Post:Ballet presents
Lavender Country
April 25-27, 2019 at Z Space
Back by popular demand, Post: revives this poignant, fun, and one-of-a-kind dance performance, concert, and storytelling experience set to the world's first openly gay country music album. Performed live by Patrick Haggerty with his Lavender Country band, the Post: dance artists bring Patrick's stories and legacy to life with choreography by Vanessa Thiessen and direction by Robert Dekkers.
This production is a moving celebration of love, individuality, and interdependence featuring the raw and vulnerable music of Lavender Country. Released in 1973, the self-titled album represented fearlessness and generated outrage as country music’s first openly gay album. Post:Ballet’s evening-length work reflects on Haggerty’s radically defiant message as Dekkers and Thiessen use ballet’s inherently traditional gender roles as a dramatic tension against queer characters and narratives.
“…come out, my dears
To Lavender Country
You all come out and make yourselves at home
It don’t matter here
Who you love or what you wear”
Haggerty’s music uses “Lavender Country” as a metaphorical landscape, a safe place where people can come to be their true selves. The work focuses on human stories, heightened by characters who love, search, and bleed in ways that are painfully visible specifically because of their unchosen differentness. Post: and Haggerty hope that audience members, regardless of orientation, will connect with Lavender Country as vulnerable, sexual, and innately human beings.
Audience members are invited to participate in the event’s costume theme, Dress West to Impress!
Photos by Natalia Perez
