The Lavender Scary Fairy was performance/exhibition by Alexander D’Agostino  meditating on the history of and resistance to the Lavender Scare, a post-Cold War moral panic in the US,where thousands of gay employees were  fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce under homophobic laws and  policies. This sparked ongoing acts of resistance to homophobic and discriminatory  policies that positioned homosexuals and sexual-minorities as threats to national  security. Even today, we see fear based policy and legislative action that echoes the  same scare tactics and nationalist agendas of the Lavender Scare. 

The processional performance began at Transformer Gallery, where I activated a shrine-like installation and became the "Lavender Scary Fairy" before continuing onto Logan Circle, where people would receive lavender blessing from Lavender Scary Fairy.  Performance relics were on display at Transformer the following week of the  performance.

A Grimoire is magical book of spells, often written in code and passed through multiple generations and contributed by multiple authors. My Grimoire, The Book of Sodom, is a large hand-bound book of 90 pages, written in an esoteric alphabet called Theban, or “the witch’s alphabet” so the information can hide in plain sight. It is a collection of queer codes, lexicons, rituals and mythologies harvested through research and embodying queer history.

This Grimoire first appeared when I performed “Queer Curiosity” at the Walters Art Museum in September of 2018, when I asked the audience to rip up pieces of paper and write the names of queer ancestors and spells for queer justice that I would add to the Grimoire. The spells that people wrote were beautiful, sad, honest and empowering. At the core of my practice is a want to enchant people to celebrate and empower their own lives. I want to develop the artistic research methods of gathering queer histories and rituals.

The Glass Closet is an invisible yet real boundary that all Queer people experience on varying levels. My closet is a boundary between the world hetero-hegemony, and my own self-empowering mythologies. I perform on a platform that has two clothing racks on either entrance. They are filled with garments I wear everyday: work uniforms, costumes and props from previous performances, masks, heels, pointe shoes, etc. The performance is a ritual of passing in and out of the closet, allowing the platform to function as a stage to perform movements and gestures exploring notions and politics of my queerness. The garments, objects, and closet ephemera are gathered each time I pass through one rack onto the stage, and hung back on the opposite rack as I walk off the platform. Moving from to ballerina, to yoga-girl, to naked body, to super butch, to super femme, shifting from persona to persona until I have arrived at Glitterwitch, the personification of my queerness at its core. The performance ends when I off the platform and out of the gallery into the "real world." This performance was presented first at Gallery CA, for Lab Bodies Borders/Boundaries/Barricades performance art review.

“The Swan: A Serial Killer Ballet” is an immersive performance following the gruesome musings of a killer who uses Grindr to seduce and kill men in order to create a deranged variation of the “the Dying Swan.” Throughout the ballet I present vignettes of gay sex, blood, ritual, and queer rage.

The audience passes through a wall of caution tape into a dimly lit room with a bed surrounded by campy plastic skulls, real bones, incense, tutus, and plastic taped to the walls. They are immersed in my sinister glittering head space.I invite my first victim into my bed after asking someone from the audience to read a script transcribed from Grindr conversations. Amidst our sexual encounter, I tactfully poison him with a cookie. Once unconscious I cut off his penis. It is my trophy. Following my kills I dance to invoke the swan. The dances are panicked, sloppy, and animalistic. Afterwards I ask men to help me carry his bloody emasculated body to a large wooden altar into a second room. I’m following an old magic trick described in Reginald Scot’s the Discoverie of Witchcraft ,“The Decollation of John Baptiste” I need one victim to be the head, and the other the body. This illusion is my variation of “the Dying Swan.”

I am obsessed with identifying the patriarchy present in each victim in order justify the murders. After a toxic BDSM ritual, I find flaw and homophobia in my second victim. With two emasculated bodies I can create the decollation, an offering for the swan. The whole performance is a ritual to find liberation from the violence of gay men who assimilate to cultural standards of misogyny and homophobia in order to find acceptance and grace in the world. By the end I have murdered two men, cut off their (rubber)dicks, and had asked the audience to adorn my bloody body in clothes pins with feathers.

The satin is ripping off my pointe shoes as the feathered close-pins cling to my bare skin like St. Sebastian’s arrows. Scattered Bourrées atop the altar with my victims deliver “the Decollation of John Baptiste.” Video projections with swans killing swans accompany a ghostly distortion of Camille Saint-Saens “le Cygne.” You can hear blood dripping from the altar onto a giant paper mache swan head. Bloodied and triumphant I am transformed into that ethereal being: The Swan.

Ritual is everyday. Sometimes, the most powerful rituals happen over a long period of time, with no clear beginning, middle and end. As part of CHASAMA summer performance series, WITCH BONES was presented at the 266 West 37th Street location in New York City from July 24-July 30th. WITCH BONES was an ongoing ritual of magic, dance, and movement research. Working with artists Noelle Tolbert and Porter Witsell, and Li Cata the durational performances function as an archeological dig for new movements, ideas, and performance rituals. On occasion, someone would knock on the door and ask to participate in the rituals. The films extracted from the rituals function as Notes for choreography. I can rebuild and understand the content that emerged from each ritual. Witch-Bones was performance laboratory for all of us to discover and uncover tools and ideas to carry into larger more refined dances and rituals and intentions.

“Persephone/Tiffany” was a durational performance exploring the power dynamic between Hades and Persephone as part of *Over/Under Limbo Lab* a performance art event curated by Baltimore performance laboratory, *LABBODIES*. Persephone’s banishment to Hades was retold as violent argument between the two over an elegant dinner. The feast itself consisted of animal organs and a pig's head enshrined in flowers, beads, cutlery, bones  and other magical objects. *Thesmophoria* was an ancient Greek festival honoring of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. A ritual of the ceremony involved burying a sacrificial pig into the earth by night and unburying the decaying remains of the pig sacrificed the previous year to commemorate Persephone’s banishment to Hades. The rituals were exclusive and secretive. I saw the exclusive and mysterious nature of this ritual as one of the first examples of a Queer Safe Space. “Persephone/Tiffany” was the Thesmophoric ritual obfuscated into performance art. The audience witnessed me moving from one side of the diner table to the other, climbing over the enshrined pig’s head shifting personas from Hades to Persephone. Hades emerged as a strict, virile male energy in a black suit.  Persephone was more wild and androgynous, performing vulgar erotic gestures wearing nothing but (at times) a faux-fur coat. I began the ritual performing the dining etiquette described in *Tiffany's Table Manners for Teenagers*. Blindfolded, grabbing forks to pantomime eat an elegant meal the gestures would trigger a trance like state that would allow me to transform back-and-fourth from Hades to Persephone. Persephone’s role was to destroy social expectation rules of the body. Interacting erotically with the pig head, and catching the gaze of people in the space, I became the protest and outrage of Persephone. Hades intention was to subdue the outbursts and dominate the wild Persephone. The dinner battle between two characters allowed me to embody the tension and pain of Persephone’s circumstance, and Hades oppressive demands. Although Hades wins in the end, the residue of the ritual can resonate far beyond the initial performance. Its empowers me, the audience, and the pig with a sense of confidence and regarding the critique and protest of social norms.