need it. Everyone is invited to this emergent celebration of one of our oldest ancestors. BLOODTIDE is a DIY cultural offering and unestablished tradition of primordial pageantry, crabaoke (altered lyrics), naturedrag, cardboard sculpting, and other hands-on locally oriented, commemorative & survivalist practices. BLOODTIDE posits that shared homage and attention to horseshoe crabs might further all repair efforts and other insufficient necessities for our collective and individual transformation.
Teaching themes:
Ecology, Theatrical Intervention, Modern Culture, Queer Futurism, Clown Poetics, Climate/Racial Justice, Puppetry, Comics, Costume, Festoonery, Visionary Organizing, Dance, Playwriting, Awe, Unsettlement, Interspecies Solidarity, Big Pharma, Greif, The Moon, Bog Bodies, Coastal Communities, Abolition, Extinction, Embarrassment, Immunology, Anticapitalism, Intergenerational Collaboration, Complexity, Care, Using Anthropomorphism to Destabilize Anthropocentrism, Place/Time-based Art, Absurdity
Good Grief is a multimedia performance by J.R. Uretsky, employing video, interactive sculpture, and live music to explore grief through communal singing and mundane rituals. Every part of the performance, from the group rituals and music to the videos, masks, and sculptures, is designed to explore and express human emotions as a group. The work uses humor and performing objects to explore difficult themes such as the 1980s AIDS epidemic, death, heartbreak, and mental illness. Uretsky's videos mix dialogue from an episode of Star Trek with diaristic stories that highlight the joy and anxiety of existing in a Queer body.
Teaching themes: Gender/Sexuality, Queer Studies, Psychology, Storytelling, Performance Studies, AIDS Epidemic, Sculpture, Wearable Sculpture, Music, Religious Studies, Video, Puppetry, Media Studies, Clowning, Humor.
Performer bios:
John-Francis Quiñonez (They|Them) is a desert flower living in Providence, RI. Q is a writer and multimedia artist. They are a current resident of the Queer.Archive.Work. project and the Dirt Palace. Q is the author of a collection of Poems with Write Bloody Publishing (‘22) entitled “Keep Your Little Lights Alive (Poems After Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love & Others)”
Eli Nixon (They|Them) builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of drawings, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They're a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.
Eli is a member of The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, the New Georges Jam, and brotherdykes unlimited. A 450-million-year timeline of organisms Eli built with 300 modern humans is currently installed in the stairwell of The Providence Public Library downtown. Eli’s illustrated proposal for a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs, “BLOODTIDE” was published by The 3rd Thing Press and is available at local libraries and shops.
J.R. Uretsky (She|They) is an artist, performer, musician, and art curator living in Providence, Rhode Island. Uretsky is also the bassist for Cómo Qué Wao and creates their own music under the moniker J.R. and the Worship Band.
Uretsky has performed and exhibited at Art Basel in Miami, Florida, the ICA Boston, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, as well as the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Uretsky’s work has been published in print, online, and video journals such as Headmaster Magazine, Gaga Stigmata, Big Red & Shiny, and ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art.
Hope to see all your gay faces there!
