Structured like a variety show in entropy, Women and Children is a multidisciplinary performance piece by Flowers in the Basement. The in-process showing is a culmination of two years of meetings, conversations, workshops, and residencies. Flowers in the Basement is a collective consisting of Kite, Mel Elberg, Tsedaye Makonnen, Alisha B. Wormsley, Frank Rodriguez and Amy Ruhl, formed to both create a new original performance piece, and to speculate on radical alternatives to our current forms of reproductive labor. Using the “demon text” of second-wave feminism, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Shulamith Firestone, 1970), as a jumping off point, the project offers a contemporary, polyvocal response to revolutionary demands for gender abolition, artificial reproduction, child liberation, and cybernetic communism. Bringing together a group of core collaborators working in vast fields of inquiry — Afrofuturism; queer, speculative, intersectional, and Marxist feminisms, Lakota epistemologies; and African migration narratives — their mode of collaboration forges collectivity while respecting the autonomy of each artists’ individual praxis.
New York City, NY; NYC