This Damned Body is a two-year lived performance of Swift Shuker’s male-to-female gender transition through exhaustively archived online content: diaries, videotapes, webcam performance. An exhibition of the beautiful, fragile, and powerful reality of the transgender body. You own your body, and you are not alone.

15 minutes / Goes live Sept 3

Writing, Film, and Music by Swift Shuker; Web Design by Joshua McLucas. Art is the link between your humanity, spirituality, and the people around you; art is a reprieve from loneliness. It is our job to restore this power to art, and to open the eyes of the our audiences to art’s lost functions. Theater is not necessary anymore. It is an elitist diversion for the upper classes, not much more than entertainment. It is our job to use theater’s unique power of direct, living presence to make the audience think, live, feel, live, question, live, dismiss, live, discover, and live forever. You will live forever. The love of the critics and the size of our audiences are not our primary concerns, but we want the whole city to come and see our plays, we want everyone who has ever lived to see our work. Our ambition is limitless but uncompromising. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the beauty. We are performers, directors, playwrights, musicians, designers, and breathing, eating, dying containers of stories. We make new work, and we make old work new. We will always be guided by the principles of collaboration. No single voice is stronger than the group. We will always be guided by the principles of ambition. We will bite off more than we can chew. We will always be guided by the principle of motley. There will be no stylistic unity, as anyone can direct a show, and each piece must be independent of the past and the future. Our true guiding light is our love for each other, our love for the work, and our love for our audiences. View the trailer here or visit thisdamnedbody.com.