FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Meg Foley Comes to KST with Blood Baby, a Week of Events Centering Radical Gender Expression, Queer Kinship, and Belonging
EAST LIBERTY, PA — The KST Presents Fall 2023 season, Brave Actions Bold Voices, kicks off with Blood Baby, a body of work by interdisciplinary artist Meg Foley. The week-long program begins on September 18 with a Welcome Dinner & Artist Talk celebrating the opening of Eternal Maternal, a visual art exhibition curated by DS Kinsel featuring Foley and Fran Flaherty. Then, on September 20, Foley and KST mutual-aid resident PearlArts co-present The Embodied Imaginary, an improvisational dance workshop. Later that evening, Foley leads a Queer Parent Convening, a free dinner where queer and trans parents can connect and share their experiences. The week comes to a crescendo on Friday and Saturday, September 22-23 when Foley presents Blood Baby: Communion, an evening-length performance piece celebrating queer kinship, radical gender performance, and belonging.
“For the past 20 years I have made performance projects with radical self-determination as subject, crafting body-based explorations of identity, belonging, and time from a queer perspective. In a loving tumble with formalism in dance and what constitutes performance and influenced by my identity as a queer mom in a trans family, I work on a continuum of research that centers the 24hr body and asks how identity is occupied: an all-the-time, ever-shifting self, a sacred site, a portal, a prism.” — Meg Foley
Eternal Maternal, a visual art exhibition in KST’s historic lobby, puts Foley’s creative practice in conversation with the work of Fran Flaherty, an artist, curator, and educator who centers issues of migrant family relationships, maternal feminism, and disability aesthetics (Flaherty happens to be Deaf). Flaherty is the founder of Anthropology of Motherhood, a project inspired by the care paradigm — the premise that human beings cannot survive alone, and that the progress of human beings as a species flows from our ability to connect to each other. In works from the Alchemy series, Flaherty scanned unusable breast milk with a flatbed scanner. The resulting silk-mounted images and 3D printed objects evoke bodily topography, subterranean organs, and pressed flowers. Foley’s contribution to the exhibition is the collaborative Blood Baby: Primordial, an otherworldly, sensual video and sound installation by visual artist (and Foley’s co-parent) Carmichael Jones. Primordial’s “rock drag” captures Foley dancing with the landscape, connecting geology, transformation, and queer gestation. The opening will take place with a reception and artist talk with ASL interpretation at Kelly Strayhorn Theater on Monday, September 18 at 6:00pm.
On Wednesday, September 20 at 9:00am, Foley asks participants of The Embodied Imaginary, an improvisational dance-making workshop: What does it feel like to be a rock? The hour-long exploration invites members to reframe their relationships to movement, inhabit the moment where feeling meets form, and use textiles as body-building tools. The workshop is co-presented with KST mutual-aid resident PearlArts and will take place at KST’s Alloy Studios in Friendship. That same evening, Foley hosts a gathering for queer and trans parents to share their experiences of family-building in an intimate home setting, complete with dinner and childcare.
Finally, KST presents Megan Foley’s Blood Baby: Communion on Friday and Saturday, September 22 – 23. The piece is participatory and audiences will experience the work in the round and in close dialogue with Foley. Exploring the relationship between body and language, the event involves shared reading, facilitated embodiment, and conversation between Foley and the audience. Overlapping geology, gestation, and parenting, Communion explores the shape and feeling of language on and against our bodies, demonstrating how language extends, represents, and ruptures our corporeal identities. Friday night will also feature a post-performance discussion with ASL interpretation.
Blood Baby is supported by a National Dance Project Award from New England Foundation for the Arts and National Performance Network Creation Fund and Development Fund grants, with additional support provided by Leeway Foundation, Indiana University-Bloomington Arts & Humanities Council, a mini-Roser grant, and a USC Visions & Voices grant.
Additional research support provided by ATLAS Institute B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance (CU Boulder), Redline Gallery, Kinsey Institute, Velocity Dance Center, ONE Archives at USC, National Center for Choreography Akron, SPACE Gallery, and CounterPulse.
Download the .pdf HERE.
LOCAL & GLOBAL PERFORMANCE | COMMUNITY
Welcome Dinner & Artist Talk
with Fran Flaherty & Meg Foley
Monday, September 18*
6:00pm
*with ASL interpretation
Kelly Strayhorn Theater | 5941 Penn Ave.
Pay What Moves You: $0 – $25
BOOM GALLERY | VISUAL ART
Eternal Maternal
Fran Flaherty & Meg Foley
Monday, September 18 – Sunday, December 17, 2023
Opening Reception: Monday, September 18, 6:00pm
Kelly Strayhorn Theater | 5941 Penn Ave.
Pay What Moves You: $0 – $25
LOCAL & GLOBAL PERFORMANCE | WORKSHOP
The Embodied Imaginary
with Meg Foley
Co-Presented with PearlArts
Wednesday, September 20
9:00am – 10:15am
KST’s Alloy Studios | 5530 Penn Ave.
Pay What Moves You: $10 – $25
LOCAL & GLOBAL PERFORMANCE | COMMUNITY
Queer Parent Convening
with Meg Foley
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
7:00pm
RSVP for Location
Pay What Moves You: $0 – $25
LOCAL & GLOBAL PERFORMANCE | DANCE
Meg Foley
Blood Baby: Communion
Friday & Saturday, September 22* – 23, 2023
7:30pm
*Post performance discussion with ASL interpretation
Kelly Strayhorn Theater | 5941 Penn Ave.
Pay What Moves You: $15 – $35