I had no idea how to start this blog.
After seeing such an array of queer performances, I was struggling to consolidate everything into one theme or idea. Do I write about northerness and queerness compared with London-centricity? Do I write about my internal debate of the gay vs queer and apply it to performances? Do I write about the audiences I saw and their relation to contemporary queer performance and its survival? I was not sure.
After trying for an hour in the Manchester Central Library reading room, I had a vape break outside. It was then that I saw a poster advertising the Queer Up North archive being displayed in the library. The universe has a funny way of guiding us.
I visited the archive, listened to oral histories and gazed at the displays of programmes, pictures and leaflets. The Queer Up North (originally called It’s Queer up North) festival ran from 1992-2002 and became one of the most pioneering and influential queer arts festivals in the UK and Europe. Queer Up North 1992-2002: Celebrating Manchester’s LGBT+ Heritage. Manchester Libraries were recently awarded funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to preserve and celebrate LGBTQ+ heritage in Manchester, with a focus on the festival.
I also discovered that the festival was born out of a collaboration created in the Green Room, an experimental arts theatre which closed in 2011 (the space now houses Gorilla).
I became envious of being born too late to experience the Green Room and Queer Up North in its heyday. We have events such as Social Experiment at Contact Theatre and various arts festivals around the city. However, listening to Kate O’Donnell talk about the Green Room, it offered four walls for performers to play and inhabit a space that they could call their own and carry out their performance desires without asking for much permission, or needing lots of funding or buy-in to take space.
Manchester still has an amazing queer performance scene, but what space does it inhabit now that two historically important queer performance spaces are long gone?
In starting my Listening journey, I found myself wanting to watch as much queer performance as I had capacity to in Manchester, to investigate the length and breadth of the queer performance scene. Some of this involved looking at venues I knew had queer performances showing; some involved simply searching ‘queer’ in their What’s On pages.
Starting at the traditional theatre, I saw Clothes Swap by Liam Mansfield at Sale Waterside with some queer young people I work with. The lighting was spectacular; the set gave so much movement to the spaces the characters could inhabit, and the narrative of a queer youth club was one we could recognise in the venue we meet at weekly. After chatting with my young people, we came away with prominent feelings about our own space. Our venue doesn’t have high production lights; it has a badge maker and some old tables. It doesn’t adapt to us; we adapt to it. It felt that the young people, myself and the other audience members I spoke to echoed adaptability in the queer (performance).
In watching Maddie Maycock’s Torso at SEESAW, I saw adaptability. The room had brick walls, fold out chairs and no theatre lighting built into the ceiling. The performance was framed using a large sheet and Maddie’s presence, drawing our attention to their movements and spoken word. They didn’t require anything light or bold to emphasise their production, just a simple light that allowed us to immerse into their nonbinaryhood.
Grindr the Opera was the one that fascinated me most. Performed in 53Two, a small theatre set under the Deansgate tram line, the black box theatre allowed for some audience members to occupy raked seating whilst others occupied two tables at the front of the theatre, set out as VIP tables. The set was huge, the songs and storytelling echoing some very typical Grindr experiences, and the audience were onboard. The audience was made up of predominantly cis, white gay men. However, some older women were scattered throughout the space. At £35 a ticket, it made me wonder whether this audience would attend non-touring, affordable queer performances in fringe venues, or whether the theatre set-up and established layout meant that demonstrations of penetration and choking during sex on-stage were more palatable. Does the theatre allow more access to queer narratives than a dark nightclub or a small venue with fold-away seating?
It was interesting watching The Probability of a Dog Becoming a Receptionist during the Manchester Fringe, which was staged in the upstairs of Jimmy’s Pub in Ancoats. As expected in a Fringe-style performance, the floor was lined with mismatched chairs, and the set was simple. The protagonist's turbulent relationship with Grindr was underpinned by a corporate work presentation.
The duality of the corporate space and the queer space fascinated me. The corporate is one that is clean, ordered, goal-driven, creating a want and need for power. I know a lot of corporate gays; do these spaces offer a clean, easy (heteronormative) way of living that gives us permission to escape queer shame? Then the performer opened a can of tripe for the dog that threatens to replace him, and I was immediately brought back to the pub; I felt sick, surrounded by this overbearing smell. This reminded me that the clean, capitalist corporations are unable to contain queerness for too long, that we will find ways to disrupt the space and bring our messy hedonism to deal with the suffocation of Microsoft 365 and windowless office walls. It gave my senses a wake-up call to know that not every space is as clean-cut as it may appear.
David Hoyle still presents his work in Manchester, recently performing in The Brewers. Although I was not able to get a ticket (yay for selling out, boo for me) it still makes me feel that the underground is still needed for queer performance to thrive. Without spaces like the Green Room to offer access to experimental theatre, we have to create that space ourselves. The reality is that queer performers still deal with an inaccessibility to theatres and established venues. Our work often doesn’t speak the language of commercial viability and struggles to write up a funding bid that declares exactly what it is we are to do with the space. As performers, we need to continue to disrupt spaces and nurture environments for queer performances to grow. We have to continue the legacy of Queer Up North, the Green Room and many other venues that have been before, and take up space when we feel too radical to contain. There are places open to this in Manchester; we just need to enter them and tear down the walls.
