Dancer-choreographer Peter Carpenter, chair of the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, will perform a solo piece at the “Explode! Queer Dance” festival of performances and conversation in New York City. Carpenter will perform “Last Cowboy Standing” on Thursday, June 22, at 8 PM at JACK, a performance venue located at 505 ½ Waverly Ave. in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

“Last Cowboy Standing,” a solo excerpt from Carpenter’s 2009 ensemble work My Fellow Americans, cultivates movement that combines Carpenter’s extensive research of country-western social dance forms with his training in postmodern release-based techniques. This work contemplates the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan through the frame of queer rage and melancholia, and interrogates the Reagan era from the perspective of the “special interest groups” that his policies consistently admonished.

The “Explode! Queer Dance” festival, running June 22-24, showcases artists from across the U.S. and around the world in a range of forms, including South Asian dance, improvisation, Irish step dancing, and drag. The festival’s schedule will include off-site programs and public conversations at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Oxford University – New York as well as evening performances at JACK. For tickets, click here.