Performance artist Deneishia LeArtiste is drained. Wearied by five decades of explaining and defending her existence as a gay, non-Christian Black woman, repeating the same tired conversations again and again. She has carried the enormous weight of representing her entire race, gender, and sexuality in every classroom she has stepped foot into since her birth in 1973.
“It made living exhausting and it made living not worth doing,” she says, her voice strong, but laced with deep emotion. “And now that I’m at this age where I am watching people go through the exact same conversations, the exact same pains, the exact same pressures, it has made my work feel like it was useless.”
And all these recurring conversations have fallen on seemingly deaf ears. So when Charlotte Piper, an East Window Gallery PR and marketing consultant, contacted LeArtiste with an opportunity to perform in LIVID, she accepted without hesitation.
LIVID: Concerned Relatives and Bridge Builders, is a spoken-word and musical stylings feature presented by East Window Gallery. LIVID brings marginalized performers to the front of the stage with five cross-cultural storytellers: LeArtiste, Lucky Garcia, Claygo, Cal Duran, and Piper herself. The event provides a creative outlet for the anger, frustration, and exhaustion that the current state of affairs in the US has cultivated.
Piper, event curator, and facilitator, is “silently seething, watching the rights of everybody I love be systemically stripped away,” she says. “LIVID came to me out of a desire to give folks that are in the community a way to take the boot off their neck and use that boot to the heads of folks who are not listening.”
LeArtiste’s performance will be a “culmination of emotion having found my voice as a new elder,” she says. “It’s the experience of going nearly five decades in this body and having to repeat and repeat, and repeat myself.” Almost every piece she will perform at LIVID is a brand-new representation of her story, and she’s looking forward to finally being heard.
Duran, a queer, Two Spirit, Indigenous, and Latinx artist, will be using his performance slot to concentrate on connection. Connection with the earth, ancestors, and each other. He’ll open the space with a universal prayer, “interconnecting … ancestors, medicine people, calling in guides and guardians,” he explains. Then Duran will perform the Grandmother Spider story, a Cherokee legend that spins the tale of the world’s creation.
He hopes the audience walks away from his performance knowing “that the earth has our back. That we could go to the waters when we feel in pain. We could stomp on the earth when we need grounding. We could go to the fire to transmute, to release,” he says. “There are tools [for grounding] that are right in front of us.”
LIVID is an important space for sharing the pain and exhaustion of generations of BIPOC and queer storytellers. But the struggle for creating a more just reality doesn’t end when LIVID does. LeArtiste hopes the audience will journal, reflect, and sit, giving the performers’ stories the space, and time, to sink in.
“What I really want [the audience] to do is to sit in the car on the way home in silence and let it sink in, and then ask themselves three questions when they get home,” she says. “How do I feel at this very moment having heard what I’ve heard? How do I live now … knowing what I’ve learned? Where in my personal experience can I not make the decisions that I’ve been trained to make?”
Ultimately, she wants each attendee to face their own shortcomings and use the stories of LIVID to create positive change. “When I see something happening, how can I be brave enough to speak against the inflicted pain? Where can that bravery come from in me?” she asks. “I want people to leave LIVID being brave enough to retrain themselves not to react in a reactionary defense against anything that they see or feel is different.”
LIVID: Concerned Relatives and Bridge Builders, is 7 to 9 p.m. on August 19 at East Window Gallery, 4550 Broadway Ste. C – 3B2 in Boulder. Admission is free.
Photo courtesy of Charlotte Piper
