Heels on Wheels is a NYC-based queer punk art extravaganza touring from L.A to Vancouver March 22-April 7, 2013. The Roadshow combines multi-media, literary and performing arts, music, puppetry, participatory art, and fierce looks onstage to trouble the question: what is a femme? The show itself consists of five performers, local acts–and a dance party if you’re lucky. The fearless artists rampage from hi-femme to femmedrogyny, dandy darling to ladybeast in a wild revue of visceral, poetic, performance, emotional escape plans in wild workout gear, dark whimsical puppetry, innovative intersectionality, and rocknroll you can sink your heels into!
Heels on Wheels emerges from an active anti-oppression, intersectional, liberatory standpoint boldy asserting: art can change our world. The people presenting art onstage and community organizing in their home city of Brooklyn all build power for traditionally-marginalized LGBTQ stories and people. The tour is working class-led and multi-racial, and includes cisgendered and trans folks, QPOC, mixed race folks, sex workers, immigrants: all fiercely political feminist queer artists whose work weaves punk herstories, survival strategies, and wild costuming into escape artistry. These are stories that do not have enough outlets on a regular basis and that’s one reason this tour is important!
The 2013 tour is the fourth, and features Damien Luxe, Adelaide Windsome, Heather Acs, The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins and Shomi Noise, with wrangler/visual artist Lizxnn Disaster. The Heels on Wheels Glitter Roadshow tours the US annually with a dazzling, diverse cabaret of performance art works and acts of resistance by queer folks of femme-inine spectrum genders.
Shomi Noise plays guitar and reads from her zine series “Building Up Emotional Muscle,” the story of her journey as a Bolivian immigrant navigating U.S. culture and finding herself through alternative music scenes. Damien Luxe invites the audience to participate in a satirical and sincere aerobics session for all bodies about dissociation and survival (complete with spandex and sparkle!). Heather Acs uses theatrical storytelling and scientific theory to explore the formation of stars and her working-class, Appalachian roots. Adelaide Windsome is a fabulist storyteller and puppeteer who queer-ifies fairy-tale structures into trans-narratives.The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins uses dance, movement, and performance drawing from traditional burlesque techniques to explore herstories of her working class, femme, sexworker ancestors, while interrogating the exotification of feminine bodies, race, and of exotic dance itself.
Heels on Wheels is a group of interdisciplinary performing artists who create performance-based cultural works and community events that have a feminist and radical agenda, are produced from sites of femme/inine-positive queer embodiment, and reveal the power in under-represented communities by including local acts, facilitating discussions on activist art, and touring social justice and anti-oppressive cultural works. By actively complicating what it looks like, sounds like, IS like to shamelessly and lovingly represent femininity, dandyness, fey, femme and queer lady, this work confronts misogyny and sexism and uses cultural works to sabotage the status quo of gender, sexuality, and “feminine” appearance, replacing it with many visions and ideas of what thriving and surviving as femme folks can be.
Stillettos fly, gender justice prevails, and fairytales fracture as they travel through space, time, and stardust to the West Coast!
Connect with the Heels! Tour Calendar, Artist Bios, Glamour shots: http://www.
“The Heels on Wheels Roadshow is a glorious campaign to put femininity in the spotlight. I totally applaud and approve. It is a delicious combination touring glitterati and local sparkle that showcases some serious queer talent. Don’t let them pass you by!”
– Lois Weaver, Obie-Award Winning Performer, Lecturer Queen Mary University of London