Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions

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Why do contemporary queer theatre and performance appear to be possessed by the past What aesthetic practices and dramaturgical devices reveal the occupation of the present by painful history How might the experience of theatre and performance relieve the present of its most arduous burdens Following recent legislation and cultural initiatives across many Western countries that have been hailed as confirming the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people are over, this book turns our attention to artists who invoke historys enduring harm. Guiding us through examples that include Artangel, Belfast Ensemble, Cassils, David Hoyle, Dickie Beau, Franko B, Jeremy O. Harris, Karen Finley, les ballets C de la B, McDermott & McGough, Milo Rau, Rachel Mars, Split Britches and Travis Alabanza, Fintan Walsh explores how theatre, performance, installation and digital practices reckon with cultural and personal histories. Among the issues confronted are the incarceration and untimely death of Oscar Wilde, the Holocaust, racial objectification, the AIDS crisis and Covid-19, alongside more local and individual experiences of violence, trauma and grief. Walsh traces how the queer past is summoned and interrogated via what he elaborates as the aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession, which lend form to the still-stinging aches and generative potential of injustice and loss. These strategies expose how the past continues to haunt and disturb the present, while calling on those of us who feel its force to respond to historys unresolved hurt.

Author Bio

Fintan Walsh is Professor of Theatre and Performance, Co-Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Director of BiGS/Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His recent books include the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020) and the monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). Fintan is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.