DEVELOPMENT - queer dramaturgy is transgression no academic citation its a commentary a transgression if you will
Photo Credit: Tiahna Johnson, 2023
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The 5th Guest rises and walks to the centre of the stage. They take a bow and the lights go out.
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Our society is built upon taxonomy, a need to categorise. Resolute distinctions aid us to navigate, providing a script of decorum. But these paradigms are built on murky moralities, and as their rot begins to spread, its cracks of fallibility begin to show. Created through a Practice as Research in Performance process, queer dramaturgy seeks to explore the strength of conservative morality and its subsequent transgression into the abject, a suspension, a space between. Performed by an audience participant who has never seen or read the piece, the work questions the interplay between body, technology, control and autonomy.
Credits:
Isobel Finnie - Lead Creative, AV designer
Fletcher Scully - Stage Manager
Tiahna Johnson - Assistant Stage Manager
Jolene Whibley - Lighting Designer
Immense thank you to my mentor and teacher Janet Lee for leading me to such immense personal and professional growth through this project. Great thanks also to Talia Zipper for braving the cold to help film the AV content.
Janet Lee
An extraordinary, sophisticated and mature work with depth and complexity...it was manifestly bold, assertive and dazzlingly sharp –– from the populating of self into the blue screen scenography of bourgeois morality through to your arsenal of subversive textual material, to the casting of an audience member into the heart of your polemic.