Pure artist - AM Allcott

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AM Allcott

AM Allcott

A.M. Allcott is a writer, actor, and queer performance artist whose works have been produced around the U.S. and in Canada. His work crosses ordinary language, theoretical discourse, poetry and theatre to create a form of story-telling that is at once sexy, funny, and intellectually provocative. He did theatre for 10 years in Buffalo, NY, where he was Associate Artistic Director of the New Phoenix Theatre and on the Board of the Buffalo Ensemble Theatre. He won acclaim for directing and producing both works with broad mainstream appeal and for avant garde audiences. A Western New York Writer-in-Residence for the Just Buffalo Literary Center, he earned his Ph.D. at SUNY Buffalo with concentrations in queer theory and modernist literature.

His new show Theolimou: my dear little god will be premiered in the PureBackspace on May 18th and 19th.

"Theolimou: my dear little god" is an elegiac meditation against the conservative cultural hegemony in the western mountain deserts of the U.S. At once deeply personal and deeply political-it is Allcott’s mourning work for an Aunt who witnessed and inspired his life. "Theolimou" is also a fierce cry against the presumption that his homeland-a small town in Utah’s west desert-is proper and property only to white Mormons.

Reminiscent of the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, "Theolimou" tells the story of Allcott’s Greek-immigrant family-his mother and her seven sisters, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in small-town Utah. In particular, he performatively moves to embody, through narrative conjuring, photographic images and a series of costumes, his late Aunt Shea, who dressed and lived as a man in that small town from the time she turned 15 in 1938.

In Greek, "Theolimou" is the diminutive form of the word for "God." The performance plays on the grammatical irony of that term, as it plays through the rich minor language of Allcott's Mediterranean American heritage. The drama and interest of the piece is in the audience’s discovering the ways this family of language crosses his queer adult body.

Allcott is currently a member of the Honors Faculty at the University of Utah where he is also an administrator in international education. He is producing queer performance artists in Salt Lake City, and is the founder of ABCD aboycandream productions which is providing theatre for gay and lesbian audiences in Utah.

"Theolimou: my dear little god" has adult content and some nudity.