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To order: ==== Check (and add!) me on Myspace to get updates on my ==== Upcoming Performances:
This is your very special invitation to the premiere of: Grown Woman Show a one-woman show by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Written and performed by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Supported by the Ontario Arts Council and Good For Her Come see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s debut one woman show about queer of color love, magic, family and heartbreak, calling up your dad after being estranged from your family for a decade, and being a long-term incest survivor who finally gets to be grown. Grown Woman Show uses storytelling, ritual, spoken word and visual installation to tell fearless true stories about the inside of our brave, broken-open hearts, the families we come from and the ones we create as queer girl of color survivors, searching for that magic love fuck family connection in an insane universe. GWS encompasses a lot of my work’s lifelong obsessions: being a long-term survivor of incest from my white mother, being a brown high femme diva who loves and partners with butches and transmen of color, the intense love and intense drama and pain within queer and trans of color communities. At the core, it’s a performance about the families we make and we come from. As we live inside the damage of colonialism, racism and abuse – but are also both more and stronger than what happens to us - what choices do we make when we are grown? When we get beyond the crazy and make it stop, what stories do we tell? What does reconciliation and healing mean and look like, for real, within QTPOC communitiies? This performance is a prayer to my ancestors, family and communities that I've been working on for the past year and a half. Please come out and share it with me. Peace with justice,
Mangos With Chili queer people of color roadshow touring the Northeast - March 31-April 9! FEATURING: The blurb: Mangos With Chili: the floating cabaret of queer and trans people of color bliss, dreams sweat, sweets and nightmares, is two weeks of history-making, ass-shaking performance by 9 queer and trans of color artists working in spoken word, theater, drag, dance and burlesque. Our work celebrates our lives, stories and survival, the histories we are making and the legacies we are creating for future generations of queer and trans people of color. The backstory: Inspired by similar traveling roadshows like the Tranny Roadshow and Sister Spit, in 2006 sister femme vixen writers and performance artists Maria Cristina Rangel and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha decided to start a similar tour featuring the most brilliant queer and trans artists of color they knew, using their experience creating events in Toronto, Boston, New York and the West Coast. Telling stories of survival, sex, dreams, magic, color, and trans, femme and genderqueer identities reaching from Sri Lanka to Aztlan to Morocco to the Philippines to the Caribbean to Brooklyn to migrant small town Washington state, Mangos With Chili is a groundbreaking performance cabaret, taking This Bridge Called My Back into the 21st century. For more information, downloadable press pics and flyers: To arrange a media interview, please contact Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha, co-Artistic Director at (416) 533-2697 (until March
30), (347) 721-7250 (after March 30), Maria Cristina Rangel at
413-218-0464, or mangos.with.chili@gmail.com PHILADELPHIA: NEW YORK: NORTHAMPTON: PROVIDENCE: BOSTON: MONTREAL: TORONTO: OBERLIN, OH
Unheard Voices: A
Sri Lankan women's night of poetry, music and theatre - THURSDAY APRIL 19, 2007. THURSDAY APRIL 19, 7pm 7pm @ TWB This unforgettable evening of poetry, theatre and music presented by the Canadian Sri Lankan Women's Action Network features the extraordinary Sathya Thillainathan, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others. (TBA) Plus a report back about Sri Lankan women's organizing and how the renewed
civil war in Sri Lanka affects women.
are you an Asian/Pacific Islander youth ages 14-29 in the G.T.A? why freedom school? Because you’re sick of being asked “Where’re you from? No, where are you really from?” Because Asian is not just butter chicken, Lucy Liu, the Mandarin buffet, being obscure one day and trendy the next, quiet and well-behaved or being stopped every time you go to the airport or cross a border. Because you’re sick of being profiled and harassed by the cops. Because feeling inauthentic is okay. The Asian Arts Freedom School is a writing/performance and radical Asian history and activism program for Asian/Pacific Islander youth in the Greater Toronto Area. We had our first session this summer and were met with incredible success, to the point of overflow crowds. After a break, we're back, and will be starting up our next cycle on Tuesday, March 6, 2007. Freedom School is taking place at the Kapisanan Philippine Arts Centre 167 Augusta Ave in Kensington Market. Kapisanan is just north of Dundas, in between Spadina and Bathurst. We meet from 6:00-8:00 every Tuesday night starting Mar 6. Workshops are a mix of writing and spoken word dance, film, music and theatre exercises, rad guest artists, radical API history and activist skills. we end each 12 week cycle by creating a zine and a performance night. All workshops are FREE, and we’ll have good food and free tokens! To us Asian= West Asian (a.k.a. Arab or Middle-Eastern), Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, Central Asian... mixed-race, adoptee, suburban, hood... just got here or been here since the 1800s. Asian stretches from the Philippines to Palestine, North China to Sri Lanka, Trinidad to Tibet, and all of it ends up in Toronto. If you’re interested, have questions, or want to pre-register, please get in touch with the two lead artists: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Gein Wong at asianartsfreedomschool@gmail.com. We are also up at www.myspace.com/asianartsfreedomschool. Download the PDF here. Because you want to be able to tell your family’s stories. Because you don't know your family's stories. Because you want to be able to tell your own story. Because we're the only ones who can tell our stories. Because we are the ones we've been waiting for. === New work: I've got pieces forthcoming in We Don't Need Another Wave, a young women and feminism anthology edited by Melody Berger, and Homelands: Women's Journies Across Race, Time and Place , edited by Jenesha de Rivera and Patty Tumong. Both are forthcoming from Seal Press this fall, an independent feminist press that produces consistently great work. www.sealpress.com. I also have a piece in BitchFest: BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural
My piece, “A letter to my cousin, the genius,” is going to be in the second issue of RifRag ( www.riffrag.org ) Look for me performing, “Restorative Justice,” on the upcoming benefit CD for No One Is Illegal Toronto, launching this fall. For more information: http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/ My review of d'bi young's Art on
Black is up on rabble.ca. You can see it at
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My book is out! See below for info and tour dates
