Poetry is not a luxury: “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt” (Audre Lorde)

This workshop will invite participants to deepen our truth-telling practice in community, through poetry. We will explore and write poetry of necessity.

About the workshop leaders:

VANESSA HUANG is a poet, writer, filmmaker, cellist, community organizer, and consultant who has worked to integrate cultural work and digital/social media with leadership development and movement building from the margins. She is a recent finalist for the 2010 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange Award.

LEROY F. MOORE JR is a Black disabled writer, poet, and community activist who has authored a spoken word CD and chapbook entitled Black Disabled Man with a Big Mouth & a High IQ and created the Krip-Hop Mixtape Project. He is a cofounder of and frequent performer in Sins Invalid.

Sins Invalid is a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Our performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body where normative paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities.

This event is wheelchair accessible. Although we cannot guarantee a scent free environment, we ask that people please refrain from using scented products for this event. Our workshops are open to anyone who is interested in exploring the intersection and disability and embodiment. Limit: 20 participants. If space becomes limited, we are prioritizing participants who identify as having a disability. For more information and/or to enroll, please contact: info@sinsinvalid.org or call 510-689-7198.

The variety of performances and acceptance of myriad artistic expressions can make it hard to pinpoint a particular focus for any theatrical production; however, this variety makes Sins that much richer and doesn’t take away from the power of the performances. Multimedia, spoken word, dance and episodic plays all contributed to the richness of this dynamic evening. Antoine-DeVinci Hunter utilized the entire stage to show the audience how he moves through the world, incorporating deaf culture and experience into his modern dance performances. The introduction to Sins Invalid was a kickboxing piece performed by Mat Fraser, who is brutalized by an invisible opponent. Fraser’s taunters are a continuous loop of fighting sounds and insults focused on his ability to be perceived as a sexually attractive being due to his disability. One particularly evocative piece, involving cofounder Leroy Moore and contributor Seely Quest, dealt with the medical perception of disability and its intersection with erotic fantasies.

An African American male patient in street clothes enters the scene of what appears to be a doctor’s office for his yearly exam, followed by a person dressed in a donkey suit carrying a video camera that remains focused on the patient throughout the performance. A Caucasian female doctor, dressed in a white lab coat, orders the patient to take a seat and undress, watching with increasing interest as the patient slowly removes his clothes to reveal a leather sadomasochism harness. An examination takes place with the doctor using medical tools to stimulate the patient’s erogenous zones, opening up questions of the medical community’s perception of disability as novelty.

Who has control in the scene is ambiguous—that the patient is wearing a harness implies a certain level of consent and subservience, with the dialogue reaffirming this dynamic. Throughout the piece the patient is heard to respond, “Yes doctor,” with what can be perceived as lust or longing. Among other questions, the doctor asks how many sexual encounters the patient has had in the last year and whether the patient’s disability lends him advantages during sex, reframing disability as a normative and potentially preferred sexual attribute. At one point the doctor puts a horse’s bit in the patient’s mouth, referencing the common practice during slavery of forcing men to wear bridles and move loads like animals. The S&M harness that the patient wears also further illustrates the perception that he is property rather than a full person.

The piece is brilliant—it comments on the audience as an animal of lust and opens the conversation to sadomasochism and questions of power and control. I would watch it again, but I understand that the performance would be difficult for some to watch. I respect this act for being a nuanced commentary on our society’s aversions to disability, race, and gender expressions outside of the accepted norm.

The variety of different performances encompassed in this one evening allowed Sins Invalid to cover a broad spectrum of disability. Sins Invalid succeeded in exposing the audience to the fact that there is more to disability than just doctors and diagnoses, stressing that it is possible and vital for this community to have sexuality fully incorporated into everyday life.

View the original blog

Terry Rowden

Sins Invalid’s Leroy Moore recently interviewed Terry Rowden, an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Staten Island. Terry is the author of The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness and coeditor of Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: As a Black professor and author teaching and writing on topics of popular culture, transnational cinema and philosophy, do you have a personal connection to what you teach and write about? Please give some background on why you teach and write on subjects that you do.

Terry Rowden: My interest in disability emerged primarily from within my teaching and research interests in African American and queer literature once I began to realize that all marginalized social identities reproduce to some extent the dynamics of disability as both a social construct and a lived condition. Disability has a special force as a means of rewriting normalizing narratives because it occurs across all social groups and categories. My overall project as a scholar is to reveal that abnormality is really just a political construct used to ground social hierarchies. For instance, all people who live into advanced old age, simply for that reason alone, will eventually experience some lessening of physical functioning significant enough to remove them from the privileged space of normality and necessitate some type of social accommodation. Normalization is the watchword for conventional social politics and, as the word itself implies, disability is one of the most obvious forms of abnormality.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: In your work and in your book, The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness, I see a lot of parallels with disability and the work of Sins Invalid. Can you elaborate on these parallels?

Terry Rowden: My work relates to the work of Sins Invalid primarily because of my commitment to the celebration of difference and to revealing the difficulties that difference can create. In ways that I like to believe are congruent with the important work of Sins Invalid, I try to reveal in The Songs of Blind Folk the ways in which popular culture and performance can be particularly dynamic sites for the project of bringing often mystified and misunderstood differences into the light and rewriting the negative scripts that have positioned those differences as either substandard and unworthy of positive recognition or as evidence of miraculous transcendence of mundane realities.

I try to help my students understand that people who occupy marginalized positions must accept their conditions whatever they may be before they can celebrate them or present them as deserving of celebration or even just respect by the very people who may be consciously or unconsciously committed to either denigrating or condescendingly “tolerating” those differences.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: We are both music historians, and in The Songs of Blind Folk, you touch on the invisibility of Black blind female Blues artists. Can you expand on this for our readers?

Terry Rowden: As I wrote in The Songs of Blind Folk, the fact that blind and other disabled women were perceived as being particularly vulnerable made and continues to make the image of a blind woman on stage an uncomfortable one for audiences that have been much more willing to accepted disabled male performers. One of the things that I would like to do at some point is to more closely consider the career of Diane Schuur, the one blind female musician to achieve significant popular success. Over the course of a decades-long career that overlapped with those of superstar blind performers like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Ronnie Milsap, Schuur’s sporadic periods of real visibility as a jazz singer and musician have reinforced my sense that regardless of the form, blind female performers are alienating for audiences in ways that blind men simply are not.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: From your essays, The Songs of Blind Folk, and your upcoming book, Difference and Desire in African American Popular Music, 1890-1940, it seems to me that you are critiquing popular images of people who were oppressed and lacked the avenues to tell their stories, including African Americans who have more than one identity, such as those who are gay, lesbian, transgender and/or disabled. Is that correct and if so, how does it fit in to your goals as a writer?

Terry Rowden: That’s true. I believe that all types of oppression are interconnected. The play between visible physical disabilities and invisible differences like sexual preference, cognitive disabilities, and the disabling force of present or past states of incarceration is central to my work as a cultural critic.  Central to the marginalization and abuse of any group of people is some narrative that positions them as not just “different” but also as lesser and, more often than not, as unnatural. A major part of the work of progressive cultural critique is resurrecting or constructing counter-narratives that can delegitimate the standard narratives that do that negative work.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: In the abstract of your upcoming book you wrote “Although increasing amounts of work is being done on the sexual and gender dynamics of black women’s expressivity in blues culture, less work has been done on early black popular music as a specifically sexed and gendered phenomenon from male and transgendered perspectives.”  Why do you think that is so, and has the research process for your books been frustrated by of this lack of information?

Terry Rowden: Actually the information and material is there in droves. It’s just been a question of accessing it and revealing why it is relevant and what it has to teach us. Because most of the influential early writers on the blues and jazz were white heterosexual men, there was a tendency to either ignore queer performers or normalize them. Some writers like Gunther Schuller and Paul Oliver were so committed to establishing the manhood of jazz and blues performers that their work, while progressive and laudable in many respects, was woefully deficient in actually presenting a well-rounded picture of the social world that gave rise to these performers and to the real dynamics of their lives and music. When one revisits the body of musical work from that period, the number of songs that reference homosexual desire and/or transgendered identities is startling given how few of these songs have been considered and circulated as significant cultural documents.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: We are very interested in your essay, “A Play of Abstractions: Race, Sexuality, and Community in James Baldwin’s Another Country.” Why did you pick this story to critique and what was your conclusion?

Terry Rowden: Another Country was really the first Baldwin novel in which he tried to present a picture of social difference in which American racial and sexual minorities were in dialogue with each other. The fact that Rufus, the bisexual black man, is presented as being irrecoverably alien to the image of modernity that the author develops in the novel is troubling and reflects anxieties about black male homosexuality that I don’t think Baldwin ever quite overcame or reconciled with his self-chosen identity as a spokesman for black America.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: You recently showed the class you teach some of Sins Invalid’s video work. What were the some of your students’ reactions to it?

Terry Rowden: I showed your video “Forbidden Acts” and a range of Sins Invalid videos in class and then directed my students to the Sins Invalid website for a follow-up discussion. Over the course of the two discussions some of the students were obviously taken further outside of their comfort zones than I expected. Their reactions made it clear to me, and more positively to many of them as well, that when it came to physical difference and especially to the sexuality of the physically impaired, they were conservative and even prejudiced in ways of which they weren’t aware. Fortunately, the discussions also suggested that their responses were often the results of surprise and lack of familiarity rather than deep-seated resistance to the issues that Sins Invalid’s work brings to light. After the initial shocks, the aesthetic beauty of the performances often served as their way of entering into a dialogue with the cultural politics.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: When I was told about your book, The Songs of Blind Folk, I was thinking, “Finally, African American and Disability studies are coming together!” As a professor who is Black and not disabled, do you see that coming together happening more now in academia? And as an ally of the disability community, how do you see your role in this happening?

Terry Rowden: As an ally of the disability community, I see my role as to make sure that as disability studies becomes a more legitimated academic space, the particular issues of people of color and sexual minorities will be recognized within that discourse. It is important to make it clear that disabilities are not just conditions that some people have. They are conditions that have different ontological, cultural, and political specificities and histories. Organizing my teaching and research around those differences is my way of crafting a disability studies perspective that will, hopefully, avoid the sentimentalism and homogenizations that have bedeviled much identity based research and pedagogy.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: This is a question that I ask many writers/activists, both in and outside the walls of academia. How can we break down these walls to make a highway of learning, publishing and shaping the next generation using a combination of street knowledge and paper credentials?

Terry Rowden: As cultural studies and engaged forms of scholarship become more accepted as valid forms of work in the humanities, I think many of these walls will fall under the weight of their own obsolescence. This interview itself is, I believe, a sign that this is happening.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: What are your next projects and will they include a focus on disability?

Terry Rowden: In addition to the book on sexuality and gender in early black popular music, I’m working on a book on the use of pornographic narrative structures and images in African American men’s fiction.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: Any last words?

Terry Rowden: I’m grateful to you and Sins Invalid for the opportunity to discuss these issues and for the interest that you have shown in my work.

Sins Invalid is please to announce the February 23^rd release of the latest novel by Elaine Beale, Sins Invalid friend and Advisory Board member.

Another Life Altogether is a coming-of-age and coming out story set in the 1970s in Elaine’s native England. The novel tells the story of thirteen-year-old Jesse Bennett, an engaging, wry and utterly sympathetic narrator struggling to come to terms with her attraction to girls. Living in a remote East Yorkshire village with her emotionally disabled mother and an eccentric and sometimes criminally inclined family, Jesse’s journey is far from smooth.

Another Life Altogether has received advance praise from Sara Gruen, the bestselling author of Water for Elephants. Gruen said of the novel: “Another Life Altogether captivated me from the very first page. Dazzling in its authenticity and utterly absorbing, it is an uplifting story about adolescence, family, and finding one’s place in the world. With the character of Jesse Bennett, Elaine Beale manages to create hope and humor in an otherwise turbulent world. It is a rare, insightful, and gorgeously written novel.” And, in an early review of the novel, Feminist Review commented: “Another Life Altogether is an extraordinary true-to-life book, and Beale tells a number of important and poignant stories all at once with great skill.”

Beale is thrilled that the book has finally made it out in the world. “It’s a book I absolutely needed to write,” she says. “But it almost didn’t get written.”

She started working on the book in 2000, but after she got a draft of 200 pages, the manuscript stalled. “I got stuck,” Beale says. “And some challenging things like illness and my mother’s sudden death got in the way.” Then, in 2007 she won the Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange Award in fiction for the novel’s first chapter. The contest prize was a trip to New York to meet with editors and agents, and it was there that Beale met Cindy Spiegel, VP at Spiegel & Grau. “Cindy expressed great enthusiasm for the book after she read what I had of the manuscript,” says Beale. “Her interest was a huge boost for my confidence. I hadn’t been sure I could finish the novel, but knowing someone might actually publish it put a fire under my butt. It took me several years to write the first 200 pages; I wrote the last 200 pages in less than ten months.”

While Another Life Altogether is not necessarily autobiographical, it is certainly informed by Beale’s experience. “I grew up in East Yorkshire in a place very similar to the place where Jesse lives. It was  very culturally isolated in a lot of ways—a place where it was hard to be different, and almost impossible for a young person to come out as lesbian or gay. While I have a great fondness for my hometown and the people there, when I was a teenager I lived for the moment when I’d be able to move away. Jesse’s story is ultimately one that’s hopeful, but the challenges she faces are very, very real. And unfortunately many of those challenges still exist today.”

Elaine Beale immigrated to the U.S. in 1989. She lives in Oakland with her partner of fifteen years and their goddaughter. She will be reading from her book at several locations in the Bay Area. More information can be found at her website: www.elainebeale.com.

ANOTHER LIFE ALTOGETHER
Elaine Beale
Spiegel & Grau
On Sale February 23, 2010
$26.00 ▪ ISBN: 978-0-385-53004-0

Publicity Contact: Kristina Miller ▪ krmiller@randomhouse.com ▪ 212-572-2858

photo by Pamela Juhl

By Leroy Moore

Watch Leroy Moore’s three-part interview with Staff Benda Bilili.

I like it when things come together!  I can’t ask for anything better.  November 1^st, 2009 wrapped my family, disabled musicians, traveling and my forty-second birthday all into one big present to myself!

For two years I’ve been researching disabled street musicians Staff Benda Bilili, who live near the grounds of the Kinshasa Zoo in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.  They released their debut album Tres Tres Forte in March 2009, and were invited to perform at the annual World Music Expo (WOMEX), which has moved to Copenhagen. Denmark. Copenhagen is also home to my sister, Pamela Julh, and her lovely two children. I had no excuse not to go and visit with my sister and nephews and at the same time meet and interview the members of Staff Benda Bilili with the Copenhagen Voice, a media outlet that my sister started.  Yes, both my sister and I are journalists for the people!

WOMEX, an international festival that brings together artists from the worlds of folk, roots, ethnic and traditional music, also produces concerts, conferences and documentary films. It offers networking as an effective means of promoting music and culture of all kinds across borders. This year WOMEX announced their 2009 awardees, which was Staff Benda Bilili!!!

There were many reasons why Staff Benda Bilili caught and held my attention – and a central one was seeing an all disabled band singing deeply about the issues they live with, like poverty, homelessness, disability and street kids. As a Black disabled activist, as a journalist, poet and lover of music, it just blew me away.

The members of Staff Benda Bilili are: bandleader Ricky Likabu, singer/guitarist/lyricist Coco Ngambali, soprano singer Theo Nsituvuidi, singers Djunana Tanga-Suele, Zadis Mbulu Nzungu and Kabamba Kabose Kasungo, bass player Paulin ‘Cavalier’ Kiara-Maigi, drummer/singer Cubain Kabeya, percussionist Randy Buda, and finally Ricky’s adopted 17-year-old Roger Landu.  Roger created his own instrument that is called a Satonge, a one-string guitar (read more about Roger’s instrument) Although the whole band was present for the interview, Ricky and Michel (the manager) were the representatives during the interview.

Staff’s songs and lyrics tell the life of poor people in the Congo.  One of the eleven songs on the CD is Tonkara, which talks about street kids who sleep on cardboard outside.   Ricky said they live & sing on the streets.  The first track of Staff’s CD is entitled Moto Moindo which translates to Black Man.  It’s a song warning Black men about what is happening in Africa, how our food, the earth, and nature is being corrupted, so Black Men should stand up, come together and take action.  On the theme of community building, Staff used to have a center in Kinsasha where they taught street kids how to build musical instruments, wheelchairs and play music, however it was bombed some years ago – by who is unclear.  Now local businesses in the Congo along with US based private organizations and individuals in the US are supporting the process of re-building the center.

When I first heard this band, what made me love them was more than their music were their political views about life in the DRC as people living in poverty and as people with disabilities. I was surprised and disappointed when their manager responded to my questions about their statement of being “the real journalists of Kinshasa” with saying that there was a “misunderstanding” and “some journalist made the quote”, but the group never said that.  Strange, because it says it right there in the liner notes of their CD.  I also recognize that Staff members were very tired as well as dealing with a whole new way of living – on tour.  Denmark’s cold weather, their new wheelchairs, different clothes, having to get used to new foods, all the reality of traveling and being managed must be a challenge for them, and I’m sure they want to make sure that they can make a good living from their music.  Maybe that’s why they have become cautious about who says what, what gets out and what they want to stay in the past.  I wonder if I had met them on their turf, by the Kinshasa Zoo, if they would tell me the political explanations that my questions were fishing for?

In the US, people with disabilities have held disability as civil rights issue but also as a cultural framework, where we reflect on our history, create art and music, and set forth an analysis that disability is not something you overcome.  From this, I was surprised to hear Ricky’s answer to my question of advice to poor disabled people around the world – that disability is all in the head, and that people with disabilities have to be independent.  I had to scratch my head and ask myself “Is that advice too simple, that pull-yourself-up-from-your-boot-straps kind of advice?” Hmmmm!

Staff Benda Bilili said that they are looking for a US sponsor for their tour in the US.  Their manager told me it is hard to get a US sponsor as compared to Europe, where they have been touring for the last three months.  The members of Staff Benda Bilili are hoping that after the tour and the release of the documentary that they will be able to afford to buy their own house.  Noticing that Staff Benda Bilili is an all male group, my last question was if they sing with disabled women.  Coco finally spoke up, answering that yes, they do.

What happens to people who go from living on streets – poor but speaking their minds about their situation – to being managed by others who have the means to bring them wealth and fame?  What happens when the people from outside your world can take you outside of your struggle and you hold back your politics – your voice – so you can make a living?  These are the questions I have after both interviews and meeting them live. If you have any thought about this, write us back.

photo by Pamela Juhl

(Big thanks to The Copenhagen Voice, my sister, Pamela Juhl, David Grossman for pulling strings here in Copenhagen, to Florent de la Tullaye who helped me connect with Staff Benda Bilili almost two years ago – and last but certainly not least, my thanks to the members of Staff Benda Bilili for being you, for your political lyrics, and for repping people who live in poverty and who are disabled!)

In 1988, when I was twenty-six years old, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammation of the lower intestine. For several months after diagnosis, I became more and more seriously ill and, at one point, was rushed into hospital in the middle of the night. I remember very vividly lying in an exam room under flickering fluorescent lights. In pain, dehydrated, exhausted and very frightened, I asked the doctor if there was anything that could be done to cure the illness was playing such havoc with my body.

“Oh, there’s no cure,” she answered, not even looking up from the chart she was paging through. “You’ll have this for the rest of your life.”

It was in that moment that everything changed. Despite my diagnosis and worsening symptoms, I had considered myself “healthy” up until that moment. Now I was one of the sick, the disabled, the chronically ill.

I hated my body for this betrayal.

Though, truth be told, I had hated my body for a while.

There were many reasons for this hatred. I grew up in a family where physical abuse was a weekly, if not daily, experience. My body made me vulnerable; it was a place of pain. I grew up female in a culture where the female body attracted hatred, uninvited groping on public transit, threats and actual assault. I was queer amid fierce heterosexism, and my gender-crossing style of dress engendered anger, outrage, disdain. And, I also grew up in a culture seeped simply with fear of the “cripple,” the “flawed,” the “ugly,” and the “weak.”

In my experience of illness, I played out what I had learned.

I was filled with shame because I had become the “other.” My shame demanded that I pass as healthy. I tried (with mixed success) to hide the fact that I had an illness—from lovers, from co-workers and friends.

I punished myself because in my family (and the larger society) I had learned that punishment and abuse is what the weak deserve.

I pushed myself relentlessly even in the face of extremely debilitating symptoms. In part, this was because the experience of abuse had equipped me with wonderful tools for disassociation from my body. And, after all, “overcoming” disability and illness is what earns societal praise.

I tried to quash the terrible flaw that had arisen within me.

I wanted my body to go away.

I had always loved writing as a child, and I began writing again as an adult not long after I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. In retrospect, this timing was no coincidence because, gradually, writing gave a voice to the body that I had tried so hard to ignore.

When I wrote, I wrote about childhood. I wrote about illness. I wrote about my parents and my family. I wrote about being female and queer in a sexist/heterosexist society. I wrote fantasy. I wrote fiction. I wrote poetry. I wrote memoir. I wrote whatever I felt moved to write.

In doing all this, writing helped me to ingest, metabolize and shift my understanding of illness. It helped me understand the ableism of the wider society that had made me think of my body as flawed and ugly and wanting. It helped me to redirect my anger—from inward to outward. It helped me to learn to love what I had been taught to hate.

Writing demands solitude. It demands being closely and deeply with ourselves in a way that few other things require. And in doing so, it opens up the possibility of peeling away the layers of the lies we have been told so we can find our own truths. It allows us to find what is deep (and sometimes hidden) within us. And it allows us to give it voice. In doing so, it can allow us to become profoundly liberated from the things that have held us down. It also offers us a means for us to celebrate and proclaim.

By writing, we create the opportunity to share our realizations and insights and revelations with others. It creates a new reality from the old.

There is a splendid contradiction in writing: in order to do it well, we must depart the present to inhabit our imaginations. Yet, in doing this, we must also being willing to move into a much deeper place within ourselves.  For me, this place is profoundly physical. I write, ironically, from the place in my body that is the site of my illness. I write straight from my gut.

On Sunday November 15^th, 1pm – 4pm, Elaine Beale will lead a writing workshop sponsored by Sins Invalid. The workshop will include exercises, prompts and discussion that will allow participants to write about their own personal and political experiences of the body. The workshop will take place at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco. For more information, go to http://sinsinvalid.org/whats_new.html.  To register, please email info@sinsinvalid.org.

“It feels so full and the way we are held, it is like a total release…being part of sins is like getting fisted by art.”

“…bonding and solidarity between disabled performers whose sexual energy is loud and visible, colorful and beautiful… “

“Antoine limping up the stairs backstage, then dancing his ASS OFF as if nothing had happened, then limping back down the stairs backstage…”(dancer Antoine Hunter had a hip injury during the performance)

“Mat flapping his dick back and forth backstage before the bathtub scene and politely apologizing to the stagehands for hitting them with it.”

(Backstage bootboi) Syndy saying, the last day, “I’ve never been as fucking proud to be a crip before in my life!”

“…my homework was very interesting…from taking an acting workshop and watching videos on s/m to practicing masturbation techniques that can be captured just right on video…”

“Maria’s passion in delivery transcending good poetry to something else”

“We created sacred space, liberated territory, room for our own beauty and brilliance and rage and love to shine.”

“Nomy donning her bird feathers. Leroy getting into his harness.  Handing out rescue remedy to the stressed. Eating Yulanda’s lemon bars and muffins (from Simply Bliss catering) — the joy of having delicious and edible food provided. The makeup magic.  The circle times when we called in those other stories not in the room, breathed and moaned and hummed and uncurled together.”

“Getting to see how powerfully moved the audiences are-the stunned faces afterwards, tears, speechlessness.”

“getting in and out of the nest backstage, all the hands and shoulders offered in support, exchanging fake leg for wings, being pushed on and off stage by jerry.  i would take deep grounding breaths and center myself so i didn’t wobble or feel unstable.  there was something about that piece that felt so authentic for me, like i was really experiencing the story i was telling.  i’m so grateful for that space.”

“getting naughty with my sweetie to calm my nerves – behind a curtain 3 feet from a performer being interviewed on camera – making sure not to spill a drop on my pretty top”

“Listening to the audiences, each one different, reacting to our work-being able to hear the comments during the show-the gasps, the “ohmygod” moments.”

“leah screaming “i’m on a boat motherf****r!” to amp herself up every night”

“Leroy wanking on stage..now THAT’s what I call entertainment! “

“…really making space for where each of us individually, and creating a culture of support with room for all of us!  it really worked! that’s the world i want to live in.”

“And everyone else leaving their mark on me in various ways”

“the masturbation check-in during the green room circle.”

“Most importantly the collective energy that was created has fed me for months to come, and feel honoured and proud to have been a part of it this year. Sins Invalid rocks serious ass, and we all have some serious asses”

“…seeing our community grow every year, as artists/activists from all over the world speak into the politics of Sins Invalid”

reposted from the National Sexuality Resource Center’s blog

If you happen to be in San Francisco the first weekend in October, do yourself the favor of a lifetime and go and see the Sins Invalid performance at Brava Theater. A quick word of caution though: you need to buy tickets soon as the show will likely sell out each night.

The press release mentions Sins Invalid and NSRC’s cultural consulting partnership and describes, “Sins Invalid is a performance event celebrating the power of embodiment and the tenderness of struggle, stripping taboos off of sexuality and disability and offering a vision of beauty that includes all bodies and communities.”

I can’t exaggerate enough the way Sins Invalid will likely transform the way you think about bodies, ability, race, sex and what it means to be human and beautiful….indeed, what it means to have pleasure itself.

When I first saw the performance two years ago I walked away feeling as though I learned more about sexual creativity and beauty in one evening than I had in years of studying gender and sexuality academically and working as a sexuality educator and disability rights activist. It is stunning and challenging on more levels than words can ever come close to describing. It also reinforces to me as a sexuality educator that the arts are perhaps the most important weapon in our arsenal in terms of educating the public about sexuality across the lifespan.

After the show, it really occurred to me for the first time that the word “disability” may actually best apply to anyone who refuses to see and celebrate and learn from the beauty of bodily diversity and sexual/intimate expression. I used to be that person until I saw Sins, my own internalized ableism preventing me from seeing my full range of sexual/intimate possibility. This kind of life lesson can’t be learned in a lecture or a book or even a really great breakthrough with a therapist. You have to feel it and not just think it. It is as Director Patty Berne says a kind of “magic”.

At NSRC we include all diversities and elements not normally included in lifelong sexuality education and “disability” is one area that is far too often invisible, discounted, ignored, hidden……even at times by those who are most progressively advocating for sexual health, education and rights…. until now.

As Sins Invalid’s popularity continues to grow nation wide, the sexual health and rights of this nation will move ahead by light years. This is why Sins Invalid and NSRC make such great partners….and we are honored to include Sins invalid workshops and performances within our trainings, publications and web site.

Really, go see it. There’s no way you won’t be completely moved by it, there’s no way you won’t leave being a better professional sexuality educator, researcher, therapist, activist and human being. And there is no doubt in my mind that you will learn a thing or two about creativity within your own personal sex/intimate life. I promise that.

If you can’t make it, you can still contribute to and learn from our movements ongoingly by talking about Sins Invalid and sexual literacy on their site and ours. Let us know how disability, sexuality and your work or your life connect….make it visible so we can all see and feel beauty in a new light.

Join us!

** Please note that show contains explicit content **

By Cory Silverberg

Imagine entering a room where, for a few hours, everything you know is turned upside down. Not in an alien-planet sort of way – you still recognize the people, the language, the feelings – but in an everything-you-secretly-thought-was-fucked-up-about-the-world-really-is-and-this-is-what-it-would-be-like-if-everyone-admitted-it kind of way. Imagine being surround by a few hundred strangers and feeling genuinely welcome, as if everyone is happy you’re there and willing to take you exactly as you are. Now imagine that you also get to see a heart-stopping, jaw-dropping, funny, loud, beautiful, sad, and smoking hot show at the same time. Since 2006 Sins Invalid has been putting on just such a show, giving hundreds of people access to this very experience.

In anticipation of their latest show (which opens October 2) I spoke with co-founder and artistic director Patricia Berne.

For people who have never been, what can you expect from a Sins Invalid performance?

Well, Sins Invalid is both aesthetic and political. It’s also definitely an adult show with sexually provocative content. Every year is a new creature, and I’m really excited about this year’s show. The theme is the magic of embodiment. There’s such a dichotomy around who is disabled and who is not disabled; what is “natural” and what is “not natural.” And it extends to asking what is human and what is of the earth? Often times I think we don’t give our species credit for the kind of grace we embody.

In the theater, the audience seems to go through a kind of transformation as they bear witness, there’s a real paradigm shift happening in the room. On stage, all these people that are considered somehow non-normative, expressing their power, sexually and politically, in a beautiful loving way. We’re used to people who look like Paris Hilton saying they are hot. But we’re not as used to us, the majority of humankind, being proud of our bodies. Most of us live with shame in our bodies. So when somebody that has a non-normative body expresses love and sexual power on stage it opens up an opportunity for audience members to claim their bodies are beautiful as well.

The result is a show that provokes a range of emotions: Joy, sadness, being turned on, being caught off guard. Additionally, the experience of being an audience member is powerful — For example, for some people it will be the first time being in an audience where there are a dozen people in wheelchairs. Even for people who use wheelchairs that may be a new experience. And being in a public space which is multigendered, all orientations, multiracial, and mixed ability is a beautiful thing to experience.

Can you talk a bit about the process of putting a show together?

The show has multiple artists although it’s not a cabaret, it’s one comprehensive show that gets woven together from different voices. It has a dramatic arc working with multiple pieces. We do a combination of commissioned work and a call to artists. We have an artistic core of five people who jury the work. The meetings are fun and varied, we don’t always agree but we have a lot of political unity so there’s a strong commitment.

One key element is that the artists’ voices reflect their experience. People don’t have to be explicit about disability politics but we do ask artists to submit a statement about why they are interested in sexuality and disability. We don’t include work that devalues / dehumanizes anybody. The strongest artistic work doesn’t rely on cheap punches at other communities in order to express itself.

The work ranges from dramatic to tongue-in-cheek. Our shows do tend to be kind of intense. More comedy is something I would welcome.

You used the word “dehumanized” and I’m aware that some people consider anything that’s as brazenly sexual as Sins Invalid to be objectifying, and that to objectify is to dehumanize. Are you aware of this line, or does it come into play as you’re planning a show?

We have discussed it internally, and we don’t have one position around it. It really gets negotiated piece by piece. My personal take on it is that sometimes the hottest sex is one that objectifies. Not always of course. Sometimes it’s great when you’re connecting with someone heart to heart. But sometimes the other person can be a tool for your own pleasure and as long as it’s consensual and informed, who are we to place judgment on it?

In this year’s show there’s a piece called “The Scene”. In it a disabled man is going to see a dominatrix, where he’s being both objectified and taking agency – he’s going to have a medical scene. And there’s some pretty hardcore objectification in it. We’ll see how people respond to that.

Why a show around sex and disability?

As people with disabilities, one of the more painful ways that oppression out-pictures is through a social neutering of our sexual vibrancy. The medical model of disability says the “problem” is located in the bodies, and the solution is to change or eliminate our bodies. The medical model questions the viability of our existence and our bodies. Affirming our bodies as valuable and sexual, our lives as valuable is key in a liberation framework.

Also, engaging in sexuality cuts to certain chases. It opens up conversations that might otherwise not be opened up.

Control of a person’s sexuality has long been a method of controlling their community. It’s not just about an individual desire to be acknowledged, but in order for our communities to be recognized and respected our bodies need to be understood as valuable.

What do you want people to understand about your bodies?

That our bodies are viable. That we’re human and necessarily that means we’re sexual, we’re hot. It’s not like one community or demographic has the corner on being hot. There’s this media driven idea that some bodies are more viable than others – you have to be between the ages 18-35, and between a certain weight and height, and a certain skin tone range, with a certain type and amount of hair – and if you fall outside of that our bodies are “less than”. That’s just fallacious media-driven bullshit.

The truth of all bodies, including disabled bodies, is that we have sexual vibrancy and by our very existence we engage in pleasure seeking and pleasure giving activities. And that’s a really good think about being in a body.

The real work is to push back on the broader frameworks of institutionalized oppression. The problem is not our bodies, it’s the way we are being treated within ableism. And this doesn’t just negate our bodies, but everyone’s. It negates humanity.

I was interested in the concept of “disability justice” that you’ve referenced. What does that mean exactly and how does it relate to putting on a show like Sins Invalid?

Disability rights has traditionally been fairly single-issue focused. The idea of disability justice is really looking at disabilities within a broader social justice framework and Looking at the systems of power and privilege across multiple communities and identities, looking at the interactions between the resulting forms of oppression, and finding ways to build resistance to oppression that also build bridges across communities, across movements.

As a concrete example, Leroy Moore and I started Sins Invalid together. Leroy’s a black disabled man and I’m mixed race queer woman of color. Let’s say we go in a cab together. The response that we get as we attempt to hail and enter a cab is mediated not by disability alone, but by perceptions of race, gender, hetero-normative expectations. So when I’m getting into a cab as a person presenting female it’s fine for me to ask for help. But Leroy’s black, so first of all they don’t want to let him in the cab. And because of his disability and race combined they assume he can’t afford a cab. How can he be an ally to me, how can I be an ally to him – how can we build together?

Within a disability justice framework we look at the intersecting dynamics and have an analysis not just as people with disabilities, but as people of color, as queer people. The question is; how do we respond as our whole selves, as whole communities, across movements so that liberation is achieved collectively, so that beauty is reflected by all of us?

Watch videos of previous performances and order tickets for Sins Invalid 2009