Courtesy Carla Rossi/Pepper Pepper
UPCOMING EVENTS
ARTIST BIO
Anthony Hudson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Siletz) is an artist and writer sometimes better known as Portland's premiere drag clown Carla Rossi, an immortal trickster whose attempts at realness almost always result in fantastic failure. Together they host and program Queer Horror—the only LGBTQ horror film and performance series in the country—at the historic Hollywood Theatre. Anthony has received project support and fellowships from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the NEA, NPN, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, First Peoples Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Community Foundation, USArtists International, Ucross Foundation, Caldera Arts Center, and more; Anthony's performances have been featured at the New York Theatre Workshop, La Mama, PICA's TBA Festival, Portland and Seattle Art Museums, Portland Center Stage, and have toured internationally. Anthony also co-hosts the queer feminist horror podcast Gaylords of Darkness weekly with writer Stacie Ponder. Anthony is currently adapting their award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.
LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY
DESCRIPTION
Looking for Tiger Lily utilizes song, dance, drag, and video to put a queer spin on the ancestral tradition of storytelling. Asking what it means for a queer, mixed Native person to grow up seeing redface and misrepresentation in white normative culture, Anthony recounts watching the 1960 production of “Peter Pan” featuring Sondra Lee’s blonde, blue-eyed “Indian Princess” Tiger Lily. Not just autobiography, and drawing from a songbook stretching across Disney’s “Pocahontas” to Cher’s “Half-Breed," LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY is a coming-of-age story that's more than cowboys versus Indians.. LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY’s 2016 Portland premiere was featured on OPB and individually profiled by the Portland Mercury, Portland Monthly, Willamette Week, the Portland Tribune, and Oregon ArtsWatch. LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY has been featured at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, at the Talking Stick and Vancouver Queer Film Festivals in Vancouver, BC, at the Yirramboi Festival in Melbourne, at the Las Vegas Library District, and at PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, OR. LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY was originally funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and developed in partnership with the 2016 Risk/Reward Festival of New Performance.
Carla Rossi And Pepper Pepper Are
GLOOP
Courtesy of Pepper Pepper and Carla Rossi
DESCRIPTION
GLOOP is a lifestyle. GLOOP is a brand. GLOOP is a modality. GLOOP is Glamorous Ladies of Opulent Persuasion. GLOOP is Carla Rossi and Pepper Pepper—Portland,Oregon’s premier avant-garde drag duo—bringing you a 90-minute, partially improvised drag explosion sending up whiteness and wellness culture. In GLOOP, Carla and Pepper are slated to lead a psychedelic wellness seminar in Sedona until their party bus runs out of gas at [your venue here], where they're left with no choicebut to teach homodalities and hole-istic healing practices — and all before the mushrooms kick in. Tackling art therapy, micro-dosing, land acknowledgments, and demonstrating what it looks like when a drag queen has a meltdown while lipsyncing on an actively-inflating airbed, GLOOP will teach you how to overcome (and monetize) your limiting beliefs through a gauntlet of spectacularly unhinged drag from two of Portland's most beloved grifters.
Queer Horror: Gravest Hits
Photo by Michael Spencer
DESCRIPTION
Queer Horror isn’t just the United States’ only LGBTQ feature-length horror screening series—it started as a short film festival incorporating live drag and burlesque acts in a riotous multimedia program asking what it means to identify with the monster. Queer Horror: Gravest Hits presents the silliest and most ghoulish DIY international horror shorts by, starring, and about queers culled from four years of Queer Horror’s short film nights. Hosted by Portland’s premiere drag clown (and Queer Horror programmer) Carla Rossi and co-starring Portland drag and dance maven Pepper Pepper, Queer Horror: Gravest Hits will leave the audience shook, slain, and screaming for more. Queer Horror: Gravest Hits runs approximately 90 minutes, opens with a live one-act drag skit performed by Carla and Pepper, and features four video-backed drag numbers from the two between the films.
Carla Rossi Does Drag
Photo by Harrison Truong
DESCRIPTION
Get to know Portland’s premier drag clown in Carla Rossi Does Drag! In this hourlong, multimedia-based drag theatre collection, the ghost of white privilege emerges from an apathetic fugue state—after years in lockdown spent watching too much reality television—with a challenge to get up off the floor and finally do drag. Featuring song,monologue, too many wigs, and interactive “Rossivision” scenography with sequences celebrating and lampooning Chicago, Celine Dion, Hoarders, drag queen storytime, Cher, and more, Carla Rossi Does Drag is a brand new theatrical experience that is equal parts greatest hits collection and video cabaret, all decked out in the signature surreality of the Carlaverse.
Clown Down 2:Clown Out of Water
Photo by Tojo Adrianarivo
DESCRIPTION
Clown Down 2: Clown Out of Water finds Portland’s premiere drag clown, Carla Rossi, trapped on a rock in the middle of the ocean while the sea level rises from melting ice caps. Alone with a seagull afflicted with IBS, Carla encounters the world’s last surviving polar bear, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a death metal moon, and Liberace and Liza Minnelli (David Saffert and Jillian Snow Harris) in this multimedia drag farce that utilizes puppetry by Matthew Leavitt, interactive video, death metal by Jacob Summers, and kinetic sculpture by David Eckard—all as Carla navigates climate disaster and the terror and joy of living on an increasingly distressed planet.