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Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance

Angelo Madsen

2009 01:12:00 United StatesColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Documentary, Feature Length, Gender, LGBTQ, Music

Description

Representing the complex lives of transgender and gender variant musicians in the US and Canada, Riot Acts offers a first-hand perspective of the intersections between gender performance and stage performance. The featured performers are talented, inspiring, sexy, critical and three-dimensional in a manner that purposefully counters mainstream media. Discussions range from songwriting, performance, voice presentation and voice changes, passing/not passing, audience, to the idea of the spectacle, drag, and media representation - the personal is always political. Interviews weave 16mm film and super8 film, present-day and archival videos, to challenge what we understand as historical or legitimate, as we craft our own history.

The soundtrack is comprised of original music by the interviewees: Anderson Toone, Lipstick Conspiracy, Katastrophe and Trannysaurus Sex (San Francisco), Basic Fix (Portland), Ryder Richardson (Seattle), Tough Tough Skin and Venus Demars (Minneapolis), Adhamh Roland (St. Louis), Ryka Aoki De La Cruz (Los Angeles), Jessica Xavier (Washington, DC), The Shondes and Novice Theory (Brooklyn, NY), The Degenerettes (Baltimore), Systyr Act (Boston), The Cliks (Toronto), and Coyote Grace (Sonoma County, CA).

About Angelo Madsen

Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire.

Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, BAM CinemaFest, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of LGBT and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sundance Film Institute, BAVC Media, New York State Council on the Arts, the Warhol Foundation, LEF Foundation, and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, North By Current (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, North By Current has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, a current USA Artists Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.