Keeping the Flame: An evening of performance

An evening of performance by Alan Pulner, Charles Lane, and Efren Perez

Judy Garland returns as Christ. Oscar Wilde rekindles the light of art and love in a Paris hotel. Arthur Rimbaud becomes Hamlet’s lover on the beach in 1990s Santa Monica.

Presented on the closing night of Pulner's solo exhibition, Reading the Flame(s), Keeping the Flame is an evening of song, spectacle, and poetic imagination. Interdisciplinary artist Alan Pulner and tenor Charles Lane—a longtime member of the LA Opera Chorus and the Los Angeles Master Chorale—revive selections from a body of collaborative performance works originally staged in underground venues across Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s. Lyrical, camp, and deeply theatrical, these works offer a rare glimpse into a luminous queer performance history that continues to resonate.

Artist and master puppeteer Efren Perez joins the evening with a selection of his iconic diva marionettes—glamorous, gestural avatars who sing, sway, and shimmer across the stage.