Midsumma Matters: A Panel on Queer Performance

It is time to pay attention to queer performance across Aotearoa, Australia, Pasifika and the Asia Pacific.

We have rich histories and thriving cultures of LGBTQI+ performance, including an explosion of queer performance from First Nations artists across our regions. Queer performance is eclectic and tenacious, persisting as a field of innovation and continuing to sustain LGBTQI+ artists and their audiences despite contexts of ongoing homophobia, transphobia and criminalisation.

Much queer performance, however, goes undocumented, overlooked in mainstream reviews, unrecorded in formal archives, or given scant scholarly attention. As such, we have gathered together contributions to a long-overdue collection of critical thinking about this body of work. This is an intersectional collection of essays, interviews and recollection-reflections.

Wherever we find them, however we’re making them – at the party, on your screen, in the studio, on our stages, in the clubs, on our streets - how do queer practices in performance proliferate diversity in our ecologies, sustain us as communities, invigorate creativity for our survival and generate lifeworlds of transformation?

We hope through the collection to trace the LGBTQI+ desire-lines linking artists and audiences – crossing social, cultural, political and regional boundaries and reaching out queerly across time and place. We want to remember, record and grapple with what emerges in intersectional-queer dance, theatre and performance that transforms us and envisions new worlds.

This public panel discussion forms part of this conversation and brings together co-editors Jacob Boehme and Alyson Campbell with contributors to the journal special.