It’s a big deal for fans of Le Tigre, the “post-riot grrrl” performance group/band that wowed LGBTQ+ audiences in the early 00s. The trio of Kathleen Hanna, JD Samson and Johanna Fateman are reuniting to to tour the globe this summer with gigs all over the place including an opening show at John Waters’ Mosswood Meltdown Festival in Oakland, California on July 1st followed by a stop at Seattle Theatre Group’s Paramount Theatre on July 6th then stops all over the country including Portland, Los Angeles, NYC, Chicago and Boston.
Yes, that’s MONTHS/WEEKS away but tickets are moving quickly! You’ll want to snatch them before they’re gone…it’s an all ages/general admission seating show so don’t dawdle! Go to: https://www.stgpresents.org/calendar/13985/le-tigre
More facts:
Forming in New York City in 1999—when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and regressive hipster irony
ruled— the band abandoned traditional punk instrumentation, pairing drum-machine beats and
looped 8-bit samples with the simplest, serrated guitar riffs and call-and-response vocals.
Though rage had its place in Le Tigre, the band, with celebratory songs such as “Hot Topic”—a
shout-out to queer and feminist artistic inspirations (from David Wojnarowicz and Lorraine O’Grady to Catherine Opie and Vaginal Davis)—was a departure for Kathleen; she was best
known as the singer of Bikini Kill, whose fans found feminist catharsis in her scorching vocals.“Deceptacon,” the lead track of Le Tigre’s debut, was perhaps an aesthetic bridge between that seductive register of rage and her new band’s dancefloor ambitions. It was later conceived of as music “for the party after the protest.”
The members of Le Tigre shared a vision for multimedia performance, touring with a slide projector in their early days with video later becoming a key component of their live show which fans can still look forward to on the upcoming tour. The band’s final show—until their reunion performance for the This Ain’t No Picnic festival at the Rose Bowl in August 2022—was on September 24, 2005, at the Operation Ceasefire concert at Washington Monument in Washington DC, where they joined a coalition of artists calling for an end to the U.S. war in Iraq.
Recently, Kathleen has been touring with Bikini Kill, running Tees 4 Togo (which sells artist-
designed T-shirts to fund the non-profit organization Peace Sisters), and writing a book. JD has
a full-time teaching position (as Assistant Arts Professor and Area Head of Performance at The
Clive Davis Institute at NYU/Tisch), performs with CRICKETS, and tours with the original live
score for the film 32 Sounds, directed by Sam Green. Johanna is an author and art critic who
writes regularly for the “Goings on About Town” section of the New Yorker and for 4Columns;
she is a contributing editor of Artforum.