Contemporary artists like Pauline Boudry, Trajal Harrell, Sharon Hayes, Renate Lorenz, Allison Smith, and Wu Tsang engage expanded forms of re-enactment to destabilize the ways in which narratives of the past are narrowly constructed to privilege specific aspects of the present. Within the spectrum of queer performance, re-enactment has often been employed as a strategy for deconstructing histories of heteronormative oppression but it is also becoming a means for queer artists to critically engage with their own cultural mythologies and origin stories. Holly Hughes is joined by Cynthia Carr, Malik Gaines, Emily Roysdon, and Alexandro Segade as they take a closer look at this phenomenon to consider the past, present, and possible future of re-enactment in queer performance.

Holly Hughes is an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work maps the troubled fault lines of identity. Her combination of poetic imagery and political satire has earned her wide attention and placed her work at the center of America’s culture wars. Hughes was among the first students to attend the New York Feminist Art Institute, an experiment in progressive pedagogy launched by members of the Heresies Collective. In the early ’80s, Hughes became part of the Women’s One World Café, also known as theWOW Café, an arts cooperative in the East Village established by an international group of women artists. Hughes has performed at venues across North America, Great Britain, and Australia including the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center, the Guggenheim, the Yale Repertory, the Drill Hall in London, and numerous universities. She has published two books: Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler and O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, co-edited with Dr. David Roman, with two other anthologies in production,Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, co-edited with Una Chaudhuri, and Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years Of the WOW Cafe, co-edited with Carmelita Tropicana. Hughes is a professor at the University of Michigan, with appointments in Art and Design, Theatre and Drama, and Women’s Studies.

Presented in conjunction with “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.”

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