FREE ZONE: Drag at the Pyramid Club in the 1980s (A Panel Discussion)

Wednesday, June 30th, 7pm at Esopus Space (64 West Third St., #210, NYC)

Held in conjunction with the exhibition “Clayton Patterson: Pyramid Portraits” (June 3 – July 15, 2010 at Esopus Space)

Co-sponsored with the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation

PANELISTS’ BIOS:

Andrew Berman, Executive Director, Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation

As a theatre historian, Joe E. Jeffreys has published in journals including The Drama Review, Women & Performance, Theatre History Studies, and Biography. His theatre and book reviews have been widely published in periodicals including The Village Voice, TheateWeek, The Advocate and The Lambda Book Report. Recent book contributions include Out of Character (Bantam), Shattered Anatomies (Arnolfini), and Extreme Exposure (TCG). He is at work on a full-length novelized non-fiction biography of East Village drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger.

“Pre-Stonewall Christopher Street queen” Agosto Machado has worked with Jack Smith, John Vaccaro, the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis, H.M Koutoukis, and Ethyl Eichelberger in New York Downtown theater venues such as La Mama,. P. S. 122, and Theater for the New City.

Clayton Patterson moved to from his native Calgary in 1979 and has since amassed an exhaustive photo, video, and audio archive of New York’s , including groundbreaking videos of the police riots in 1988. He has published several books, including Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side and Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side, and most recently exhibited his work at Kinz+Tillou Fine Art in New York. Captured, a documentary about Patterson by Dan Levin, Ben Solomon, and Jenner Furst, was released in 2009.

Between 1981 and 1994, Iris Rose (moderator) wrote, directed, and performed dozens of original works, alone or in collaboration with the performance group Watchface, and performed regularly at the Pyramid Club, 8BC, P.S. 122 and La MaMa, among other venues. Her shows were also seen in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Houston, where Of Little Women was the first work of performance art presented at the Alley Theatre. Iris has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as grants from the Jerome Foundation and Art Matters. She devoted most of the years from 1995 to 2007 to parenting and writing, but returned to directing with the creation of Theater of the Grasshopper in 2008.

www.esopusspace.org