Screening of RIOT ACTS: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Musical Performance

Join us for a film screening of RIOT ACTS, a full-length documentary representing the whole lives of transgender and gender variant musicians, through a first-hand perspective of the intersections between gender performance and stage performance. This feature-length documentary highlights issues crucial to interviewees such as songwriting, voice presentation, presenting a body/bodies on stage, audiences, venues, the idea of the spectacle, media representation, performing gender and theories about "drag," and the personal as political. The film culminates with the notion that identities and bodies are undeniably political, and that the trans experience isn't always one of tragedy, but one of creativity and joy. The film's producer Simon Strikeback--a former member of the Bent Boyz drag troupe in St. Louis--will do a Q&A following the screening.