“Daddy Issues” by Eleanor Kipping | Open Call 2022

Eleanor Kipping’s solo performance in “Daddy Issues” presents her dating exploits as a queer Black woman new to New York City and pursues the impossible: to reconcile her family’s memories of life in Brooklyn in the ‘80s and her childhood memories of Maine in the ‘90s, all within the context of the AIDS crisis. The performance, presented through monologue and video, centers her father’s experience as a Black Brooklyn native who moved to Maine shortly before Kipping was born to “become his best self and start a business.” When he passed away from AIDS-related complications when the artist was six, Kipping was left in Maine with the white side of her family to make sense of her father’s life and mind. “Daddy Issues” explores trauma, death, sex, and race through a feminist lens in a poetic consideration of body, language, mass media, and bodily fluid as a conduit for disease—taking you on a journey while Kipping guides you through her own.