Backpages 33.1-2

Abstract

Backpages is an opportunity for the academy to engage with theatre and performance practice with immediacy and insight, and for theatre workers and performance artists to engage critically and reflectively on their work and the work of their peers.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. See our website: https://feralqueercamp.com/.

2. Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor, ‘Feral Theory: Editors’ Introduction’, Feral Feminisms, 6: 5–17.

3. See Alyson Campbell, ‘Going Feral. Queerly de-Domesticating the Institution (and Running Wild)’, in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, eds Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan, (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), 177–80; Alyson Campbell, ‘Queering Pedagogies’. Theatre Topics, 30, no.2 (2020): 117–24.

4. Alyson Campbell, Meta Cohen, Stephen Farrier, and Hannah McCann, ‘Embracing Feral Pedagogies: Queer Feminist Education Through Queer Performance’, in Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism: Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies eds Penny Jane Burke, Julia Coffey, Rosalind Gill and Akane Kanai (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 193-209.

5. A qubble is a neologism merging queer and bubble, formed in the isolation of Melbourne’s long lockdowns by single-household dwellers Campbell and Meta Cohen. One thing we wanted to resist was the government’s focus on romantic partners and families and posit (queer) friendship as a strong alternative. The full definition is available on writer Peta Murray’s blog https://mmmmycorona.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/29-september-2020/

6. We have been fortunate to work in partnership with Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast (2018/19) and Midsumma Festival, Melbourne (2020/21 and ongoing). In 2023 for Midsumma we were also in partnership with the Science Gallery Melbourne.

7. Bella Milroy, ‘Access as Meditation’, Human Libraries, https://humanlibraries.co.uk/projects/soft-sanctuary-online/access-as-meditation/ (accessed February 28, 2022); original emphasis.

8. Ibid.

9. ‘Home’, Extant, https://extant.org.uk/ (accessed February 28, 2022).

10. Maria Oshodi, pre-show talk for Movie Theatre, Kennington Park Community Centre, London, June 4, 2021.

11. Louise Fryer and Amelia Cavallo, Integrated Access in Live Performance (London: Routledge, 2021), 59.

12. Agnieszka Szarkowska, and Pilar Orero, ‘The Importance of Sound for Audio Description’, in Audio Description: New Perspectives Illustrated, ed. Anna Maszerowska, Anna Matamala, and Pilar Orero (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014), 121-140 (124-125).

13. Ibid., 122.

14. Fryer and Cavallo, Integrated Access in Live Performance, 57.

15. Grace Joseph, post-show Q&A for Movie Theatre, Kennington Park Community Centre, London, June 4, 2021.

16. Maria Oshodi, post-show Q&A for Movie Theatre, Kennington Park Community Centre, London, June 4, 2021.

17. Grace Joseph and Maria Oshodi, post-show Q&A for Movie Theatre, Kennington Park Community Centre, London, June 4, 2021.

18. Christopher Taylor, ‘Textual Cohesion’, in Audio Description: New Perspectives Illustrated, ed. Anna Maszerowska, Anna Matamala, and Pilar Orero (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014), 41-60 (42).

19. Sahitya Akademi, ‘Meet the Author: Mahesh Dattani’, Sahitya Akademi website, http://sahitya-akademi.gov.in/library/meettheauthor/mahesh_dattani.pdf (accessed June 30, 2021).

20. Elke Huybrechts, ‘What is Queer about Queer Performance Now’, Theatre Times, https://thetheatretimes.com/what-is-queer-about-queer-performance-now/ (accessed June 29, 2021).

21. David Cregan, ‘Irish Theatrical Celebrity and the Critical Subjugation of Difference in the Work of Frank McGuinness’, Modern Drama 47 (2004): 671-685 (682).

22. Ibid., 671.

23. Alyson C.ampbell and Stephen Farrier, ‘Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies’, in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, eds Alyson C.ampbell and Stephen Farrier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1-26 (13). (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 13.

24. Ibid., 15.

25. Ibid.

26. Octavius Jones, ‘You Will Not Erase Us’, The Pantograph Punch, 2021, https://www.pantograph-punch.com/posts/you-will-not-erase-us, (accessed September 16, 2021).

27. Campbell and Farrier, ‘Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies’, 16.

28. Ibid., 8.

29. Amit Noy, ‘Legacy Vogue Ball: Tāmaki Aflame’, The Pantograph Punch, 2021, https://www.pantograph-punch.com/posts/tamaki-aflame, (accessed September 25, 2021).

30. Campbell and Farrier, ‘Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies’, 14.

31. Shane Bosher, ‘Do We Actually Know Our History’, Playmarket Annual 55, 2020, https://www.issuu.com/playmarket/docs/online-playmarket-annual-55-2020/S/11118945, (accessed September 17, 2021).

32. David O’Donnell, ‘“Whaddarya?” Questioning National Identity in New Zealand Drama’, in Performing Aotearoa: New Zealand Theatre and Drama in an Age of Transition, ed. Marc Maufort and David O’Donnell (Brussels: PIE Peter Lang, 2007), 17-25 (24-25).

33. Marie-Laure Ryan. ‘Interactive Drama: Narrativity in a Highly Interactive Environment’, Modern Fiction Studies 43, No. 3 (1997): 677-707.

34. Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theater (Menlo Park, CA: Addison Wesley, 1991), 16.

35. Margaret Thomas Kelso, Peter Weyhrauch, and Joseph Bates, ‘Dramatic Presence’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 2, no. 1 (1993): 1-15, (2).

36. Ibid., 9.

37. A. Al-Azraki, and James Al-Shamma, ‘General Introduction’, in Contemporary Plays from Iraq, translated and edited by A. Al-Azraki and James Al-Shamma (London: Bloomsbury Methuen., 2017), xi-xviii.

38. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London: Faber, 1974), 210.

39. Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia, when are we ever at home?, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 22.

40. Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter, trans. Angela Rodel (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022), 266-267.

41. Homer, The Odyssey (Book 19, 467-475), trans. Richard Lattimore (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 294.

42. Mischa Twitchin, ‘Angels in Poland’, in Contemporary Theatre Review 30, no.4 (2020), 584-588.

43. For information, see the company’s website: https://nowyteatr.org/en/kalendarz/odyseja-historia-dla-hollywoodu (accessed August 14, 2022).

44. Homer, The Odyssey (Book 17, 300-305), trans. Richard Lattimore (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 261.

45. Curzio Malaparte, The Skin, trans. David Moore (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 170.

46. Ibid., 165.

47. Ibid., 172.

48. Ibid., 154.

49. Ibid., 159-164.

50. Ibid., 160.

51. In the UK, for instance, Suella Braverman, the Attorney General at the end of Boris Johnson’s government (August 2022), made a speech (arguing in favour of withdrawing the country completely from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights) in which she said that ‘there was a serious risk that the fight for rights undermines democracy’ (quoted by Peter Walker in the Guardian, August 11, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/aug/10/uk-must-curb-influence-of-european-human-rights-rules-says-suella-braverman (accessed August 14, 2022).

52. Curzio Malaparte, The Skin, trans. David Moore (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 171.

53. Ibid., 165.

54. Ibid., 163.

55. Ibid., 164.

56. Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, in Cultural Memory Studies: an International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 97-108 (98-99).

57. Hanna Krall, King of Hearts, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Peirene, 2013), 156.

58. Czesław Miłosz, ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’, trans. Czesław Miłosz, in Postwar Polish Poetry, ed. Czesław Miłosz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 75-76.

59. Alexander Ward, ‘Scotland Named Best European Country to Live in If You’re Gay’, The Independent, May 11, 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/scotland-named-best-european-country-live-if-you-re-gay-10240352.html.

60. See David Bol, ‘Transgender hate crime in Scotland has doubled in last five years’, The Herald, February 23, 2021, https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19111132.transgender-hate-crime-scotland-doubled-last-five-years/ and Lil Wakefield, ‘Homophobic Hate Crime Soars to Record Highs in Scotland’, Pink News, July 20, 2020, https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/07/20/homophobia-hate-crime-record-scotland-dundee-aberdeen-transphobia-crown-office/.

61. See Libby Brooks, ‘Sturgeon Trans Rights Support Prompts Calls for Reform’, The Guardian, January 28, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/28/sturgeon-transphobia-tweet-prompts-calls-to-push-through-legislation.

62. See Simon Johnson and Daniel Sanderson, ‘Rishi Sunak blocks Nicola Sturgeon’s gender reforms’, The Telegraph, January 16, 2023, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/01/16/rishi-sunak-blocks-nicola-sturgeons-gender-reforms/.

63. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.

64. Love, 4.

65. ‘Scottish Archbishop says “transsexual Jesus” play part of agenda to mock Christianity’, Catholic News, November 9, 2009, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/17647/scottish-archbishop-says-transsexual-jesus-play-part-of-agenda-to-mock-christianity

66. GOMA, ‘Sh[OUT]: Contemporary Art and Human Rights’, Gallery Of Modern Art Glasgow, 2008, https://galleryofmodernart.blog/portfolio/shout-contemporary-art-and-human-rights/.

67. Mark O’Neill, ‘Question of Responsibility’, in Beyond Belief: Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order, ed. Julia Farrington and Natasha Lehrer (London: Index on Censorship, 2011), 56-59 (56).

68. See Katy Watson, ‘Brazil culture wars heat up’, BBC News, November 19, 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-41913720

69. Ethics Approval Project ID 12129, University of Melbourne.

70. Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 158.

71. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Fintan Walsh, ‘Queer Performance and the Drama of Disorientation’, in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, eds. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 313-329.

72. Walsh, ‘Drama of Disorientation’, 324.

73. The doctoral work this paper is drawn from is an explication of queer nightlife and heterotopia, within which their affectual components, such as disorientation, are situated. Benjamin Gennochio describes heterotopia as ‘an idea that… produces/theorises space as transient, contestory, plagued by lapses and rupture sites,’ as something that ‘both question[s] and undermine[s] the limits of the alleged coherence and totality of self-contained linguistic and spatial systems.’ ‘Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of ‘Other’ Spaces’, in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 35-46, 43, 41. For more on heterotopic space, see: Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997); Joanne Tompkins, Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

74. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 217-51; José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 5.

75. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 160.

76. madison moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (United States of America: Yale University Press, 2018), 123.

77. Fox Pflueger, in discussion with the author, March 2020.

78. Ibid.

79. Fox Pflueger, in discussion with the author, March 2020.

80. Fig. 1. [Photo of Nefertiti LaNegra performing at GayTimes]. 16 Feb 2018. Photo by Jackson Grant. From Nefertiti LaNegra Facebook Page, accessed 1 Oct, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/NefertitiLaNegra/photos/a.810353736031287/810355632697764

81. Nefertiti LaNegra, in discussion with the author, September 2020.

82. Nefertiti LaNegra, in discussion with the author, September 2020.

83. Nefertiti LaNegra, in discussion with the author, September 2020.

84. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 178-179.

85. Walsh, ‘Drama of Disorientation’, 314, 322.