As part of the series Queer Cabaret, this fantastic evening of performance will feature lesbian punk folksinger Phranc and art/performance troupe My Barbarian.

For more than 25 years, Phranc has described herself as “the all-American Jewish lesbian folksinger.” As a visual artist, she has adopted the moniker “The Cardboard Cobbler.” As part of the late-1970s Los Angeles punk scene, she was a member of the bands Nervous Gender and Catholic Discipline. And in 2001, the film Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc’s Adventure in Plastic documented a year in her life as a musical Tupperware lady. Both her music and her visual work employ humor to raise consciousness, trigger response, stimulate memories and provoke discussion. Phranc received the 2007 C.O.L.A. Fellowship, and she is currently writing songs about Los Angeles.

Founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade, My Barbarian is a Los Angeles–based performance troupe that creates rock operas, folk plays, theatrical situations and music videos. With a nod to the radical theater of the 1960s, the camp musicals of the 1970s, the rock videos of the 1980s and the performance art of the 1990s, My Barbarian confronts the monoculture with a commitment to “majorly serious fun.” The group’s work has been featured at the Performa ’05 Biennial in New York, the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art and the 2007 Montreal Biennial, among many other venues. At USC, My Barbarian will present Non-Western, a new “historiographic fantasia about L.A. in the 1840s.”

Organized by Richard Meyer (Art History) and David Román (English and American Studies and Ethnicity). Co-sponsored by the USC Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center.