*Contains partial nudity & strobe lighting*
*Contains references to suicide and a handgun*
‘make me cry’ by Tia Ashley Kushniruk 亚女弟 is a solo response to the exhibition dance work ‘make banana cry’ by Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson. Using projection, self interviews and personal movement material, ‘make me cry’ attempts to identify when the fetish starts, and where it ends.
Erin Hayes - Stage Manager
Writer & Co-director - Jake Tkacyzk
Dramaturg - Philip Geller
Lighting Designer - Trent Crosby
Composer - Cole Dorchester
Featured Artists
Tia Ashley Kushniruk 亚女弟 (Edmonton) · Make Me Cry | a practise: Misinterpretation (a performance)
Tia Ashley Kushniruk (亚 女弟) is a Queer Woman of mixed-race heritage from Treaty 6 Territory of Edmonton AB. Straddling sincerity and mockery, her artistic milieu swings wildly from honesty to parody, indelicately proclaiming the hypocrisies of what it really means to be a person living today. Kushniruk’s adaptable artistry is crafted through an encyclopedic lens of current pop-culture, high risk/high reward style theater making, and her dynamically magnetic stage presence and poetic physical vibrancy.
Make me cry is a solo work inspired by/in response to the durational group work ‘make banana cry’ by Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson. An existential exploration into the psyche of our titular artist (tia), the audience is delved into the horror and ambiguity of what it means to be the end result of a fetish versus
participating in one, and the minstrelsy that accompanies BIPOC artists creating ‘valuable’ work for the consuming public.