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PERFORMANCE ............................. Thinking Queer Responses to Audre Lorde The Marlborough Theatre’s Abby Butcher is struggling to summarise all the reasons they have chosen American writer and civil rights campaigner Audre Lorde – a self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ – as the subject of their forthcoming Thinking Queer event. “I don’t know, man,” she sighs eventually, “She’s just wicked.” Those not familiar with Lorde’s many novels and poetry collections may recognise lines taken from them – ‘Your silence will not protect you’, or ‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own’ – many of which have acquired renewed weight more than 25 years after her death in 1992. “We thought, wouldn’t she be an amazing person to respond to?” explains Butcher, the theatre’s creative producer. “So we did an open call for artists and were immediately inundated with applications – which highlights how influential a figure she is.” The four commissioned to produce new, 15-minute pieces for the event are all “black, queer women making stuff that responds to different elements of Lorde’s work, her identity, her practice.” Butcher says Paula Varjack’s work is “especially fascinating” because of the parallels between her life and that of Lorde’s. Like Lorde – who lived in Berlin after the fall of the Wall and witnessed the rise of racist violence in the city – Varjack too has spent time in Berlin, and experienced racism while there. “Paula’s working with video and I think is planning to go back to Berlin to explore this idea of shared history.” Toni Lewis will look at “ritual practices” around Lorde’s work, while spoken word artist Mia Johnson is “a young queer woman, gutsy, blunt and really smart in the way she uses language”. Lastly, there is dance artist Zinzi Minott, who underlines the ongoing relevance of Lorde’s writing with a piece informed by her thoughts on the Windrush scandal. The Audre Lorde event is the second in the theatre’s Thinking Queer programme, an informal night of ‘reflection, resistance, poetics and power’ held in ACCA’s café-bar – “So it’s pretty chilled.” It follows a launch last year inspired by the Bloomsbury Group that featured artist Jacob V Joyce, from whose <strong>2018</strong> ‘Black Herstory’ calendar of radical black women the above image of Audre Lorde is taken. Joyce spoke of the problems they had with some of the Bloomsbury Group’s attitudes – and, says Butcher, that was great. “Performers don’t have to respond positively to the subject. They can say ‘This work is really alien to me, really dense and heavy and I, as a queer person in <strong>2018</strong>, just don’t get it.’ That’s totally fine. We want people to feel they can be honest. Although, you know, no one has had that response to Audre Lorde.” Nione Meakin Thinking Queer, ACCA, 7th Nov, 8pm From the <strong>2018</strong> ‘Black Herstory’ calendar by Jacob V Joyce ....47....