The Audition

My upcoming project, “The Audition”, is a short film that is very much in line with my greater career goal of bringing authenticity to a traditionally stereotyped and misunderstood community. The film is designed to be a peak behind the curtain into the world of strip clubs. It drops you into a situation that happens every day, when a young, uneducated individual enters a club with a mind filled with stereotypes fed to them by the media and quickly gets a taste of the reality of why people choose s//x work. In the film, a young, eager protagonist meets three veterans in the dressing room as she prepares to audition for a local topless club. After making some rash assumptions about the type of girls she’d see backstage, our protagonist quickly learns that strippers are much more than their stereotype and that people come to this club for very different reasons.

The film’s goal is to separate fantasy from reality, to show you what real world s//x work looks like from a variety of perspectives without having to explain itself. It jumps back and forth from lively dressing room conversation as the girls get ready to extremely theatrical dance sequences as the girls detail their fantastical personas on stage. It’s a feminist, queer, BIPOC story that showcases the incredible diversity of experiences that can be found in the dressing rooms of clubs all over the world. It’s both comedic and dramatic, theatrical and authentic and, in a short time, it leaves you both having learned a bit about the world of s//x work in strip clubs and having realized how much more there is to learn.

Like the rest of my work, the film is dedicated to decades upon decades of strong, Black, Latinx, Queer and Trans survivors and storytellers who have instilled in me that, despite the odds against us, black joy is possible and is revolutionary.