Come On Down to the Cosmic Docks - March 13 & 15, Chicago
An invite and some backstory from the guts of a big new show.
Dear friends,
The tl;dr of this email is that I have a Big Show coming up. It’s the Biggest One I’ve Had In A While (Ever?) / Will Have For A While To Come, I think, anyway, based on factors like venue, funding, and length of time I’ve been building toward it. Fascinatingly, that doesn’t guarantee anything about its quality or worth-it-ness - but even so, if you’re around and in town, I’d love for you to take a chance on me and come check it out.
The show is called Cosmic Docks, and it’s happening March 13 at 7:30pm & March 15 at 1pm on the Chicago Solo Spotlight Festival at the Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago.
Cosmic Docks is a trans tall-tale about orbiting the sources of yourself and yearning for clarity in a broken world. What I mean by that is that it is a case study in trying to understand how the fuck we ended up like this and, while we’re asking, whether the fuck we’re going to make it out of here alive. It’s an hour-ish long first-person, direct-address solo show wherein I use absurdity, choreography, an absolute rabbit hole of spiraling ridiculous jokes, several alien characters, synthy songs, family history, excessive blue, and a mysterious doc(k)ument to share what I’ve learned (or not) in the course of being trans while seeking a theory of change on this earth.
I’m extremely honored to share the weekend bill alongside Jenn Freeman | Po’Chop’s premiere of THICK: a crumbling freak show. Po’Chop is one hands down one of my favorite artists in Chicago and beyond, and has also been a fantastic partner in mutually supporting each other toward this weekend. You should see both of our works! Theirs is Friday 3/14 at 7:30pm and Saturday 3/15 at 3:30pm. If you come Saturday, you can do it as a matinee double-feature, with an hour-ish break in between so you can step out for coffee/lunch/a refresh!
If you don’t need to know anything more, get tickets here, and use the codes NORA or POCHOP for $10 off.
But since you are the people who went out of your way to subscribe to this newsletter, I thought I’d share some additional little tales about the work. I’m also planning on sharing some juicier reflections later this month, but haven’t quite gotten those out of my imagination and into the keyboard yet.
It also goes without saying that this show turns out to arrive as we crest a coup - which is just one way of tl;dr-ing the Everything Is Very Bad that we somehow continue to hurtle deeper through and toward. It’s particularly hard to tell right now where art falls on the line between gratuitous and profound. But I think if nothing else it makes our daily lives feel meaningful, which in turn makes them feel worth living, which is motivation to sustain such living for ourselves and others for as long as possible. If we’re lucky, this life-affirming work intertwines with life-preserving action.
Anyway, without further ado, please enjoy a series of assorted anecdotes from my journey to the Cosmic Docks.
It started from a joke I was trying to write about not being an astrology queer. February 2022, I was on an Amtrak from NYC to DC and wrote in my notebook something along the lines of, “some of us get the planets and the stars, and the rest of us have to go dumpster diving out back of the local gender affirming surgery clinic and find a secret message encoded in a bar tab and…” This obviously needed workshopping - hopefully it’s gotten enough in the years since.
I once performed a 45min draft of it for a very small audience that was significantly made up of middle-aged well-off white women, which turned out to be awkward, which said awkwardness I didn’t realize was going to happen until I was about 25min in and still had 20min more to go. The reason it was awkward was that they were looking at me as if what I was doing was very uncomfortable. Which I guess it was, for them. When it came time for the post-conversation, the handful of trans people and immigrants in the room really held me down.
I was at times delusional with regards to how this show might find support. Or maybe not delusional, but just a mix of hopeful and naive. I applied to a lot of major stuff right away after I started working on it in 2022, and I just thought it was going to all work out, I guess because I was feeling personally enthusiastic and clear on the work’s mission. At another point I had a supported work-in-progress showing in NYC to which the people supporting me helped invite a bunch of fancy NYC curators/presenters and other artists I admired. I thought they would come, and then I thought I would get my big debut. Break onto the scene in the big apple!! (Say that with a W instead of an R or L and you’ll have been inducted into an inside joke Grace and I share about the desire for a big career launch moment.) Those first several applications didn’t work out, and the fancy curators/presenters didn’t come to the showing (or for the most part reply). However, other things worked out, other people showed up, and now here we are, and obviously (global circumstances notwithstanding) I feel like where we are is pretty great.
Speaking of here we are: this produced premiere opportunity came about in part because I pitched it. Sharing this because I know I wonder about this stuff and it’s helpful to normalize pulling back the curtain. The short version is: in early 2024 I had just done a showing of a full draft of this work through Queer|Art, and also was feeling bolstered/emboldened by having received the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. I reached out to a handful of spaces essentially saying: I have a show and some support, and I need a venue/producing partner - would you like to talk? Some people didn’t write back, or some did but it led nowhere or elsewhere. Certainly the results of this pitching map fairly well to who I already had some kind of prior relationship or established credibility with. Meredith Sutton and Roell Schmidt at the Dance Center at Columbia were interested, and our conversations led to this show, for which I am wildly grateful. There are other pieces of the puzzle of course, including presumably the Dance Center’s funding and priorities (which I don’t have full insight into), the whole right-time-right-place-right-moment synchrony that brings anything together, and more, so I don’t mean to imply that the lesson is “just ask and ye shall receive!” or some other over-simplified nonsense. Additionally, this was a new move for me, and I definitely had to embrace some ballsiness and forced confidence to do it. If you’re an artist trying to navigate this stuff, I’m always happy to chat (with the usual Your Mileage May Vary/who knows anything caveats, of course).
It’s been through a lot of titles. 17 wild and precious reasons why. Indicator/Explicator. The Dumpster Out Back. Dykey Faggy Middle Aged Kiddo Teen Angst Origin Story. [just] Origin Story. And then one day in December 2024 I wrote a long list of words, combined them in different orders, talked to too many people, had a mild breakdown, and eventually landed on Cosmic Docks. I feel Cosmic Docks is good, and it has grown on me since I landed on it. But usually titles come to me essentially instantaneously and seem immediately correct. This has been the case for me for many projects past and current: Two Steps Back, For Our Purposes, Small Boobs, Family Portrait, Family Reunion, The Real Dance, DISCIPLINE, Swine Ball, Another Word for Sandbar. Short, tight, pair or trio or quartet phrases, that tend to arrive right on time with minimal angst or uncertainty. That was not the case for this show, and I promise to no longer take title ease for granted in the future!
It has a secret title. The secret title is Cosmic Cocks. The much-needed follow-up to 2018 smash hit Small Boobs, amirite? There’s also a surprise horny dickmoji chain text at one point. This salacious preview is your reward for reading this far. 😘
Shoutout to the legacy of artists and writers who sought stories of outer space as an existential lesson in community, solidarity, and facing ourselves. Particularly in this era where fascists are making the Mars-curious look bad, I want to be clear that my creative and political vision as it applies to outer space has been shaken and shaped by Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nikki Giovanni, and the populist but clearly anti-fascist pleasures of Star Wars/Guardians of the Galaxy/For All Mankind/etc.
There are a bunch of things I’m doing in this premiere that I’ve never gotten to do before, largely because this time I have the resources to do them. These include hiring and/or developing: projection design for integrated live captioning, actual full thorough intentional lighting design, set design and build, a production manager, people serving in combination direction/dramaturgy/movement + performance coaching/etc roles at a more committed level, and more. (The costume is still thrifted/from my closet, though.) Because we don’t live in Europe, I have no idea when I’ll have this scale of resources for an individual show again. I also wonder if people will get that “oh I can see the budget” feeling when they watch it, which I know I notice sometimes, with consequent feelings that depend on how much I feel like they did the damn thing with it. Anyway, I’m once again extremely, extremely grateful, and I hope these investments make it a better (as in more accessible, more connective, more engaging) audience experience than it would have been without.
And since you’re probably now wondering about the budget, I’ll share some basics. Let’s call it your other salacious reward for reading this far :) I expect overall expenses for the execution of this show - that is, to bring it to life at the Dance Center, not anything that happened before that in 2022-24 - to come out to around $13k. This is entirely made up of collaborator payment (at baseline $30/hr), materials, and/or travel. In terms of income, the Dance Presenting Series at Columbia paid me $8500 for this commitment, in addition to providing a week-long production residency and technical/production staff for the theater. I’m boosting this with an individual donation and a portion of the 2024 CDF Lab Artist Award. There are some other income pieces, namely merch and a cut of ticket sales, although those are still tentative/dependent on outcomes not guaranteed at this time, so I can’t speak to them concretely.
Po’Chop and I co-hired the same lighting and projection designers. This was not part of the plan or contract per the venue, but once things started kicking into high gear, we talked, got some outside advising, and realized it might be good to join forces on some fronts. This worked out really well. I am so excited for you to see Ruby Que’s Projection Design and Christine Shallenberg’s Lighting Design on each work.
I used Save the Cat to do the final stages of story and structure development. And have generally been heavily influenced in the final few months of rehearsal by recent intensive forays into screenwriting. This is one of the reasons I’m ultimately grateful things happened on the timeline they did. I feel a lot clearer on the final version you’ll see in March because the things I learned relatively recently from other forms are helping me see and make so many choices I wouldn’t have otherwise made. (Btw, apart from reading the book, I use a mapping spreadsheet my friend Lucas made that is extremely helpful. It’s a template and I’m happy to share it - lmk if you’re curious.)
A lot of people helped me. Apart from those who are in the program + promo materials for direct role credits - Christine and Ruby as mentioned, plus Bryan Saner + Erin Bliss + Gisselle Dorado (set design + build), Sophie Minouche Allen + Zachary Nicol (performance development), Jessi Barber (production management + overall problem-solving), Daniel Patrick Borland + Jovan Landry (promo photo/video), Giau Truong + Joyy Norris + Meredith Sutton + Roell Schmidt + Jane Jerardi (Dance Center team), and Melanie Jeanne Plank (merch design) - I want to thank the many people who have been present for key in-progress moments, who facilitated those moments, who took time to give me feedback or help figure some shit out along the way, who resourced me, or who just said some affirming thing in a moment when I needed it, some of whom I am certain to have forgotten in the list that follows: Grace McCants, Lucas Brown, Lally Gartel, Lu Yim, Catching On Thieves, Miranda Haymon, Rio Sofia, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Demetri Burke, Zefyr Lisowski, Miller Robinson, Will Davis, the 1076 Carroll household & extended universe, Mary Provenzano, Scout Hutchinson, Leslie Cagan, Hank Oliver, Aaron Greer, the Sharp-Fischer family, the Sharades, Erin Kilmurray, Anjal Chande, Gina Hoch-Stall, Dorian Vanunu, Christina Chammas, Meredith Talusan, Liza Birkenmeier, Gherdai Hassell, Iddo Aharony, Ruoyi Shi, John T. Edge, Charlotte Long, Katie Harrison, Michi Osato, Leah Plasse, Jessie Young, Beth Graczyk, Moe Angelos, Marýa Wethers, Daniel Lavery, Sarah Schulman, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Will Rawls, David Thomson, Ira Sachs, Joanna Furnans, all the people who came to or performed at Sharp Tank in 2023, Amanda Maraist, La Mar Brown, L Marmon, Hal Cosentino, Bear Bellinger, Christine Wallers, Reya Sehgal, Alex Shephard, Ellen Chenoweth, Helene Achanzar, Sam Wein, Psychic Wormhole, Shawn Lent, Raynner Garcia, Kayla Hansen, all the staff at the Dance Center, all the staff at Chicago Dancemakers Forum, all the staff at Queer|Art, all the staff at Hambidge, the New Dance Alliance Performance Mix 37 team, Rachel Miller and RAD Fest, and many more.
That seems like plenty for now. If you live in Chicago or can be there March 13 or 15, get your tickets to Cosmic Docks today.