SINS INVALID: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility September 6, 2008

Seven artists from California to Georgia strip taboos off of sexuality and disability in an evening of erotic spoken word performance, dance, song, and performance.

Performers are Rodney Bell, Nomy Lamm, Leroy Franklyn Moore, Jr., Maria R. Palacios, Cara Page, Noemi Sohn, Seeley Quest, and Patty Berne.

PLEASE NOTE: This show contains nudity and explicit content. It is appropriate for ages 18 and up.

Friday and Saturday, September 5 6, 2008
8:00 PM
Brava Theater (2789-24th Street, San Francisco)

$10-$15 sliding scale (no one turned away for lack of funds).
BOX OFFICE: brownpapertickets.com or at the door
PUBLIC INFORMATION: (510) 689-7198 or sinsinvalid.org

SINS INVALID: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility is a groundbreaking performance event that celebrates the sacred nature of fierce desire and claims all bodies as beautiful. Co-founded by Patty Berne and Leroy Moore in 2006, SINS INVALID is the only event of its kind in the United States. It has inspired audiences and redefined the conversation about sexuality and disability.

On September 5 and 6, SINS INVALID returns to Brava Theater with a radical showcase of erotic spoken word, song, performance and aerial dance. This year, seven provocative artists from California to Georgia will take center stage to confront misperceptions and to strip taboos off of sexuality and disability. Their poetic bodies and hot activism combine for a powerful, fearless, and sensitive evening of theater.

Rodney Bell, a Maori male dancer from New Zealand, performs aerial dance in his wheelchair in celebration of the body. Maria Palacios, a Latina poet, performs her acclaimed spoken word piece about forbidden love (Maria, Full of Sin) and also transforms herself from crippled girl into a goddess (in Testimony). These pieces, along with original works by Patty Berne of Oakland, Noemi Sohn, Seeley Quest, and Nomy Lamm are simultaneously erotic, tender, and fierce.

SINS INVALID was founded in 2006 by Patty Berne and Leroy Moore, both Bay Area activists with disabilities. Berne and Moore were frustrated with the dominant view that people with disabilities must be asexual or deviant. And, as Berne says, they wanted to address the disconnect between what we know to be true about our beauty and what the world seems to believe that we are less than, undesirable and pitiable. Berne and Moore formed a partnership with The Dancing Tree, a non-profit alliance of visual and performing artists seeking to facilitate, develop, perform, document and publish the stories of underrepresented people around the world, and launched a revolutionary series. Each year SINS INVALID is met with tremendous acclaim and this ground-breaking, erotic event is performed before sold-out houses.

Event submitted by Eventful.com on behalf of NEQA.