Presented by The Theater Offensive
In partnership with Double Edge Theatre and Think Outside the Vox
June 26-29, 2025
Arrow Street Arts
2 Arrow Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Critique by Kitty Drexel
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The Theater Offensive’s inaugural Queer [Re]Public Festival was a glorious presentation of queer, trans and BIPOC joy. At which, artists Victoria Lynn Awkward, Annalise “River” Guidry, and Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones convened and performed the fruits of their 22-month-long Emergent Artist and True Colors Residencies. By doing so, the residents transformed Arrow Street Arts into a community space where artists offered art to their audience, we received it and offered it back again.
I was fortunate to attend Awkward’s dance composition In The Space Between in the main theater and a reading of Wyzzard-Jones’ The Messenger in the studio. My reactions to those works are below. I was unable to see Guidry’s Theater of Union or attend The Audacity of Being Yourself conversation with Durand Bernarr, Victoria Awkward and Diovanna Frazier. It is my sincere hope for the artists involved that they received everything they wanted and needed from their work.
In the Space Between
Choreographed by Victoria L. Awkward
Directed by Ian Andrew Askew
Music direction and voice coaching by Desiré Graham
Score Composition by Eden Girma
Featuring: Dava Huesca, Desiré Graham, Diovanna Obafunmilayo, Dominica Greene, Justin Daniels, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Sasha Peterson, Victoria Lynn Awkward
Choreographer Victoria Lynn Awkward describes her dance masterwork In The Space Between as “a river towards care and liberation.” It includes expansive movement, breathe work, and tactile fabric textures carving guide space and transcing into joy, beauty, and pleasure, wading through the rifts and tangles. Awkward continues, her “choreography conjures new and ancient rituals of flight, weaving, and enacting love in community.” She invites audiences to “stretch into the erotic as defined by Audre Lorde, a necessity for the realization of liberation in an often-vicious world.”
From the audience, this work looks like Alvin Ailey meets Martha Graham. Masc, femme and nonbinary bodies weave, gyrate and twerk through an angelic landscape of hanging, white aerial silks within a frame of gauzy clouds. Dancers leap onto the silks, lunge across space through them, and swing on them like children on a playground. In The Space Between contains joyful community dance and severe modern and contemporary dance figures. The silks looked fun and precarious.
The dancers moved with certainty and confidence; their thigh muscles popped; the strength in their arms strained as if the dancers were lifting the room up. Maybe they were. As noted in the credits by Awkward and Music Director Desiré Graham tell us, In The Space Between is a departure from Western classical dance practice and performance. Awkward cites her Ancestors and texts by Audre Lorde and Alice Walker as sources for this piece’s artistry. Graham explains how the dancers’ breathe and breathing led the cast to their singing practice in thie piece. By lifting each other up (literally and metaphorically, as the dancers used their physical bodies to suspend their castmates into the air and gently deposit them back down to the ground), it felt like these dancers were lifting up the generations of artists who came before and those who will come after.
I admit that dance is not my bailiwick – I entered theatre criticism through musical theatre and improv. I have a lot to learn, but I can appreciate the poetry, dexterity and significant skill these dancers developed to make the movements of In The Space Between look effortless. In their efforts, each performer left a part of themselves on the stage. Towards the end of the work, dancer Justin Daniels is twisted in the aerial silks. His body is center stage; his arms are lifted high above him, wrapped in white. When he twists one way, he is a Christ figure on the Cross. When he twists another, he is dangling from a trap. Just before he wrangles free, he is a bird with outstretched wings, beating the wind and flying far, far away from earthly cares. If only we could all be so lucky.
The Messenger: A Play
Playwright & Composer: Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones
Directed by Pascale Florestal
Dramaturgy by Devika Ranjan and Shawn Rene Graham
Score composition/ Gyil: Steph Davis
Flute: Díjí Kay
Piano: Jeremiah Cossa
Altar builder: Nia Holley
Featuring: Latrell “Lala” Novali, Kayla Sessoms, Rémani Lizana, Kandyce Whittingham, Kai Clifton, Karimah Lizana, Kim Pevia
It is general New England Theatre Geek policy not to critique staged readings of works. Wyzzard-Jones’ The Messenger: A play with music is unfinished and deserves the space and breathe it needs to develop. In the interest of providing light constructive feedback, I offer these notes.
The Messenger, a coming of age story about a young spiritual leader Zanayah (Sessoms) who will be the next spiritual leader of her nation, The In-Between, reminds me of the works of Octavia E. Butler: The Parable of the Sower and Dawn of the Xenogenesis series. Butler had a nack of explaining her characters’ complex spiritualities and ideologies with simplified language so anyone could understand it. The In-Between sounds like it is an important, unspoken character, not only the play’s setting. Knowing this, the audience knows very little about The In-Between by the time the play ends. We want to know how the characters’ interact with each other in their nation and how their relationship to/withThe In-Between guides those interactions. We know who lives there and why. We learn how that came to be, but we don’t know what the differences are from our current reality and how this realm was manifested.
Wyzzard-Jones writes dialogue the way people talk. She captures the colloquial conversations of folk in a way that is comparable to Zora Neale Hurston. But, unlike Hurston, Wyzzard-Jones leans into telling us stories rather than showing us character interaction. As written, The Messenger would make an interesting radio play. The audience needs to see more. If there were stage directions the audience didn’t hear, please let us hear them.
The cast gave a delightful performance with Florestal at the helm. It was hotter than the Cambridge mid-week sidewalk in the Arrow Street Arts studio theatre during this reading, and we stayed awake through the performance despite the heat. If keeping the AC off during readings is going to be a regular practice for Arrow Street Arts, the building managers should invest in cheap bamboo hand fans to distribute and collect with the programs.
Nia Holley built spiritually significant, artistically expansive altars in the studio performance space for The Messenger and the lobby of Arrow Street Arts. These altars contain photos, art, cut tree branches, and plants propagating roots in clear, glass vases. They are transcendent metaphors for how art functions within society and for the space marginalized folx carve out of society as their own. The altars look how righteous community feels and what righteous community means. I know they are specifically for the festival, but I wish they’d stay intact through the next production cycles. Seeing divine visual art in a public forum calmed the sadness in my soul.
Accompanying the lobby altars, the Queer [Re]Public festival also provided glossy program booklet of credits, notes from the festival staff and artists and other dramaturgy. It is chock full of startlingly beautiful production and rehearsal photos by Hakeem Adewumi, Tavon Taylor, Victor Figueroa and Travis Coe and artist headshots. In rich greens, blues, and reds, the colorful booklet’s heavy paper ensures it will last a long time. It is not just a playbill; it is a festival memento: despite the putrescent turbulence careening through politics to fuck up our artistic ecosystem one grant at a time, this festival grew deep community roots. It will not die, but it may transform.
The Queer [Re]Public Festival could potentially extend TTO’s good works with children to the adult population. Thereby completing a circle of good work and good trouble for all ages. When they say great art comes out of bad politics, this is what they mean. If you missed TTO’s Queer [Re]Public festival, please donate HERE to assist in the next one. Action is the best way to remind your future self to stay active. You’ll be helping children and artists make the art they wish to see in the world.
UPDATE: A previous version of this article did not include the full cast list of The Messenger. It now includes cast members Karimah Lizana and Kim Pevia.
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