MAS

JADE BLACKSTOCK

'Mas' is a solo walking performance exploring transformation, remembrance, protest and celebration. The work draws on myths and materials used in Afro-Caribbean masquerades to explore the role of storytelling in expressing cultural identities and encouraging social change. The work highlights the interconnectedness of legacies of slave labour and trade and the modern landscape of Britain. It aims to be a catalyst for open conversations about equity, perceptions of difference and collective memory.

Jade is a British-Jamaican performance artist. Her work explores the body and identity in relation to historical, cultural and personal events and experiences. Her practice is particularly ​anchored in exploring Afro-Caribbean customs, rituals and material, and attempts to unpack how colonial histories impact the lives and current representations of people of colour. She seeks to highlight how the body, material and space have shared capabilities of transferring and embodying collective pasts or memories, which bears importance in our understanding of selves and each other. Themes of Black identity, feminism, ownership, class and loss are present in her work.

A VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM

WHISKEY CHOW

Whiskey Chow shares a new performance to camera work A View from the Bottom. Touching on queer identity, race, and power, Chow decodes traditional perceptions of hypermasculine attributes. Overturning a binary understanding of gender, Chow explores the idea of multiple ‘masculinities’ through playing with stereotypical motifs of athleticism (often perceived as a proxy for strength).

WHISKEY CHOW (b.1989) is a London-based artist and Chinese drag king. Her interdisciplinary art practice engages with broadly defined political issues, covering a range of related topics: from female/queer masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, to stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Her work combines embodied performance, moving image and experimental sound pieces. Whiskey has been involved in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China since 2011. She contributed to and performed in ‘For Vaginas’ Sake (2013)’, and curated the first Chinese LGBTQ music festival, Lover Comrades Concert (2013), Guangzhou. Whiskey is currently working as Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She is director/ curator of Queering Now, a programme amplifying the voices of queer Asian artists in the West.

Creative Concept / Direction / Lead Artist/ Performer: Whiskey Chow
Cinematography: Ning Zhou
Sound Production: Ning Zhou & Whiskey Chow
Make-up Artist: Olly Yip
Producer: Ruth Holdsworth

Mystical Femmes’s Variety Intimate Lizard TV Show

MYSTICAL FEMMES

'Mystical Femmes’s Variety Intimate Lizard TV Show' coming straight to your homes this June.

Are you lonesome? We can help! Everyone is Welcome. 

Join us for one night only where we will answer the world’s most asked Questions, such as:

-What time is it?
-Will it rain?
-Are we still alive?
-How do I make a cake?
-Who’s my daddy? 

Attention:Disclaimer
    *We are not responsible.  

Mystical Femmes (founded in 2018) address themes of failure, femme erasure and surreal feminisms. They are ‘two alien creatures, trying to learn basic human skills such as baking, accounting and personal hygiene.’ Their work builds on a foundation of body based live performance, subsequently including film and video. They are influenced by lesbian porn, pseudo scientific writing around lesbianism and queerness that appears in nature. 

In 2020 they were Duckie resident artists and were also commissioned by Camden People’s Theatre to create a show for the Calm Down Dear festival (cancelled due to the Pandemic). 

In November 2020 they created ‘<A lecture on how to be intimate online="With a focus on exploring humans.”>, an online show commission by Centre For Live Art Yorkshire for their online festival CHASM.

@mysticalfemmes

TRÂUDAZE: கோலம் | Kōlam

HAMSHYA RAJKUMAR

Kōlams will spiral out of and around Tramway.

They honour weeds, who exist to repair contaminated soils birthed from industry.

In keeping with the tradition of Kōlams, they will be created during dusk;
scattered and morphed by human movement throughout the day,
visited and consumed by the inhabitants of soil & birds.

sad act

samir kennedy

SAD ACT is a short video work posing as an archetypal study, using the devil and the clown as vectors for contemporary urban apathy. 

Samir Kennedy is a British/Algerian Dance, Performance and Sound Artist based between London and Marseille. 

He is queer, working class and crass. He makes interdisciplinary works across video, sound and performance that centre the body as a site from which to perform notions of class, race, otherness, queerness and abjection. He makes work that wants us to feel something, anything... 

He has shown work at Arts Admin (UK), Southbank Centre (UK), Present Futures Festival/CCA (UK), The Place Theatre (UK), Hackney Showroom (UK), METAL (UK), Humber Street Gallery (UK), LAB (UK), Latitude (UK), SPILL Festival (UK), 

] performance S P A C E[ (UK), Quarterhouse (UK), Queertopia Festivalen (SE), Sophiensaele (DE) and Freakatoni's Wild Weekends (NE) to name a few. 

He has worked extensively as a performer and collaborator with other artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Florence Peake, Lucy McCormick, Colette Sadler, Theo Clinkard, Charles Linehan,  Simon Vincenzi, Joe Moran, Rahel Vonmoos, Liam Warren

And Pablo Bronstein and has performed these works in both high profile and underground spaces across the UK and Internationally. 

Created and Performed by Samir Kennedy 

Shot by James St Findlay
Sound by Samir Kennedy 

Kill The Cop Inside Your Head

SUBIRA JOY

We’ve all got a cop inside our heads.
It’s up to you what you do about that.

Spoken word and performance artist Subira Joy explores their experiences being targeted by the police as a Black, queer and trans person in the UK.

Combining striking visual imagery with powerful language, this new work examines the impact of the police in our communities and how we internalise their role to repress and suppress ourselves into submission.

Tracing narratives of police encounters while centring themes of violence, gaslighting and abuse of power, this work exposes how we impede our liberation when confronted by our inner cop.

Subira Joy is a Brighton-based spoken word and performance artist. They perform both in the UK and internationally. Their first show Subira debuted at 2018’s Brighton Fringe and won ONCA’s Green Curtain award. Their second show Joy Nduku, with their identical twin sibling Wandia Nduku, was performed as part of Marlborough Productions' New Queers on the Block and as part of Queer B-Cademy’s programme at Kampnagel. Subira has also performed as a support act for Travis Alabanza’s Before I Step Outside (You Love Me), in the Queer Migrant Takeover at Latitude Festival and in Hester Chillingworth’s A Pair Of Pantos.

Created and Performed by Subira Joy
BSL Interpreter Ali Gordon
Lighting Designer Marty Langthorne
Make Up Designer Vlad Von Kitsch
Sound Designer Mwen
Videographer / Photographer Rosie Powell
Outside Eyes Rachael Young & Emma Frankland

Special thanks to Cole Alvis, Tarik Elmoutawakil and Wandia Nduku

Developed with support from Arts Council England, Buzzcut, Marlborough Productions, ONCA, ACCA and Cambridge Junction

A LIFE IN THE C*NTRY

CLIFF DICK AND STELLA

Cliff Dick and Stella have packed up their locked down city lives and headed outwards for a life in the C*ntry. Where the fields are green, the water is flowing, the birds are singing and the people are straight. So lock up your hetero kids, siblings, parents, grandparents, dogs, cats, pigs, sheep, cows, goats and chickens because the queer trans agenda has arrived darlings.

A life in the C*ntry is an unapologetic celebration of trans euphoria and queer liberation in rural heteronormative spaces. A musing over how we connect with queer identity and community in the spaces where we can't see it reflected back at us, and how we find trans affirmation in rural surroundings.

Cliff Dick and Stella are the drag receptacles of professional trans mischief makers Nelly Kelly and Adam Kashmiry. Nelly and Adam work collaboratively with the shared goal of spreading trans joy across the land. They put a trans audience at the heart of all they do and use drag as a way of pushing gender boundaries imposed on trans people by cis-heteronormative society. What they love most of all is connecting in a shared sense of euphoria with trans audiences. They are trans artists making work with the sole purpose of uplifting the trans community and injecting joy into the hearts of trans individuals - cis allies encouraged, but not essential.

Videographer: Tiu Makkonen

hollowing out

Alicia Radage

This body of work touch on queer ecology, neurodivergent kinaesthetic experience and vibrations that call for a human rewilding within the ecosystems we inhabit. Over the past year, I have been developing a body of work exploring the relationship between Shamanism* and Neurodiversity.

Shamanism is a practice that exists through the understanding that everything is alive and that we can communicate with all aspects of the Universe. It maintains that we have lost our connection to that which is beyond the human, resulting in the treatment of the natural world is at our disposal which has caused the current ecological crisis.

Radage places this in tandem with Neurodiversity as a civil rights issue, maintaining that a Neurotypical world should expand how it functions as opposed to pathologising Neurodivergent processes.

An opening up and expansion of our modes of communication and a restructuring of the prevalent world order will make space for both Neurodivergent people to thrive as well as a balanced biosphere. Radage has been working with Shamanic journeying, developing expansive ways of communicating beyond commonplace Neurotypical modes.

Radage has shown their work throughout the UK as well as Italy, Germany, Austria, Colombia, Chile and India.  They have been supported by The British Council and Arts Council England and have taught at Universities on Fine Art and Theatre courses. They co-organise Assembly with Jasper Llewellyn, a workshop and residency for Action Artists in Provence, France. They are one half of the collaboration Radage ▽ Hardaker with Ro Hardaker. Radage is currently making work at the intersection of Neurodivergent experience and Shamanic practice with support from Shape Arts.

All video, audio and performance content created by Alicia Radage.
www.aliciaradage.com

Jinhwa

PURINA ALPHA

My name is Purina Alpha, and I am a dancer and drag artist: best defined overall as a performance artist. I take influence from a myriad of styles when I perform: contemporary, commercial Korean (K-pop), hiphop, African and Indian dance. I also train with Vogue Scotland and incorporate what I learn from that into my performances. My drag is about mixing elements of things that aren’t ‘supposed’ to be mixed. I take a lot of influence from K-pop but also from the vogue and drag scenes, so I basically take Korean music/media and make it black and queer.

In This Moment I'm Living: Ease

thefuries

In This Moment, I’m Living: Ease is a spell, where the human blurs with the non-human calling an end to sexual violence. In This Moment I'm Living is a wider project that uses sound to surface how trauma changes the way survivors listen. In restructuring sounds and engaging in a process of healing, Thefuries hopes that the listener can experience the work with moments of ease and see the strength of vulnerability.

Thefuries is another face of a practicing artist. They make music for the tranquillity of the souls of survivors of sexual violence: requiems for the living, the living dead and the dead.

Concept, Performance, Music Production & Bell Making: Thefuries
Director & Videography: Tiu Makonnen
Costume / The Living Suit: Design and hand printed textiles by Zephyr Liddell, made by Morag Seaton
Costume / The Gravel Veil: Designed by Zephyr Liddell, made by Poppy Camden, casting by Jen Kilgour