mouf//full (2024) — Multidisciplinary Artist

mouf//full

On February 2-4 of 2024, OYSTERKNIFE mounted one of our most ambitious projects yet: a site-specific production titled mouf//full, performed inside Grace Cathedral, a historic Episcopal church in downtown San Francisco. This work revisited themes initiated during our developmental production of mouth//full, which debuted at the 2019 Performing Diaspora Artist Residency, as the second part of our mouth triptych.

Presented in partnership with CounterPulse and Grace Cathedral, OYSTERKNIFE took over the entire church, creating an immersive, multimedia performance that led audiences through the basement, outdoors, and into all three interior chapels. With the pews removed for their Spacious Grace arts festival, OYSTERKNIFE had free rein over the entire space, incorporating the Cathedral itself, as well as the main altar, pipe organ, and historic murals as supporting characters.

Working with a large team of collaborators - including the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, drag house fabricators House of Perception, and Rev. Marvin K. White - we once again interrogated the role of the Church in our personal lineages and its influences across (queer) Afro-Diasporic cultures, this time at scale. We asked: how has the Church been both balm and barrier? Where can we find a similar divinity in secular spaces: in the club, inside our bodies, through song, by gathering, and within our quotidian lives? mouf//full combined dance-theater, ritual masquerade, song, poetry, projections, live music and video to explore how Black cultures have transformed the Church into a uniquely syncretic cultural space. We even installed a “godhome” set piece inspired by Igbo mbari temples as a physical intervention in the Cathedral space. This participatory performance embodied the ways Black people made the Church reflect our own images by preserving African traditions and transmuting a colonial ideology into one of radical liberation, spiritual catharsis, and creative spectacle. Despite the obvious flaws and cracks in the Church’s violent foundations, mouf//full ultimately sought to create a different kind of Mas(s) that welcomed and celebrated all peoples, while centering a queer Blackness that births expansive new worlds we can thrive and believe in.

In the months preceding our performance, we presented a series of free workshops called “BlaQ Benedictions,” intended to bring our Black queer communities into our creative process. For these sessions, we invited Black, majority queer mentors and peers to present workshops on truth-telling & revolution, embodied emancipatory movement, Black rapture, and sermonics/free writing for liberation. These artists were chosen based on their connections to themes explored in mouf//full, and because they each inspired or mentored OYSTERKNIFE in some way. The 4 workshops were led by dancer & conjure artist amara tabor smith, preacher & poet Rev. Marvin K. White, theater artist Rhodessa Jones, and ritual artist brontë velez.

In addition to OYSTERKNIFE as co-directors & co-lead performers of mouf//full, we also worked with the following folks as our cast and crew: