2024 Out-FRONT! Festival – Joey Kipp with Pioneers Go East Collective

The LGBT Community Center, Theatre 301

Joey Kipp’s Tracing Lorraine is a theatrical performance and sharing of Kipp’s connection with the Black queer playwright Lorraine Hansberry and her ghost, pulling forth the common thread of personal memory and erasure. Through a trilogy of works by Hansberry, Kipp imagines her humanistic vision for a contemporary audience. Rooted in an early pandemic video work by Kipp based on Hansberry’s play What Use Are Flowers?, Tracing Lorraine deepens his research into the author’s life and work with the addition of two more plays, The Drinking Gourd and Les Blancs. The theme of erasure to rebuilding prevails not only in the plays’ narratives, but also in Hansberry’s and Kipp’s personal histories, separated by over 60 years, in confronting the loss of their identities within normative society and their respective creative/cultural communities.

Conceived, choreographed, and performed by Joey Kipp. Co-choreographed by Symara Johnson. Dramaturgy by Chloe O. Davis. The project was developed in collaboration with Pioneers Go East Collective’s artists Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte(creative director), Jo Wiegandt (assistant director/producer), and Philip Treviño (production designer)