karaokeography: WE dance YOU sing
Collaborator: Kristen Stake, Holly Taylor, Jennifer Dignan and Scott McPheeters
Five performers will create, rehearse and perform movement-based performance pieces to 45 minutes of well-known karaoke songs. Videos (with lyrics) will be projected with music, except the vocal tracks are missing. The audience is tasked with singing the words karaoke-style, using provided microphones and projected text. The show will explore queerness through a contemporary/postmodern narrative: instead of concrete story, the piece is intended to evoke an emotional, intellectual and visceral responses through relationships, movement, transitions, costumes, props and other elements. Performers will provide the missing visuals to a popular pastime, while community singers will add the missing vocals. Together they create evenings where performers and audience members joyously amplify the ethos of karaoke: mess, aliveness, community and “just going for it.” Events will take place at both social bars and performance spaces where the artists live and work.
Artist bio
Janoah Bailin (ze/zir), aka "Janoah the Jester," learned unicycling in the empty after-hour corridors of zir middle school. As a teenager, ze traveled New England with the award-winning Circus Smirkus Big Top. Janoah is Assistant Director for the Gym Dandies Children’s Circus of Scarborough (ME), as well as coach for the Children's Circus of Middletown (CT). In 2019 ze toured "SpinS" – a full-length solo circus-puppetry performance – across the Canadian Fringe circuit, from Montreal to Vancouver, winning "Best Variety" in London Ontario. That year Janoah premiered "meSSeS," a second full-length solo – in which the audience learns to juggle during the show – with funding from the Maine Arts Commission (MAC) and New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA). "meSSeS" has toured from Halifax to San Diego, winning "Spirit of the Fringe" at the 2022 Elgin Fringe and "Pick of the Kids Fringe" at the 2023 Orlando Fringe. Accompanied by keyboardist Kafari, Janoah debuted a third show ("rOng") in the Spring of 2023 with funding from MAC and the Puffin Foundation, and a fourth ("CHRONIC PAin au chocolat") at the Philly Fringe in 2025. Janoah received the 2020 MAC Fellowship in the Performing Arts, as well as NEFA's Public Art Learning Fund 2022. Janoah is an amateur dancer, studying contemporary movement through Casco Bay Movers, the Living Room and Bates Dance Festival (ME), Lion's Jaw and SCDT (MA), the Field Center (VT), Fresh Festival (CA). Ze has also danced for Maine choreographers Kelsie Steil and Laura K. Nicoll.
Image caption: “Zombie Karaoke-ography” Still from video by Janoah Bailin of dancers Jennifer Dignan, Kristen Stake and Scott McPheeters rehearsing choreography by Janoah Bailin, 2025.