Heavenly Brown Body | Revry

Director: Leslie Foster

Heavenly Brown Body, originally conceived and displayed as a four-channel art installation, uses the poem “Litanies to my Heavenly Brown Body” by poet Mark Aguhar (she/her) as the text for a queer liturgy. The poem, which subverts--or perhaps highlights the inherent subversion of--biblical texts, builds the framework of a piece featuring all trans and non-binary performers of color. In crafting Heavenly Brown Body, director Leslie Foster (he/him), producer Jessi Knippel (she/her), and cinematographer Avery Holliday (they/them)—employed religious iconography and the tropes found in fashion and perfume commercials in the hopes of not only making visible but celebrating the people and bodies that heteronormative culture fears, marginalizes, and hides from view. The project, which features Rawiyah Tariq (they/them), Jade Phoenix (she/her), and Tas Al-Ghul (they/she) as mysterious seers who use the words of the poem as the liturgy for their ritual of cleansing and healing, was first exhibited as an installation at