About the Festival
Two extraordinary new works in relation : one intimate weekend of performance and connection
Crowded Fire Theater’s In Tandem: Two New Works on Transfuturist Visions pairs two bold new works that imagine trans lives and futures across memory, precipices, and possibility.
Through breathtaking physical performance in Box [M] and a time-bending journey through Hollywood history in lupe finds me in the garden of dreams, the festival explores creation and self-actualization through mining of ancestral wisdom, artistic legacy, and the radical possibilities of imagining new futures.
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Artwork by Eluterio Lopez (@eluteriothe3rd)
Box[M]
Using only visual storytelling, dance and acrobatics, this award-winning duo show explores the experience of growing up transgender in an Asian American immigrant household, and the connection between siblings each navigating their own relationship to gender. Winner of multiple Best of Fringe awards and named ‘groundbreaking work’ by FringeReview. ‘It’s a testament to how well-crafted this show is that it can be so specific and yet feel so universal at the same time’ (Matthew Palm, Orlando Sentinel). Created by Genie Cartier, Landyn Endo and Os Roxas. Produced by Flying Rabbit Circus. Performed by Landyn Endo and Kapi Lee.
Recommended for ages 12 & up.
A staged reading of:
lupe finds me in the garden of dreams
by Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel | directed by Adin Walker
Estrella, a young trans playwright, is at a spiritual crossroads. She becomes the Old Hollywood actress Lupe Velez on the last night of her life to find the answers to her questions, and the two people who hold them are Anna May Wong and Gary Cooper, her lifetime’s greatest relationships. LUPE FINDS ME IN THE GARDEN OF DREAMS spans years in cinematic history to raise the question: what are the costs to being a queer artist of color in today’s industry, and what would happen if we found a way of creating ourselves and our work outside of it?
Landyn Endo (they/he) is a queer, transmasculine-of-center actor, dancer and circus performer, specializing in aerial/acrobatics. He graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a double major in Dance and Drama. Since graduating, he has enjoyed dancing professionally in LA and on tour with Multiplex Dance Company, helping to found the West Hollywood Dance Festival. He also had the opportunity to perform in Europe with DTM2 Improvisational Ensemble, Off-Broadway in NYC, and in Japan in “Dreaming Forward,” an artistic collaboration with choreographer Motoko Hirayama. Landyn is a co-founder of Flying Rabbit Circus and a proud member of People’s Circus Theatre, and teaches at the San Francisco Circus Center and VRV3.
Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (she/her) is a Guatemalan playwright and educator, born in Guatemala City and based in Brooklyn. Her works are spiritual, hyper-theatrical narratives that give Black and Brown Queer+ Trans voices a space to interrogate core wounds and offer them a path towards healing.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Adin Walker (Director) – Crowded Fire: choreography for Last of the Love Letters and acrobatic movement for Limp Wrist on the Lever. Prior to moving to SF, Walker was a core company member of the internationally-touring dance, puppetry, and climate-justice focused Phantom Limb Company as movement director + associate director. The company’s works include Falling Out about the 2011 tsunami and radiation disaster in Fukushima, which premiered in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s (BAM) Next Wave Festival. Walker recently choreographed Center REP’s Jagged Little Pill and Indecent and has directed and/or choreographed in the Bay Area with Golden Thread, New Conservatory, and regionally with Profile Theater (OR), Artists Repertory Theater (OR), and Chautauqua Theater (NY), among others. Walker has been a guest artist at NYU, Emerson, Yale, and Princeton, has developed new work with New York Theatre Workshop, National Queer Theatre, and Breaking the Binary Theatre, and has served as an associate to May Adrales, Shana Cooper, Dustin Wills, and Tony award-winner Rebecca Taichman. Walker recently completed a PhD in performance studies at Stanford where Walker directed and choreographed Fun Home.
