Open Flame Theatre is an all-transgender/gender non-conforming theatre ensemble based in Minneapolis, MN. Founded by Walken Schweigert and Katie Burgess in 2009 under the name the Unseen Ghost Brigade, Open Flame creates outdoor, site-responsive operatic performances about rewilding and the inherent power of transgender people. Through live music, dance, large scale climbable sculptures, and circus arts, Open Flame opens portals into surreal other-realms where the power of the imagination is released and reclaimed as part of the larger struggles for justice and freedom from colonization and the culture of capitalism.

Open Flame Theatre began as the Unseen Ghost Brigade, a Minnesota-based traveling theatre troupe founded by Walken Schweigert in 2008. In 2010 the Unseen Ghost Brigade created a circus-influenced tragicomedy called Death on the Mississippi that they toured down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft. The mission was to provide free theatre to communities along the Mississippi and explore the historical impacts of industry along the River. In six months they made it from Minneapolis, MN to Caruthersville, MO. This same year, Schweigert and Katie Burgess created Gut Wrenched and Rising (GWaR), a surrealist and autobiographical performance about lived trans experiences. From these two performances (Death on the Mississippi and GWaR) was birthed the “Rewilding Cycle”—a fantastical operatic triptych about uprooting oppression and imagining liberated futures.

In 2012 Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, MA—an internationally-renowned theatre ensemble, founded by Stacy Klein—offered Schweigert a mentorship in the development of The Wastelands, a traveling folk opera inspired by Dante’s Purgatorio and first performance of the “Rewilding Cycle”. In 2013 Schweigert founded Children of the Wild to create The Wastelands using the process and training practices developed by the Double Edge Ensemble, inspired by the work of Rena Mirecka and others from Eastern Europe and South America. Children of the Wild was the first-ever company-in-residence at Double Edge Theatre’s Farm Center from 2012-2016. It was there during those four years that The Wastelands was developed with Katie Burgess and other artists under Schweigert’s artistic direction, as part of his and Katie’s mentorship by Stacy Klein and Carlos Uriona.

The Wastelands premiered in the spring of 2016 and then toured for six months across the Great Lakes region, shared for free in public everywhere it went. As part of this journey The Wastelands was performed in Holyoke, MA; Buffalo, NY; Cleveland, OH; Lorain, OH; Mackinaw City, MI; Detroit, MI; Duluth, MN; and Minneapolis, MN, in collaboration Great Lakes Commons and a wide-range of social and environmental justice organizations.

In 2017 Children of the Wild was renamed Open Flame Theatre and returned to the midwest. Open Flame Theatre is now in residence indefinitely at Philadelphia Community Farm in Osceola, WI, and in November 2017 began work on The Garden (part two of the triptych, inspired by Dante’s Inferno) for which Schweigert received a JFund Award (now ACF Creates) from the American Composer’s Forum to create.

A direct link to the full text of ‘Towards a Queer Theatre’ by Walken Schweigert can be found here:

‘Towards a Queer Theatre'