Loosely based on Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, QFWFQ (pro: kif-wifk) is a labyrinthian, surrealist plunge into the politics of gender, music, international relations and storytelling by trans non-binary multidisciplinary artist Gregory Nussen.
Taking its nonsensical title from the name of the ageless and timeless protagonist who permeates Calvino’s iconic and experimental short story collection The Cosmicomics (1965), Gregory Nussen’s QFWFQ is a genre-breaking adaptation of its surrealist themes and structure. Explored in the traditions of artists from Jorge Luis Borges all the way to Charlie Kaufman, where Calvino’s work concerns itself with time and space, QFWFQ instead links together stories from the performer’s life - touching on architectural marvels, improvised jazz concertos, gender identity, and suicide, reckoning with Zionism, Judaism, Gaza, and everything in between.
Growing up Jewish and queer, Nussen reflects on the stories they have been told throughout their life, of their cultural and religious heritage, their echoes into the past, and their relationships with the present. QFWFQ is a meditation on the politics of storytelling itself, asking what the human cost is of silencing certain narratives in favor of others. Who has permission to tell the stories we choose to listen to?
Deeply personal, razor-sharp, and absurdly funny, Gregory Nussen rummages through the power and peril of storytelling, and the art that saves your life. QFWFQ is a show that neither begins, nor ends. It works, until it doesn’t. It’s a solo performance structured entirely without a fourth wall. How does it come together? Watch it and find out.
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