The Outfest Platinum Centerpiece at REDCAT
Friday, July 13, 2018 | 8:30 PM
Some Serious Business is pleased to co-present the Los Angeles premiere of artist and filmmaker Clement Hil Goldberg’s Our Future Ends, the Outfest Platinum Centerpiece performance for 2018 at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St, Los Angeles. Tickets go on sale to Outfest members ($18) on Thursday, June 14 and to the General Public ($20) on Monday, June 18. One night only!
What is being lost is us. —Clement Hil Goldberg
Will queer culture go out with a stylish bang, or will the spirits of Lemuria inspire us to preserve our fabulousness? Clement Hil Goldberg’s Our Future Ends is a multidisciplinary satire that intertwines the fate of near-extinct lemurs, the inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria, and the ongoing threat against queer culture. Lemuria, the mythical site of catastrophic loss, was believed to have been populated by queer prehistoric entities that became extinct alongside the inhabitants of the more famous mythical city of Atlantis.
Our Future Ends tragicomically illuminates the at-risk nature of queer spaces—and of lemurs, the world’s most endangered mammals. Drug-addled lemurs bond in rehab, while Lemurians confront their newly-unearthed crystals, as parallel extinction stories unfold across stop-motion animation and live performance. Starring Brontez Purnell, Heather María Ács, and Siobhan Aluvalot, with Zackary Drucker, Silas Howard, Xandra Ibarra, Ben McCoy, and Maryam Farnaz Rostami as additional voices of the animated lemurs. As a metaphoric and conceptual piece, the performance connects the near extinct lemurs of Madagascar to an imagined queer origin story, paralleling species loss with cultural atrophy.
Lemurs (from the Latin word lemures, or spirits of the dead…ghosts) are the most endangered mammals on the planet. The displaced primates are housed in captive breeding programs for research and to maintain diverse genetic populations, but even if their species is rehabilitated to adequate numbers in captivity, they will not be able to return home. After 60 million years, Madagascar is no longer a suitable habitat as 90% of its original forests are gone, and profitable deposits of minerals continue to be mined.
Lemuria, however, was a channeled consciousness, location, and history. Its first incarnation was on a map created by zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater in the late 1850’s, as part of a cartography exercise that speculated on a submerged land bridge that would explain continental drift (and how the lemurs came to exist in Madagascar). Driven to resurrect the sunken landmass, theosophist Helena P. Blavatsky situated the Lemurians as queer prehistoric entities—divine androgynes that became extinct along with the Atlanteans—in her book The Secret Doctrine. Blavatsky framed the Lemurians as a failed race of psychic hermaphrodites (an 1890s term that conflated sex, gender, and orientation as a stand in for “gay”). Our Future Ends reimagines the occult account as a queer and trans origin story about the displacement of telepathic beings, to reflect upon the current predicaments of globalization and ecological destruction.
In the stop motion narrative of Our Future Ends, Seymour, a lonely blue-eyed black lemur, begins a sorrowful quest for emotional connection and something to eat, finding new friends across a dismal landscape. The forests are ablaze and the few remaining lemurs, sick with nostalgia, self-medicate using millipede spray—which acts as an opiate—and Prime MateTM pharmaceuticals to cope with their grief. After being drugged and admitted to an experimental rehab facility run by rogue Sifaka Lemurs, Seymour agrees to set out with ring-tailed sailor pal Dusty in search of a new supply of millipedes and a more optimistic horizon. Meanwhile, on stage, Lemurians Whut, Rite, and the Cosmic DJ confront their newly-unearthed seed crystals, an 80-million-year-old archive they buried for future lineages. Their sacred artifacts were mined and are now being sold in new age rock shops. They are over it. All they ever wanted to do was dance.
Cultivating an aesthetics of extinction, Goldberg sourced field recordings from various sites including calving glaciers, oil pumps, lava, storms, fires, and dead leaves. Composer Ted M. Superstar then created samples and beats from these sounds to make a dance track to catastrophe.
Our Future Ends is a parable that connects threats of extinction to wildlife and marginalized communities. The wildlife population has declined by half since 1972—a shared arc of disappearance for the artists, culture, and community lost to the AIDS crisis. In an emotional way, and in terms of endangerment and preservation efforts, these everyday extinctions are tethered to what is happening with queer spaces across this country. San Francisco’s 107-year-old gay bar The Gangway closed its doors the same week as the Eastern Cougar was declared extinct. By 2020, nearly two-thirds of wildlife may be lost to the planet. Queer spaces, meanwhile, face a similar fate.
Parallel storylines oscillate between live performance and video projection, stop motion animated lemurs, ancient Lemurian performers, and lemurs documented by Clement at the Duke Lemur Center. It’s a darkly comedic satire and a queer dance party with choreography by Larry Arrington and gorgeous costumes by Margaret Bolton Grace. Performative origin and extinction mythologies merge, engaging contemporary drag, cabaret, and experimental theater aesthetics, extending the boundaries of queer performance to incorporate a new aesthetic for extinction.
Join the Lemurians for this dance party on the brink.
Support Our Future Ends with a tax-deductible contribution here. Please write “OFE” in the note accompanying your PayPal donation. We thank you in advance for making this important work possible.
Written, Directed, Animated, and Created by Clement Hil Goldberg
Starring
Brontez Purnell
Heather María Ács
Siobhan Aluvalot
With Additional Animation Voices by Zackary Drucker, Silas Howard, Xandra Ibarra, Ben McCoy, and Maryam Farnaz Rostami
Choreography by Larry Arrington
Costume Design by Margaret Bolton Grace
Lighting Design by Jerry Lee
Original Animation Score by Ted M. Superstar
Original Music by Ted M. Superstar and Hale May with Sound Engineering by Sophia Poirier
Produced by Clement Hil Goldberg
Co-produced by Some Serious Business and CounterPulse
Set Design Collaborators Jerry Lee, Conrad Meyers, Maryam Farnaz Rostami with Clement Hil Goldberg
Special Thanks to Duke Lemur Center and their lemurs; Sumathi Ramaswamy, author of The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories; Tiffany Naiman; Some Serious Business; CounterPulse; Outfest; REDCAT; Bett Williams; and Beth Hill.
This work was made possible in part by awards from The Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund that is also supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as well as the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Clement Hil Goldberg is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working in film, sculpture, theater, and animation to create a fabulous extinction aesthetic. Clement received an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley. Their work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Worth Ryder Art Gallery; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; CounterPulse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SOMArts, Luggage Store Gallery, and Artists’ Television Access (all in San Francisco); and over 50 international film and arts festivals including Frameline, Outfest, MIX NYC, Hamburg International Queer Film Festival, and Cleveland International Film Festival.
Goldberg created the stop motion animated web series The Deer Inbetween and joined Michelle Tea to produce the 20-filmmaker collaborative experimental feature film Valencia, which won Jury Awards for Best Experimental Feature at the Polari Film Festival and Best Narrative Feature at Reeling, The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. Goldberg was awarded a San Francisco Arts Commission IAC grant in visual arts in 2017, and their project Our Future Ends was awarded a Creative Work Fund visual arts grant in collaborative partnership with CounterPulse in 2016.
The Artist Always Comes First
Artists have always been in the forefront of social and cultural innovation. That is what SSB means by always putting the artist first. The art comes first. SSB offers culminating presentations of new performances, works in progress, and intimate, focused interludes and salons.
Founded at the height of the Conceptual 70s, Some Serious Business incubates emergent expression in the arts, germinates intrepid new works and ideas, and presents diverse projects that celebrate audacity, experimentation, and surprise. Our core artist-driven programs and partnerships are both catalysts and sanctuaries that sustain visionary creators and thought-leaders.
SSB supports hybrids and chimeras that traverse performance, literature, theater, dance, visual art, moving image, music, architecture and design, social practice, and fields of unforeseen possibilities. Guided by eggheads and free spirits who value collaboration, SSB is as much about process as outcomes. From the ridiculous to the sublime, SSB revels in the creative process—embarking with artists and fellow travelers to explore the puzzles, mysteries, messiness, challenges, dialogue, and peak experiences along the way.
Celebrating its 36th anniversary, Outfest was founded by UCLA students in 1982 who were looking for positive images of themselves in media. Today, Outfest is the world’s leading organization that promotes equality by creating, sharing, and protecting LGBTQ stories on the screen. Outfest builds community by connecting diverse populations to discover, discuss, and celebrate stories of LGBTQ lives. Over the past three decades, Outfest has showcased thousands of films from around the world, educated and mentored hundreds of emerging filmmakers, and protected more than 37,000 LGBTQ films and videos. Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival is 11 days of world-class films, panels, and parties.
REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CALArts Theatre)
631 W. 2nd St, Los Angeles 90012
(213) 237-2800
Photo Credits: Top to Bottom
Lemur Photos: Clement Goldberg
Header: Sioban Avulot, Heather Ács, Brontez Purnell Photo: Alex Girard
Middle Photo: Brontez Purnell and Heather Ács Photo: Robbie Sweeny
Last Photo: Brontez Purnell, Clement Goldberg, Heather Ács Photo: Robbie Sweeny