Archives for LGBT

What we’ve learned from … Tarell Alvin McCraney

In our digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we often look at work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our writing and performance skills. This is what we learned when we looked at a speech from The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney. 1 When the lights come up at the beginning of The Brothers Size, there are three Black men in the space. Throughout this opening invocation, one is grunting with the effort of work; one is in the grip of a bad dream; the third is singing in gospel tones about the roughness of

Thinking big with Vijay Patel

Performance artist Vijay Patel made a guest appearance at last week’s digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people to help participants think about how they could tell their stories and consider their access requirements when writing and performing. Vijay has extensive experience of transforming his own lived experiences into autobiographical / political art. He developed his debut solo show, Pull the Trigger, in 2015, from some of his experiences of growing up working in the family newsagents, in order to explore queerness, work, family and migration. (Vijay was touring the show again earlier this year, when the UK lockdown forced

Amplifying Black voices

We welcomed our first guest artists to Inside Out, our digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people last Friday: Actors Jahvel Hall and Oseloka Obi and theatre-maker Vicky Olusanya (who was sitting in ahead of joining a session in a few weeks’ time). We’d been planning to start introducing our guest artists later this ‘term’ but the urgency of the Black Lives Matter protests led to a change of plan. So we asked Jahvel and Oseloka to bring texts to perform by Black writers that connected with them and talk about why. Jahvel performed a speech from Paul Boakye’s Boy

What we’ve learned from … Frances Bingham

In our weekly online digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we’ve been using work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our life-writing and performance skills. The Blue Hour of Natalie Barney by Frances Bingham premiered at The Arcola in the autumn of 2017. It’s a one-woman show, in which the lesbian pioneer Natalie Barney reflects on her life and art one afternoon in 1950s Nice. This extract is from early in the piece, when Natalie, on her way back from lunch with her long-term lover (the painter Romaine Brooks – that’s her portrait of Natalie, left),

What we’ve learned from … Tony Kushner

In our weekly online digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we have been using work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our life-writing and performance skills. Prior’s speech to Louis about the ship’s captain he’s discovered way back in his family tree from Millennium Approaches (Act I Scene 8) is a supreme piece of story-telling by Tony Kushner (left). Here are nine things we learned by working on it together. 1 Like many good stories (indeed, many good dramas), Prior’s tale is told in three short ‘acts’. 2 Every story needs some exposition. In this case it’s one