Lectures

Art & Social Justice: Group Panel

What is it about creating the worlds we deserve is made possible by art when no where else? The six artists talk about their different disciplines, including theatre and performance, film/video, literature, music, print and web media, healing arts and community organizing, and their relationships to creating art in a time of, and as part of the struggle for justice.

Co-producer Damien Luxe, a media justice activist and multimedia artist, says of the performers’ relationships to social justice, “We travel with our work in order to connect each other and local folks with intra-community liberation strategies and to develop, as a complicated community, visions of a world we want to live in. To paraphrase the brilliant Toni Cade Bambara, we hope to make the revolution look irresistable — by presenting art that supports each other’s self-determination and brilliance, we start to radically re-vision a world we can survive and thrive in — a world that deserves art and which needs all kinds of people making it.”

Co-producer Heather Acs, a New York City teaching artist and theatre performer, says of the performers, “Touring with multi-disciplinary artists who work professionally in a variety of media means that we can share strategies from Theatre of the Oppressed to DIY, from ukelele chords to community forums to bring a combination of glitter, gender justice and engaged art.”

Queer Femmes Dreaming Away From Home

Heather & Damien at Duke University, March 2010.

As performing artists, teachers and community organizers in New York City, how does one accomplish creating and showing compelling, radical, political, engaging, feminist art when one comes from a place of multiple marginalizations as queer femmes, sex workers and working-class origin cisgendered women.
How do activism and cultural production work together?

Traveling performers and partners in action Heather Acs and Hadassah Damien talk about building community, their experiences organizing and currently touring
How To Build A Fire: teaching artists’ tour and the Heels On Wheels Femme Roadshow, New York cultural production events with The Boxcutter Salon Series and the NYC Femme Family; touring individual shows Tragic Magic and Femmes Fight Back
and what it means to be an underground artist in New York today.

MFA in DIY

Given by Damien at UofT Austin Feb 2009, and Boxcutter Salon March 2010

Sex Workers’ Rights

by Damien Feb 2009 at Evergreen State

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