Femenine is a place of listening and action, of discovery and beginning, a point of solitude and euphoria. A queer, unhinged space, a microcosm created for and by the ‘organic’ music of Julius Eastman, in which musical phrases live within other phrases, multiple layers that ebb and flow with the passage of time, between passages and transitions, in an accumulation that provokes stun, frustration and grace. A landscape of the scene that slowly lives and populates thanks to a total dependence on Eastman’s musical composition, which regulates the laws of the scene and at the same time gives freedom of exploration and construction. A gradual knowledge of the other as a discovery of the self, a radically queer process, in which intimacy and death, AIDS and illness, transfiguration and joy of the erotic, memory, fiction and the real, solitude and its disappearance are organically revealed.

This work stems from a very specific need, the desire for a direct confrontation with the legacy, both historical and artistic, of the expressions of that generation affected by the advent of AIDS, a long sequence of names that have recounted their queer stature and their position in the world, only to disappear. To create a scenic work for them that could connote a farewell, a symphonic ritual of farewell that finds in Eastman’s score a meeting place for new discoveries, of being and stage presence, of forms and bodies, approaching, through moments of pure intensity, a musical expression that has the sole purpose of satisfying the listener’s ear, nothing more. Besides, Eastman himself said on Femenine: the end sounds like angels opening the gates of heaven… should we say euphoria?