Along with viewing excerpts from the film, Rawls will join The American LGBTQ+ Museum’s Chief of Programs, Suhaly Bautista, in conversation about the new project and inspiration he draws from queer history. Following the short screening and conversation, Will has invited past BOFFO Festival Artist Jesus Hilario-Reyes (MORENXXX) to DJ poolside at 601 Tuna Walk, a beautiful bay front home. We invite the community to join us in celebration of this new work in progress. Doors open at 2pm, the screening and conversation will take place between 2:30 – 3pm, followed by MORENXXX’s DJ set until 6pm.

I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night is a short horror film that channels queer, intergenerational tensions into a story of illness, aging, desire and soured utopia. Rawls spent a week with a small film crew and seven performers, shooting across Fire Island’s many landscapes and interiors. The goal was to re-imagine the island as an eerie and seemingly deserted place where a lone, elderly man seeks medical supplies to cure his advancing illness. Featuring Ishmael Houston-Jones in the lead role, the man’s search is interrupted by the realization that he is being stalked by a band of wayward, young men. Inspired by the DIY fantasies of the Cockettes and Houston-Jones himself, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, brings these queer genealogies to bear on our anxious era of apocalyptic delirium, ultimately asking, what can we receive from each other before destroying each other out of fear?

Will Rawls is an artist and choreographer whose multidisciplinary practice explores the ambiguities of Blackness—its visibility and erasure, its performance and abstraction—to reframe the relationship between language and the body. In 2016, he co-curated Lost and Found, a six-week program of performances and artist projects at Danspace Project focused on the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS on dancers, women, and people of color. Based in New York and Los Angeles, he is Associate Professor of Choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles and lectures widely in academic and community contexts. In addition, his work has been exhibited across the U.S., including at The Kitchen, New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; 35th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; The Chocolate Factory Theater, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven.

Image Credit: Ishmael Houston-Jones by Will Rawls