Friday, August 1 2025 at 7 PM
Le Petit Versailles
https://www.alliedproductions.org/news/reading-of-hand-book-a-manual-on-performance-process-and-the-labor-of-laundry-by-lynne-sachs-lizzie-olesker-and-jasmine-holloway
Please join us for a performative book event with authors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker and actor/writer Jasmine Holloway celebrating the publication of Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry. Just published by punctum books, an independent queer- and scholar-led, community-formed publisher, Hand Book is a collection of writings and images that came out of a hybrid documentary performance and film made by Sachs and Olesker that was set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our city. With a focus on the people who wash and fold “drop-off” loads, Hand Bookexplores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. This theatrical reading will include short essayistic pieces, a dramatic monologue and poetic dialogue distilled from real conversations with laundromat workers, against a backdrop of projected photographic images.The work will call to mind the intimacy of laundering other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.
Lizzie Olesker makes theater and performance, reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience. Her most recent plays include 5 Stages of Grief, Night Shift, and the collaborative Language of Dolls. Her work has been presented at Cherry Lane Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, New Georges, Ohio Theater, and The Public Theater. As an actor, she’s performed with the Talking Band, at La Mama and Mabou Mines Theater. She’s received support from Blue Mountain Center, Brooklyn Arts Council, Dramatists Guild, Hedgebrook, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Olesker lives in Brooklyn and teaches playwriting at New York University.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet. With each project, Sachs investigates the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work enacts a critical journey through reality and memory. In films such as The House of Science, Which Way is East, Your Day is My Night, and Film About a Father Who, Sachs uses hybrid form and collaboration, incorporating documentary, performance, and collage. Retrospectives of Sachs’s films have been presented at international film festivals and at NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image.
Jasmine Holloway is an actor, singer, and writer who works to excavate the bones of a character before she can tell their story, honoring the life and times of the people she is portraying in a performance. Her New York theater credits include Generations at Soho Rep, and The Wiz, In The Heights, and Tambourines To Glory at Harlem Repertory Theatre.