Location: Mosher Alumni House
RVSP Link: https://forms.gle/
Performance Description:
“Another Land in the Sky” features an evening of live music, poetry, and film by Jess X. Snow and Treya Lam. Their show takes the audience on a journey across time: channeling matriarchal histories of Asian American resistance, the artists' own fractured relationships with their motherlands, and the authentic ways they heal trauma and build chosen family in the present day. In a moment of racialized and gendered violence, the artists invite the audience to hold our collective pain at the root, allow it to move through our bodies and back into the earth.
Artist Bio: Treya Lam
Treya Lam (they/them) is a queer Taiwanese-American multi-instrumentalist and composer who's joyously complex identity informs but does not define their work, whether solo or when collaborating with a variety of multidisciplinary ensemble. their strident voice, politically charged songwriting and fluency on guitar, piano, and looped viola recalls Nina Simone and Andrew Bird. treya's debut album, Good News was created entirely by womxn and genderqueer collaborators and released via Kaki King's label. Iam is a OneBeat fellow, NYCLU Artist Ambassador and active member of the Resistance Revival Chorus (RRC). their song Dawn was featured on the RRC's debut album This Joy-released on Ani Difranco's Righteous Babe Records. Iam has performed original music at Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, the Prospect Park Bandshell and the American Museum of Natural History and opened for Ani Difranco, Valerie June and Kaki King. they are currently developing otherland–an interdisciplinary grief ritual and chamber protest album that explores grief as a catalyst for radical empathy, intersectional solidarity, and repairing our relationship to the earth.
Artist Bio: Jess X. Snow
Jess X. Snow (they/them/他) is a non-binary filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist, poet based in New York and California. They recently received their MFA in writing/directing at New York University where they were a BAFTA Scholar. Spanning community-informed murals, narrative films, children's books and speculative fiction–their body of work reimagines queer asian diaspora, mental (un)wellness, kinship across cultures and species; and abolitionist futures. Their short films, centering the desires, disobedience and dreams of flawed Chinese migrant queers–have screened at festivals globally. Their murals, which feature intergenerational kinships with Black, Asian, Indigenous and Pacific Islander femmes can be found on walls across Turtle Island. As an educator they have taught screenwriting and mural making for scholars, organizers and students of all ages and backgrounds. Currently they are writing several narrative feature films: ALIEN ENEMY/ALIEN FRIEND (with co-writer Alán Pelaez Lopez), a coming of age drama about Black Asian intimacies and time travel in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as WHEN THE RIVER SPLIT OPEN, (with co-writer, Yumeng Han) a romantic road movie about multi-species kinship set in their ancestral homelands of JiangXi China.
Event Description:
Through this summer residency program, three queer Asian-diasporic artists and cultural critics will produce new work. They will offer accessible screenwriting and cultural criticism workshops, film screenings and musical/poetry performances geared toward students and faculty interested in Asian American Studies, ethnic studies, coalition-building, queer and non-binary experiences, climate justice, film and cultural criticism, poetry and spoken word. Together, these offerings help us remember that cinema and song–and the cultures they ignite, can be some of the most powerful tools we have to critique this world and build a better one.