Choreographer and Artist Jack Ferver on Practicing Father Erasure

Tell Me About Your Father

On our latest episode, Elizabeth talks with choreographer, writer and performance artist @jackferver about their work, which puts words and movement to the shattering of the self that comes with the near-constant existential and cultural threats the world poses to queer people and essentially anyone without power.

Jack’s piercing dance-theater pieces have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” by the New Yorker, and although pain is at the center of much of Ferver’s work it’s often bitingly funny too. A new performance forthcoming at MASS MoCA is titled, “Is Camp Global Warming and Other Forms of Theatrical Distance for the End of the World,” and incorporates Kellyanne Conway as a character.

If you've seen the now-iconic Starbursts candy commercial from 2008 featuring a character evocative of Little Lord Fauntleroy named “The Little Lad,” that's also Jack Ferver, clapping and exclaiming they're "a little lad who loves berries and cream." The commercial is deeply strange and silly and was otherwise forgotten until Gen Z TikTok users started posting clips of Jack as the Little Lad in 2021, prompting them to make the Little Lad their own viral account.

Our conversation in this episode centers less directly on Jack's experience of their own late father, or difficult childhood growing up in rural Wisconsin, but about what the "Little Lad" that makes adults uneasy with their femmi-ness has come to represent for a new generation of other "half boy and half girls." (Which is the way Jack described themself in kindergarten, and which led to relentless bullying from classmates and society at large.)

Jack, who is a faculty member at Bard, also talks to Elizabeth about the role of the teacher, the loss of would-be mentors to AIDS, the ruinous defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 80s under America's abusive father Ronald Reagan, Tori Amos's "father record," and the importance of learning how to take off your own handcuffs.

Additionally, you can watch Jack’s work at JackFerver.com, find their poetry on Instagram, or see them as the Little Lad on TikTok or YouTube, where a recent piece, Anna, directed by Jack’s husband Jeremy Jacob with cinematography by Daniel Rampulla, features the Little Lad trying desperately to connect with their mother, Anna Wintour.

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