Identity as Prism & Genderful Family-building: The World of Blood Baby
KST Presents
Artist Talk with Meg Foley in Conversation with Michèle Steinwald
Thursday, March 11 | 6:00pm
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KST Presents welcomes Meg Foley as an Artist in Residence for her forthcoming iterative performance work Blood Baby. Exploring queer motherhood and parenthood, gender performance, queer sexuality and belonging, Blood Baby manifests as a site-responsive dance installation, experiential sculpture, collective readings, somatic workshops, and queer-artist parent community convenings. This unpacking of queer family experience is woven together by an original queer creation story, written in collaboration with Sylvan Oswald.
For this Artist Talk, Foley will be joined by Blood Baby dramaturg Michèle Steinwald for a conversation around the origins of the project and the context in which it is being created. Beginning from Meg’s experience as a queer mom in a trans family, Meg and Michèle will unpack how magmatic rocks might be relatives to queer family-building, why a performance quadriptych rather than one, and how the inquiry of Blood Baby extends from community and the day-to-day of parenting.
Meg Foley is a Philadelphia-based performer, choreographer, and director of various dance- and performance-based actions that explore the materiality of dance and physical identity as form. For the past nine years Foley has been researching improvisational practices and embodiment frames that engage with meaning-making through practiced attention, danced affirmation, expansion, and relationality and a concern for the action of decision and engagement as form. Foley’s work has been presented by the Philadelphia FringeArts Festival, Vox Populi Gallery, Moore College of Art & Design, Pilot+Projects, Bowerbird, Thirdbird, and Icebox Project Space, throughout the U.S., and in Canada, Germany, and Poland. Foley’s research has been supported by grants from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the Independence Foundation, and the Polish Cultural Institute and through residencies with Art Stations Foundation and Dancemakers Centre for Creation. Foley sometimes teaches at University of the Arts and is creative co-director of The Whole Shebang, an interdisciplinary arts space and studio in South Philadelphia that hosts workshops and classes and provides studio rental to artists at affordable rates.
Marked by four major influences (seeing Belgian dance company Rosas at age 14, producing a post-punk show at age 15, studying with choreographer Deborah Hay at age 21, and watching for decades the American TV series Law & Order), Michèle Steinwald is a queer, Canadian, feminist, DIY, artist-centered, pseudo-forensic, embodied, community-driven, cultural organizer based in Minneapolis.