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Gay Cirque performer in peak shape after conquering addictions
Joe Putignano says his passion for gymnastics never went away. Even in the throes of heroin addiction, he replayed his old routines in his mind. (Photo courtesy Cirque du Soleil)
Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Totem’
Aug. 15-Sept. 30
Plateau at National Harbor
201 Harbor View Ave.
Tickets: $40-$153
cirquedusoleil.com
Cirque du Soleil gymnast Joe Putignano prepares for his character in the big top show “Totem” by donning a dazzling costume containing eight pounds of Swarovski crystals. When he enters the arena, he descends from the ceiling illuminated in light.
“Totem,” which opens at the National Harbor on Wednesday, is a story about evolution, combining the scientific theories and myth that humans have developed about it. Putignano’s character, the Crystal Man, is the spark of hope and light that begins the journey. He says the character embodies Charles Darwin’s quote, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man.”
As he performs, audience members can sense the intensity and passion in the movement of his body. Company manager Jeff Lund describes him as a “human disco ball.” Putignano says, “It is difficult, performing in a heavy costume is like running a small machine and it does take a lot of practice.”
However, the audience will not realize that less than 10 years ago, the spark in Putignano’s life almost went out. At age 17, he began using various drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine and later heroin, and would not be clean again until he was around 29. When he was 19, he quit gymnastics thinking he would never return to the floor.
“I felt I betrayed myself,” he says. “I never wanted to do a handstand or a split again. It was like a divorce.”
Lund, who has worked with Putignano for almost two years and is in charge of almost all aspects of “Totem,” says Putignano’s performances these days defy his background.
“He is a world-class athlete,” he says. “His story is a very inspiring one.”
Joe Putignano (photo courtesy Joe Putignano)
Putignano began gymnastics when he was around 8 years old, after watching the Olympic gymnasts compete on television. He says as he watched them, he knew he wanted to be doing this for the rest of his life.
He was immediately very good and began competing around the U.S. and went to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs twice when he was 11 and 13.
“As a child you bend to the laws of passion,” Putignano says. “You can’t imagine as many people as passionate as you. Later you see that it is a sport and there are rules, and now everybody sees your imperfections.”
As a Boston native, he says competing in New England is different from competing with top gymnasts from around the country. For a young Putignano, the mounting pressure to reach perfection and to compete began to wear on him. Especially, as he describes, an injury can completely derail a gymnast from his path very quickly.
“We know that our art form is fleeting, we can’t take it for granted because it can leave you in a moment,” he says.
He says growing up with gymnastics made it feel like his church. Though he did not come out until he was 19, being gay and a gymnast was never an issue for Putignano. He says, “The floor has no sexuality.” But the increased competition felt like a violation of his sacred space.
Putignano began taking ecstasy and cocaine during the “’90s rave era” and eventually quit gymnastics when he was a sophomore in college.
“To be a gymnast, one has to conquer perfect precision and control over the physical capacities of the body,” he says. “To be an addict, one must surrender this control over to the underworld, and I couldn’t keep them both together.”
After walking away from competing, Putignano plunged into what would turn out to be a very dark 10 years. He moved to New York in 1999 and began using heroin. He says his experiences with the drug were full of “bitter irony.”
“The more I shot up to escape the memories of my once beautiful pure sport, the quicker I nodded out into a dreamscape of performing my old gymnastics routines,” he says. “I was shooting up to escape the memory of my failed destiny, only to be flooded into an unconscious heroin state where I performed my gymnastics skills over and over. If there was ever a layer of Dante’s inferno, this was it.”
In New York City, he worked various jobs like waiting tables and modeling. He tried to stop several times with no success.
“Eventually, I was getting older and hadn’t gotten any better and over the years I saw the tiny spark of light inside me dimming down to nothing,” he says. “That one thing which made me myself was going to burn out forever. The fear of losing this light kept me constantly chasing sobriety.”
As time went on, Putignano ended up homeless and overdosed twice where he was declared dead both times.
“At the time of my overdoses, I was so far from reality that I was actually strengthened by my experience because I believed I had beat death,” he says.
This cycle continued until he was 26, when he was in rehab for the fifth time. One day, he went up into his room and began doing headstands. Though it would be another three years before he was completely clean and intense training was required to get back in shape, his interest was rekindled. But sobriety did not come easily.
“When I started to audition for shows, I was still not completely clean,” Putignano says. “I would be three months clean and relapse.”
Putignano’s second chance in gymnastics came when he got clean and began performing at the Metropolitan Opera House and Broadway Bares. A pivotal turning point came for him when he was eventually hired by Twyla Tharp to perform in her Broadway show “The Times They Are A Changin,’” based on Bob Dylan’s music. This was important to Putignano, as he was rejected from the show twice before being hired.
“It was such an important point in my sobriety. Tharp is an icon in the dance world,” he says.
While performing on Broadway and the Opera house, he connected with Robert Lepage, one of the creators of Cirque du Soleil. Lepage knew Putignano’s background and asked him if he would like to be part of show. Putignano says it is not a coincidence that his character should represent hope and light in the world.
“For myself, my character represents my sobriety, my hope, my faith and the relentless power of the human spirit,” he says.
Now six days a week, he brings that light to others through the 4,000 pieces of reflective glass. And just like Putignano, Lund says the costume is far more durable than it seems.
“At the end of the night, it gets thrown in the wash with everything else,” he says. “Sometimes pieces will fall off, but we have people who will reattach them when it happens.”
With a tight performing schedule and around six years of sobriety under his belt, Putignano says remaining sober is still a challenge.
“I would love to say that touring has been easy for me in sobriety, but the truth is, it isn’t,” he says. “Some humans are like trees and they need to stay close to their roots. My sober network is in New York City and it has been difficult without them.”
Despite the challenge, he has remained clean so far and he is able to use his experiences to be an emotional support for other performers. He says since he has been in dark places himself, he can be empathetic to others’ emotional struggles.
Lund describes the “Totem” performers and crew as one big family. Nationality and sexuality do not matter there, he says.
“For me as a manager, I try to avoid making lines between artists and technicians and so on, “ he says. “I know in other companies it may be like that, but I like my entire crew to be connected with each other. This is made easy since we are on the road together for so much out of the year.”
What keeps Putignano going is the thought that many who have been in his position have not received a second chance.
“I have to continue to carry the torch for the dead, for those who didn’t get a second chance and I have to do everything in my power to bring hope to the hopeless,” he says. “I was once the hopeless.”
Another Cirque show to open in Baltimore
“Dralion,” Cirque du Soleil’s acrobatic show that fuses influences from the East and the West, is opening in Baltimore on Aug. 22 and runs through Aug. 26.
The name of the show represents the different parts of the world combined— it’s the combination of the dragon, representing the East, and the lion, representing the west. It mainly draws on the 3,000-year-old tradition of Chinese acrobatics combined with the more modern Cirque du Soleil twist, according to the website.
In the show, the four elements of nature come to life. At first they are separated and have their distinct colors. Air is blue, water is green, fire is red and earth is ochre. When they are combined balance is achieved.
“Dralion” is one of Cirque du Soleil’s arena shows, and is performing at the 1st Mariner Arena (201 West Baltimore St.) Tickets range from $40 to $165. For more information, visit cirquedusoleil.com.
a&e features
Award-winning D.C. chef reaching new culinary heights
Anthony Jones of Marcus DC competing on ‘Top Chef’
In Anthony Jones’s kitchen, all sorts of flags fly, including his own. Executive chef at award-winning restaurant Marcus DC, Jones has reached culinary heights (James Beard Award semifinalist for Emerging Chef, anyone?), yet he’s just getting started.
Briefly stepping away from his award-winning station, Jones took a moment under a different set of lights. Recently, he temporarily gave up his post at the restaurant for a starring small-screen slot on the latest season of “Top Chef,” which debuted in March. (The show airs weekly on Bravo and Peacock).
Before his strategic slice-and-dice competition, however, Jones, who identifies as gay, draws from his deep DMV roots. In the years before “Top Chef” and the top chef spot at Marcus, he was born and raised in Sunderland, Md., in southern Maryland, near the Chesapeake.
Early memories were steeped in afternoons on boats with his dad bonding over fishing, and wandering the garden of his great-grandparents spread with fresh vegetables and a few hogs. “It was Southern, old-school ethics and upbringing,” he said. “Family and food went hand in hand.” Weekends meant grabbing bushels of crabs, dad and grandma would cook and crack them. Family members would host fish fries for extra cash. In this seafood-heavy youth, Jones managed time to sneak in episodes of the “OG” Japanese “Iron Chef” show, which helped inspire him to pursue a career in the kitchen.
Jones moved to D.C. after graduating from college, ending up at lauded Restaurant Eve, and met famed chef Marcus Samuelson, who brought him to Miami to be part of the opening team for Red Rooster Overtown. After three years, Jones moved back to D.C., where he ran Dirty Habit, reinventing and reimagining the menu, integrating West African flavors and ingredients.
Samuelson, however, wouldn’t let a talent like Jones stay away for too long. Pulling Jones back into his orbit, Samuelson elevated Jones to help him open his namesake restaurant Marcus DC, which has been named a top-five restaurant by the Washington Post. Since then, Jones has been nominated as a semifinalist for the RAMMYs Rising Culinary Star in 2026 and won the Eater DC’s Rising Chef award in 2025.
Samuelson’s Marcus is a tour de force interpreting the Black Diaspora on the plate, from the American South to West Africa, along with his signature “Swedopian” touches. Yet it’s Jones who has deeply informed the plate, elevating his own story to date. Marcus DC is primarily a seafood restaurant, which serves Jones well.
“Where I’m from is seafood heavy, and as I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve moved away from meat.” Veggies and fish are hero dishes. His own dish, Mel’s Crab Rice, was not only lauded by the Washington Post, but is framed by his youth carrying home the crustaceans from Mel’s crab truck. It’s a bowl of Carolina rice, layered with pickled okra, uni béarnaise, and crab. Jones also points to a dish on the opening menu, rockfish and brassica, paying respect to a landmark D.C. institution, Ben’s Chili Bowl. Jones reverse engineered a favorite bowl of chili that’s seafood instead of meat forward, leveraging octopus and rockfish along with different riffs of cauliflower: showing his intellectual, creative, and cultural sides.
While “Top Chef” is showing Jones’s spotlight side, he also lets his identity show at work. “In the kitchen, I make sure we’re inclusive. We don’t tolerate discrimination. Everyone that’s here should feel confident to express themselves. There are so many different flags in the kitchen.”
Jones says that he didn’t fully express his gay identity until fairly recently. He felt reluctant coming out to certain family members, “you’re scared to tell them about being different,” he says, and while that anxiety ate at him, “I’m lucky and fortunate to have unconditional love and that weight off my shoulders.”
Today, “I’m me all the time, Monday to Sunday. I’m honest with people, and my staff is honest with me.”
“Being a chef is hard,” he says, “and being a chef of color is even more difficult.”
Yet his LGBTQ identity is a juggling act, he says. “I need to keep that balance, because once someone finds out something about you, their opinion can change, whether you want it or not.”
Being on a whole season of TV cooking competition, however, might mean millions more might have an opinion of him (Jones has appeared on TV already, on an episode of “Chopped”). To prepare, he says, “I’ve just kept a level head. It’s just an honor to be on top chef with amazing people happy to be there.”
Plus, this season is set in the Carolinas, and Jones attended Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. “It’s a full story of my life, now a monumental moment for me.”
Jones also recently was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. “JBF has been a north star, a dream for so long. I always had this goal on my wall.”
Being at the top spot at Marcus DC, making waves through his accolades, and cooking on Bravo means that Jones is highly visible. “I think that if someone has a similar background to me, and can see our story, trajectory, and success, they can have more ability to be themselves. This is my goal.”
Back at Marcus, Jones has plenty up his chef’s white’s sleeves. A new spring menu is in the works. He’ll be launching a new tasting menu “dining experience,” he says, and has plans to work on more events and collaborations with chefs and friends to bring in new talent and share the culinary wealth.
Movies
Trans-driven ‘Serpent’s Skin’ delivers campy sapphic horror
Embracing classic tropes with a candid exploration of queer experience
It’s probably no surprise that the last decade or so has seen a “renaissance” in horror cinema. Long underestimated and dismissed by critics and ignored by all the awards bodies as genre films, horror movies were deemed for generations as unworthy of serious consideration; relegated into the realm of “fandom,” where generations of young movie fanatics were left to find deeper significance on their own, they have inspired countless future film artists whose creative vision would be shaped by their influence. Add to that the increasing state of existential anxiety that has us living like frogs in a slow-boiling pot, and it seems as if the evolution of horror into what might be our culture’s most resonant form of pop art expression was more or less inevitable all along.
Queer audiences, of course, have always understood that horror provides an ideal vehicle to express the “coded” themes that spring from existence as a stigmatized outsider, and while the rise of the genre as an art form has been fueled by filmmakers from every community, the transgressive influence of queerness – particularly when armed with “camp,” its most surefire means of subversion – has played an undeniable role in building a world where movies like “Sinners” and “Weapons” can finally be lauded at the Oscars for their artistic qualities as well as celebrated for their success at providing paying audiences with a healthy jolt of adrenaline.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boldest and most biting entries are coming from trans filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun (“I Saw the TV Glow”) – and like Australian director Alice Maio Mackay, whose new film “The Serpent’s Skin” opened in New York last weekend and expands to Los Angeles this week.
Described in a review from RogerEbert.com as “a kind of ‘Scanners’ for the dolls,” it’s a movie that embraces classic horror tropes within a sensibility that blends candid exploration of trans experience with an obvious love for camp. It centers on twenty-something trans girl Anna (Alexandra McVicker), who escapes the toxic environment of both her dysfunctional household and her conservative hometown by running away to the “Big City” and moving in with her big sister (Charlotte Chimes). On her first night in town, she connects with Danny (Jordan Dulieu), a neighbor (the only “hottie” in the building, according to her sister) who plays guitar in a band and ticks off all her “edgy” boxes, and has a one-night stand.
The very next day, she starts a new job at a record store, where she connects – through an intense and unexpected incident – with local tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Faust), a young woman she has seen in psychic visions, and who has been likewise drawn to her. The reason? They are both “witches,” born with abilities that give them a potentially deadly power over ordinary humans, and bound together in an ancient supernatural legacy.
It goes without saying that they fall in love; together, they teach and learn from each other as they try to master the mysterious magical gifts they both possess; but when Danny coincidentally books Gen for a tattoo inspired by his earlier “fling” with Anna, an ancient evil is unleashed, leading to a string of horrific incidents and forcing them to confront the dark influences within their own traumatic histories which may have conjured this malevolent spirit in the first place, before it wreaks its soul-stealing havoc upon the entire community.
Confronting the theme of imposed trans “guilt” head on, “Serpent’s Skin” emanates from a softer, gentler place than most horror films, focusing less on scares than on the sense of responsibility which seems naturally to arise just from being “different.”. Both McVicker and Faust bring a palpable feeling of weight to their roles, as if their characters are carrying not only their own fate upon their shoulders, but that of the world at large; blessed (or cursed) with a layer of awareness that both elevates and isolates them, their characters evoke a haunting sense of responsibility, which permeates their relationship and supersedes their personal desires. At the same time, they bring a mix of respect and eroticism to the sapphic romance at the center of the film, evoking a connection to the transgressive and iconic “lesbian noir” genre but replacing its sense of amoral cynicism with an imperative toward empathy and social responsibility.
All of this helps to make the film’s heroines relatable, and raises the stakes by investing us not just in the defeat of supernatural evil, but the triumph of love. Yet we can’t help but feel that there’s something lost – a certain edge, perhaps – that might have turned up the heat and given the horror a more palpable bite. Though there are moments of genuine fright, most of the “scary” stuff is campy enough to keep us from taking things too seriously – despite the best efforts of the charismatic Dulieu, who literally sinks his teeth into his portrayal of the possessed version of Danny.
More genuinely disturbing are the movie’s scenes of self-harm, which both underscore and indict the trope of trans “victimhood” while reminding us of the very real fear at the center of many trans lives, especially when lived under the oppression of a mindset that deplores their very existence.
Still, though Mackay’s film may touch on themes of queer and trans existence and build its premise on a kind of magical bond that makes us all “sisters under the skin,” it is mostly constructed as a stylish tribute to the classic thrillers of an earlier age, evoking the psychological edge of directors like Hitchcock and DePalma while embracing the lurid “shock value” of the B-movie horror that shaped the vision of a modern generation of filmmakers who grew up watching it – and even if it never quite delivers the kind of scares that linger in our minds as we try to go to sleep at night, it makes up for the shortfall with a smart, sensitive, and savvy script and a rare depiction of trans/lesbian love that wins us over with chemistry, emotional intelligence, and enviable solidarity.
What makes “The Serpent’s Skin” feel particularly remarkable is that it comes from a 21-year-old filmmaker. Mackey, who built the foundation of her career behind the camera with a series of low-budget horror shorts in her teens, has already made an impact with movies ranging from the vampire horror comedy “So Vam” (released when she was 16) to the horror musical “Satanic Panic” and the queer holiday shockfest “Carnage for Christmas”. With her latest effort, she deploys a confidence and a style that encompasses both the deep psychological nuance of the horror genre and its guilty-pleasure thrills, rendered in an aesthetic that is grounded in intimate queer and trans authenticity and yet remains daring enough to take detours into the surreal and psychedelic without apology.
It’s the kind of movie that feels like a breakthrough, especially in an era when it feels especially urgent for trans stories to be told.
A “No Kings” demonstration was held in Anacostia on Saturday to protest the Trump administration. Speakers at the rally included LGBTQ activist, Rayceen Pendarvis. Following the rally, demonstrators marched across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge.
(Washington Blade photos and videos by Michael Key)
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