people to AIDS, as well as a testament to the beauty and power of the communities who held those losses and fought for justice.
The Secret History of Love reveals the underground ways that trans and queer people managed to find love and community in decades past when it was illegal to gather in public or wear clothing of the “opposite” gender. The show’s sound score includes excerpts from the oral history interviews, including bold declarations of love in the face of great danger for those open queers and trans people in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Before STONEWALL, LGBTQ people could be fired, exposed, beat up or even murdered without any rights, protections or recourse. Lesbians, gays, and trans people could lose their children and their families of origin. Financial and emotional ruin was and still is, especially for trans people, a very real possibility in America.
Dorsey feels strongly that the queer community needs to remember and know the stories of the past. His work attracts intergenerational audiences and opens up the conversation between trans and queer, queer and straight, old and young. That dialogue moves hearts and minds. Every Sean Dorsey Dance performance spills over into the lobby for wine, non-alcoholic beverages and conversations to continue. “I’m always mindful of how my elders and ancestors’ art and activism and struggles made my life possible” Dorsey said.
Fresh Meat Festival, produced by Fresh Meat Productions, is not a low-quality community performing arts program. It’s a professionally staged and well-curated set of performances by diverse artists. Professional ballroom dance champions; original music; spoken word; performance art; comedy; Taiko drumming; all this and more is found at the festival. The eclectic festival, produced annually during Pride month, is ever-changing, with eternally strong production values. Fifteen years after founding Fresh Meat Productions, Dorsey continues to curate and produce the sold-out performances.
In an increasingly gentrified San Francisco, Sean and his partner of fifteen years, fellow transgender activist, musician, and singer-songwriter Shawna Virago, live in the same rent-controlled house Shawna’s lived in for twenty years. “We have a truly lovely, wonderful, kind landlord who’s very generous. He loves us and we love him. That’s a big reason we can be here making work in San Francisco. My work with my dance company, Sean Dorsey Dance, and Fresh Meat Productions allow me to sustain myself as an artist. We are always busy because we operate year-round programs—making new work, the Festival in June, the Sean Dorsey Dance home season in April, the Sean Dorsey Dance year-round national touring, and LGBT-friendly dance and self-expression workshops across the US.”
Sean considers himself foremost a choreographer and dancer—but always an activist. It is that passion that led him to leap onto the stage as an openly transgender modern dancer and choreographer: to make dances, but also to work for justice.
Transgender people still face legally-codified and socially-sanctioned discrimination in the nation and the state’s criminal justice, employment, education, and healthcare systems. Trans people experience a disproportionate percentage of hate crimes and police brutality—90 percent have experienced harassment on the job; 61 percent have experienced physical assault; 64 percent have experienced sexual assault; transgender households are four times more likely to have an annual household income below $10,000 compared to the cisgender population; and 47 percent have been fired for being transgender (National Center for Transgender Equality, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, GLAAD, 2013-15). Added to this, transgender people rarely see affirmative representations of themselves in dance, the performing arts, or the media.
Dorsey’s advice to any transgender person who wants to become a professional dancer is: “GO FOR IT! I want to see transgender dancers feel empowered and beautiful in their bodies and feel that dancing is our birthright. Make sure you’re connected to support during training rehearsals and time spent in the field. As trans people, using our bodies as our primary instrument in a highly-gendered field, hard stuff can come up—either feelings you have about your body or feelings or judgments other people have about your body. There is so much gender-based casting, gendered roles and gendered partnering in dance—this is painful.” Sean encourages everyone to “adopt some kind of self-kindness practice. One thing anyone can do is put a hand over your heart and give yourself positive messages. You can look in the mirror and tell yourself that your body is beautiful. All people, especially trans people and queer people, people from communities of color and people with disabilities have wounded hearts and feelings because we have been given so many negative and hateful messages from other people about our bodies—we can really benefit from a self-kindness practice.”
Brain science now proves that affirmations, whether or not consciously believed, can actually rewire hardwired neural pathways, laying down new tracks in the brain, carving grooves, expanding dendrites and firing synapses, changing brain chemistry and brain circuitry (“Brain Scans Can Help Explain Why Self-Affirmation Works,” Christian Jarrett, New York Magazine, 11/16/15). For trans people who suffer disproportionately from bias, these emerging findings offer hope.
For Sean Dorsey, who lives on more than hope, life is good. At forty-four, in a long-term happy relationship for fifteen years with a transwoman artist, doing work he loves in a city that protects and supports trans people and loves the arts, he has defied the statistics. A professional choreographer and dancer for nearly twenty years, founding director of the nation’s first year-round transgender multidisciplinary arts nonprofit for fifteen years: Sean is ready for the next artistic mountain to climb.
“GO FOR IT! I want to see transgender dancers feel empowered and beautiful in their bodies and feel that dancing is our birthright. Make sure you’re connected to support during training rehearsals and time spent in the field.”
Sean Dorsey
Thea Farhadian: Variations on a Theme
Composer and Professional Violinist, formerly under Conductor Kent Nagano
Co-Founder of the Armenian Film Festival, NYC and San Francisco
When she was a child, she wanted to be a rock star. At age four, she wanted to play the violin because she thought it was a guitar. By age six, Thea Farhadian was taking violin lessons from some of the top music teachers, including Gerard Svazlian, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Trained as a classical violinist, Thea defied her parents’ more practical expectations and became a professional violinist with the Berkeley Symphony under Conductor Kent Nagano, now conductor of the Orchestre Symphonique Montreal. “It was an honor to play under him,” Thea said.
Thea’s parents loved music, but expected that their oldest daughter would pursue something more practical as a career. She realized much later that her parents were children the Depression, which affected their views on the place music should play in one’s life. Though her father was an accomplished violist with a budding talent aborted by a World War II injury, her aunt a classical pianist, curtailed by lack of support, and her grandfather a kanun player, composing in the Armenian style, music was all around her, but never viewed as a viable profession. This made pursuing music in such a singular way a challenge for Thea at times.
If the clock were thirty hours instead of twenty-four, Farhadian would have remained with the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano. She loved the orchestra and the contemporary classical music Nagano brought to the intellectual audiences in Berkeley. However, Thea was called to create, and after ten years as a classical freelancer, she found her composing interest and allied with two San Francisco Bay Area groups, Composers Cafeteria and Ovaryaction. They played and performed one another’s compositions. “I found my own voice through improvising and working with others,” she said.
A third-generation Armenian-American, Thea is the granddaughter of Valentine
