Hello Friends, Lovers, Supporters, Creative Visionaries and all that is the Sins Community!
Here at “Sins Central” we have heard from people repeatedly that they’d like to see a certain performance again, that they couldn’t see a performance because they were out of town or their cat/dog/significant other had the flu, that they want to share this performance with their friends and do we have a DVD — well, y’all are going to love this!! We have been planning and are very pleased to announce that we are launching a web streaming pilot of Sins annual performances!!!
August 6th through 12th, we will stream the full length 2008 Performance — and depending on the success of this venture we will be streaming other performances in the near future. Please help make this pilot a success by watching! Why are we doing this? Because each of us matters, and we recognize that for many people with disabilities, traveling to performances is difficult. The clips on the website, while lovely, are snippets, and Sins’ shows reflect a masterful connectivity and arc that is best seen straight (or queerly) through. In addition to bringing Sins to you and building Sins’ community, we also need to raise money so that the work of this beautiful organization can continue. Of course, the system will be sliding scale — and, we want to strongly encourage those who would like to and can pay to see the webcast to do so.
“My Body is Not a Liability” – Interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
by Stacey Milbern
LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA is a Bay Area-based queer Sri Lankan writer, performer and teacher. Her work is featured in the upcoming Sins Invalid show this weekend.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
My name is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and I am an almost 36 year old queer femme mixed heritage Sri Lankan poet, writer, organizer and teacher who is chronically ill. Some of my passions are community accountability/ transformative justice strategies to end violence and abuse, queer and trans sick, disabled and crazy folks of color and queer trans people of color (QTPOC) performance art. With Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, I co-edited The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, a book on dealing with violence without the cops or courts that we’ve been working on since 2004, that is coming out on South End Press in a month. I have fibromyalgia. I’m a little psychic. I like eating kottu rotty. I like making out. I have a gigantic friend family. I grew up in the rust belt and mid 90′s New York, I have a Dravidian white-mama heart, my heart has deep roots in Toronto, and I love the fresh fruit and ocean waves of Bay Arealandia, CA. I’m a hermit and a social butterfly.
Why Sins?
Seeing Sins Invalid perform for the first time in 2008 changed my life. I don’t say that lightly. I, like many other folks, had heard, “You gotta go to this show, it’s going to blow your mind!” But… I didn’t reaaaally get it. I did when I started about crying thirty seconds into the opening act – as Maori wheelchair dancer Rodney Bell got pulled into suspension 40 feet above the stage as Patty Berne’s quiet voice asked, “Do we scare you? The chronically ill? The disabled? The crazy…. Tonight, we are coming home.”
I couldn’t claim a disabled identity as a queer woman of color before Sins, even though I got sick in 1998. Read the rest of this entry »
An Intimate Interview with Sins Invalid Artist Ellery Russian
by Stacey Milbern
ELLERY RUSSIAN is an artist, writer, makeup artist, comic artist, and physical therapist living in Seattle, WA. Ellery is the author of the zine “Ring of Fire”, Co-Director of the documentary “Third Antenna: A Documentary About the Radical Nature of Drag”, and has performed across the country and internationally doing drag and integrated dance and reading poetry. As a long-time admirer of Sins Invalid, Ellery is honored to perform in this year’s show and would like to dedicate hir performance to the memory of Vic Chesnutt.
What do you identify as “the work” that you do? The work that Sins Invalid does?
I think Sins is doing groundbreaking work in terms of performance and also with disability justice and liberation. To me Sins Invalid does 3 really important things — curating the work of artists with disabilities (artists with disabilities often aren’t able to access most artistic communities to develop their work), building relationships, and doing work in leading the emerging disability justice movement.
Why is Sins Invalid important to you, personally?
I really appreciate that in Sins, the creative work is so centered in total embodiment of all aspects of self. You don’t have to sacrifice any parts of yourself, you’re totally embraced to bring it all, and that is so edgy that it totally adds to this component around the erotic.
I’ve made some of the most meaningful relationships through Sins and I’ve been able to bring a lot of fuel back to my home in Seattle. The disability experience is so lonely and isolating sometimes — even in activist communities. With Sins Invalid, it is different. Read the rest of this entry »
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