Performance Work
As a spoken word artist she has performed widely in the United States, Canada and Sri Lanka. She has featured at Bar 13, Michelle Tea's RADAR Reading Series, The Loft, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, as well as at universities including Yale, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Swarthmore and the University of Southern California. Her first one woman show, Grown Woman Show, debuted at Toronto's Alchemy Theatre in August 2007.
Her one-woman show, Grown Woman Show deals talks about being "a queer girl of Sri Lankan descent", and the incest by her mother that she suffered. Grown Woman Show has been performed at at the National Queer Arts Festival, Swarthmore College, Yale University, Reed College and McGill University.
In April 2007, Piepzna-Samarasinha and Maria Cristina Rangel, aka Cherry Galette, launched Mangos With Chili, a "floating cabaret" annual tour of queer and transgender people of color writers, dancers and performance artists, "like Sister Spit, only all brown." Since 2004, she has curated and produced Toronto's Browngirlworld series of spoken word performance nights by queer and trans artists of color. She is also involved with the biannual Asian Pacific Islander Spoken Word and Poetry Summit.
She was the 2009-2010 Artist in Residence at UC Berkeley’s June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. From 2009 to the present, she has been a commissioned performer with Sins Invalid, the national performance organization of queer people with disabilities and chronic illnesses.
Read more about this topic: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Famous quotes containing the words performance and/or work:
“O world, world! thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a-work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavour be so loved, and the performance so loathed?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in “playing” chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)