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La MaMa’s Squirts – June 6-8

June 6 – 8, 2025

The Club
74A East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003

Tickets:
Adults:
Students/Seniors:

Ticket prices are inclusive of all fees.

Curated and Directed by
Paris Alexander

Starring: Tyler Ashley, Garrett Allen, S T A R R busby, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Cynthia Carr, God Complex, Kay Gabriel, Lola Flash, Slant Rhyme, Heather Glynis, Sarah Schulman, RuAfza, VaLeria, Abyss X

ABOUT

The singular intergenerational queer performance festival celebrating the downtown avant garde—returns for three days of urgent, experimental art, honoring and confronting the possibilities of renewal in collapse.
Over a weekend, artists seek ruin as a generative force. Together, we lean into refusal, illegibility, and disintegration—not to mourn, but to make room. These works are not bound by progress or resolution. They circle, press, and tear at the edges of structure and story.
Each show begins in abject in darkness.
Two figures face each other.
A single lightbulb swings between them.
In tandem, the figures ponder.
Then, a series of show-offs, show-off
In a bright void wrapped in white paper.
Nothing stays clean for long.
The paper will tear. The void will shift.
Something is unraveling.
This is a place between worlds—
where dreams collide,
where collapse becomes choreo,
where the end is a space to begin
 
This year’s theme, disintegration and respair, draws inspiration from the late dramaturg and La MaMa family member Morgan Jenness, who invoked the word “respair” in their final days —a nearly forgotten word meaning the return of hope after a period of great hardship. The explored themes take homage from a talk at SQUIRTS last year between Journey Streams and Jack Halberstam- where it was noted that queer utopianism often centers around world building- but the way for us to get to those new worlds is not through the build, but the collapse of the structures we inhabit now. Set within a white paper landscape that evokes purity, limbo, and void, the space will visually and physically unravel over the course of the festival, through the interventions of performers, making way for new visions of queer futures.
 

FRIDAY JUNE 6, 7:30PM

Slant Rhyme
S T A R R busby
Tyler Ashley
Abyss X
Lola Flash
RuAfza

SATURDAY JUNE 7, 7:30PM

Sarah Schulman
Heather Glynis
Garrett Allen
Tyler Ashley
Maxi Hawkeye Canion

SUNDAY JUNE 8, 5:30PM

Cynthia Carr
VaLeria
Tyler Ashley
S T A R R busby
Kay Gabriel
God Complex

    

        

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CREDITS

Curated and Directed by Paris Alexander
Produced by Buffy Sierra
Production Managed by Gloria Gomez
Set Design by Devante Melton
Lighting Design by Kate McGee
Imagery by MTHR TRSA and Paris
Modeled by Gloria and Buffy
Funded in part by The Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust and the American LGBTQ+ Museum

BIOS

ABYSS X Evangelia VS aka Abyss X is an artist, composer, songstress, director, choreographer, creative director and curator from Crete with an academic background in computer science and the performing arts, including a Central St Martins MA. She has released albums on acclaimed music labels AD 93, Halcyon Veil and Danse Noire and her music has appeared in fashion for the likes of Mugler, Luis de Javier, Anna Bolina, Julius and more. Former and ongoing collaborators include Grammy-nominated producers Rabit and SOPHIE, Chinese-American filmmaker and visual artist Andrew Thomas Huang, New York artist and writer Juliana Huxtable and visual artist and lighting designer Theresa Baumgartner. Evangelia VS has contributed choreography, movement direction and video design to theatre productions by the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, the National Theatre of Greece, the Mediterranean Biennale and more. Her personal cross-disciplinary work traverses a range of themes including the feminine body, eco-grief, surveillance, monetization of the feminine, the erotic, and post internet life. She has performed and toured her work in Europe, Mexico, USA, Asia and Australia at numerous festivals, art and music spaces including National Sawdust, Tanzquartier Wien, Performance Space New York, Phoenix Central Park, 3537org, La Gaité Lyrique, ICA Miami, Miami Art Basel, Southbank Centre (Royal Festival Hall, Purcell Room), La Casa Encendida, Vooruit, the Biennale of Moving Image (Geneva), Small Epidaurus Theatre, HAU2, DOKUFEST, MONOM (Funkhaus), Wysing Arts Centre, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), Inkonst and more. Evangelia VS is also the founder and curator of Nature Loves Courage Festival taking place in Crete since 2019

 

GARRETT ALLEN is an artist and director currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. They primarily work through live performance and experiences. Garrett has shown, shared, and directed work with the School of Drama at Yale, Ars Nova, Prelude Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Knockdown Center, Public Assistants, Yale Dramat, The Invisible Dog, Laguardia Performing Arts Center, Jupiter Disco, Spectrum NYC, School for Visual Arts NY, NXTHVN, University for the Arts Philadelphia, and more. www.garrett-allen.com

 

Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for Paper Magazine

Tyler Ashley is a Dance, Drag and Performance Artist. Ashley has performed for Elizabeth Streb, DANCENOISE, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Sean Donovan, Katy Pyle, and Charles Atlas among others. She is also known as The Dauphine – a nightlife personality, performer, producer, and emcee. Her dance art and/or drag performances have been presented by Performa, The High Line, Times Square Alliance, NADA, BOFFO, and seen at Brooklyn Museum, Bard College, Art Basel, BAM, FIAR, The Kitchen, MANA, New York Live Arts, The Public Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, Triskelion Arts, Knockdown Center, The Chocolate Factory, Movement Research, Danspace Project and more.

 
S T A R R busby (all pronouns said with respect) is a Black experimental artist who sings, acts, composes, educates, and is committed to the liberation of all people. S T A R R leads a music project under their name and is the lead singer of dance&b band People’s Champs (www.peopleschampsnyc.com). S T A R R  has also supported and collaborated with artists such as Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, Son Lux, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, Alice Smith, and Quelle Chris. Selected credits: Between Wave and Water (Composer and “Ghost”, Alethea Pace, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); If You Unfolded Us (Sable Elyse Smith, MoMA); (pray) (Ars Nova and National Black Theatre, A Singer, Composer, and Music Director) *Lucille Lortel Award Winner and NYT Critic’s Pick; The Beautiful Lady (La Mama, Boris) *NYT Critic’s Pick; Octet (Signature Theatre, Paula) *Drama Desk Award Winner. www.https://linktr.ee/S_T_A_R_R
 

Maxi Hawkeye Canion (they/she) is a Brooklyn based Performance Artist. Through their lens as a Black Queer artist, they distill their life experiences through performance, sculpture, sound, and garment. Their work illustrates the nuances of intimacy, failure, the grotesque, and ephemerality, centering on non-linear, autobiographical narratives that focus on intricate personas that serve as metaphorical embodiments of their socio-political stances. As a creator, they are currently a 2024/2025 Fresh Tracks artist, and have held residences at Chocolate Factory Theater, Art OMI, BOFFO Performance Festival 2022, Otion Front Studio, the Galim Moving Artist Residency 2023, to name a few. Their work has recently been presented for the 2024 Les Urbaines Festival in Lausanne, Switzerland, Black Aesthetics at Judson Memorial Church and SFX Festival 2024. As a performer, Maxi has collaborated with notable artists such as Buffy Sierra, MTHR TRSA, Nifemi Ogunro, Dominica Greene, Ella W-S, Akira Uchida, Theo Triantafyllidis, Eve Tagny, Alexandra Waierstall, Ryan Ponder McNamara, Miles Greenberg, Sigrid Lauren, J. Bouey, slowdanger, Shikeith, Monica Mirabile, Richard Kennedy, Young Boy Dancing Group, and Sidra Bell, among others.

 

Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Cynthia Carr is the author, most recently, of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, winner of the National Book Critics Award for biography. Her previous books are Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Once a staff writer at The Village Voice (using the byline C.Carr), her work has also appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, TDR:The Drama Review, and other publications.

 

God Complex (also known as Aeon Andreas) is a transexual, transdisciplinary director and performer working in the fields of drag, theater, film, and dance. Both in and out of drag, God Complex crafts wild, glittering, pseudo-mystical, atmospheric landscapes about transgender euphoria and joy through the collision of genre and form. Aeon is a member of the dance-theater company Witness Relocation, the sideshow theater company, The No Ring Circus, and he is a resident artist at the nightclub House of Yes. He has performed across the world as a dance artist and drag performer in iconic places such as Lincoln Center, BAM, The Chelsea Hotel, LaMama, Bonnaroo Arts festival, New Orleans’ Civic Theater, Detroit’s Masonic Temple, the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater, and Berlin’s Mahalla. Aeon taught contact improv, composition, choreography, and drag practicums at Tisch Drama’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School for eight years, and has guest taught at colleges like MIT and Montclair State University. His dance-theater work has been shown at TV Eye, Center for Performance Research, Greenwood Cemetery, God Complex’s work straddles drag and performance art and often centers his transexual body in conversation with “the void,” whatever that may mean. He is a warped reflection of his host body’s reality. IG: @g0d.c0mplex.

 

A New Jersey native and long-time figure in New York’s downtown scene, Lola Flash is an activist documenting themes of race, age, and gender. Flash was an active ACT UP member during the AIDS epidemic in New York City and featured in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster. Their art and activism are deeply connected, fueling a life-long commitment to visibility and preserving the legacy of LGBTQIA+ and communities of color.
Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4×5 film camera and a digital medium format camera, engaging those often deemed invisible. With numerous international exhibitions and commissions, their work is included in collections such as MoMA, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the George Eastman Museum. Flash is also a Kamoinge Collective member and President of the Queer Art board.
A committed artist, Flash uses photography to provide “new ways of seeing.” They create visually alluring images while initiating change and progress. Their work invites viewers to not only look but see.

Photo by Travis Sherwood

Heather Glynis is a writer, performer, and all around transsexual-about-town. She is interested in the ways sex and celebrity both free and confine us, the asymptotic friction of trans identity, jokes, Language poetry, and apocalypse as an opportunity for a vaudevillian coming together. She approaches her work through the lens of a poet, but sees poetry not as an end, but an engine for something more expansive that can integrate drag, narrative, music, and performance into an alternative mosaic theater — though she does occasionally just write poems. She’s written and performed for The Poetry Project, Wonder Press, No, Dear, Parkside Lounge, La Mama, and more. She is from fair Verona, New Jersey and lives in Bushwick.

 

Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She’s the author of A Queen in Bucks County and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame, and the co-editor of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, all from Nightboat. Kay is the editorial director at the Poetry Project, where she edits the Poetry Project Newsletter. Her next book, Perverts, is forthcoming from Nightboat in fall 2025.

 

 

 

 

RuAfza (b. Siddhant Talwar) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Brooklyn, specializing in drag performance and visual arts. As a queer immigrant from India, their work explores themes of gender, immigration, and consumption through lenticular imagery and immersive installations.
Their practice balances artistic innovation with accessibility, creating emotionally resonant work that combines humor with introspection. Drawing from community organizing and labor union collaborations in India, RuAfza has performed at the Paramount Theater in Boston and The Flea in NYC, and held workshops and participated in panels at Tufts, Yale, SFSU, Northeastern, and Williams College about performance and collective resistance.
RuAfza holds a BFA in Studio Art and BA in New Media from Tufts University, graduating Magna cum Laude with thesis honors. 
She has produced shows at 3 Dollar Bill, C’mon Everybody, Herbert Von King Cultural Center and more.

Photo by Lola Flash

SARAH SCHULMAN is a novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, and AIDS historian.  She holds an endowed chair in Creative Writing at Northwestern University and is on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

  

 

 

 

 

 

VaLeria  is a trans multidisciplinary artist born and raised in the Philippines. Their work explores the intersections of sexuality, race, gender, and spirituality, investigating the role of spiritual traditions in family and broader cultural relationships. They emphasize the theatricality and psychological impact of these traditions, drawing upon a deep appreciation for Pilipino culture and an avant-garde trans creative energy.

Honoring ancestral, trans, two-spirit, and siya heritage, Valeria’s work fuses traditional techniques with influences from the Tausug Region and Ballroom-vogue scenes. Through their artistry, they push the boundaries of trans visibility, fashion innovation, and performance.

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La Mama is a world-renowned New York cultural institution dedicated to the artist and all aspects of the theatre.