Reviving the Legacy of Queer Ancestors with Seth Eisen

The Queer Spirit

Seth Eisen is a San Francisco-based artist, writer, director, dramaturg, archivist, and educator who engages LGBTQIA+ history as a living, breathing dialogue by researching lost legacies. His transdisciplinary aesthetic combines physical theater, dance, ritual, puppetry, drag, circus, installation, and video art. Blurring the edge between art, research, and activism, the work is a hybrid of visual art and immersive live theater. For 25 years Seth has staged performance pieces, original plays, street spectacles and installations and has curated and appeared in numerous collaborative projects created with other Bay Area artists.

In 2007, he founded the ensemble-based theater company Eye Zen Presents that unearths and elevates the lost and hidden histories of queer ancestors so that we can better understand our lineages and ourselves. The company’s mission is to share queer cultural legacies with the general public and provides space for our local QTBIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities to gather and be in creative relationship with each other. Eye Zen creates multidisciplinary community-building events in traditional and alternative theater spaces, private homes, gardens, schools and community centers. Eye Zen’s most recent multi-year project OUT of Site, is a series of performance-driven queer history tours make the connection between the people and the sites where histories took place, bringing them to life in immersive, educational, and entertaining events around San Francisco. FabLab queer history program provides community members opportunities to learn queer history while developing creative interdisciplinary projects specifically focused on queer ancestors of color.

Episode Highlights

• Seth shares his path of creativity through his youth to becoming a performer and producer.
• We talk about why he began focusing his work on queer ancestors and how he brings these histories alive in the present day.
• We explore Seth’s simultaneous connection with spirit and his creative work, beginning in childhood.
• Seth talks about the art of puppetry and his work through that medium.
• He shares about the experience of caring for his brother, who passed from cancer, and how it transformed and inspired his life & work.
• We discuss the power of place when bringing queer history alive, in particular queer BIPOC ancestors

Web links

• Find Seth online at www.eyezen.org
• And follow him on Instagram & Facebook

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