Revolutionary Love
Dialog:City in partnership with Creative Time will premier Sharon Hayes's public speech performance Revolutionary Love: I Am Your Worst Enemy, I Am Your Best Fantasy along the 16th Street Mall. Revolutionary Love is a genderless love letter written for the Democratic National Convention.
Seventy-five performers will join together as a collective identity, to speak the Revolutionary Love text. While the text is not overtly gay, Hayes specifically casts performers who embody queer identity. Hayes defines queer as "A self identified affiliation with non-normative sexuality".
Revolutionary Love expresses both love and desire, as it addresses both the political and the sexual. Believing that our personal lives cannot be separate from our political lives, Hayes examines the way in which love exists in opposition of and a solution to war. Hayes's work approach often implements artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics and journalism. In Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20, & 29 Hayes performed a re-speaking of each of the four audio tapes made by Patty Hearst and the SLA during the kidnapping of Hearst in 1974.
Hayes partially memorized the transcript of the tapes, and then gave copies of the transcripts to audience members, who would correct her and feed her lines when needed. The Symbionese Liberation Army like Revolutionary Love, investigates language and the many levels of address found in each text as well as audience.
Hayes received her B.A. in sociology/anthropology from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; and her M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited at Art-in-General, New York, NY; The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland; Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, New York, NY; La Rebeca, Bogata, Columbia. Hayes received the MacDowell Colony Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1999) and is currently a faculty member at Cooper Union in the School of Art.
Comments
This particular GLBT performance art installation is an important piece of Dialog:City and is significant for Colorado's GLBT community, since it is supported by the Convention Host Committee and the city of Denver in association with the DNC. I know Hayes needs more volunteers, and I hope that people will contact her through the Web site listed. Also, I hope people will come out to see it. It is by, for, and about us--Colorado's GLBT and queer community, and it is a fantastic statement to be making at the DNC.
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