The New York Healing Circle (NYHC) practiced touch as a form of mutual aid during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The NYHC’s work challenged fear of the ill body while asserting a view toward flourishing despite illness. Participants asserted a practice of truly seeing each other—a practice of “activist intimacies” centered in care and acceptance (but not passivity) rather than in fixing, hiding, or avoiding.
Queer nightlife is all the rage. Over the past several years there has been a surge of creative practice, performance, music, media, contemporary art, and scholarship focused on the past, present, and future of queer dancefloors. This TDR Consortium issue brings together an intergenerational group of queer artists and scholars who are thinking about the rhythms, textures, and analog intimacies of queer nightlife.
Ranging across queer sexual politics, clinical psychoanalysis, and political solidarity, this conversation investigates the opportunities and vulnerabilities that arise related to risk. What possibilities open when safety is not the goal, but solidarity? An ethical relationship of responsibility rooted in “mutual entanglement” and vulnerability can accommodate the surprising, enigmatic, and unruly nature of sexuality, in ways that an affirmative consent model cannot.
Managing queer venues requires plunging into flows of effluence removal and taking care of drinks, patrons, money, performers, and queer effervescence. A DIY queer nightlife methodology embraces gossip, embodied knowledge, and mess, examining shocks, blocks, and leaks as both material and metaphorical dynamics to trace how use and misuse intertwine in these spaces.
Honcho (George d’Adhemar, Aaron Clark, Michael Moraine, and Clark Price), a staple of the queer dance music underground, highlights the centrality of collaboration and connection to queer nightlife. For Honcho, queer nightlife is not simply flashing lights and the faint smell of poppers, but an opportunity to engage queer history. The most important aspect of queer nightlife, what keeps people coming back for more, might not be the spectacle and dancing bodies, but the many kinds of long lasting, queer intimacies that can unfold on, through, and beyond the dancefloor.
On 1 November 2024, a concrete and steel canopy at a newly reconstructed railway station in the Serbian city of Novi Sad collapsed, instantly killing 14 passersby, with two more succumbing to injuries in the following weeks. Many citizens saw this as the outcome of rampant government corruption and staged silent vigils for the victims. In response to the regime’s violent crackdown on a vigil in front of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, students went into blockade, a protest performance that soon spread to all state universities in the country.
Clit Club (1990-2002) was a lesbian party in New York City where, according to cofounder Julie Tolentino, "every single place in the club was for sex." From a 1991 complaint letter found in NYC's municipal archives to a 2019 performance-installation by Tolentino involving a one-to-one encounter in a dark mineral pool, Clit Club's ephemera and transmissions produce lesbian surrounds-provisional envelopments of the social that are subtended by dyke sex and erotics.
Rituals of listening articulate social hypotheses through the internal dynamics of the musics they feature and the relational intricacies of the encounter itself. At Berghain, extreme duration, audience mobility, and cathedral acoustics mobilize a profoundly physicalized experience of sound. This stands in contrast to the obedience and hierarchy grafted into Western classical music culture. Between these extremes lies a fertile terrain that draws the full-bodied visceral listening of the club far afield from dancefloor formulas.
From schoolroom reenactments of the Constitutional Convention to in-Congress readings and Broadway shows, performance comprises a crucial mechanism by which laypeople in the US understand “constitutionality”—the practices, laws, and actions permissible within the US political arena. These performances illustrate that constitutionality is not simply a set of legal procedures and concepts defined by a document, but a cultural field of which legal practices are one pillar. They also clarify how constitutional protections have come to be abrogated in their own name, and urgently call for intervention.
Contemporary queer nightlife is shaped as much by regulatory discourse as by the unpredictable, dissociative, and even inhuman pleasures that defy normative frameworks of consent, exposure, and identity. Tracing the genealogy of "safer space" policies alongside the shifting cultural resonance of ecstasy and ketamine illuminates how queerness, risk, and digital visibility intersect in nightlife spaces.
Practices of rest—such as napping, dreaming, or lazing about—can seem like counterintuitive subject matter for political performance. A recent cluster of books, however, carves out new space for performance scholarship in studies of aesthetic styles and content centered around rest. The authors examine artistic practices of rest to make interventions in our ongoing modes of humanist study and aesthetic critique.
The 12 short provocations “From the Floor” explore the analog intimacies, memories, textures, practices, vibrancies, and contingencies of the dancefloor.
Performance artist Daphne (formerly known as Imp Queen) opened her 2018 festival performance with a mic drop: “There are two historical professions available to trans women: drag and sex work.” The history she cites concerns the radical unemployability that certain trans women and trans feminine people face—a common discriminatory tactic deployed by the hostile “straight” (and presumably cisgender) world. The history of the founding mothers of contemporary drag (the stage queen and the street queen) reveals lip-syncing and diva worship as trans femme embodied aesthetic practices central to drag’s contested histories.
This performance text is Elfriede Jelinek's instant response on the day of the announcement of Trump's second election victory. It was conceived during his campaign as a coda to her response to Trump's fi rst victory, titled On the Royal Road-The Burgher King, also translated by Gitta Honegger and published in 2020 by Seagull Books.
Over the past decade, several prominent ballet companies have come under fire for perpetuating racist stereotypes. With blackface, the discourse has focused on the United States and minstrelsy. Ballet's far older alliance with European colonialism, however, entangles Orientalism and racism, Africa and Asia-Pacific, in the figure of the "blackamoor."
As "blackface" has become a catchall for a range of practices in contemporary global popular culture, use of the term has entrenched an implicit assumption that blackface is distinctive to the United States. To grasp the manifest globality of blackface, however, it is necessary to consider the many histories and forms blackface has taken across disparate geographies as well as its role in shaping racialized mappings of the world.
Examining the "heathen Chinee" craze prompted by Bret Harte's poem and its transnationalization uncovers what happened to the minstrel form and the violence of slavery that the figure evokes. As the "heathen Chinee" figure became racialized as distinctly "Oriental," it obscured the antiblackness of the minstrel form.
Blackface performed by South Korean women entertainers reveals a precarious, gendered economic condition for these actors and singers whose appearance does not conform to K-pop and K-drama beauty standards. Their use of blackface often represents an attempt to garner attention as a valuable resource, even if negative, within the contemporary attention economy.
Cuban-born A.M. Hernandez traveled to the United States in the late 1840s and performed in various US blackface minstrel troupes from the 1850s through the 1870s. His movements across Cuban and US borders show how his participation in blackface minstrelsy reflected global logics of race and antiblackness, pushing existing studies of blackface to consider subjects whose lives exist transnationally.
What could Dave Carson, a US American minstrel in British India, have in common with Ardhendu Sekhar Mustafi, pioneer of Bengali public theatre? Or with Hindi cinema superstar, Amitabh Bachchan? These seemingly unrelated actors are yoked together across time and space by their distinct Indianized interpretations of the urban dandy, each of which shares an unexpected ancestry with blackface characters like Long-Tail Blue and Zip Coon.
