Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency
Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens
Los Angeles Premiere
- Price
- $20 + $2 Convenience Fee*
- Genre
- Film
- DATE
- SEP 26
- TIME
- SAT, 8 PM
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 90 minutes
- COUNTRY
- USA
* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & CalArts faculty and staff
Join the conversation in the REDCAT LOUNGE
About
Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is a documentary by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that imagines the Earth as a lover. When lightning ignites the redwood forest surrounding their home in Boulder Creek, longtime partners Beth and Annie are forced to evacuate and their lives are forever transformed. Blending loss with art, humor, and community care, the film interweaves stories from formerly incarcerated firefighters, an Indigenous scholar, neighbors, a fire tassel twirling burlesque dancer, and a witch therapist. Drawing from Stephens and Sprinkle’s interdisciplinary, sex-positive practice, the film also features performances including a fire stunt by the artist Cassils, a volcanic fire-play massage with sex educator Barbara Carrellas, and an impassioned ritual by performance poet Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Born from the ashes of California’s devastating wildfires, Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is a creative and urgent call to action that illustrates how climate catastrophe intersects with social justice, and portrays the power of queer resilience in the face of a world in flames.
The screening will be preceded by an Ecosex 101 Primer, a performative introduction by Sprinkle and Stephens to the Ecosexual movement, which they describe as an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, post-human, materialist, and steeped in humor. A post-screening conversation with the filmmakers will be moderated by Amelia Jones.
Please note: Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency contains flashing lights, nudity and loud sounds.
A sex-positive, deeply loving approach to the myriad issues facing our planet.
—
Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine
Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency was developed in support of The Guggenheim Foundation, Robertson Family Foundation, UCSC Arts Research Institute, San Francisco Arts Commission, The Fleishhacker Foundation, California Arts Council, Palimpsest Foundation and Grants for the Arts.
about the artists
Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle have created multimedia art projects about love, sex, and queer ecologies together since 2002. Sprinkle was a sex worker who morphed into a feminist performance artist. Since 1994, Stephens has been a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz. They co-direct the nonprofit E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF and together make printed matter, write books, and have gallery exhibitions. They also create performance art, do walking rituals, and produce eco-activist symposiums. Their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press) chronicles their epic love story and adventures in art/life. Their new feature film, Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, is the third film in a trilogy that explores environmental issues through an ecosexual lens.
Amelia Jones is a curator and influential scholar of contemporary art and performance based in Los Angeles. She is the Robert A. Day Professor of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, where her research focuses on feminist and queer art history, performance and body art, identity politics, and visual culture. Jones is widely recognized for reshaping the field of art history by foregrounding the work of women, LGBTQ+, and other historically marginalized artists. She is the author or editor of numerous influential books, including Body Art/Performing the Subject, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Seeing Differently, and In Between Subjects. Her scholarship has had a profound international impact on contemporary art history, performance studies, and feminist and queer theory.
Cover Photo: Barbara Carrellas.
