In the Spirit: Stormer Webber

"Mama Was A Hustler, Nana Was A Warrior & All My Daddies Were Butches" This experimental multidisciplinary performance tells the story of an Indigenous family who found refuge in an old gay bar in Seattle. Through audio, archival photographs, animation, live music and sampling, it captures threads of Urban Native narrative, pre-Stonewall queer history, Black Indigenous stories, and the deep spiritual undercurrents that kept an embattled lesbian mother and her children afloat in the 1960s. Using a form named jazz / poetics by the artist Laiwan, Storme Webber flows between spoken word and a cappella vocals to distill a sovereign journey of a girl growing up in whiskey bars and hustler dens until she leaves home at age eleven. The story's hero, the girl's fearless and beautiful grandmother, gives the girl all that she will need to voyage as a stranger in a strange land. Painting a smoky yet vivid portrait of the noirish lesbiana setting, this work rejects a lens of trauma in its story of endurance, humor and triumph. Reaching past colonialism's erasures and carrying back tales rooted in ancient spirituality and knowledge, Webber weaves together Billie Holiday's languid testimonies, the courage of Alaskan Native women and the inexplicable angels found in shadowy places.