In January of 2013, alumni of the Sex Workers‘ Art Show Tour will be meeting up for a weekend in (where else) Las Vegas. 20-25 SWAS performers and road crew will be attending from all over the country. We will be catching up, sharing current projects, and discussing the future of the SWAS. This campaign is to help cover airfare, and to make the reunion more accessible to more people. I’m hoping if you’ve ever seen and loved the SWAS, or if you feel inspired or positively affected by it, you’ll be down for kicking in a few $ to help us reconverge. It’s been such a meaningful experience to those of us who were in it, and we are so deeply looking forward to the opportunity to reconnect with each other.
I imagine if you’ve been led to this page, you already know what the Sex Workers’ Art Show is. If not, check out Chris Kraus' account of her time on tour here: http://www.realitysandwich.com/sex_workers_art_showor here's a bit more info:
The Sex Workers' Art Show was a cabaret-style show featuring visual and performance art created by people who worked in the sex industry. It was created by Annie Oakley in Olympia, Washington, first as a one-off annual event and then growing into a nationally touring show. The SWAS did 6 national tours from 2002-2008, and a mini-tour in 2009. Each tour included 10 performers from all over the world.
The Sex Workers' Art Show brought audiences a blend of spoken word, music, drag, burlesque, and multimedia performance art. The performances offered a wide range of perspectives on sex work, from celebration of prostitutes' rights and sex-positivity to views from the darker sides of the industry. The show included people from all areas of the sex industry: strippers, prostitutes, dommes, film stars, phone sex operators, internet models, etc. It moved sex work dialogue beyond "positive" and "negative" into a fuller articulation of the complicated ways sex workers experience their jobs and their lives. From Annie Oakley’s debate with Laura Ingraham on The O’Reilly Factor, to being a plaintiff in 2 free speech lawsuits against state governments, the SWAS was an active part of a national dialogue on sex worker issues You can read more and see the lineup for the last tour on the website: www.sexworkersartshow.com
As the show’s founder, I can tell you that while the goal was about „educating“ the audience and asserting the right of sex workers to be considered fully human, an equally important result of the show was that it created a space for the performers to meet and be inspired by each other. Basically, the tours were a sex worker sleepover camp on wheels- 10 performers and 2 road staff in 2 vans for 5 weeks. The sex industry can be extremely isolating. Even if you have the sort of job where you do have co-workers, rules and mores at strip clubs, for example, are often set up to foster competition and divisiveness. And it’s frequently a job you can’t share with many people in your life. So to get a chance to hang out with a group of smart, talented, creative sex workers was (to use the words of the people who went on the tour) empowering, inspiring, and life-changing. The all-too-rare experience of getting to be surrounded by people who can relate to the physical and emotional stresses and triumphs of an unmentionable line of work.
It’s now been almost 4 years since the last tour. Many of us are still in touch. People who met on tour have gone on to write movies together, work on performances together, even live together. Sex Workers Art Show alumni have won grants, published books, opened bakeries, won Lambda awards, staged plays, received masters degrees, started magazines, opened schools, had children, so much. And now, we want to have a reunion! We want the chance to see each other again, to be reinspired, to hatch new plots! We want to continue the community building that was fostered by the original tours. Thank you so much for your support.
