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Performances · Exhibition-Related

The Dyke Division of the Two-Headed Calf: Room For Cream

Cover Image:

Photo: Andrea Geyer

The underground hit Room for Cream is back! Reuniting with new special guests, The Dyke Division of the Two-Headed Calf stages Season 4 of Room for Cream, a live performance serial that ran for three seasons from 2008 to 2010. This subversive soap opera situates itself in the fictional Sappho, MA, a lesbian enclave and life experiment that is paradoxically both separatist and inclusive by nature of its world-building aspirations. Sappho is home to a wild, sweet, and perverse collection of queers of diverse ages, gender expressions, and politics. Thinking through a communal modality—in practice and representation—The Dyke Division stages contemporary queer discourse in the vernacular of “soap,” simultaneously embracing and critiquing what constitutes popular culture in our current moment. The project aims to hold and represent the mess that ensues when a group of folks elect to consciously live against the monolith of patriarchy, sometimes in competing forms of vigilance.

The first twenty-four episodes of Room for Cream were performed over three seasons at La Mama’s Experimental Theater Club in downtown Manhattan; Season 4 moves to the New Museum for “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.” Because each episode is developed quickly—as a response to the previous show as well as to current politics—and involves actors and non-actors alike, the room is charged with unpredictability and the delight of knowing that, at any given moment, anything is possible and everyone in the room is part of it. For “Trigger,” three new episodes will continue the tradition of Room for Cream, while public rehearsals activate the Museum’s galleries and public spaces. Documentation of the original three seasons will be featured on video monitors in Liz Collins’s installation Cave of Secrets (2017).

November 11 and December 9 are currently at capacity, but a standby list will begin at 11 a.m. the day of the events. Sign-up for the standby list will be in person only, and we will admit as many people as capacity allows.

Need to refresh your memory on Sappho’s steamy past? Check out all the past episodes of Room for Cream on The Dyke Division’s YouTube channel! Scripts for missing episodes in season 2 can be found here.

The Dyke Division of the Two-Headed Calf was founded by Jess Barbagallo, Laura Berlin Stinger, Laryssa Husiak, and Brooke O’Harra in 2008. Other members are Sacha Yanow and Barbara Lanciers. The full-time four-season cast also includes Becca Blackwell, Mieke D, Rosemary Quinn, and Amber Valentine. Additional cast for performances at the New Museum include (in order of appearance) Donna Barkman, Simone Davis, Greg Mehrten, Esco Jouléy, Cecilia Maria Gentili, Leonie Bell, Frances Doefeen, Jibz Cameron, Brian Liem, Aden Hakimi, Zavé Martohardjono, Max Pendergast, Nick Auer, and Alice Hayes.

Sponsors

Exhibition-related programs are made possible, in part, through the support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.


Generous endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund; and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.

This project is supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant to The Dyke Division of the Two-Headed Calf.

Full support for “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” can be viewed here.

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