A Vibrant Celebration of Dance and Queer Culture
BlackLight Summit returns to herald art and innovation with a fabulous night of dance, drag, and queer BIPOC performance.
“I like to think of myself as a professional fan,” says Tariq O’Meally. “So, I want people to love the things that I love too. And bringing them together around that is really exciting.”
Not merely a fan, but a dancer, choreographer, educator, and, since June, Artistic Director at Dance Place, O’Meally has been bringing communities together for the Blacklight Summit, a nightlong celebration of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ dance, performance, art, and culture, since 2021.
“It initially started out [as] a platform to present early-career, emerging BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ artists to give them a platform to share their work,” he recalls. “There weren’t a lot of resources fostering what I would believe [are] the next generation of dance artists. So I used my position as guest curator and then artistic planning coordinator at the Clarice [Smith Center] to start that.”
The event took a break in 2024, in the midst of O’Meally’s move from the University of Maryland’s Smith Center to Dance Place, but BlackLight returns this year featuring New York-based artist MX Oops and their group [NONFATAL_ERROR], presenting “UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL,” a multimedia performance and party experience “that captures the essence of queer nightlife culture.”
O’Meally caught the work a couple of seasons ago in New York. “MX is a really incredible and vibrant performer, and also a scholar and a professor — that is, both in-practice and in the theoretical work,” he says.
The Summit will also welcome back for a third year the “glitter-filled, wig-pulling, lip-syncing” drag extravaganza afterGLOW, produced by haus of bambi. “One of the things about BlackLight was just stripping the pomp and circumstance around performance,” O’Meally says.
“And some of the best performance that I was seeing around the city and really anywhere was coming from really, really incredible nightlife performers. So, Christopher K. Morgan, the [Dance Place] executive artistic director at the time, supported it and then carried it over, and it was a really amazing success closing out each of our Summits.”
Sounding no less excited for this year’s afterGLOW lineup, O’Meally notes that “hosting for the third time is Pussy Noir, who is a D.C. legend. And returning once again is Bumper, who is an incredible drag performer, and also really eats up a Beyoncé set. Miss Grace David, who was actually a BlackLight artist in 2022, is gonna be performing, and also returning Baltimore drag artist, Stealya-Manz, who did an incredible set at our last afterGLOW that people ate up.”
Drag artists Hennessey and Qing Blaze, performers new to the afterGLOW party, also join the lineup. The BlackLight Summit continues to grow its community. “Home is the experience of connection and belonging,” says O’Meally, quoting poet-activist Sonya Renee Taylor, not for the first time during the conversation.
“That’s really something that I’m wanting to facilitate in my work,” he continues. “It’s hard out here by yourself. So just thinking about ways that we can come together, and share body heat as the winter seems to be flowing in. Building a village and a tight network, not even a network, but a latticework of care, seems really important. It has always been really important to me.”
BlackLight Summit 2025: MX Oops [NONFATAL_ERROR] presents “UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL” is Saturday, Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. at Dance Place, 3225 8th St. NE. Tickets are $30, with discounts for seniors, students, artists, and ages 3 to 17. afterGLOW follows at 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $30, with discounts. Or, buy a ticket to both programs and pay only $25 total. Call 202-269-1600, or visit www.danceplace.org.
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