Sean Dorsey, artistic director of the Fresh Meat Festival. Photo credit: Lydia Daniller.

"Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. Hello, soon-to-be-ladies, soon-to-be-gentlemen."
—Shawna Virago at the Fresh Meat Festival

I'm not quite sure what I expected from the seventh annual Fresh Meat Festival. The event, which runs through June 22 at Project Artaud Theater (450 Florida St), is billed as a "transgender and queer performance festival," so I suspected I might be in for a long evening of shrill activism and bad art.

What I didn't expect was a boisterous, sometimes stunning collection of performance pieces. The breadth of offerings covers a range as broad as the range of sexual identities on stage. And one segment in particular—artistic director Sean Dorsey's dance piece "Lost/Found"—is absolutely worth the $15 admission fee.

That said, I highly recommend that you flee at intermission. The Fresh Meat Festival may offer some startlingly good stuff in its first 70 minutes, but the second half is close to unwatchable.

"The dressing rooms at the Fresh Meat Festival are a gender activist's fantasy."
—Scott Turner Schofield, "Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps"

The evening opens with an unspectacular aria from an "opera-in-development" by Carla Lucero. Then the Barbary Coast Cloggers liven things up with a down-home rendition of "Hollaback Girl," and Scott Turner Schofield follows with a witty stand-up routine in which he divulges that he "can't be gay and nude at the same time."

But the evening's best moment arrives when Sean Dorsey takes the stage. Dancing along with Brian Fisher, Dorsey tells the story of two diaries—one belonging to a little girl who yearns to be a boy, the other belonging to a little boy who yearns for George Michael—and the result is both cleverly staged and ridiculously moving. Dorsey is a fantastic storyteller, and he has the rare gift of creating modern dance that's as accessible as it is daring.

"I sort of thought that a Fresh Meat Festival would be raunchier."
—Overheard from a fellow audience member at intermission

As I've already mentioned, the second half of the show is far less engaging than the first. Singer/songwriter Shawna Virago plays a moderately entertaining set, followed by a Colombian troupe whose lack of invention makes for a very tedious and overlong dance piece. And the evening concludes with two songs from the Transcendence Gospel Choir, a group that suffers at the hands of an unenthusiastic audience. (They attempted to get us to sing along to some completely inscrutable lyrics—e.g. "We're all part of God's body / I need you to survive"—but the crowd remained silent and visibly unmoved. Awkward!)

My recommendation: buy a ticket and attend the first half of the show, because it's totally worth it. Then stroll over to Bar Bambino (2931 16th St) for a glass of wine and a plate of eggplant parm while the rest of the audience suffers through the second half. After all, sometimes it's good to have no idea what you're missing.