This is so surreal for something that includes zero special effects of any kind
HOLY SHIT
If this is the group I think it is (you can find them by searching Dance of a Thousand Hands on YouTube), the dancers are all hard of hearing and the orchestra is visually impared. The dancers can feel the music through vibrations in their feet and hearing and feeling each other’s breathing. They are the China Disabled Peoples Performing Arts Troupe and have traveled to 100 countries and counting. They aim to prove that anyone can dance, and anyone can play.
Happy birthday, Marsha P. Johnson! (August 24, 1945)
An influential figure in the early LGBT rights movement, Marsha P. Johnson was born in New Jersey to a working class family. Johnson first began dressing as a girl as a young age, but chose to suppress her desires and identity for many years due to bigoted harassment. After graduating high school, Johnson left home for New York City, where she finally allowed herself to come out. She began performing as a drag queen and frequenting the Stonewall Inn. She was involved in the Stonewall Uprising, though denied accounts of being one of the leaders of the rising, and continued to play a major role in the gay rights movement afterward. Johnson organized with the Gay Liberation Front and co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, an organization which sought to provide food and shelter to homeless LGBT youth. Unhoused herself for much of her time in New York, Johnson often relied on sex work in order to get by. In 1992, Johnson’s body was recovered from the Hudson River; she had evidently been murdered in a hate crime. The police ruled her death a suicide despite the evidence against this, and Johnson’s friends and allies fought for years to have the case reopened and investigated as a homicide.
