Tessie Chua The Shame of Disco
Tessie Chua The Shame of Disco
Performance and Video Screening
featuring Animal X
Comedienne and performance luminary Tessie Chua brings her hilarious take on living in the East Village during the late 70s—its grungiest heyday, when sharing your apartment with cockroaches was the norm—in this commentary on culture and the times. There’s mohawks, blazing colored hair, leather and bondage clothes, and Roxy, a very opinionated cockroach with gourmet tastes. No bodega! Yes, Dean & Deluca! Roxy’s been through the Roach Potential Movement and learned meditation at the Dalai Lama’s knee. As part of the post-punk community, Tessie and Roxy both vocalized the movement’s collective hatred for disco.
“I really wasn’t sure why everyone hated disco. Roxy and I liked PIL, but we also liked disco. I’d be mortified when my friend Animal X or two-thirds of Mission of Burma would go through my record collection and see that it contained Donna Summer, and worse yet, Patrick Juvet,” says Chua. The New Wave Vaudeville Show, meth and heroin addicts, Keith Haring, Club 57, CBGB and Danceteria, loser bands, Manic Panic, and John Sex’s apartment all are observed through Roxy’s jaundiced and satiric eye.
The evening will also feature, Android X, a performance by Animal X, the Ultra Punk fashion designer from the 70’s and 80’s in the East Village. Her Shows were known for her wild fashion shows that included punk celebrities, porn stars and other surprises. The performance will feature a film by Marty Abrahams and animation by Marjan Moghadon
Also on view is the short video The Scary Truth About Cockroaches and Landlords which is included in Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983 at the Museum of Modern Art.
Born and raised in San Francisco, California, home to beatniks and hippies, she studied art at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. A teenager during the Summer of Love, she remarks: “People walked down the street happily greeting each other, ‘Have a nice day!’ I moved to New York in 1974, people answered back, ‘Fuck You!’” In New York, she performed with the New Wave Vaudeville Show that put her smack in the middle of the post-punk Community. The show was an opportunity to write her first comedy sketch—In the Name of God—casting herself as a sadistic nun who accidently beats a schoolgirl to death for taking the name of God in vain one too many times. More opportunities followed at Club 57, Mudd Club and other downtown clubs.
In 2015, she started working on an ongoing solo performance about her life in the East Village, spurred in part by meeting young comics who said, “That must have been a romantic era to have lived through.” “Romantic? I would call it gritty,” she says.
Animal X explores the possibilities of a future when we will be ghosts in the machine, our minds downloaded into robots. Featuring a film of her work by Martin Abrams and inspired by her participation in the Club 57 exhibit at the MoMA, and Drawing on her early career, this multimedia performance combines video, puppetry and costume. Animal X is an award-winning performance and multidisciplinary artist whose work spans four decades, including nightclub appearances, Art Gallery installations, theater Productions, NEA fellowship, appearing at wild and crazy music festivals, as well touring the country with her theatrical company “I Believe in Fairies Productions”. Instagram: officialAnimalX, website : Ibelieveincreating.Com
