OPEN SEAS: Worklights 
6:30pm-7:30pm 

Worklights brings you four exciting new pieces by local playwrights. Featuring work by Brooke Shilling, AZ Espinoza, Tyler Rocio Econa, and L M Feldman. Come get a 10 minute taste of what these artists are working on, that will leave you wanting more!

Brooke Shilling will present Pirate Queens.
In this relatively true story, we follow the 18th-century tale of Mary Read, a woman dressed as a boy since childhood. The day she is captured by pirates, she meets Anne Bonny. The two share a unique, piratey love story until their end. Today, you’ll hear the beginning of the play.

AZ Espinoza will present Caribbean King.
Caribbean King is an equatorial, decolonial play in adaptive conversation with Shakespeare’s King Lear in which transmasculine Cord(elia) must coexist with his aging hotelier titan of a father on a Caribbean island that is about to face a hurricane of catastrophic proportions. A love letter to found family and queer community building, the play is structured to center Queer Black Diasporic excellence, including a chorus of drag performers who play the role of the hurricane itself.

Tyler Ecoña will present DEVOTEEBAG.
DEVOTEEBAG by Tyler Rocio Ecoña: Dumped by her longtime partner and caregiver, desperate for excitement, and recently blind-dating randos from Lex, part-time babysitter/solo cam worker Camila navigates life and love as a disabled queer woman in Philadelphia.

CRASH: Vile
8pm-9pm  

Are you sad? Me too, bestie. Let’s stuff our faces with girl dinner (patriarchal pepperoni pizza pie) and order some face masks for self care (from Amazon because we need them TOMORROW) and watch some tv (that we’ve seen before) while we scroll tiktok (to judge a stranger’s Target haul) all to make sure that we absolutely DO NOT have a feeling (or a memory, or a critical thought.)

In Vile, Francesca Montanile Lyons brings you a solo performance that rides the line between pleasure and disgust, where clown and buffon hold a funhouse mirror to the artist’s self. Here, the laughter is tinged with nausea, and the nausea is tinged with relief. Ingredients include: the decay of late stage capitalism, a skewering of rape culture, the hilarity of depression, plus greasy toes, a balloon penis, extra cheese, and a side of bdsm.

Content Considerations: consent violation, rape/rape culture, kink, depression, suicidal ideation. You can request more information about how these show up by contacting the artist: www.francescamontanilelyons.com/contact

Scenic Designer & Collaborator: Alicia Crosby
Sound Designer: Tom Carman

Francesca Montanile Lyons (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Philadelphia: a performer, director, visual artist, and educator. She conceived of, wrote, and directed ‘Dear Diary LOL’- a play made with the words of real-life diaries of teenage girls in the late 90s/early 2000s- which premiered in the 2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, followed by a run at FringeArts and the New Ohio in NYC in 2018 to rave reviews (“…we absolutely need more theater like this.” – Exuent NYC 2019). She was a member of ‘Girl Poop’ (2018-2021), a “delightfully weird” femme foursome specializing in Pussy Pop Rock: short, high-octane ditties inspired by first-person experience set to simple and catchy beats. She also makes cheeky visual art that is often literally cheeky: drawings, embroideries, and animations that celebrate sensuality and eroticism. Across mediums, her work seeks to disempower shame and taboo through playful honesty & voyeuristic delight. Other credits include co-creating/directing ‘Rough & Tumble’ (Canonball Fest in PHL Fringe), ‘Legal Tender’ (PHL Fringe & AntFest), ‘Fourth Quarter’ (FPA Fest), co-creating/performing ‘The Hopefuls’ (2015-2106), and directing ‘All 100 Fires’ by Donna Oblongata (Panorama), ‘Die, Dumping, Die!’ (MuralArts/D3), and ‘Sometimes the Rain, Sometimes the Sea’ (Arts Bank). She has served as Co-Artistic Director of Antigravity Performance Project. Francesca’s teaching artistry has ranged from dramatic story times for infants and their caregivers to adjunct teaching at Temple University & UArts, with plenty in between: visiting school classrooms for theater curriculum with various organizations, bilingual arts and literacy classes with the Barnes Foundation/Puentes a las Artes, and sexuality education with Yes to Consent/Puentes de Salud. MFA in Devised Performance from UArts/Pig Iron School (2016). BA in Theatre Arts & Performance Studies from Brown U (2011).

Late Night Cabaret: HOMOS! A Solo Disaster Musical, Bitch
9:30pm-10:30pm 

Local Queer Dan Kitrosser wrote a queer post-apocalyptic musical but has always hated scheduling actors. So now, just like the chronic masturbator, he’s going to do it himself! In the 2023 Fringie Award winning solo show HOMOS! A SOLO DISASTER MUSICAL, BITCH, Dan will play all the roles and sing all songs about the end of times. But as Dan pieces his ‘end of day’s show together, song by song, reconstructing a deconstruction of disaster stories in this meta-cabaret, Dan’s ridiculous hilarious queer asks show asks if we’re at the end, might we also be at a brand  new beginning?

Dan Kitrosser is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and storyteller. He cowrote the screenplay for WE THE ANIMALS which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2018, winning the NEXT: Innovator Award, Best Narrative at OutFest 2018 and is nominated for 5 Independent Spirit Awards and a GLAAD Award. His plays include TAR BABY, DEAD SPECIAL CRABS (monologues published in Smith & Kraus Best Men’s and Women’s) and THE MUMBLINGS (optioned for TV series by FOX) and you can hear Dan as the host of the acclaimed iHeartRadio podcast SVETLANA! SVETLANA!, a ten-episode podcast about Dan’s obsessions with Josef Stalin’s daughter. Dan is the 2018 Peter Shaffer Award Winner, a 2016 TimeWarner 150 Fellow, a 2014 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow, a 2014 Harold and Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Fellow, a 2015 TerraNOVA Collective Groundbreaker, a Maryland Filmmakers Fellow and for his writing of TAR BABY, Dan received the Fringe First Award for Playwriting at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and a Special Citation from Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Awards. Dan just received the coveted Fringie Award at the 2023 Philadelphia Fringe Festival for his show HOMOS! A Solo Disaster Musical, bitch. Dan is the Artistic Director of Writopia Lab’s Worldwide Plays Festival, a festival of plays written by young playwrights from all over the world, now in its 15th year. He received his MFA from The New School for Drama and serves as an adjunct professor at Temple University. He lives in South Philadelphia with his fabulous husband Jordan and his narcissistic dog, Gemma.

In the Bar

Created by Jeff Evans, Idle Hands is a series of interactive exhibits that offer you an alternative engagement for social spaces. If you’re tired of talking to people, but don’t want to go home just yet, come put your hands to idle ends.

Videos by Nia Benjamin.
Nia Benjamin is an agender, queer, Afro-Carribean multidisciplinary artist, performer, filmmaker, set/projection designer, video-synth artist and director of experimental theatre. Their work uses the synthesis of dance, poetry, live music, theatre and video arts to create live performances about the sovereignty, liberation and interiority of Black and Brown, queer and trans* people. Nia is the Co-Artistic Director of Ninth Planet, a Philadelphia based experimental theatre company that makes original works of performance that

centers people of color, women, queer and trans* people. Their most recent full-length work, high noon was the winner of a 2022 Fringies Award.

6pm – 7pm
OPEN SEAS: THE TROUGH

Introducing THE TROUGH, a lavish and captivating encounter where gluttony takes center stage. It’s not your mama’s dinner party; it’s an exclusive invitation to sit at The Table, indulge your senses, question what you’re consuming and, perhaps more importantly, what you’re not. The plate is your canvas; will you leave the scraps, or lap it clean?

THE TROUGH offers a unique experience for up to two people at a time. From 6-7PM, dive into this provocative exploration of appetite and excess. It’s a moment to savor, a chance to confront the complexities of our consumption habits, and an opportunity to venture into uncharted territories of taste, desire, and outrospection. The feast begins at THE TROUGH: come hungry, stay until you’re stuffed

8pm – 9pm
CRASH: Eat Me Baladi: Leila Delicious & Mette Loulou von Kohl 

An evening of two artistic explorations that investigate the intersections between sexuality, sensuality, and Palestinian identity through the body, movement/dance and food.

Leila Delicious & Mette Loulou von Kohl will share their works in conversation to probe the spaces of dissonance and familiarity between their individual experiences in relating to their bodies as Palestinians.

LEILA DELICIOUS (she/her) is a Palestinian Jordanian performance and burlesque artist whose work forces space for the fragmented identities of Palestinian and levant Arab youth. Focusing on the embodied experiences of displacement, occupation, and incarceration, and how these experiences are inherited through the body, Leila’s solo and community based works invites the audience to witness and fall into various states of kinesthetic empathy.

METTE LOULOU (she/her) was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. She is a queer femme, of Lebanese/Palestinian and Danish ancestry. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco, Denmark and England. Mette Loulou is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. She grapples with her past to complicate and better understand her present. Mette Loulou weaves movement, words, and objects into the exploration of her embodied histories. She exists in two places at once. 

9:30pm – 10:30pm
AFTER HOURS CABARET: Recipes for Genocide 

Can’t stand the heat, but you’re locked in the kitchen? Reaching your boiling point? Having trouble keeping your temper at a simmer? Well lucky for you, your hosts LunchLady (Cannonball Producer, Colby Calhoun) & TheChef (Cannonball Co-Founder, Mae West) are here to share their tips for easy-bake anarchy, ready-to-eat revolution, and resistance to-go — to make sure you can still feed you and yours back home after the night is over. Your hosts have curated a world-class tasting menu of performers, which will be revealed leading up to the evening.

During this variety show cabaret, artists will offer multidisciplinary responses to South Africa’s recent proceedings in the International Court of Justice — in solidarity with our local and global communities experiencing the brutality of apartheid and genocide in Gaza, in all of Palestine, and beyond.

Featuring performances by Nicole Bindler, Mikah Baumrin-Daniels, Ella-Gabriel Mason, and Vanessa Rosensweet. 

Nicole Bindler (she/her) is a dance-maker, Body-Mind Centering® practitioner, writer, and activist. Her work has been presented on four continents. Diyar brings to life Palestine’s rich history and culture through dance, movement and theatre. These practices are important outlets for creative cultural resistance against oppression.

Mikah Baumrin-Daniels (they/she) is a Jewish Egyptian-American interdisciplinary artist who grew up in New York City and currently lives in Philadelphia. With a focus in dance and performance, Mikah explores the feeling of “home” within the queer & femme experiences of these mixed diasporas.

Ella-Gabriel Mason (they/them) wants to understand who we are, how we got here, and how we’re all thinking and feeling about that. An artmaker, mover, educator and bodyworker, they combine rigorous academic research with lived experience, words with dance, brain with body, living in the tension between ways of knowing and methods of being.

Vanessa Rosensweet (she/her) is a black biracial Jew and a proud New Jersey native. She is a poet, dancer, kindergarten teacher and aspiring midwife. Her favorite food is chocolate cake and her favorite person is her grandma.

OPEN SEAS 6:00pm – 7:00pm

“Valerie” by Kayliani Sood

When I listen to Amy Winehouse, I hear my mother’s story and mine sounding simultaneously. I hear sunlight, the compact heat inside a car before the air kicks on. I hear diet coke in a 32oz cup, the texture and click of a seatbelt, an engine’s steady hum, and miles and miles of curving, bright road.

I hear a little body’s window into her mother’s life, a view from the backseat.

“Valerie” is a way to move closer to my mother within myself. I am my mother; I am not. Truth is a detail, neither here nor there. The edges of my body are as relevant as they are convenient.

“Voicemail Poems” with Warren C. Longmire and Alison Lubar

Voicemail Poems, a Philadelphia-based literary magazine, presents readings by Warren C. Longmire and Alison Lubar.

CRASH 8:00pm – 9:00pm

“xxJAMxx” by Angel Shanel Edwards, Jonathan González, and Marguerite Angelica Monique Hemmings

xxJAMxx is a performance score in four parts. The score is the collaborative dreaming of angel, jonathan, and marguerite written in 2021. xxJAMxx was/is meant to antagonize, sift, distribute, make something else of our personal practices and values… all the while colliding into one another, improvisationally. xxJAMxx finds ways of moving, sounding, being, that attends to the task of performing and being Black.

angel, jonathan, and marguerite move through a live and emergent manifesto, created in response to Ishmael Houston Jones’ and Fred Holland’s “Wrong” Contact Manifesto (1983). When performing this manifesto, we allow ourselves to feel the ‘wrongness’ imbued onto and through our bodies in relation to the constellations of performing arts and expressions of black life.

AFTER HOURS CABARET 9:30pm – 10:30pm

“It Had To Be Us – An Aunties Rose and Rosa Birthday Bash Romporee” by Rose Luardo and Marisol Soledad

Hold up – wait a minute … Your rude, racy and ribald Aunties are throwing a party for THEMSELVES and the entire tri-state is invited! Aunties Rose and Rosa have been your biggest cheerleaders and your messiest fans – they’ve talked you through your breakups, bad jobs and blunders, they’ve supported your mistakes and let you drive the car when you were 12. Oh hell, they showed up to your wedding on DMT. Now enjoy an evening of their brand of vamping, delight-ing and the unbearable lightness of being Auntie. This musical, freewheeling, live-laff-lewd celebration is brought to you by members of the Auntieland creative team (Cannonball 2023).

Valerie

Kayliani Sood is a dance artist living and working in Philadelphia. Growing up in Missouri, her grandmother, a poet and visual artist, cultivated her love for the arts, and she began her formal dance training in 2003. Sood has since graduated from the University of the Arts with a BFA in Dance and has performed in recent works by Curt Haworth, Brian Sanders, and Vince Johnson. In her current solo, Valerie, Sood moves to embrace and release her matrilineal heritage.

Voicemail Poems 

Warren C. Longmire is an uncle, writer, technologist and an educator from the bad part of North Philadelphia. He is the host of House Poet: A Spoken Word Dance Party, and is a Board member for Blue Stoop. He’s been published in journals including Cartridge Lit, The Cleveland Review of Books, The American Poetry Review and is featured in the Best American Poetry 2021 anthology. His latest book, Bird/Diz [an erased history of bebop] was released in Nov. 2022 through BUNNY Presse.

Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, mixed-race femme whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people.  Their work has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart & Best of the Net, and they’re the author of four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (CLASH!, 2023), and It Skips a Generation (Stanchion, 2023). You can find out more at https://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.

Voicemail Poems is an online magazine published by Amy Saul-Zerby and a small team of dedicated editors. The magazine highlights the intimate and raw voices of new and established writers of all styles. Poets submit by reading their work to a voicemail box, and their poetry can be heard and read at voicemailpoems.org.

xxJAMxx

ANGEL SHANEL EDWARDS is a blackqueerandtrans first-generation Jamaican and Philly-rooted artist. They utilize the creative modalities of movement, poetics, filmmaking, and photography to witness and re/member blackness as it moves through daily life, love, intimacy, and transitions [*gendered and otherwise]. angel is being moved and led by the beautiful cartographies of black life. 

JONATHAN GONZÁLEZ is an artist, born and raised in Queens, NY, working towards the limit of discipline. Their practices emerge through the apparatuses of black geographies, critical theory, black study, somatics and the choreographic. González’s work unfolds as performance, works for video and text, sonic investigations, and platforms for collaborative study, lecture and curation.

MARGUERITE ANGELICA MONIQUE HEMMINGS is a performance artist/educator currently based in Philadelphia, USA. They focus on one’s own body, one’s own way of moving, and connecting to the unseen. They are a master of body ceremonies and a curator of vibes. As a choreographer, they specialize in emergent, improvisational and social dance movement styles and technologies, rooted in the story of the African Diaspora. They are researching the ancestral and subversive role of dance and the dancer throughout the African Diaspora and look to conjure these technologies through all of their (present) work. Marguerite uses body, text, media, and moving images in their work.

It Had To Be Us – An Aunties Rose and Rosa Birthday Bash Romporee

Philadelphia comediennes Rose Luardo and Marisol Soledad are 2/3 of Glamorous Dangerous Stuff – a sexy, zany cabal of wild weirdos here to tickle your Auntiebone. In addition to 2023’s festival favorite Auntieland, Rose’s recent work includes 2022’s Pedestrian Circus. Marisol produced and directed 2023’s Read Me A World, and co-created and performed in the 2022 Cannonball production of The Most Important Place in The World.