BOFFO Fire Island Performance Festival, August 10 - 12, 2018, is a weekend of performance, music, and dance made for the island’s unique social and geographic context. In keeping with BOFFO’s mission of supporting experimental art and fostering dynamic social environments, we have invited a stimulating constellation of artists to produce new and adapted works, presented throughout The Pines, for the island’s diverse public. Some participating artists are new to Fire Island, others have spent extensive time there. In commissioning them to present works in the festival, BOFFO affirms its commitment to engage and enrich the cultural scene of the island.
2018 marks the 4th annual BOFFO Fire Island Festival and the 7th season of the BOFFO Fire Island Residency. Since 2012, BOFFO has supported over 100 artists on Fire Island infiltrating the community with a vibrant creative spirit. Reflecting upon our time in The Pines, the intention of this year's performance festival is to contextualize our work within the history of arts on Fire Island. Fire island has a rich history of the arts, with figures like Andy Warhol, PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French), Frank O'Hara, Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Thek, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney, Truman Capote, AA Bronson, Edmund White, and many others spending time there. The artists in this year's festival will expand upon their work by reflecting upon the legacy of these great artists and others.
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. He has read at the Poetry Project, Kampnagel, and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, and performed at Artists Space, Knockdown Center, and Queer Abstract. He is a 2017-2018 Queer|Art Fellow with Mentor Che Gossett.
Amelia Bande is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer from Chile. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Storm King Arts Center, Tang Museum, MoMA Library, MIX NYC, Abrons Arts Center, and more. She has been an artist in residence at WORM Filmwerkplaats, The Shandaken Project and Yaddo. She is co-editor of Critical Correspondence, an online publication of Movement Research. Her chapbook The Clothes We Wear was published by Belladonna in 2017.
Savannah Knoop is a New York-based artist who incites strategies of permission through writing, performance, and object-making. In 2001, Savannah Knoop founded the clothing line Tinc, which ran until 2009, with creative partner Parachati Pattajotti. From 2009-2016 they co-hosted the monthly queer audio-visual party WOAHMONE. They received their BA at at CunyBa under the mentorship of Vito Acconci, and their MFA at Virginia Common Wealth University in Sculpture+ Extended Media. They have shown and performed at the Whitney, the ICA Philly, Sculpture Center, Movement Research, VCU, Alfred University, Yale, CAVEDetroit, and ACP in Los Angeles. In 2007, they published the memoir titled "Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy" (Amy Scholder, Seven Stories Press) cataloguing their experiences of playing their sister in law's writing persona and avatar JT Leroy. In 2018 it was made into the major motion picture "Jeremiah Terminator Leroy" co-written, and co-executive produced by Savannah and director Justin Kelly, starring Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern.
