Viva Brighton Issue #69 November 2018

PERFORMANCE
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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 2018 ‘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 2018, 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 2018 ‘Black Herstory’ calendar by Jacob V Joyce
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