RSVP to bloodbabyproject@gmail.com
Seeking Audience Members for Beta-Testing of Gently Participatory Performance
Communion is a text-driven performance enacted by both audience and performers. Part of the multi-year Blood Baby performance project, it explores queer parenthood, gender identity, gestation, sexuality/sex, and belonging.
We are seeking audience members to help us test out Communion and let us know how it went for you. Communion offers the audience an experience of being with yourself and connected to your body in a group, while embracing the complications and intricacies that brings up. As you can imagine, this is hard for artists to do without a group of people! Your gentle participation will offer us valuable insight as we continue to develop the show. There will be invitations to move or speak or gesture or read or interact with others, and all things are optional. All abilities are welcome. We will then take plenty of time to hear from you, the audience, about what you enjoyed and didn’t and how we can adjust.
Blood Baby is conceived of and directed by Meg Foley, a dance artist, educator, and queerdo mama based between Ypsilanti and Philadelphia. Communion is co-created with LA-based playwright Sylvan Oswald. Dramaturgical support and audience experience conversation facilitated by Michèle Steinwald. Blood Baby premieres Summer 2023 at Velocity Dance Center.
Please RSVP to participate at bloodbabyproject@gmail.com and/or reach out with any questions or concerns. We look forward to hearing from you!
Blood Baby is supported by a NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant, a National Performance Network Creation Fund Award, Leeway Foundation, and an Indiana University Arts & Humanities grant.
ARTIST BIO
MEG FOLEY
For the past 20 years Meg Foley has made performance projects with radical self-determination as subject, crafting body-based explorations of identity, belonging, and time from a queer, nonbinary perspective. In a loving tumble with formalism in dance and what constitutes performance and influenced by intersections of parenting practice and artistic practice, she works on a continuum of research that centers the 24-hour body and asks how identity is occupied. Foley’s work has been presented by TanzFabrik Potsdam, Art Stations Foundation at Malta Festival, Prague Quadrennial, SummerWorks Festival (Toronto), LA Performance Practice, DraftWork at Danspace Project, CATCH! at Invisible Dog Art Center, Philadelphia Contemporary, CounterPulse, and Philadelphia Fringe Festival (curated), Moore College of Art and Design, Pilot+Projects, Icebox Project Space, and Vox Populi Gallery. Grants include: New England Foundation for the Arts, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Independence Foundation, National Performance Network, Dancemakers Centre for Creation, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. She has taught across the US and abroad.
More at megfoley.org
Photo by Gema Galiana
Sylvan Oswald
Sylvan Oswald is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Philadelphia who creates plays, texts, publications, and video. His work uses metatheatricality and formal irreverence to explore queer and trans identity. Recent projects include the theatrical essay Trainers (Gate Theatre, London) and the performance text High Winds, based on the book of the same name he co-authored with graphic designer Jessica Fleischmann (X Artists’ Books). Sylvan’s lo-fi semi-improvised web series Outtakes starring Becca Blackwell and Zuzanna Szadkowski is hosted at weareopentv.com. His plays and collaborations include A Kind of Weather (Diversionary Theatre, San Diego), Sun Ra (Joe’s Pub, Jerome Travel and Study Grant, Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab), Profanity (Undermain Theater, Dallas; Soho Rep Dorothy Strelsin Fellowship), Nightlands (New Georges), Pony (About Face Theater, Chicago), and Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb). Honors include a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosati Fellowship from Duke University Libraries, the Thom Thomas award from The Dramatists Guild, a Jerome Fellowship, and residencies at Sundance/Ucross, Macdowell Colony, and Yaddo. Sylvan is an alum of CTG’s Writers’ Workshop, an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb and an alum of New Dramatists.
Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber
ACCESS INFO
12th Ave Arts is fully accessible for wheelchairs and walkers. The lobby and bathrooms are at street level, and seating is available without the need for an elevator or stairs. For special needs, advanced word to erin@velocitydancecenter.org can help in preparations.
COVID-19 SAFETY
We will require all attendees to show proof of vaccination or negative Covid test within 48 hours at the door. We also ask that all attendees wear a mask, and we will have extras available at the door for those who need them. The lead artists will be unmasked during the event, but will take rapid tests before the event and maintain distance from attendees while unmasked.