CANCELED: Shroman Shmoliday

Overview

This show has been canceled.

Shroman Shmoliday, written and performed by Willie Filkowski, is a new solo performance composed of autobiographical storytelling, poetry, dance/movement, pop music, heavy-handed fictionalization, and low-budget spectacle. Shroman Shmoliday excavates Filkowski’s personal affinity for Robert Rauschenberg as a fellow artist, queer person, and Southwest Floridian, while also offering a queer fever dream that attempts to correct the record. Shroman Shmoliday offers a poetic and fictionalized rom-com that reinvents the (real) trip that Rauschenberg took with friend & lover Cy Twombly in 1952, a trip that art history largely records as a “formative,” if platonic, time in the artists’ lives. Shroman Shmoliday aims to create a vision of the smutty, gay, romantic trip that Filkowski hopes and wishes it was, drawing inspiration from the film Roman Holiday, which, coincidentally, Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn were in town filming at the same time as Twombly and Rauschenberg’s trip.

About the Artist

Willie Filkowski (he/him) is a theater artist, teacher, quiltmaker, and professional waitress based in Brooklyn, NY. Willie received a BFA in Interarts Performance from the University of Michigan. He writes plays & solo performances that veer between literary & camp, poetic & plainspoken, irreverent & sincere. His works inhabit familiar worlds that easily slip into the surreal with frequent interventions of razzle-dazzle choreo, low-budget spectacle, pop music, smut, and poetry. He has worked as an accomplice/collaborator to Holly Hughes, Deke Weaver, Tina Satter/Half Straddle, Robert Wilson/The Watermill Center, Brita Thorne, Gabrielle DeCaro, Corey Smith, Nola Sporn Smith. 

Credits