THIS IS WHAT I WANT festival is hosting an Unconference on pleasure, lineage and sustainability. Join us in this peer led space to collectively explore vital ideas about our various practices and activities through conversation, embodied enquiry and performative experiments. This unconference is a site of cross pollination between artists, activists and sexuality professionals, where we can dive deeply into issues pleasure, lineage and sustainability in our practices.

THIS IS WHAT I WANT is working thematically with ‘the line between private and public’ in 2016. Here is what is current for us. Whatever you want or need to talk about is welcome.

1) Pleasure: What does our practice look like if it is pleasure informed? What is the aesthetic experience of watching someone express desire if they expect to get what they want? Or not? How can our pleasure be relevant beyond our immediate private practices, on the broader stage? How does the erotic fuel our every day lives, and can cross fertilization of our bodies of knowledge contribute to sustainability in our practices?

2) Lineage: How do we honor both our chosen and inherited ancestors in our creative practices?  Is there a dichotomy between the potency of drawing from a rootedness  - spiritual line/race/culture-making/  and the new creations? What is authenticity in creativity? Can you track where those impulses which form our identities and performance inspirations come from?  How do we honor both our chosen and inherited ancestors without cultural appropriation? (considering Japanese rope bondage, yoga, body modifications, tantra, butoh, etc) 

3) How do pleasure and lineage sustain us? Can pleasure shift us from victim or martyr into something more creative and sustainable that energizes change? How are taboo desires such as age play, the Master/slave dynamic, and gender transcendance reframed as sites of resistance or empowerment? How do we contribute to a culture of shame resilience?

Saturday, June 11 & Sunday, June 12,  10am - 5 pm both days

Lunch will be provided at 1 pm both days and there are cafes nearby.

The Chapel, Fort Mason Center for The Arts

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Or reserve a NOTAFLOF (noone turned away for lack of funds) ticket here

Fort Mason. Pretty once you get there, but far away. We are putting on a bus service to get your ass to the shows. Not just a normal bus service, but a magical bus service with Baruch Porras Hernandez reading you age appropriate stories. Meet at 24th and Mission BART station at 5:30PM.

Purchase a ticket for the bus and admission to both Tessa Wills's Hermit Project and Crystal Mason's There Is No Other will be included. 

The bus will leave from 24th and Mission at 5:30 on Friday night and will feature entertainment by the ever delightful Baruch Porras Hernandez from Radar. Plus when you get there, while you wait for entry to Masons' piece, you can grab dinner at the food trucks.

Magical Bus Ride

Meet 24th and Mission at 5:30PM 

Friday the 10th of June

Buy Tickets

Or if you would like to reserve a NOTAFLOF ticket, let us know here

Piece by piece we dream ourselves into being, hoping someone will see our magic making, terrified someone one will see our power. Using self revelation, personal artifacts and a call to respond, There Is No Other seeks to create an intimate connection with the audience and to create a dream space where even a fat, black queer can ask for love and care. There Is No Other is a performance/ installation and site specific piece looking at what it means to claim multiple troubled identities in a world that seems to fear the other these days more and more despite more media attention.

Crystal Mason is a youngest child. Genderqueer. Social, and works for art and art making. Crystal Mason is a mover of emotions and thought. A happy pervert longing for justice. A black person who can not hide, so I assert my right to be seen. Art maker, arts administrator, videographer and editor.

'There Is No Other Fractured And Complete Tell Me Something True'

Studio 308, Building A Fort Mason Center for The Arts

8pm-10pm

Buy Tickets June 9th

Buy Tickets June 10th

Please note that only ten people can experience the performance at once. You will be allocated a 20 minute time slot. No latecomers. If you want a NOTAFLOF ticket to this event, let us know here

FRIDAY NIGHT SPECIAL: We put on  a ride for you from the Mission! The bus will leave from 24th and Mission at 5:30 on Friday night and will feature entertainment by the ever delightful Baruch Porras Hernandez from Radar. You can catch Wills' culmination of The Hermit Project, Plus you can grab dinner at the food trucks before Masons' show. Tickets for that here FRIDAY NIGHT SPECIAL

The Hermit Project is a three year project culminating at 'THIS IS WHAT I WANT 2016: the line between private and public'. This interactive piece by artistic director Tessa Wills invites you to discover what you would do with some privacy. In our connected world, does spending time alone fertilize your relationship with solitude? Can solitude fertilize your connections to others? How are you faring in a culture that worships the individual yet fears alienation? The Hermit Project offers individuals space for anything from a moment of respite to a deep reflection and private performance by constructing a simple space for audiences to be alone in the gallery,  or watch the ornamental hermit: a solitary person who sets off the landscape. Experience your own aesthetic of genuine constructive aloneness through this unique art theatre experience by internationally acclaimed solo experimental artist Tessa Wills. Choreographic coaching by Sara Shelton Mann.

Tessa Wills creates experiments in live performance which activate individuals and subcultural communities. Leveraging the distance provided by theatre as a behaviour form, she excavates moments of humanity for the audience to reflect and connect to. She often integrates eroticism to charge the bodies of work which happen primarily on stage and video. Wills is also the artistic director and producer of THIS IS WHAT I WANT festival. www.tessawills.com

The Hermit Project

Studio 308 Building A Fort Mason Center for The Arts

Performance installation 10-7:30PM Tuesday 7th until Friday the 10th of june. FREE

Culo Love Portraits will be a an opportunity for willing participants to have their precious bare asses immortalized by posing live for a mixed media portrait. The intimacy of baring one’s ass for documentation, even if for a short period of time can be a playful, confessional and fruitfully vulnerable space I enjoy creating, inviting the public into and creating within for the sake of honoring that all too often contested site. Show me your beautiful, gorgeous, culitos, asses, booties and pompis.

As a daughter of Cuban exiles born and raised in the transience capital that is Miami, the inheritance of exile experience has been and still is at the root of my desire to play with and manipulate notions of displacement through the body. Using performance, video and installation, I create intimate environments where language, parody, fiction, contradiction and nostalgia are all ingredients to addressing the complexities of framing identity. www.cristinavictor.com @who_is_cristina_victor

'Culo Love Portraits'

The Chapel, Fort Mason Center for The Arts

Sunday the 12th of June

10AM - 5PM

Tickets

Stephens & Sprinkle will bring their sparkly blue Pollination Pod-- a multi-purpose camper designed to spread ecosex art, theories, practices and activism. It will be parked outside by the Bay. Audience members will be invited to savor some water, get a watery divination, and learn more about ecosexuality.

Visit with the Ecosexuals FREE from Midday Sunday the 12th of June, Fort Mason Center carpark

THIS IS WHAT I WANT hosts the water toast engagement party for John Sims' The Wedding: A Civil Union.

The performance will explore the complexity and synthesis of desire born out of conflict, and nurtured by water.  Water - a force of life, truth, cleansing and forgiveness. 

The Wedding: A Civil Union, performance of two soldiers: one Confederate and one Union set to be staged and live streamed from a secret location in the Bay Area in time for the Juneteenth celebration - the weekend of June 19th. This second presentation will be invite only. 

But THIS IS WHAT I WANT invites you to the open engagement party to engage with the project

John Sims, a multi-media artist has been working on the 15 year project, Recoloration Proclamation which features hanging the Confederate flag in Gettysburg in 2004, and organizing a 13-state burial of Confederate flag on Memorial Day 2015, a play, a documentary film and the AfroDixieRemixes--13 black music versions of the song "Dixie."  

AfroDixieRemixes will also be a part of the TIWIW unconference happening the same weekend.

The Water Toast is a collaboration between Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and John Sims

This event will be at the Pollination Pod, FREE, Sunday the 12th of June. Fort Mason Carpark.