The National Endowment for the Arts earmarked $35,000 for an all-queer and trans dance group called “Fresh Meat Productions” to support a tour of their work and “related community engagement activities,” according to a list of grants published by the agency.
Sean Dorsey, a biological female who identifies as a man and was called “America’s first acclaimed transgender modern dance choreographer” by the San Francisco Bay Times, leads the NEA-funded performance company. The NEA’s grant database describes the dancing it funds as work that “imagines transgender and queer futures through contemporary dance, grand-scale costuming that will double as set and visual elements and physical theater.”
Dorsey praised Fresh Meat’s government-funded dancing, saying that “dreaming is a political act” and “inviting us all to dream at a time when transgender communities are living in a state of emergency is powerful: we cannot forge the change we want without dreaming of it first,” according to the Bay Times. (RELATED: US State Department Funded Film Fest Depicting Incest And Pedophilic Content)
Dorsey felt the name “Fresh Meat” was “so saucy” when it was coined in 2002, saying that the group “wanted to center trans artists, center BIPOC queer/trans artistry, and do it gorgeously,” according to an interview published by Dancers Group.
The dancing itself features people of ambiguous gender performing modern interpretive dance in low lighting. Dorsey described it as “sumptuous” and “sensual” when speaking to the Bay Times.
Guests at a Sept. 29 performance where Fresh Meat is scheduled to perform will be required to wear masks, according to the Bay Times. People who don’t have masks will have a K95 mask provided to them by the theater.
While on tour, the group also “commissioned four brilliant trans, Indigenous Two-Spirit, and non-binary visual artists to create an original piece of art inspired by the themes” of the performance, according to the Bay Times. One of the artists Fresh Meat tapped goes by the name “Art Twink,” and another goes by “liminal hymn.”
A “twink” is “a gay man who is young, slim, and looks like a boy,” according to the Cambridge Dictionary.
This isn’t the first time Fresh Meat Productions has gotten money from the federal government.
Fresh Meat received $150,000 in COVID-19 relief funds from the NEA, according to the agency’s grant database. Dorsey’s Fresh Meat also got $30,000 to fund “the research and creation phase of Sean Dorsey Dance’s new work The Lost Art of Dreaming,” the performance currently being supported by federal funding, as well as tens of thousands of dollars to fund Fresh Meat’s other LGBT art projects.
During the pandemic, Fresh Meat produced a video featuring a drag queen giving a “fabulous all-levels seated dance class for folks of all ages.” The video was made as part of the group’s “Stay Fresh At Home” pandemic safety campaign.
The NEA and Fresh Meat did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
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