Brian Slattery photo
Allie Bee stood in front of an admiring audience in the downstairs space of Westville’s Third Space. Tracks they’d made themself played behind them as they took their time unfurling melodies they’d written on bass. The first one, groovy, insistent, they said, was called “Wayward Giant.” The second one, hazier and jazzier, was called “Blue Moon,” named after a smoothie of the same name that they’d made at work.
“Inspiration comes in weird places,” they said.
An enthusiastic voice came from the back: “Yeah it does!”
The occasion was the monthly Punq Noire Open Stage at Third Space Arcade Lounge at 410 Blake St. in Westville. As advertised on Instagram, “music, spoken word poetry, stories, and even ideas are welcome on stage,” in connecting in “local creatives who’d benefit from this art-centered initiative to empower local trailblazers and cultivate a space for renaissance builders to thrive in the continuum of imagination.”
Upstairs, people are invited to “chill out and level up in the arcade, featuring a prized collection of video games, board games, and card games.” Downstairs, “rock out and get inspired! Share your poetry, discover new music, and express your ideas on the open stage.”
Punq Noire — both the summer festival, which started in June 2022, and other events that happen throughout the year — is the brainchild of Dymin Ellis, a.k.a. Indigaux the Fae, who is “usually curating or performing on stage,” they said. Ellis started Punq Noire thanks to going down the “rabbit hole” of “the history of the riot grrl era,” they said. It was “modern feminism creeping into music in a radical way, through punk.” That got them thinking more broadly about “women and non-men — genderqueer people — throughout history who have contributed to punk, and really contributed to the overall sound of music we hear today.”
As a genderqueer person themself, “I was so affirmed by the history I didn’t even know was there,” they said.
They thought back even further, to Little Richard, who “originally performed as a drag queen, and also identified as genderqueer and pansexual,” even if “he didn’t use those words.” He was “just so open and free with his personality”; “for generations he really held that torch, being the icon,” as well as asserting his place in musical history.
They got the sense of Little Richard as a lonely figure as well, without the community or the language to express who he was. That got them thinking about how “20, 30, sometimes 50 years later, we’re just hearing about things,” they said. “How many generations missed out on that knowledge? Or had to wait to find out it was in their backyard?” With that knowledge, “lives could be saved, honestly,” they said. “Music saves lives.”
“I want to create space where people like Little Richard feel at home, and realize that they are part of something important and big,” they said. “I wanted to create a platform where people feel the sense of affirmation that I felt. Even if you don’t realize it, even if you’re not taught this, you are a part of a larger journey and you are carrying the torch as well.”
This Thursday marked Punq Noire’s second open stage night at Third Space on Blake Street in Westville. Ellis connected with the owners of Third Space in part because the place itself used to be Ellis’s mother’s day care center. “It’s like being a teenager again, being in here, because she started off in here,” they said. “It’s a full-circle moment.”
To kick off Thursday’s open stage, Ellis began by reading some rules for the room, creating an atmosphere that encouraged artistic expression and creative risk while also making sure that everyone in the room felt safe. They also did a quick trivia contest that doubled as a way to learn a small slice of cultural history — in this case, about Poly Styrene, a.k.a. Marianna Joan Elliott-Said, leader of the punk band X‑Ray Spex. The contest ended with a recitation of the lyrics to the X‑Ray Spex song “Identity,” released in 1977 but sounding like it was written yesterday (“Identity / Is the crisis / Can’t you see / Identity, identity / When you look in the mirror / Do you smash it quick / Do you take the glass / And slash your wrists / Did you do it for fame / Did you do it in a fit / Did you do it before / You read about it”).
Ellis then read two of their own poems. The first was about the Earth and its relation to humans (“we seem like some sort of sickness / and the Earth is overdue for healing / I understand her rage / She tears us about with wind and fire / exterminates us in countless ways / we exterminate ourselves with her / helping her destroy the cause of her destruction”). The second was about Yale and its relation to New Haven’s Black community (“oh baby, it’s never too late for a revolution”). It set the tone for outspokenness and acceptance.
After Allie Bee’s performance, BlueJay took the stage to perform three of their songs — “The Watchers,” “Crazy,” and “Washing Machine” — that each time found them singing over tracks that married atmospheric instrumentals to head-bobbing rhythms.
The final act before intermission was MT, who delivered three mesmerizing monologue-poems to the audience, though they were addressed to others — a woman who had jilted them; to Richard Russell, who stole a plane from Seattle’s airport in 2018, flew it for over an hour, then crashed intentionally into a nearby island; to Andrew Shannon, who punched a hole in a Monet in 2012; to God. The first poem zeroed in on a moment while skydiving: “It’s almost disappointing / how far you still are from God at 14,000 feet / how always you are returning back to earth / and maybe that’s why I’m telling you this, Maria / because your name sounds like prayer, Maria / like you know people, Maria / like you can reach people I can’t / so if you see him, tell him / I’m just trying to find my way home.”
MT’s performance of their pieces was dynamic, calibrated, and connected hard with the audience.
“Do you act?” said one audience member after MT’s recitation.
“God, no,” MT said.
“Why not?” the audience member said.
The next Punq Noire Open Stage and Third Space Arcade Night is scheduled for Thursday, June 20. Punq Noire will also be collaborating with Seeing Sounds this summer on a show “inspired by the format of SXSW,” Ellis said, with multiple events around New Haven during the week of Seeing Sounds, as well as an event on July 4. See Punq Noire’s Facebook and Instagram feeds for more information.