About Homomentum:
Homomentum is a sci-fi musical comedy series which tells the story of the Gaybious system's most notorious performing artists, the Homomentum Players. Homomentum is a love letter to queerness, an exploration of class, queer & gender identities, polyamory, capitalism, disability justice, collaboration and the role of artists in social justice movements.
The Homomentum universe was born in 2013 with a 21-song musical, staged in Portland, Oregon. Max is re-working that original piece to become Unlearning Metopia, a musical podcast series. Additionally, Max is writing Inside the Ship, a small cast stage musical telling the origin story of the Homomentum Players.
Photo from the 2013 live performance of Homomentum, the Musical at CoHo Theater. Image description: Cast of 16 queers throws glitter while singing and dancing.
Inside the Ship: Synopsis
Captain Magic, a drag queen title-holder from Spectacalus, loses her crown, borrows a spaceship, and heads out on her redemption tour. During her stop by the lesbian moon, she loses a sew-off to Sam Kazaam, fat femme poet singer, who joins the tour as the opening act. Their cultures clash as they begin to co-habitate and collaborate.
After a failed first performance, these divas realize they need practical help. They hire Pixel, an arts management student intern and classical musician from a post-plague disability-justice planet. Sam and Magic must check their egos and adjust their lives to meet Pixel’s access needs.
When a drone from Metopia steals their creative library and leaves them stranded, they must learn to appreciate each other’s artforms and find a collective vision that combines drag, poetry, classical music and theater in order to power the crystals that offer a new powersource. Captain Magic then faces a major decision; to return to Spectacalus and try to win back her crown, or stay with her newly formed troupe.
Set inside the ship, the show revels in the hilarity and transformative power of negotiating interdependence through difference. These three queer artists learn to set boundaries, create collective agreements, interact with alien cultures, and appreciate each other as they build a troupe while hurling themselves across the gay galaxy.
Unlearning Metopia: Synopsis
Photos from the 2013 live performance of Homomentum, the Musical.
Welcome to Metopia, an uber-capitalist post-Earth dystopia, where our young protagonist Eli is at the verge of adulthood, a closeted queer artist struggling to fit into a heteronormative, anti-art world. Enter the Homomentum players, a band of inter-galactic performers, who crash-land on Metopia and catalyze Eli to step outside their privileged life, embrace their queer artist identity, and discover the hidden truths about Metopia.
Production History
Homomentum started as a monthly queer cabaret series that showcased dance, burlesque, music, drag & performance-art, with tons of glitter and ridiculousness at every turn, and began at the E-Room and then ran for 2 more years at the Fez Ballroom, 2009-2012.
The themes and grassroots art of the Homomentum Cabaret served as creative fuel and inspiration for Homomentum the Musical. It was also a queer incubator for work that would later become part of Homomentum the musical, including Heal the Greed, written by Max and performed by Glitterfruit, Max's collaboration with Riley La Roux (video below).
In July 2012, after creating the basic music and theatrical structure for the piece, Max assembled a small cast, collaborated with Musical Director Leander Star and performed a sneak-peak medley at the Portland Center Stage JAW New-Work Festival (video below).
Max then got to work writing the rest of the soundtrack, mostly on their ukulele, and took a trip to the Bay Area to perform it as a musical set. Once back in Portland, Max, together with Leander Star and Director Kim Lundin and a Production team launched their first casting call for a work-in-progress version was performed at Lewis & Clark college in April, 2013. This performance featured 13 original songs, and a few scenes leading up to them (pictured below).
The full Homomentum script and 21-song soundtrack was performed by a cast of 16 queer, trans and ally pdx artists at CoHo Theater Nov 2013, for a 3-show sold-out run, that was partially supported by a RACC Project Grant. After that, the cast recorded the soundtrack album, which debuted at The Alberta Rose Theater in May, 2014 (photo below).
After experiencing the logistical and fiscal challenges of producing a large queer anti-capitalist musical, Max spun-off the boyband element to create Turnback Boyz, a time traveling queer boyband. Max has been performing and producing with this collaborative musical theater ensemble for the last nine years.
More Video
Reviews
"Homomentum is campy, smart, witty as hell, and, most of all, great...it felt like RENT and Moulin Rouge had a queer, gender-less baby." Homomentum: Bright Lights, Big City, Big Hit (Daniel Borgen, PQ Monthly)
"Fabulous... filled with glitter and camp." Class Warfare Littered With Glitter (Jenna Lechner, Portland Mercury)
