You are invited to a reading of Daphne's Game a specially commissioned text by Dodie Bellamy and read by local performance artist Autumn Knight, on September 13th atShe Works Flexible.
Dodie Bellamy writes genre-bending works that focus on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. Her methods include radical feminist revisions of canonical works, as in Cunt-Ups (2002) and its follow-up Cunt Norton (2013), which appropriate the “cut-up” technique made famous by William Burroughs; and The Letters of Mina Harker (2004), an epistolary collaboration with the late Sam D’Allesandro, which reimagines Bram Stoker’s Dracula in an AIDS-plagued San Francisco. In her 2004 book Pink Steam, Bellamy explains, “I’m working toward a writing that subverts sexual bragging, a writing that champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the sexually fucked-up.”
As an active member of San Francisco’s avant-garde literary scene for the past thirty years, Bellamy is often associated with the New Narrative movement. Before moving to San Francisco in the late seventies, she grew up in the Calumet region of Indiana, studied at Indiana University, and joined a New Age cult. That experience informs her newest book, The TV Sutras, which Norman Fisher has described as “part porno, part memoir (maybe), part spiritual teaching (probably not), [and] part fiction.” Her reflections on the Occupy Oakland movement, “The Beating of Our Hearts,” was published as a chapbook in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Autumn Knight is a Houston-based interdisciplinary artist. Knight’s performance and installation work has been in group exhibitions at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum and Artpace. Knight recently completed residencies with In-Situ (UK), Galveston Artist Residency, Millay Colony for the Arts, YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan) and Artpace (San Antonio, TX.) Autumn received her B.A. from Dillard University and M.A. from New York University (New York, NY). She works collectively with many other artists - specifically with long time performance collaborator Dr. Denise Frazier staging site-specific works.Knight is also one half ofMF Problem, a social practice collective with partner, Robert Pruitt. Knight holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy, from New York University (New York, NY) and a B.A. in Theatre Arts/Speech Communications from Dillard University (New Orleans, LA). She has studied Arts Management & Marketing at (Birkbeck College, London, UK) and Speech & Drama with the (Central School of London (London, UK).