NEVE flows bads so good you don’t even know. This invisible theorist sings language-motion-healing as far as the Nile is close. Together, we’ll get heavy to float on water older than our ancestors—who are here too. NEVE’s art is an invitation to pray this sway and here, drawn open, comes a solo cabaret.

Lover of Low Creatures is a new take on musical and dance theatre, a solo cabaret, and a spiritual ritual take on coming of age and sexual healing. Snow is a mixed race (Sudanese Nubian and Scottish American), physically disabled girl growing up in a forest on a river near a town. Snow and her mother are scientists, artists, and witches in tune with each other and the natural world. But underneath the flow of their routine, is an entity, or entities, very ancient, and very much alive, following Snow, that she is afraid to face, most of all because she has reason to believe her fate is intricately tied to it, in a way her mother’s is not. A dramatic lens on elementary school revelations, a darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it, Lover of Low Creatures is much like the Nile it references – an ocean posing as a river, a river that feels like the sea.

Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco, or NEVE, is a Black (specifically Sudanese, even more specifically Nubian) punk disabled queer fairy beast. A certified personal trainer and integrated dance teacher – Neve cares about the welfare and equitable access to joy, sensuality, community, self-expression, and liberation of all bodies. Especially animals. Neve received multiple film and theatre directing awards in 2017, from East Bay Express in Oakland, the Toronto International Porn Festival, and from the Seattle Gender Justice League. In spring 2018, Neve joined the artistic board of directors of PlayThey Studios, a media and event production cooperative company of queer/trans/Black/disabled and otherwise marginalized artists building celebratory spaces in Seattle.

Credits

Created by and Starring: NEVE

Directed by: Sara Porkalob

Co-Produced by: Velocity Dance Center, Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco, and PlayThey Studios

Sponsored by: The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture

Second in the Big River, Not the Sea Trilogy by Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco

Full length version premiered May 9-12 2019 at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle

There is photography, video and audio documentation of this performance, available below.

There are two versions of the video. The first video is captioned in English, and the second video features live audio description recorded at the performance. Both versions feature live American Sign Language interpretation.

All documentation is released under Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND).