Author queerguruPosted on Categories queermatterBluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartok Porchester Hall, London, July 8th-10th ☆☆☆☆ In mid-March 2020 – which feels now like eons ago – I waxed lyrical about a certain dancer, Carmine de Amicis, in his role as Jokanaan in a dance-theatre adaptation of Wilde’s Salomé . Then Covid19 struck and a hurdle-track of lockdowns prevented … Continue reading
Author queerguruPosted on Categories queermatterIn this impressive debut, Sam Kenyon offers a painful meditation on lost opportunities and the grievous consequences of thwarted love. In prose that is as delicate as it is precise, we are given the tale of Ray and Joe, whose lives entwine briefly in New York in 1963 when Ray is just 21 years … Continue reading
Author queerguruPosted on Categories queermatterWild(e) Tales: Tales From the Shadows ☆☆☆ Vault Festival, Waterloo It’s no secret that I worship and adore Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, so it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I took my seat for this shadow puppet show of some of his children’s stories, originally written for his two sons, Cyril … Continue reading
Author queerguruPosted on Categories queermatterAt one point during the session Queers in the Library, there was a brief discussion of the concept of space itself, that the library can be as much a virtual zone as a material one, a space both physical and theoretical. It seemed to me to sum up the whole of the festival … Continue reading
Author queerguruPosted on Categories queermatterLike many others, I discovered the Cockettes through David Weismann and Bill Weber’s wonderful eponymous 2002 documentary (frockumentary?), and like that film, this book is an essential monument to the countercultural force of nature that was the Cockettes, the late 60s/early 70s San Francisco queer drag troupe who took on the tedious establishment of mainstream … Continue reading