Roxanne! The powerful catalyst of change

Roxanne is performing on the 16, 17 and 18th of December in Bar Bario, the new bar for the community of color and queer community in Amsterdam! Help the LGBTQIA+ community by making a small donation.

Igor Alvarez Cugat and Rae Elstak are bringing members from the LGBTQIA+ community together to create a performance about identity, love and emancipation.

Imagine your personal identity, as a thought experiment. What is your nationality? Where were you born? What is your sexuality? Your gender? What is your race? Your ethnicity? What is your job? Your religion? What other beliefs, roles, identity markers are important to you?

We believe that progress has been made towards acceptance of trans and gender non-conforming performers in the theater industry. Yet challenges remain, particularly giving them the chance to tell and show their struggles and reality. Which as a result its much realistic and interesting for our new times.

We are bringing six performers from different disciplines together, we will help them create, explore and develop their own story. We will create as a result Roxanne, a performance about emancipation and the myths we tell ourselves about love and identity.

All the support we will receive will be used to create the scenography, costumes and to pay the performers!

About the performance

Society by design wants clear answers to these questions. The gender you are assigned at birth can shape your entire life as society projects on you limitations of interests, jobs, and even personality traits. Your nationality too, is thought to be a stable part of your identity as if you cannot lose affiliation with your country of birth.

Life proves to be much more complex than the clear-cut and balanced world that Western society tries to enforce. You can be gender non-binary or agender, bisexual or pansexual or asexual, mixed race, agnostic, a jack-of-all-trades. These identities occupy an in-between, as it relates to societal norms, and that in-betweenness can be felt when individuals with such identities try to find community.

In reality, those that occupy the in-between are more likely to feel like an Other. Mental health and suicide statistics are often deeply connected to these identities. Philosophers and sociologists like Foucault and Derrida have looked at how those with identities that don’t fit into the boxes of society form identities around their otherness and can even believe that they are in the wrong. Queer theorists and intersectional feminists have sought since at least the 1980s to repair the harm of society on certain identities and move towards a certain liberation. Small victories have been won in terms of representation and acceptance in greater society, but much of the change has still yet to happen.

Roxanne is a character that occupies the in-between in every form possible. They are the embodiment of this idea. They are bound and limited in her movement, and they are covered in walls. This piece is meant to explore the in-between, and also try to repair the damage that has been done.

We work for a world where all people can enjoy their identities fully.

Written by Jordan Scott Hardesty