Cirrus@Austlit

'What is a queer black drag aesthetic? Who are the architects of this work? How do you go about producing or curating an event that celebrates queer black drag culture? These are questions that emerged when, quite by accident, independent producer Harley Stumm (Intimate Spectacle) approached me as a then Co-Artistic Director of Moogahlin Performing Arts, inviting the company to curate an event for the Near and Now Festival at 107 Projects in Redfern. The time slot offered was 24-25 February 2017, right in the middle of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival season. After extensive consultation with members of the Moogahlin artistic leadership, and with various black LGBTQI+ community members, it became clear that there was a need for and interest in initiating a queer black arts programme to be presented in Redfern on Gadigal land, an area that historically has been known as a gathering space for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from across the country. As the lead creative, I never intended to view the project as research. However, this special issue has provided the opportunity to reflect on the process of creating and producing a queer black event, and subsequent events, and to contribute to the discourse on Indigenous queer performance in Australia. This article is therefore assembled from my memories and experiences, though partial, of curating four annual events known as Koori Gras. In framing this discussion, I am informed by the writings of Gayatri Gopinath, specifically in relation to the idea of curation as a practice of 'care', and extend this notion to also include the concept of 'kin' when investigating Indigenous queer curation and a black drag aesthetic in Australia. I am similarly influenced by the critical writings of Indigenous scholars such as Sandy O'Sullivan and Nat Woodall in consideration of the social, cultural and political aspirations of black drag performers in Australia. In addition, I include a timeline of Koori Gras and list the key creative personnel and performers who contributed to the overall success of the many programmes that Koori Gras platformed. This documentation is constructed from materials sourced from project production schedules and contact lists from Moogahlin company archives.' (Publication abstract) 

'This article is part of an ongoing conversation between Jacob Boehme, Alyson Campbell and Jonathan Graffam about Boehme's play 'Blood on the Dance Floor' (Melbourne and Sydney, 2016; Australia and Canada tour, 2019), and we see it now as a kind of queer collaborative musing that we are doing together to think through how the production works. While we have published some of our thinking on the play before, we realised that none of us was finished trying to articulate how it was created (Boehme), and the impact it had on us as spectators (Campbell and Graffam) and, indeed, that there was still so much to unravel in terms of its place in the context of queer performance in Australasia. In this article, we focus on key decisions made during the dramaturgical process of composing two sequences from the production, 'Sandridge Beach' and 'Anthony'. In examining the production's 'dramaturgy', we refer both to the structure and content of the piece and the processes of decision-making that are key to composing the work. While the term 'dramaturgy' is used to describe the selection of material in crafting and organising new work, on another level it seeks to make explicit the relationship between the artistic composition and the socio-political and cultural context in which the work is staged. There are multiple ways to approach any framing of 'Blood on the Dance Floor (BOTDF)' - Indigenous identity, queerness and HIV - and, though we start from the perspective of queerness for this special issue, they are as inextricably interwoven and inseparable as the double helix of DNA. In our conversations for this article, what emerged most strongly from Jacob were ideas of love, the complexity - or, perhaps more precisely, absence - of Indigenous sexual lives from stage and other representational forms, and queer kinship.' (Publication abstract)

'This part-interview, part-recollection/reflection between trans-masculine, non-binary queer theatre-maker Stace Callaghan and their long-term collaborator, director and creative practice researcher, Leah Mercer, was conducted via a series of curated online conversations in early 2022. Stace and Leah met as undergraduates majoring in Drama at the University of Queensland in 1989 and have continued to collaborate on and off since then.'(Publication abstract) 

'Every night of the first season of 'cLUB bENT' was a spectacular performance event. Taking place at The Performance Space, Redfern, during Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG) festival 1995, 'cLUB bENT' represented a defining moment in 1990s queer performance, exploring identity, new and old performance forms, gender diversity, abject sexuality and sex positivism. 'cLUB bENT' also became a site where performance forms and 'elements' - which I define as creative tropes, gestures and performance languages which might recur in identical yet random ways in later works - were hybridised over time and new reference points for content and form were created among a broad community of performers and activists.' (Publication abstract) 

'On 13 March 2021, I attended The West Ball II held at Casula Powerhouse, an arts and performance venue in Liverpool, New South Wales. Liverpool was the city I grew up in and where I was appointed to for my first teaching job. I attended school there, hung out at the Westfield shopping mall and lined up for hours for donuts at Krispy Kreme when it first opened. I spent what feels like most of my undergraduate degree at The University of Sydney explaining where Liverpool was and why I couldn't just get a taxi home after a night out in the city. In a promotional piece for the ball, one of the hosts, Xander Silky, sets up the ball as 'reclaiming' safe space in Western Sydney for queer people, as ‘no one’s ever thrown queer parties in Western Sydney', and people from the area are forced ‘to travel into the inner West or the city to find safe spaces'. In identifying the ball as an opportunity to reclaim space, Xander is calling out to people from Western Sydney to take up space in their local community and to claim it as safe space for their queer community.'(Publication abstract)

'All these groups, for one reason or another, are loosened from the power structure of society because they are different, other. Such folks can easily see their fellow human beings as themselves. They have a sense of the naked unaccommodated human being, the 'communitas' person. Power structures tend to kill 'communitas'. It is the fact of liminality, its aside-ness, its below-ness, that produces and protects 'communitas'... The domination system cannot understand liminality. But the liminal desires the liminal, has to be out of the structure game, where it can have its ordinary people quality. There 'communitas' exists, just as grass wants to come up between the cracks.' (Publication abstract)

(Introduction)