THE ARTIST: Patrick Andrews

Patrick Andrews (he/him/his) is a dance theatre maker, stage and film actor, and musician. His work ranges from broadway theatre, award winning film, world premiere plays on acclaimed stages across the United States, touring with a dance company, releasing an album and touring with his genre-defying queer synth band BAATHHAUS. He continues multi-year development of the principal figure in Martha Clarke’s latest dance theatre creation dissecting St. Francis of Assisi.

THE WORK: Interdisciplinary Performance

P I S S

urinal
a monument 
blossoms sprouting from
damaged bathroom tiles
love notes from werewolves 
stuffed inside dance belts
truck stop catharsis
tumbleweeds roll golden 
the scorpions scream
west texas fey bathing 
in dust and sunsets

Primal instinct guided me as a boy to the abandoned mall bathroom and truck stops scattered across the highway of my small Texas town. My surrender blissful and stunting. Reconciling joy and pain linked to personal revelation in public space is a commonality that exists among many queers across the spectrum of identities. Our elders, the mothers, the fathers found one another gathering in spaces claimed and fleeting. We find each other still in manifested spaces, precious family found in languages invisible to the straight world.

My myth keeps calling me back to the public restroom. I’ve been held in them. I’ve been harmed by them. I’m drawn to them. The palpable tension between two worlds coexisting. One purely functional, the other a terrain to be navigated with a multitude of truths. Cruising as connective tissue finding family. Cruising as a currency feeding family. The momentary relief of living out one’s truth, recorded and manipulated to dismantle lives. Trans bodies politicized while politicians use glory holes.

I’ve been generating music, text, and movement in the DREAM BROTHER studio and inside of public restrooms. This began with a return to the public restroom of personal origin, and recently the empty rest stops on a solo cross country drive during the pandemic. I am committed to collaborating with trans and non-binary artists in the shaping and performing of this work, an essential lens for this bathroom rite and reclamation to incite and speak truth.

I see the work stark and fantastical utilizing stage, installation, film, movement, and the creation of an accompanying studio album. In conversation with PISS, DREAM BROTHER curator Nathan Rapport created Employees Must Wash Hands, a visual collaboration which positions the gloryhole in the purchasable fine art context, offering a tactile link to the themes of public private joy and shame that exist within this larger exploration.