miscellany

SweLL featuring Anna Camilleri, Ivan E Coyote, & Lyndell Montgomery

Two of my favorite butches on the planet – and the fabulous addition of femme Anna Camilleri – have collaborated in a queer performance collective. This clip from earlier this year is fucking rad.

SweLL featuring Anna Camilleri, Ivan E Coyote, & Lyndell Montgomery

SWELL—the new incarnation of Taste This, notorious Vancouver-based queer performance collective. In 1994, four young East Vancouver artists—Ivan E. Coyote, Anna Camilleri, Lyndell Montgomery, and Zoë T. Eakle—came together to conduct an experiment. All four had been performing solo on small stages, and they wanted more than a ten-minute spot sandwiched between the fire breather and the sound poet. They founded queer performance troupe Taste This, and premiered their first full-length project at the Edison Electric Gallery. 100+ people were turned away at the door. Artistically emboldened by the response, they took the show on the road to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, and then continued to create and tour a total of four stage works in Canada and the US, until disbanding in 2000. Notably, Taste This released Boys Like Her: Transfictions (Press Gang Publishers, 1998) to critical and public acclaim, including a 1999 Book of the Year Award from Forward Magazine, an American Library of Congress Award nomination, a Community Service Award for Achievement in the Arts by Xtra West, and in 2008, Boys Like Her was included in the Queer Canadian Literature Collection at the University of Toronto. With over a decade of artistic experience to their individual credit, Camilleri, Coyote, and Montgomery recently started talking about resurrecting the kind of magical collaboration that Taste This was. A lot has changed, but the issues that the early collective inhabited are still relevant in the contemporary artistic and political landscape. Questions of gender, class, sexuality, rural versus city life, and family dynamics continue to attract the attentions of the three artists. For the premiere of “So The Story Goes”—an original, full-length inter-discipline performance work—they’ll be joined by acclaimed artist Leslie Peters.

– Swiped from myspace.com/swetlltastethis

Published by Sinclair Sexsmith

Sinclair Sexsmith (they/them) is "the best-known butch erotica writer whose kinky, groundbreaking stories have turned on countless queers" (AfterEllen), who "is in all the books, wins all the awards, speaks at all the panels and readings, knows all the stuff, and writes for all the places" (Autostraddle). ​Their short story collection, Sweet & Rough: Queer Kink Erotica, was a 2016 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and they are the current editor of the Best Lesbian Erotica series. They identify as a white non-binary butch dominant, a survivor, and an introvert, and they live outside Seattle as an uninvited settler on traditional, ancestral, & unceded Snoqualmie land.

6 thoughts on “SweLL featuring Anna Camilleri, Ivan E Coyote, & Lyndell Montgomery”

  1. genderkid says:

    If anyone needs a transcription, there's one here.

    Thanks for all the neat recommendations!

  2. alisha says:

    i want to gooooooooo..

    <3

  3. awesome. this was so nice to watch after a long and stressful day.

  4. saintchick says:

    Lyndell… OMG HOTNESS !!!!!!

  5. Rockets says:

    *swoon* laugh… Nice clip, wish I was there.

  6. Jeanette says:

    Fantastic! Aside from the general amazingness (yes, that is totally a word despite what spell check may have you believe) of queer performance art – this Canadian girl far from home is soothed by the sound of Canadian voices…thanks for sharing Sin. Would love to see more of them…of to search for videos.

    I loved the part about being put in boxes and refusing to close the lid, and this bit especially moved me "writing myself down, sketching directions so that I may be found" is that not what we all do, writing like we do – putting ourselves out there again and again and again. It's all a way to be found, isn't it?

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