Live Event Passed
You can watch the MELTED RIOT: CHROMATIC performative meditation by click the video above!
The week-long Melted Riot digital residency will culminate with an hour-long performance featuring past, present and future Gender Tender collaborators and YOU, in an engaged meditation experiment on Zoom.
During this hour-long event, a kaleidoscope of Gender Tender collaborators will respond to structured meditative prompts from Fox Whitney. And for those that signed up to participate through Zoom as an audience member, your video and audio will not be on, but you will have the opportunity to participate in this experience by messaging the artists through the chat feature during this event. If you did not sign up to participate, you can still watch the live performance on YouTube!
This event is intended to hold space for queer and transgender people, our lovers, our friends, our families chosen or otherwise, and our advocates and allies to softly question the commodification of Pride. To safely grieve and express rage and sorrow over so many lost to violence, to rest and recharge our spirits, and celebrate our loved ones that are still here.
Pride weekend is the most well known LGBTQ+ holiday and was originally intended to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969 as a pivotal moment in the fight for civil liberties for QTBIPOC. Fox and Gender Tender collaborators believe this weekend was, and still is, a reason to REST and RIOT towards creating the queer future we want and need.
“I continue to grapple with my own history with abuses of power and the exacerbated state of oppression for queer, transgender, black, brown, indigenous and or mixed people during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter revolution. In creatively investigating and embodying the wide rainbow like spectrum of possibilities in the ideas of rest and rebellion, support and sabotage I wonder if we can transform landscapes full of terror, detachment and confusion into possibilities for connection, freedom and love.” - Fox Whitney, Artist-in-Residence
chro·mat·ic
/krōˈmadik/
adjective
1.MUSIC
relating to or using notes not belonging to the diatonic scale of the key in which a passage is written.
(of a scale) ascending or descending by semitones.
(of an instrument) able to play all the notes of the chromatic scale.
"the master of the chromatic harmonica"
2. relating to or produced by color.
MELTED RIOT
A Digital Residency with Fox Whitney | Gender Tender
June 21 - 27 on On the Boards' Instagram Live, 7pm PDT
RSVP
"When everything seems destined to keep us apart, I believe we must find new ways to be together, especially when isolation threatens to defeat our spirits." - Fox Whitney, Artist-in-Residence
Join On the Boards Artist-in-Residence Fox Whitney | Gender Tender in research based on the colors of the rainbow Pride flag: ROYGBIV. This digital residency arose from conversations about what it means to be an Artist-in-Residence with an arts organization whose building is closed because of a global pandemic.
“We began gathering on Zoom with all the Artists-in-Residence talking about what they needed, how we could provide support to their artistic practice during this pandemic, and listening to what they were feeling and going through at this moment.” - Rachel Cook, Artistic Director
This week-long digital residency will be a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer. MELTED RIOT uses tactics rooted in dance, durational performance and visual art to investigate the effects that peaceful and violent forms of protest have had on the bodies, minds and spirits of the transgender and queer community.
MELTED RIOT softens the word riot (a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd) and replaces the word VIOLENT with: somatic, satirical, surreal, and psychedelic. Fox’s work will feature an isolated crowd of socially distant voices, bodies and sculptural interventions coming together to reflect on the past, the unstable present and the opaque future.
Viewers at home will be saturated in Fox’s rebellious version of tableau vivant practices (recreating artworks with living people) that move beyond classical painting into photography, video and installation. Drawing from photographs taken during the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and images from other queer protest actions, the anonymous past will be abstractly re-enacted using psychedelic visuals, movement research and vocal performance.
Miss the live meditations on our Instagram? Check back here to watch them!
Here is how you can stay involved:
· Sign up here to receive a daily meditation practice from Fox Whitney
· Watch Fox Whitney and participating artists on On the Boards Instagram Live June 21-27 at 7pm PDT
· Connect with Fox | Gender Tender on their Instagram Live on June 25 at 5pm PDT and June 28 at 1pm PDT for a chance to connect during the residency
· Sign up here to participate in the hour-long performative meditation, Melted Riot: Chromatic on June 28 at 7pm PDT
· Check out the Gender Tender website to learn more about Fox Whitney and his other work
Some questions Fox and his collaborators are researching/exploring during this digital residency:
· What can we do in the midst of a crisis when we can’t hold each other’s hands?
· How can we stay connected during a global pandemic that is taking a toll similar to the HIV/AIDS crisis at its onset?
· How do we grapple with a murky and violent past?
· How can we make space for a myriad of possibilities? For optimism?
· How can we transition, transform, survive?
