Warlé: A Multimedia Event Exploring LGBTQ+ Caregiving and Community

Presented By: Epsilon Spires, Co-hosted by Valley Village and Friends of Argentine Tango. This event will be filmed and broadcasted live by BCTV on Comcast Channel 1078, on brattleborotv.org/live/events and on Brattleboro Community TV's YouTube Channel.

Using storytelling, archival documents, photography and tango, Warlé is a dance-theater performance that conjures the lives of long-lost gay relatives – who were partners in life and in business for 58 years – and opens a conversation about care for LGBTQ+ elders. The program includes Q&A and an introductory queer tango class.

The goal of Warlé is twofold: to encourage others to explore their queer ancestry and to generate conversations about how we care for LGBTQ+ elders and refugees today. Warren Kronemeyer and Leon Ingall co-founded Warlé, a small business on Manhattan's Upper East Side specializing in antiques, contemporary objects, art framing, restoration, and interior decorating. Leon was a Jewish refugee and fashion designer who fled Bolshevik Russia, relocated to Weimar Berlin, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1940; Warren was a writer, journalist, antiques dealer, and an operative of the WWII-era U.S. Office of Strategic Services. After several decades together in New York, they left the city in 1980 and relocated to Townshend, Vermont and became beloved citizens of this rural community. The people of Townshend took good care of them at the end of their lives; they were, in the words of Armistead Maupin, “logical” family. The work of Warlé is to repair broken branches in our family trees, to graft new ones, and to think expansively about kinship and caregiving.

Concept and story by Andrew Ingall

Choreography by Walter Perez

Costume design by Ethan Gekow

Featuring tango performances by Mariana Parma, Walter Perez, and Leonardo Sardella

Warlé is supported in part by the Vermont Humanities, Vermont Community Foundation, The Windham Foundation, Arts Council of Windham County/Brattleboro Town Arts Fund, Valley Village, and Grace Cottage Family Health & Hospital.

Warlé is a fiscally-sponsored project of Out in the Open.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the Vermont Humanities.