John Waters & Penny Arcade
Photographed by Danielle St. Laurent in New York
September 26, 2007
See portraits of all 100 honorees in the
December/January issue of Out
The Globesity Festival
October 22nd-28th, 2007 / New York City
GLOBESITY is
the over consumption of all natural elements that create
and sustain life on Earth – some of the most
vital and visible being water, minerals, oil, and FOOD.
Our approach to food and sustenance is destroying our
personal and social health. Our Earth and our Bodies
cannot sustain the beastly grind of consumption. This
beast is Globesity. It has been named. Now is the hour
of confrontation.
The GLOBESITY FESTIVAL is
razor sharp performance, comedy, education, celebration
and collaboration. With Theatre as our laboratory, we
are cooking & cutting up ingredients for SOLUTIONS.
All participating artists will engage in
a juice fast, during which they will conceive a theatrical
performance in response to consumerism. Then, they will
develop these conceptions to be premiered at the festival.
In 1990 Penny Arcade created BITCH ! DYKE ! FAGHAG!
WHORE! her sex and censorship show, in response to the
Senator Helms -National Endowment For The Arts censorship
crisis. Originally concieved as a 4 day audit for a NEA
solo fellowship grant, it was a run away success, fueled
by what became known as The Drag Factor, as people returned
over and over, dragging their friends, co-workers, neighbors
and family to share the show and the show's cathartic
audience dance break.
A call for the seperation of church and State, B!D!F!W!
is a powerful critique of the Christian right as well
as of the politically correct Left. A blend of outrageous
humor, political humanism, freedom of expression and
erotic dancing, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore shocked NY's
supposedly unshakeable downtown art scene with it's brazen
use of strippers and erotic dancers and it's huge audience
dance break.
Sometime after Andy Warhol's heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as "Downtown." Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street.
The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time.
Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker's short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life.
With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City's smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.
"This book is inspiring in so many ways: it makes you want to write, to get outside and meet people, and more than anything, to travel back in time. It is proof of a New York that is now very hard to believe ever existed. But beyond all there is this writing, and everything in here is amazing."
—Jonathan Safran Foer
"As Kmart and Subway sandwiches invade NYC, it's crucial to remember that great art, writing and music once flourished downtown. As Patti Smith has said 'We created it, let's take it over.'"
—Kathleen Hanna
"This genuinely important cultural document will undoubtedly be an inspiration to any young artist who feels alienated from the mainstream."
—Bret Easton Ellis
"A sprawling collection of exquisitely made choices, Up Is Up, But So Is Down conveys the reality of one of the great Bohemias, an 'underground' like mid-19th century Paris and Berlin in the 20s. This book made me love the Downtown Scene all over again. The rants are here, the funky glamour, the gloriously dysfunctional idealism, the romantic dystopia, the ambition and the running joke that was made of fame. [How great that room was made for the ephemeral with the iconic, the unknown with the mighty, and the losses with the survivors.]"
—Robert Glück
"A fascinating gallery. Downtown—fact or phantom—haunts me still."
—Wayne Koestenbaum
Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! will be reborn at OUTFEST 06's Platinum Series at
REDCAT, The Disney Theatre!
Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! Penny Arcade’s Sex and Censorship performance piece , originally premiered in 1990 in response to the Senator Helms – National Endowment for The Arts censorship crisis.
It went on to a three year run Off Broadway propelled by word of mouth and in 1995 after thousands of shows, B!D!F!W! left in it’s wake an international, queer and alternative erotic dance and burlesque movement. Now it is being reborn at Outfest 06’s Platinum series.
The show, written and performed by New York's legendary Penny Arcade, along with a multitude of gay/bi/lesbian/ erotic dancers, brought New York ‘s underground aesthetic kicking and screaming into the mainstream. B!D!F!W! introduced the concept of queer culture to the world as a major commercial theatre hit in 19 cities internationally, from Calgary to Sydney, Vienna to Dublin, Glasgow to London, Zurich to Manchester, Adelaide to Melbourne to Berlin etc.
Exploring the boundaries between theater and performance, B!D!F!W! consists of comedic monologues, characterizations, improvisations, music, pre-recorded and live video, male and female erotic dancers and an audience dance party.
Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! is a cultural phenomena that compels people to experience it several times. First because of the personal and entertaining style of Ms Arcade, with it’s serious but humorous, political convictions that underscore the similarities between different people and bringing together an unusually diverse audience.
The second part of the phenomena is that the impact of B!D!F!W! is emotional and transformative, moving audience members to bring neighbors, family and friends to share the experience (commonly referred to as “The Drag Factor “
The audience, once initiated, feels like shipmates on a humanistic voyage. A common ground is literally established when the audience takes over the stage during a dance break and the often restrictive issues addressed in the show like intolerance, censorship and right wing puritanism, are no longer inhibitive, creating a true sense of shared experience and real community.
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006:
All Night * All Star * Art Jam
Galapagos Art Space
Earl Dax Presents:
7PM > disCONCERTing
Video of live performances by KIKI and HERB (the "secret" fire escape performance), and VAGINAL DAVIS's CHEAP Collective
8PM > the PLAYerS are THE THING!
get a sneak peak at these ace performers, then see their upcoming shows...
MARGA GOMEZ (off-Bway "Los Big Names"
TAYLOR MAC (P.S. 122 - "Red Tide Blooming")
DYNASTY HANDBAG (P.S. 122 - "Schoolhouse ROXX")
9PM > the REAL DEAL
a very special return to health performance by the legendary PENNY ARCADE and CHRIS RAEL
Circus with a Purpose...
Circus Amok's JENNIFER MILLER
singer/songwriter JAY BRANNAN
10PM > LATE NITE BOOTY Shakin' and Performance ANTICS from...
NEAL MEDLYN
LOREN DEMPSTER and JEREMY WADE
THE FABULOUS ENTOURAGE
KENNY MELLMAN and BRIDGET EVERETT and
THE WAU WAU SISTERS
Art Jam
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
Galapagos Art Space
70 N. 6th Street (L to Bedford)
$10 Suggested
Special Guest Co-Host MURRAY HILL
March 19th, 2006
"Theatre of Performance Art" - IT Awards Fundraiser
MTC Studio # 2, 11:30AM-1:30PM
With Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, Penny Arcade, George Emilio Sanchez, 31 Down Radio Theater
With Special Guests: John Vaccaro and Richard Foreman
From May 11th-May 13th 2006, Penny Arcade will perform in Antony Rizzi's dance theatre piece Snow Man at The National Arts Center in Ottawa, Canada 