"Temple of Cunt" at the New Orleans Fringe Festival

The city's freshest temple just dropped with four bombshell deities! Come worship the newest freaks on the celestial block and bear witness to delicious acts of whoopla. Experience imperfect divinity in 55 minutes through dance, dialogue, and audience involvement. Be reborn in the process.

In "Temple of Cunt", we are introduced to four newly made, genderfucked deities, who embody Gossip, Orgy, Sacrifice, and Transformation, in their quest to become respected gods by their mortal followers. In this journey to become known names, they realize their power isn’t in being famous or loved publicly — it's in accepting each other in their totality, modeling for humanity how to be in community through messiness and change.

Avery Temple (they/she/he) is a Latine and Native interdisciplinary artist and community organizer born ‘n’ raised between Florida and Texas. She primarily works with words, events, movement and fabric. Through altar making, performance, and poetry, Avery creates secure containers meant to hold the full spectrum of human expression and center a reverence for life. They are a current resident for Community Design at the John Thompson Legacy Center, a recent resident of Brackish Artist Collective, the Editor for Mangrove Magazine, a featured artist at Ori Gallery, and a past recipient of the Independent Publishing Resource Center portfolio residency for poetry. He is currently writing his first play, a sci-fi utopian about how rebuilding our relationship to the land heals us. Their artistic medium is ever evolving yet always guided by Black and Indigenous liberation frameworks.​​​​​​​

Juniper Joel Cassaway (they/he) is a Black, Southern, disabled/chronically ill, neurodivergent, genderqueer creative residing in New Orleans. All of these identities greatly and proudly influence their work as they build new worlds to play in, both onstage and off. Joel is also a playwright who has written, directed, and produced three of their original plays, as well as self-published their debut poetry book, “She Speaks: Twenty Years of Silence” (2019). As a lifetime performer and director of over a decade, he eager to alchemize the arts into a more accessible space for Black, disabled, and queer and trans folks. 

Juniper utilizes his experiences as a disabled person and American Sign Language interpreter to continue centering accessibility and creativity from disabled artists. Their work often centers conversations that challenge societal expectations and limitations, weaving fantasy, whimsy, and audacity into the threads of their multimedia art.

Paulette Argeres (she/her) is a queer multidisciplinary artist and burlesque dancer from Seattle, Washington. She graduated with a BFA in Digital Filmmaking from Loyola University New Orleans, where she wrote and directed her debut short film The World Is on Fire and I Just Wanna Dance. Paulette aims to continue centering her work on the lesbian experience, her Greek ancestral ties, and freedom of expression. 

Nova Jewell (they/them) is a community member, earth worker, land steward, and multi-modal interdisciplinary artist. Performance rooted in ancestral veneration, playful embodiment, and honoring their many teachers is essential to how Nova engages in collective creation. They are born and raised in Los Angeles, CA and have resided in New Orleans for the past nine years. Jewell grew up in a gospel choir and praise dance team, has practiced dance in formal and informal settings, and has always had a passion for writing and poetry. Here, in New Orleans, they have spent much of their time engaging in movement work, food justice, political street theatre, latin dance groups, earthen crafts, and teaching youth, adults, and the elderly the wonders of reconnecting with our roots in the land. They understand that storytelling is a time and dimension bending technology that they are excited to activate with collaborators, audiences, and all that exist within the context that holds them.