Grown Woman Show premiere in Montreal, Friday January 11th.  Benefit for St.
Emelie Skillshare
*** PLEASE forward and spread the word!*****

Grown Woman Show
a one woman show by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
January 11, 2008
doors 7:30, show at 8 PM (EARLY SHOW!)
Main Hall
5390 St-Laurent
Montreal, QC
pay what you can – $5-skies the limit, no one turned away
A benefit for the St. Emelie Skillshare and Heart and Hands Sense Project
ONE NIGHT ONLY@!@!@!@!
For more information: brownstargirl@riseup.net

Supported by Queer Concordia, SASU, the Simone de Beauvoir Institute,
and a whole lot of other folks.

Written and performed by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Sound and image design by Jo SiMalaya
Costume design by Zavisha of HeartAttack Clothing

Grown Woman Show is a fearless, sexy and powerful one-woman show about
being a long-term incest survivor and a femme of color making love, family
and heartbreak within queer and trans of color communities. Using
storytelling, spoken word, ritual and movement, Leah traces one year in
her life as she leaves her long-term white partner and returns to finding
love and trouble in a series of new lovers of colour – while
simultaneously attempting to reconnect with the family she hasn’t talked
to in a decade.

Part stand up, part theatre, part mix of performance poetry, storytelling
and ritual, Grown Woman Show is a re-membering of the fierceness of queer
and trans people of colour’s ways of loving, with a focus on issues
between femmes and butches and transmen of colour searching for that
magic love fuck family connection in an insane universe. In the tradition
of of Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know For Sure and Anna
Camilleri’s I Am A Red Dress, Grown Woman Show asks: What do we do with
what we’ve survived once we’re grown?

Grown Woman Show is an opportunity for healing through shared story and a
documentation of the complicated realities of one brown femme survivor’s
life, told with compassion and honesty.

What people are saying about Grown Woman Show:

“Beautiful and inspiring. I love the fact that we can break the chains
that tie us to our ancestors and begin doing different things. Thank you.”

“Thank you for sharing this. I think this performance may have changed my
life- literally, I’m not exaggerating.”

“So powerful, I feel like our ancestors felt it.”

About the Artist:

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken word
artist, arts educator and cultural worker. The author of Consensual
Genocide, she has performed her work widely across North America,
including performances at the University of Winnipeg, McGill University,
Swarthmore College, Yale University, Oberlin College, Sarah Lawrence
College, University of Southern California, and at Femme 2006, Bar 13,
Gendercrash, The Loft, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the RADAR Reading
Series. Her writing about queer and young women of color activism has been
widely anthologized, appearing in Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race,
Place and Time, We Don’t Need Another Wave, BitchFest, Colonize This!,
With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, Without a Net, Dangerous Families,
Brazen Femme, Femme, and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World. For the
past ten years she has worked as a counsellor and organizer around sexual
assault and domestic violence, as a feminist crisis line worker, LGBT
youth worker and member of INCITE Women of Color Against Violence.

>From 2003-2007 she produced Toronto’s acclaimed Browngirlworld queer/trans
of color spoken word series. With Maria Cristina Rangel,
Piepzna-Samarasinha is the co-founder and co-Artistic Director of Mangos
With Chili, an annual touring cabaret of queer and trans people of color
artists. She has taught writing, spoken word and performance to LGBT youth
for six years through Supporting Our Youth Toronto’s Pink Ink program,
winning a 2004 Community Service to Youth City of Toronto Award and Best
Zine of Toronto in 2005. In 2005 she co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts
Freedom School, a writing, activism and radical Asian history program for
Asian/Pacific Islander youth.

Recently relocated to Oakland, California, after running away from America
for a deace, she is completing her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills
College and finishing her second book, Dirty River, a memoir of coming of
age as a young queer brown survivor in mid 90s anarchist, queerpunk and
women of color movements. She is a collaborator on The Revolution Starts
At Home, a zine and online resource about partner abuse in activist
communities.

About St. Emelie Skillshare:

Who we are:
The Ste. Emilie SkillShare is a group of artists and activists, primarily
people of colour and queer people, committed to promoting artistic
expression and self-representation in our communities. We are building and
running an art studio for people to learn new skills, share their skills,
and create art in the spirit of revolution and anti-oppression
(anti-racism/sexism/classism/ homophobia/
transphobia/ableism/sizeism/etc). Long live skill-sharing!

For more information or to get involved, contact:
mtlskillshare@gmail.com or leave a message at 514-933-2573.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
www.brownstargirl.com
www.myspace.com/leahlakshmi
www.myspace.com/mangoswithchili