Phoenix City

This event has two performances: October 29 at 7:30PM October 30 at 7:30PM Phoenix City is a collaborative performance by Jimmy Joyner, Mingyong Cheng, and Sean Nguyen-Hilton that draws on Atlanta’s former queer spaces, including the Atlanta Eagle on Ponce, Charlie Brown’s Cabaret, Outwrite Bookstore, and the Ansley Mall movie theater. Connecting these lost sites with Atlanta’s enduring phoenix symbolism, the work explores passing, portals, collective memory, and transformation. Using dance, costume, puppetry, and a body-mapping system created with TouchDesigner, the performers attempt to confuse and move beyond the technology tracking them. By making the body unreadable to systems of capture, Phoenix City asks how queering the body might create new possibilities for passage, connection, and collective safety. At its center is a fundamental question: What is a body?