HOT! Festival and New Museum Presents bring you an evening of confession, digression, and song, featuring Joseph Keckler and Max Steele. 

Drawing on his signature blend of vocal acrobatics, funny, trenchant language, and uncanny characterizations, Featured Creatures is a new multimedia cycle by monologist/singer Joseph Keckler in which he evokes stories of adolescent transformation, the vengeance and longing of an incompetent receptionist, and an imagined encounter with a biological hybrid hiding out in Brooklyn.  Joined by violinist Dan Bartfield, Keckler heightens the everyday to the level of operatic.

Max Steele's Lover, Ferocious follows our hero Billy, a queer youth counselor who gossips about his new boyfriend Scott Panther to his young charges, who don't believe him. In a world populated by sexy beasts and runaway babies, our young lover investigates the possibility of a real connection, using the bisected rainbows of memory and his words to light the way.

Joseph Keckler is a singer, monologist, and interdisciplinary artist. His solo play with music, Human Jukebox, became a big hit with audiences and critics alike at both its recent Dublin Fringe premiere and subsequent run at La MaMa ETC. He has been presented at such venues as HERE, Performance Studies International, SF MOMA, Spiegelworld, and The Stone, and has been featured on NPR and The Sundance Channel. Keckler has appeared in various traditional and experimental operas and plays and enjoyed the privilege of collaborating with artists such as John Moran, Holly Hughes, Erin Markey, Jeff Mangum, Dan Fishback, and others. Keckler holds a BFA in painting from The University of Michigan and trained operatically under George Shirley. He throws a monthly performance and art salon "Inner Beauty Parlor" at Envoy Gallery. New York Press writes, “Keckler commands the stage with erotic bravado, launches into dramatic monologues and embodies so many different personae that you wonder whether he’s possessed by spirits or if his body cannot help but channel all the of voices in his head.”

Max Steele is a performer and writer. He has presented work at Galapagos Art Space, Rapture Café, Deitch Projects Long Island City, Envoy Gallery, and Dixon Place's 2008 HOT! Festival. He writes the experimental porno zine Scorcher, is a contributor to East Village Boys, and has had his writing featured in HX Magazine, Fag School, Birdsong, and at New York's PPOW Gallery. He included in Interview magazine’s 2009 "art issue,” and his nightclub performances have earned him the title “Go-Go boy of the Damned.”

Launched in 1991 as an initiative of Dixon Place, HOT! Festival (July 1-August 1) is a pioneering festival of queer performance and culture. In fact, it’s the longest running festival of its kind. 2009 sees a dynamic expansion of the festival with the new, state-of-the-art Dixon Place theater complex at the heart of five weeks of performance, literary events, and humanities programming. Dixon Place is located at 161A Christie St. (between Rivington and Delancey).

Banner image: Left: Max Steele by Ves Pitts; Right: Joseph Keckler by Adam Gardiner