Serf's Up

FORT POINT THEATRE CHANNEL PRESENTS A TIKI SURFARI OLIGARCHIC KARAOKE PROTEST HAPPENING CABARET SOCIO-POLITICAL CELEBRATION

7pm

OVERVIEW: It’s the stages of modern life, in song! They’re born, they go to school, high school, college. Job, married, house, kids, old. And at the end we eat the rich, or maybe reprogram their singularities so they no longer know what’s real.

STAFF: Mitchel K. Ahern, lyrics and concept; Nick Thorkelson, music and additional lyrics; Demetrius Fuller, Master of Ceremonies, additional music; Larry Plitt, music and additional lyrics; Danny Gessner, producer

PERFORMERS: Sally Nutt, Mitchel K. Ahern, Nick Thorkelson, Demetrius Fuller, Larry Plitt, Danny Gessner

THE BAND: Nick Thorkelson, keys; Larry Plitt, guitar

Mitchel Ahern works in multiple media, including letterpress, performance art, and invented instruments. He prints on fabric and paper at his shop, mitchelka Show Card Press, in Lynn, Massachusetts. He has exhibited and performed at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 119 Gallery, Atlantic Works Gallery, Galatea, Marblehead Arts, The Middle East, The Rat, the Knitting Factory, Figment, and the Wonder Valley Festival. As a member of Fort Point Theatre Channel he led the band for Inter-Actions, performed in Threw the Keyhole at the AMP Gallery, and he arranged and directed Dahlgren Sunrise, a multimedia performance project based on the sci-fi novel Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.

Nick Thorkelson is a cartoonist, painter, animator, and musician. He wrote the music and led the band in three Fort Point Theatre Channel productions, Carny Knowledge, The Good Person of Setzuan, and Dreambook. He has sung and played in various bands including Boston’s first reggae band, Jamaica Hylton. His animations include “Où est Fleuri Rose” and “Robotic Interruptions.” Books illustrated, created, or co-created by Nick include The Earth Belongs to the People, The Underhanded History of the USA, The Legal Rights of Union Stewards, Economic Meltdown Funnies and the 2019 graphic biography Herbert Marcuse, Philosopher of Utopia, from City Lights Books.

Danny Gessner is a stage manager, theatre producer, creative writer, social media manager, and occasional treasurer. He was introduced to FPTC while completing a communications internship with The Theater Offensive. An office administrator by day, he is grateful to be working humbly in the background of Boston’s eclectic theatre community. His personal goals are to inspire art and culture from sources that have been previously overlooked. His first FPTC production was "The Ghost Sonata" and he looks forward to working on many future endeavors with this distinguishable group.

Demetrius Fuller is a visual artist, musician, writer, and occasional actor. He currently has a one-man show, entitled “Gaze,” at the Apollinaire Theater Gallery in Chelsea. Three years ago, Demetrius restarted his acting career at the Apollinaire theater, after a 25-year hiatus. He has appeared in four productions there, including “Informed Consent” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Demetrius has also acted in productions by FPTC and T-Squared. Demetrius is now finishing work on a large outdoor mural in Chelsea entitled “Chelsea Right Now,” which will be completed this summer.

Sally Nutt grew up in rural New Jersey, traveled the world courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, currently resides in Massachusetts, and has thrived on theatre in all those places. She’s appeared in FPTC productions of Carny Knowledge, The Good Person of Setzuan, Reel to Reel, Waiting for Gilgamesh, and The Ghost Sonata. Other stage credits include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Hackmatack Playhouse), The Good Body (Hub Theatre Company), Steel Magnolias (Jean’s Playhouse), Salute to Dorothy Parker (Rogers Street Theatre), and new plays in NYC’s Unfringed Festival, Fresh-Fruit Festival, and Play Lab. She is a member of SAG-AFTRA, an actor-in-resident with Boston’s Playwrights’ Platform, and the host of the playwriting group, The Fardels.

Larry Plitt is a guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He currently sings and plays guitar with the Squeezebox Stompers. Larry is the proud winner of the 2007 Boston Folk Festival Singer/ Songwriter contest. His playing is rooted in the Piedmont and Delta blues styles but is also peppered with Cajun, Zydeco, Celtic and classical influences. As a veteran of the San Fransisco folk rock scene of the early 70's, he played in a number of bands including Camp Granada and the Stephen Fiske Band. In recent years he and Nick Thorkelson have played together frequently in the Fort Point neighborhood of Boston, including many memorable nights at the late lamented Internal Matters Restaurant.

Saturday, August 10

Conversations with Gay Elders: Gene Fedorko - A film by David Weissman

Screening and Discussion

7pm

"Conversations With Gay Elders is a series of single-character video documentaries of varying length, focused on older gay men. In addition to creating a repository of passing history, it also functions as a vehicle for facilitating intergenerational dialogue and understanding.

The project and its genesis: I’ve often felt as if AIDS made me a premature elder in my community. This is directly related to the deaths of so many men in the generation just above me—men who would have been my mentors, and whose memory I’ve wanted to preserve. Further, my experience of the epidemic was very much colored by having Holocaust history in my own family, and the awareness that gave me of the cathartic and long-lasting value of sharing painful, inspiring, and complex stories between generations. And thus I began to make historical documentaries.

Conversations With Gay Elders is a documentary storytelling project focused on older gay men—initially those currently in their 70s and older. Emotionally reflective, historically informative interviews will capture histories of men whose gay lives long preceded Stonewall, and also those of the Gay Liberation generation. Inescapably, these men are also survivors of the AIDS era. I focus specifically on gay men (instead of the wider LGBT community) because this is the world that I know best and with which, as a 60-year-old gay man myself, I can engage as a peer rather than as an observer." - David Weissman

David Weissman is an Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker, teacher, film programmer, public speaker, and longtime activist. He is best known as producer of the acclaimed documentaries We Were Here (2011) and The Cockettes (2002). Currently a resident of Portland, Oregon, David spent more than three decades in San Francisco, where he was deeply engaged with the city’s cultural and political life.

Gene Fedorko is a medical professional, caregiver, art collector, curator, activist, sexual outlaw, and cultural flâneur. He is happily well-traveled: a lieutenant in the Army of Love. He lives in New York City, a place he loves.

Fedorko says: “Being gay in those years was lethal. Monolithic systems were in place in our social, familial, cultural, and political institutions that were designed to silence, demonize, annihilate, criminalize, marginalize, destroy us…. Despite these oppressive juggernauts, we formed communities; loved one another; created art, poetry, theater, and music; and gathered our political muster to fight the good fight another day. Asserting one’s sexual identity was not easy. Some of us were exposed to psychiatric systems of conversion, compulsory heterosexual marriage and family structures, discrimination at work and school, and banishment from our families. Some of us broke under the pressure and self-destructed either overtly or passively through alcohol and drugs. A lot of us had fun, embracing our outlaw identities and flipping the bird to the patriarchal society we viewed as absurd.”

Sunday, August 4

Tough Girls & Lucid Dreamers X

Readings and Performances by Michael Cunningham, Eileen Myles, Katrina del Mar, Jay Critchley, Monica Falcone, Sarah Greenwood, Billy Hough & Susan Goldberg w/ Sarah Burrill, Karyn Kuhl, Bobby Miller, Sarah Schulman, Genny Slag, Anne Stott, Betsy Todd, Thalia Zedek & others!

6 PM-on

James Montford (Ari)

Hairpiece/peace, a performance

7 PM

Performance of Hairpiece/peace by AMP gallery exhibiting artist James Ari Montford will take place in the gallery at 7PM on July 10th. This performative piece celebrates Indigenous people’s rituals around hair and its connection to the spirit world. It is sacrifice as a form of renewal and serves to create a celebratory blessing for the creative life.

Donations are excepted to benefit the Dune Shack and AMP Gallery.

James Montford, AKA Ari, is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work ranges from photography and collage to performance art. He works between his studios in Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts. Graduating with Honors in Fine Arts at Brandeis University, he was awarded the Rosland W. Levine Award for outstanding Achievement in Fine Arts and served on the Advisory Committee to the Dean of the College. He went on to earn his MA in Art and Education at Columbia University and MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He has pursued opportunities to study and work under great artists such as painter Robert Colescott, architect Paolo Soleri, painter Grace Hartigan and painter Joseph Stefanelli.

For over thirty-five years, Montford has exhibited his work nationally, curated exhibitions and educated students in a variety of disciplines and media. In 2015 Persuasions, a mid-career retrospective exhibition, was presented at the Boston Center for the Arts. Montford's numerous residencies include several Yaddo Residency Fellowships in Saratoga Springs, NY, the Art Matters Inc. NYC Individual Artist Fellowship, Skowhegan residency and a VT Studio Center Residency Grant. And the Dune Shack Residency in 2019 as well as a Blue Mountain Residency. Montford received 2 Connecticut Commission on the Arts grants, funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NEA Individual Artist Fellowship, the New England Foundation Art Matters Grant and was twice awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation International Grant to support independent work.

From 2005 till 2017, Montford was Director of the Edward M. Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, where he was a Professor in the Art Department and curated thought-provoking exhibitions by both regional and national artists. Montford had previously worked at the RISD Museum and taught in the Fine Arts division. His current academic affiliations include the University of Rhode Island, Bunker Hill Community College and Montserrat College of Art. Montford is represented in Boston by the Howard Yezerski Gallery and is affiliated with the June Kelly Gallery NYC. His work is in the collections of the RISD Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum the Taft Museum, Scottsdale Arts Center, Visual Artists Fellowship Archive At the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art and the Haas Family Arts Library at Yale "3 Decades of Change" Artspace, among others.

Laurie Essig

Reading

4 PM

Laurie Essig is Professor and Director of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. She is a sociologist who teaches courses on how power shapes our bodies and our desires Her courses including Sociology of Heterosexuality and White People Her most recent book, “Love, Inc.: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter,” argues that romance as an ideology became even more powerful in the last few decades even as actual marriage rates declined. Romance promises us a safe and secure future as a private love affair even as our future is more and more precarious. Rather than demanding the necessary political and structural changes today for a secure tomorrow, we are too busy reading romance novels, obsessing over royal weddings, or swiping through our dating apps to pay much attention to the world around us. Essig has written for a variety of publications including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Conversation, Ms., and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Saturday, June 8

Voices of Poetry - Raise the AMP III, presented by Neil Silberblatt

Readings & Performance

5 PM

Readings by Michael Ansara, Lori Desrosiers, Howie Faerstein, Krysten Hill & Heather Treseler.

The music will be provided by pianist/cellist Lisa Gross & accordionist Thomas Leidenfrost.

Suggested donation: $10.