Lua Girino, Keijaun Thomas, and Christian Hansen Appel
Performance Studies M.A. Candidate David Sierra has curated a project, (space) 4 The Girls, in which Performance Studies Ph.D. Candidate Lua Girino is presenting work and performing.
(space) 4 The Girls provides three artists with free rehearsal space, a small stipend, an in-progress public showing, the opportunity to create amongst other trans women & femmes, and free professional video documentation for future use in grant, residency, and fellowship applications.
The program aims to be part of a larger movement to uplift the work of trans girls across a variety of personal herstories and sociopolitical contexts while addressing the fact that, currently, trans women & femmes as a whole are frighteningly absent as lead artists and makers within many of New York’s performance & performing art communities —even in queer, trans, and non-binary spaces within those communities.
Simultaneously the program hopes to create a space that alleviates participants from the burdens of representation in the often depleting and tokenizing discourse of current American identity politics and to enable them to imagine and create the ways they want to relate to themselves, one another, and their audiences.
This program is dedicated to the immense labor, patience, education, compromise, and erasure that come from having to be ‘the first’ and ‘the only’ in any space while attempting to collapse that model of “inclusion.”
The 2019/2020 (space) 4 The Girls participants are:
Lua Girino
Keijaun Thomas
Christian Hansen Appel