The Medea Project and Katastrophe

Yesterday was the Women and Theater and LGBT Studies pre-conference for ATHE (Association for Theater in Higher Education) in San Francisco. For the evening keynote performance, Rhodessa Jones brought some of her performers from The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, which was completely amazing. I expected it to be simple, honestly, girls with no performance training enacting their life stories and what got them to prision, but it was actually amazing from a performance standpoint as well. These women were wonderful artists, which made me all that much more impressed with Jones' work. I will most certainly buy the book one of these days.

Following Jones, katastrophe performed. The sad thing was that by that time it was 10pm, and almost everyone was exhausted from a full day of conference and only a few people were left in the audience. Even some of the people I would have expected to stay there, like the girl from Santa Barbara who studies transgender performance, went home. So Katastrophe was left in this big theater, performing by himself to about 20 or 30 people scattered throughout the audience. He did a valiant job, and he was great holding his own on a panel (with SEC among others) in the middle of the day, but it was clear that he belonged in a smaller venue with 2 or 3 other artists (or perhaps a show like Fresh Meat) and an audience with much more energy. Hearing more of his songs, though, convinced me to buy his CD (despite the awkward way the conference organizer relished saying the name Let's f*ck and then talk about my problems). I look forward to seeing him perform more in his element at some point. I hope they paid him well for this gig, though.

I must confess that one of the highlights of seeing Katastrophe is also getting a glimpse of Michelle Tea, who also rocks. I love her books and getting a chance to see her is pretty cool. One of these days I'll have to go and hear her speak or do a reading. I'm still a bit mad at myself for missing her in LA.

Earlier in the day, I walked in late for a performance by Anastasia Coon, who is an MFA student at UT Austin. It looked like an interesting, if slighly awkward show about a queer woman who lived as a man for years in the 1960s, but apparently eventually decided to live as a woman. What was amazing about the whole thing was the slow pace of all the talking. The performance was incredilby deliberate and precise, but clearly intentionally slow but with bursts of frantic energy. Missing the beginning, several things were unclear about the performance but it was interesting nonetheless. I will try to watch out for her in the future.