Last weekend, the Queering Perspectives Festival began at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance with This Show is Available for Touring by Alex Davis and TALAGA, A Performance Lecture Demonstration by Jay Carlon and Micaela Tobin. The festival seeks to “interrogate conventional, culturally normative performance” and provide a platform for the “othered, experimental, and subversive,” according to an email sent on Jan. 6 from the ’62 Center. The festival will run through the rest of the month and have its second weekend of shows starting Feb. 23.
Faculty working on CenterSeries, the ’62 Center’s visiting artists series, proposed hosting a festival centered around queerness in response to the increase in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation at the time. “We [at the ’62 Center] wanted to find a way to respond to that,” said Randy Fippinger, visiting artist producer and outreach manager at the ’62 Center. “The way we wanted to start with that was by asking artists from all around to help us reimagine — because artists, in particular, queer artists help create new worlds and new visions of what the world could be.” From there, Fippinger and CenterSeries faculty, including Operations Manager Nathaniel Wiessner, began to search for artists whose work relates to the festival’s themes of “queering” performance and offering new perspectives.
In addition to bringing professional artists to the College for the festival, members of the Town community joined all of this weekend’s shows. “A big goal of the festival was getting more people on our stages — different faces and bodies than we normally do,” Fippinger said. “For instance, the dance ensemble of Davis’ show included a student from Mount Greylock High School, retirees [from the College], and local medical professionals.”
Students at the College were also an part of the festival’s first weekend. Leo Levine ’26 is the co-host of the festival and designed lighting for This Show is Available for Touring. “Working on Davis’ show was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about what it’s like to work as a professional artist,” Levine said in an interview with the Record. Students also had the opportunity to be involved in the creation and final performance of Davis’ show through the Winter Study course “Queer Performance and Rituals” that Davis taught.
As described by Fippinger, This Show is Available for Touring, performed Feb. 9 and 10 in the Adams Memorial Theatre in the ’62 Center, was a comedic movement piece in which Davis, along with several backup students and community member performers, attempted to “sell” the show to audience members in the hopes that one of them would book them for future performances. “In the show, Davis and his backup performers say things like, ‘You can have this show in your backyard,’ and it ends with a grande finale in which they tell the audience all the crazy things they could do with the show,” Fippinger said.
“[My show] isn’t really about anything as much as it is a conversation between me and the audience in an attempt to continue having the opportunity to tour the dance, so that I can continue to exist,” Davis wrote in an email to the Record. “I need this dance to be booked for a future performance, so whenever I have the opportunity to perform, I really take the time to make sure someone else will book it.”
Davis, a Boston-based performer, choreographer, and fiber artist, began working on This Show is Available for Touring as the culmination of his research for his Masters in Fine Arts in dance, choreography, and performance at Smith College. “[This show] didn’t come from a singular source of inspiration as much as a series of circumstances and points of interest that have converged into this work,” he wrote. “As [the show] is a living and breathing thing, my source of inspiration keeps shifting.”
Carlon and Tobin’s TALAGA was performed Feb. 9 in the ‘62 Center’s CenterStage. The show, presented in the format of a lecture rather than a traditional performance, explored Carlon’s experience as a queer, Filipinx American dancer and discussed his upcoming project with Tobin, entitled WAKE. “The stage was surrounded by rice cookers, which Carlon and Tobin used to demonstrate how rice is an important and symbolic part of the Filipino queer community,” Fippinger said.
Fippinger and Davis similarly expressed that the festival is important for fostering a community between audience members, crew, and performers. “It is really important to me that folks see themselves and their community reflected on stage,” Davis said.
“It’s not about just coming in, seeing a show, and leaving — we want to find a way to have a more lasting connection with people,” Fippinger added.
In addition, Fippinger expressed that he hopes audiences can extend the queer themes and different perspectives offered through these performances to other aspects of their lives. “All of these shows are in some way pushing against what we traditionally think of as performance,” he said. “My primary hope is that through this, audiences will start to reimagine what performance can be — because if we can do that, then we can start reimagining what the world could be.”
The Queering Perspectives Festival will have its second weekend of shows on Feb. 23 and 24, which will feature Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters by Rachel Mars and Bigmouth Strikes Again (The Smiths Show) by Salty Brine.
