Performing Que(e)ries Series Part 4: Holly Hughes and Jill Dolan

ON QUEER INSTITUTIONALIZATION

Lauded queer performance artist Holly Hughes joins theatre scholar Jill Dolan to discuss the genealogy of her politics and aesthetics as a queer artist in New York, informed by her experiences at venues like the WOW Café, to the development of her pedagogy as a professor at the University of Michigan. Many artists like Hughes have transitioned into the university in order to sustain their work as queer performers. How is the lived experience of collective queer artistic communities transferred to the institutional atmosphere and how does queerness translate into pedagogy and remain transgressive? How do we deal with the taboo of a faculty member as a sexual creature? Can queerness be translated through teaching and/or training in a way that students can experience queerness outside of the community for which it was intended? What is it mean to teach LGBT history by asking your students to embody lesbians and lesbian desire? An excerpt from The Well of Horniness will be performed by Hughes’ current and former students in addition to the talk.

The event will take place in the Segal Theatre at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Please RSVP to rsvp@clags.org.

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Holly Hughes is a renowned writer and performance artist. Hughes began her career in New York City’s club scene on the Lower East Side and considered the WOW Café her home base. Currently, she now holds the position of Professor at the University of Michigan, with appointments in Art and Design, Theatre and Drama and Women’s Studies and is Director of the new BFA program in Interarts Performance. Hughes’s performance work includes plays such as The Well of Horniness, Dress Suits to Hire, Let Them Eat Cake and solos such as World Without End, Clit Notes, Preaching to the Perverted, and The Dog and Pony Show (Bring your own Pony). Five of her plays are included in Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler, published by Grove Press. She is also co-editor with David Roman of O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, which received a Lambda Book award. She is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, and is currently co-editing two anthologies, Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, with Una Chaudhuri and Memories of the Revolution with Carmelita Tropicana, both for the University of Michigan Press.

Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor in English, Professor of English and Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She began teaching at Princeton in 2008, arriving from the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and headed the Department of Theatre and Dance’s MA/PhD program in performance as a public practice from 1999-2008. She was inducted into UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers in Fall 2006, after winning a College of Fine Arts teaching award earlier in her UT career. During her six years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from 1988-1994, Prof. Dolan won the William Kiekhofer Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2009, she was inaugurated into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. For more information about Dolan, visit her awarded website The Feminist Spectator.

Erin Markey is a Brooklyn-based writer/performer. She recently starred in the NYC premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes at the Hudson Hotel. She is a series regular on LOGO’s Jeffery and Cole Casserole TV show. Her solo musical, Puppy Love: A Stripper’s Tail played and extended at PS 122. She is a company member of Half Straddle and her work in FAMILY was heralded as “the scariest performance of the year” in 2009 by Time Out New York. As a playwright, she was invited to the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and is currently developing her newest work, The Dardy Family Home Movies by Stephen Sondheim by Erin Markey, which premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Kinotek Series in the Fall of 2011. As a cabaret and performance artist, she regularly presents work at Our Hit Parade with Kenny Mellman, Bridget Everett and Neal Medlyn at The Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub.

Joseph Keckler is a singer, writer, and performer. His shows have recently been seen at The New Museum, BAM Fischer Center, SXSW Music, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, Afterglow Festival, Cameo Gallery, La MaMa ETC, PS 122, The Stone, Theatre Bellevue in Amsterdam, Abrons Art Center and various other music venues, galleries, theaters, and museums across the country and abroad. He has been awarded residencies at MacDowell Artist Colony and Yaddo Artist Colony and has received a 2012 NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work as well as a grant from the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art. Joseph is currently under commission by Dixon Place. He is in the process of creating on a new performance piece, videos, recordings, and a collection of stories.