Posted by Ben Walters, Monday 20 May 2019, 12:48pm.
Iran’s first unveiled woman singer, post-punk night-bus fashion and Jewish refugees turned Deep South racists – each found their way into Queer Connections: Where Are We Now?, an afternoon cabaret, panel and sort-of-salon at Camden People’s Theatre on Sunday afternoon (19 May 2019). Dedicated to connection across queer generations, it touched on archives and ancestors, identity and experience, with the conversation organically branching out from the stage to the audience and then the foyer.
Camden People’s Theatre asked me to put the event together to bounce off a tantalising aspect of my doctoral research – the idea of queer intergenerational connection. What might it mean to think of queer generations? What kind of contact between them does, might or should exist? Can we use the past to demand the future? And how might performance help grapple with such questions?
So I invited three amazing performers on the London scene whose work touches on these themes to show some short work.
Tom Marshman’s show King’s Cross (Remix) draws on interviews with veterans of the 1980s gay scene to consider what that scene represents, then and now, and what we risk losing if it’s forgotten. With help from the audience, Tom selected three snippets from the show, each a glimpse of a vivid real-life character thinking and feeling across time.
Mzz Kimberley, an icon of the London cabaret scene, presented an electrifying performance suite riffing on aspects of queer Black identity. It combined a haunting excerpt from Strange Fruit with an incisively critical monologue by Rikki Beadle-Blair on the endless limitations on and inventiveness of QTIPOC expression, plus a barnstorming rendition of I Know Where I’ve Been, Hairspray’s gospel-style anthem. It was a miniature masterclass in combining cabaret intimacy with thoughtful stagecraft.
The young Iranian-born genderqueer artist, performer and club promoter Katy Jalili brought an experimental live-art flavour with a movement-based piece bringing together deadpan affect, gorgeous pink facepaint-and-diamante look and a cluster of inflated condoms, accompanied by a personally resonant soundtrack. Body hair, sexual autonomy, clown-like humour and ancestral echoes bounced off each other toward an explosive climax.
After a short interval, I talked with Tom, Kim and Katy about the different ways each uses the past in their work today – sometimes as inspiration, sometimes as critique – and more broadly about how queer culture and community shift across time. We touched on the value of increasing conversation between queer people of different ages and experiences, then opened up the conversation to the audience. There was a broad mix of people: we heard powerful first-hand insights about ingrained inhibitions in some older people and many younger people’s discontents with today’s supposedly more enlightened conditions.
Through accident and instinct more than conscious strategy, Queer Connections was an alcohol-free Sunday daytime event that enabled a diverse range of LGBTQ+ people to come together and empathetically exchange understandings – understandings about our different experiences and expectations of past, present and future – both within the event and in the conversations that continued as we tumbled out of the theatre. It felt like the sort of space we could use more of.
King’s Cross (Remix) is at Camden People’s Theatre from Tuesday May 21 to Sunday May 25 2019. More info here.
This post also appears on the Camden People’s Theatre website here.
