Women, Sex, and Desire: Sometimes You Feel Like a Ho, Sometimes You Don’t is a multi-media investigation on how women navigate sex, desire, choice, and perception. Dance, personal stories and video imagery combine to tackle powerful personal and political issues under discussion nationwide. Women, Sex, and Desire challenges our cultural programming, examines our belief systems, and reflects the struggle, humor, and pleasure we encounter as sexual beings, in an effort to empower ourselves and inform our sexual choices, whatever they may be.







Women, Sex, and Desire:

· opens a dialogue around women's sexuality, desire, and choice, and creates an opportunity for self-reflection

· questions the influences of media, past experience, and social, cultural, and religious upbringing on sexual behavior

· challenges stereotypes, assumptions and conventional wisdom by engaging a diverse cross-section of women, including those often dismissed or unheard (ex. sex workers, teens)

Ms. Mason uses her community-based participatory process to engage a diverse cross section of women including sex workers, disadvantaged youth, university students, mature women, and LGBT communities. Focus groups, interviews, identity workshops, and web logs provide narrative material for the choreography, and act as a vehicle for women to voice their thoughts and opinions and encourage community dialogue that exposes our prejudices, expectations, and beliefs.

The research and multi-media aspects of the piece allow for the possibility for the work to exist beyond its evening length dance theater form. It can be reconfigured as a video documentary, cabaret performance, spoken word/ theater piece, and be performed in a variety of venues. In some cases, participants may be included in the performance. By combining real stories, real people, pop culture, humor, and a diverse movement vocabulary ranging from post modern, to hip hop, to pole dancing, Women Sex and Desire: Sometimes You Feel Like a Ho, Sometimes You Don’t is at once entertaining, insightful, honest, risky and risqué.

Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (CSPAC) at the University of Maryland, is the lead presenting partner. They help cultivate relationships with the campus community, assist in recruiting and convening focus group participants, and leverage additional funds for the project. CSPAC will provide residency space for Gesel Mason Performance Projects in Summer 2009 and premiere the work Spring of 2010. There are many ways to be involved: become a presenting partner or collaborator, host a sex discussion party or choreographic residency, participate in a focus group, or share your thoughts in a blog. To learn more contact gmason@mason-rhynes.org or call 301-887-1078.