🌝 📽️ 🎞️The Ancestral Circuit and You 📞 🔌 🌛

What a summer of ancestor revelry it’s been, with many rich conversations with people thinking about, making, and reading Ancestral Performance Art. Here’s some especially provocative exchanges:

I always thought it would be funny if once I die, I get buried under a fruit tree so my great-great-grandkids can say, 'Let’s make jam out of grandpa.' Maybe one of those weird trees where you graft a gazillion different fruits and it makes crazy hybrids. Like a fruit salad tree.

–Workshop Participant’s response to the question, What is your ancestral performance art?

I’ve started my own ancestral healing process, and I still have a lot of rage-masking-grief to metabolize. Your book bumped me ahead several notches.

–Joan Gold, Marriage and Family Therapist

I read your book almost immediately and couldn’t put it down. Your lack of fear in remaining vulnerable is inspiring and a model for moving ahead.

–Maryanne de Prophetis, Musician

I’ve also been developing and performing ancestral work. In August, my friend Sammy Burhoe and I co-hosted in New Hampshire The Ancestral Circuit, an evening of drag and performance that connects us to our queercestors, known and unknown. Now we’re bringing the Ancestral Circuit to Brooklyn!

This special edition of The Ancestral Circuit falls on Kol Nidre, which marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, an important Jewish holiday when we break vows that no longer serve us.

What do you need from your ancestors right now? What are you letting go of that is no longer of service? What do you want to smash? (There’s SOOOO much!) Join us and your queercestors in our vow-breaking revelry!

Tickets are free and need to be reserved in advance.

I will be debuting a new piece where I embody my great aunt Erna, vow smasher and life lover. Queer people's history can often get lost because their stories do not get shared or passed on. They may not have been properly included or added to a family tree, died early, or been closeted. Sometimes we didn’t know them and other times we forget them.

Makeup practice for Erna!

The use of speculation and the imaginary is a powerful and accessible way of tapping into queer ancestral wisdom and connection, for healing and direction setting. In order to write Ancestral Performance Art and to embody my great aunt Erna, I took a leap of faith in trusting my understanding of how I saw reality and the realities of stories I had heard.

I was recently interviewed by Elana Lipkin and Jessie Sander for their podcast Making Mensches (release date TBD). When they asked me for a message to give their listeners, this is what I shared:

Give yourself the contemplative space to put yourself in your own history and arc of your culture and communities, so you can feel part of the lineage of and draw sustenance from our ancestors focused on liberation and positive, expansive ways of being in the world. You are part of something bigger, the whole human project of betterment.

There is a throughline of people who want something different from the conditions they were currently living in and what we’re currently enduring now. The practice of ancestral performance art can help you find ways to tap into past wisdom and help set liberatory direction.

Sending you the sweetest fall wishes,

Alissa