SEASON 37 | April 2025
Body Politics
april 23 - 27, 2025
by Shasparay
Directed by Mark H.
Wednesday - Friday 8:00pm
Saturday 4:00pm and 8:00pm
Sunday 6:00pm
The VORTEX presents the regional premiere of BODY POLITICS by Shasparay. This show is a personal revelation of award-winning Shasparay’s experiences as a fat woman navigating issues of shame, bullying, health, love, and fetishization in a fatphobic world. Using an interdisciplinary approach including comedy, poetry, dance, and theater, BODY POLITICS speaks to the nuanced nature of the so-called "fat experience". For Shasparay, this journey has been funny, deep, sexy, disappointing, and beautiful, and it could not be told using just one form of creative expression. Previously performed in the Midwest and Canada, Shasparay is excited to bring her show to her hometown. The audience is invited to bring their authentic selves and discover empathy, awareness, and shared experience through the lens of BODY POLITICS.
Mark H., the director of BODY POLITICS describes the show as –
“ a Bag Lady…in the Erykah Badu sense. A woman alone in the public gaze unpacking, sifting through and confronting her baggage; a woman spilling, exposing and reconfiguring (repacking?) its contents in preparation for the journey.
Towards self-acceptance.
Towards healing.”
About the Artist:
Shasparay (she/they) is a multi-hyphenate performing artist born and raised in Austin, TX. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of the annual Black Arts Matter Festival and is the 2024 Austin Poetry Slam Grandslam Champion. She was also the 2022 4th Ranked Woman Slam Poet in the World (W.OW.P.S). Shasparay completed a Master's in Arts Administration at the Wisconsin School of Business Bolz Center and holds a B.S. in Theatre from UW-Madison. She was a recipient of the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Full Tuition Scholarship, a speaker at the 2016 TEDxYouth Austin conference, and is a National NAACP ACT-SO Gold Medalist. Shasparay has been a finalist in national and regional slam competitions such as Women of the World Poetry Slam, Stone Wall International Poetry Slam, Southern Fried Poetry Slam, Texas Grand Slam, and is a two-time Lip Stick Wars Poetry Slam Champion. She has been featured on platforms such as the New York Times, Button Poetry, Huffington Post, Youth Speaks, and Buzzfeed. Lastly, she is an AudioVerse award-winning cast member of the highly acclaimed horror anthology podcast Old Gods of Appalachia.
About the Director:
Mark H. is a director, performer, and scholar with a primary focus on physical theaters, and American and African diasporic performance. As a multidisciplinary artist, his portfolio of professional work ranges from the classical to the postmodern, from text-based to body-centric, and has been performed in spaces both traditional and unconventional. He approaches performance as a rite/right, as an art, and as a vital technology for sight, development, liberation and healing. Mark’s artistic research is concerned with retrieving, preserving and expanding African American cultural heritage, and in developing a unique and personal African American aesthetic by “remixing” ideas and practices borrowed from his various cultural lineages. Thus, he creates experiences where elements of the African, the European and the American mingle in harmonies and tensions that reflect the inherent complexity of African American existence. He is particularly interested in how these interactions play out in immersive, site-specific and participatory performance contexts.
