Anohini and the Johnsons have a new album titled My Back Was a Bridge for you to Cross Over. The album is a collaboration with the writer of James Bay’s gold-selling 2015 single If You Ever Want to Be in Love and Duffy’s Warwick Avenue, Jimmy Hogarth. Anohini has been a fixture of the underground music scene since she was known as Antony, before coming out as a trans woman. The new album may pull her and the band into the spotlight but you won’t find any formulaic pop on the album. Check out It Must Change featuring Munroe Bergdorf on vocals.
ruth tang
New York City’s Breaking the Binary (BTB) Theatre has named nonbinary playwright and creative experimenter ruth tang as the first recipient of its commissioning program. The initiative is meant to create and develop original full-length pieces written by trans, nonbinary, and two-spirit (TNB2S+) theatre artists. BTB Theatre uses the term “TNB2S+” in hopes to encompass “any person who does not correspond with the male and female binary and is transgender, nonbinary, two-spirit, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, agender, gender expansive, bigender, gender fluid, or otherwise lives outside of the cisnormative gender binary.” Chose artists get $10,000 to develop a new work with the company. Learn more from the American Theatre website.
Susanna Velenti in Casa Susanna.
The documentary Casa Susanna explores the Catskills boardinghouse community that allowed denizens to spend a weekend in the mountains expressing their gender identity when that was taboo. The documentary aired on PBS recently and is available to stream on the American Experience page. You can learn more about the Catskill weekends in PBS’s A Thousand Words collection. Casa Susanna weekends were the precursor to the Pocono weekends hosted first by Joyce Dewhurst and inherited from her by TGForum founder JoAnn Roberts. The photographer who took all the photos of the Casa Susanna ladies was Andrea Susan who became a friend of JoAnn’s in the ‘80s. The director of the documentary, Sébastien Lifshitz, was interviewed by The New York Times.
Murray Hill
Murray Hill is an exuberant drag king from New York City who has been living the showbiz lifestyle since the days when he did his act on tiny stages in small clubs. No matter the venue Hill would proclaim his signature catchphrase “Showbiz!” Things have been looking up. Hill landed the role of Fred Rococo on HBO’s Somebody Somewhere (recently renewed for a third season) and is the host of Hulu’s new game show Drag Me to Dinner. Murray Hill is no longer an underground performer. He’s on the way up. Learn more from The New York Times.
Drag Race Allstar winner Monét X Change will perform her show, Life Be Lifein‘, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe August 2–15. It will be her Fringe debut and happen in Underbelly, one of the largest venues at the highly regarded Scottish festival. Life Be Lifein’ is an hour long and, besides lip syncs, will include “her anecdotal intrusive thoughts and opinions on life.”
Pippa Garner
High-heeled roller skates, a palm-frond umbrella and a shower in a can — just a sample of Pippa Garner’s many, many artistic inventions. For the past 50 years, the artist has been satirizing U.S. consumer habits with designs that are not always useful. Few things have escaped her restless, imaginative tinkering, from automobiles to her own body, which she began, in her words, “gender-hacking” in the mid-1980s. The conceptual artist is now 81 and debuted her first U.S. solo museum show at Art Omi, the international arts organization in Columbia County, N.Y., on June 24. Garner was an early critic of the gender binary and said of her “body hacking” “I thought, with all this energy that I was putting into altering consumer appliances from the assembly line, can’t that be adapted to the human body?” Meet Pippa Garner in The New York Times.
The cast of 1776.
The new production of the Broadway musical 1776 features an all female/trams/nonbinary cast. It is strange, but some audience members arrive at the theater and don’t know about the way the founding fathers are presented on stage. Cast member Gisela Adisa says she can see people in the theater reacting negatively to the casting. She commented in a recent interview “I just love that arc that this type of casting can provide for an audience if they get past their initial explosive reaction,” Adisa says. “Sometimes it’s really positive. Sometimes it’s really angry. But either way, it shows me that this is theater that’s actually touching a nerve.” Learn more about the show from Microsoft Start.
La Cueva in the Little Village section of Chicago may be the oldest Latino drag hotspot in the country. It has been in business providing a space for drag performers looking to sing in Spanish and celebrate their culture and entertain a diverse crowd for over 40 years. La Cueva performer Gabriel Chavez said, “It’s for every type of person, not exclusively gay. Many of the regular guests are married couples who just love the show.” Learn more about the club from Book Club Chicago.
Category: Transgender Fun & Entertainment
