Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom! MOM! MOMMM!
Cries from the wasteland. Alone. Red hydrogen lights forming a barricade.
Lesbians smoke cigs. Queer grunge cunt uniform meets sheer bike shorts.
BIGKID DANCE takes Amy Novinski’s ballet studio and makes it gay, club, funeral, travesty.
Deep across this studio wasteland, the clock’s stuck at 56:44. It’s not a clock, it’s a timer, glowing blue beneath tattered curtains. Wind howls. “Is it Cold in the Water?” comes on. Dance to it! They don’t. But If I Die Before the Revolution does do justice to SOPHIE’s cresting invocation into trans loneliness and eternity.
Count down. Capitol D dancing: thrashing meets technique, ballet collides with street dance, am I watching my IG discover page? Not queer, not revolutionary, but then, exhausted, they fall to their knees dry heaving. A second later, they’re smoking. I’m back in.
An interracial lesbian love story hooks me. Makaila Chiplin and Maris Krysocheck caress, love, leave, fight, collapse, return. They watch each other’s anguished solos. Without two friends holding them up, they’d collapse, lovers just beyond arms reach.
Mikey Morado lumbers, blue cake in hand, pointy birthday hat marking him ‘FAG.” Sad FAG turns one alone while her friends laugh at the lesbian bar, laughing, laughing, and then, sobbing.
Jahnell Boozer is sobbing.
She stumbles toward us, shadowed. Mumbles.
I can’t make out words. Panic spiral mumble dance. Shadow boxing.
“I’m not the monster!”
Hands blocking her hung head waving no, no, don’t look.
Behind them, rubberneckers miming jokes and jabs over a dead body.
The lesbian couple fights:
“It’s not funny. She’s dead.”
“You were laughing too.”
“Fuck you. And fuck your mom.”
“I would fuck your mom.”
“You always take it too far.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“You keep this shit up you will.”
“The world’s ending, please, be with me.”
Morado recites Michael’s dream from The Holy Bible. He’s crying, for real, trying to hold it together reading your lover’s eulogy tears at another AIDS funeral or trans funeral or both.
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Running at us, hair down, panic solo. Lights go out. One. Then another. Dancers skid to the ground, bare thighs screeching.
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Running. Heaving. Searching. Your people, lying dead.
My skin tingles. Then something deeper. Myself, house music and city streets, reflected back to me, dripping glamorous grotesque living, dying. Risking being on the nose and trendy, BIGKID DANCE is raw, ancestral and speculative, queer knowing. Magic and Monster. If this is the apocalypse, we hold us.
If I Die Before the Revolution, BIGKID DANCE, BOK / Amy Novinski Ballet, Philadelphia Fringe Festival
