12/12/2025
Enjoy some clips from Melissa Charles' performance at this fall's National Q***r Arts Festival's Emerging Artists Showcase. Melissa was part of our Creating Q***r Communities artists development program and crafted this original piece to share with the community.
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Some more about the piece from the artist:
Centering around themes of her debut collection, love poems about no one, Melissa will be presenting an embodied political meditation and reflection on r/evoltionary love, aiming to invite the audience into her internal monologue and understanding of what it looks like to love and how it feels to be in love — where love is, in fact, enough. the audience will be invited to engage as active participants and learners in their own understandings of love, r/evolution and anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist/anti-colonial violence in a performance that is meant to activate, inspire and highlight the contradictions of life which we all maneuver. they will experience poetic sounds, somatic/meditative practices and political education.
For those who are engaged (or wanting to engage) as activists and organizers, she is hoping to uplift the message that in these spaces of material r/evolution and militant organizing, it is valuable to be able to lean into our softness, imagination and the parts of ourselves that may be tender and a little idealistic…that parts that some may deem naive or unrealistic. and in those parts, also hopes to inspire folks to also find that the love which anchors them can also serve as a catalyst for material change and tangible dismantlings of the oppressive forces which have shaped the society we exist in on a day to day for much longer than we should be willing to tolerate without moving into some kind of bold and meaningful action.
