Sins Invalid is a performance project, a show and a group of artists who I guarantee will show you something you haven’t seen about sex, about gender, about race, and about yourself. The project was conceived and is led by disabled people of color, and the work (which is shown in annual performances and workshops mostly in the Bay area) explores sexuality, embodiment, and the disabled body.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m non-disabled, this has nothing to do with me,” think again. It’s hard to explain but as someone who is currently non-disabled and spends most of my time thinking about sex, I can tell you that the most practical and profound stuff I’ve learned about sexuality I learned from Disability. You may not get it at first, but Sins Invalid is as much about you as it is about anyone.
The truth is that when it comes to sexuality we are more the same than we are different. As deeply ingrained in our psyches as it is, the idea of sexual differences (based on what you look like, who you lust after or love, who you sex with) is a distortion of actual experience. It’s a convenient way to keep some of us feeling powerful and right, but we all lose in the end.
By offering something so honest and direct about their sexual selves, the performers who make up Sins Invalid open up the opportunity to briefly remove the distorted view we have of sex, gender, race, the body, beauty, and pleasure.
The best part of the site for me was delving into the video archives of performances. The opening to the 2008 show with Rodney Bell and seeley quest (with, I think, the voice of artistic director Patty Berne) was an awesome mix of uncertainty and sexy, fear and desire. I’m still trying to figure out all the different things I feel about Cara Page and Leroy Moore’s performance. And any opportunity to hear Nomy Lamm’s songs – always a mixture of sad and funny, delicate and raunchy - is a treat.
The promise of the site is “an unashamed claim to beauty in the face of invisibility” and having only been through about a quarter of the site I can say they deliver on it big time.
Check it out – Sins Invalid Online
Photo of Cara Page courtesy of Richard Downing.