BOFFO PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL FIRE ISLAND

The 2025 BOFFO Performance Festival Fire Island, Dystopian Ecstasy, brings together ten artists to develop newly commissioned works which will premiere in a multi-site festival in the Fire Island Pines on July 12-13. This will be the 10th annual BOFFO Performance Festival Fire Island, a milestone in BOFFO’s mission to amplify intersectional queer and BIPOC artists and their community on Fire Island. 

Curated by Sydney Fishman and Lucas Ondak, Dystopian Ecstasy presents an inverted, uncanny world where performances act as portals to multiple realities, blurring the line between what is real and what is a distorted reflection. The artists included are Shannon Funchess, Jonathan González, Lysis, Byrell the Great, Nile Harris, Jas Lin, Makadsi, River Moon, Symara Sarai and WILDBLUR.

At a time when the US’s national political rhetoric insists on conservatism and obedience, the commissioned artists challenge coherence, conformity, and dogma. They offer ruminations on liminality, illusion, and queer possibility through durational performances, sensory, sensational experiences, and evocations of spirituality and ritual. 

Situated in an historic conclave of queer celebration, liberation, and expression the Fire Island Pines, provides a generative geography by which, over the course of a three week residency, artists will engage with the literal and symbolic landscape to cultivate new work. The artists’ spatial, sonic, and personified transformations will guide an audience through slippery, transitional spaces: day to night, club to beach, embodied to alienated, past to present, life to death and back again.

Performances will open doorways to numinous circumstances, where perhaps the performers themselves are messengers from the other side. Behold an artistic spectacle at the edge of existence.