Performing the Queer Past

Why do contemporary queer theatre and performance appear to be possessed by the past? What aesthetic practices and dramaturgical devices reveal the occupation of the present by painful history? How might the experience of theatre and performance dispossess the present of its most arduous burdens? In light of a swathe of legislation and initiatives that suggest the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people are over, Fintan Walsh turns our attention to artists who invoke history’s enduring hurts. The book draws on an eclectic range of examples that includes work by Artangel, Cassils, David Hoyle, Dickie Beau, Franko B, Jeremy O. Harris, Karen Finley, les ballets C de la B, McDermott & McGough, Milo Rau, Rachel Mars, Split Britches and Travis Alabanza. Through these, it traces how the past is summoned and interrogated via strategies of channelling and haunting, working through and working out, recollection and replay, reproduction and transformation, occupation and commemoration, intermedial recontextualization and dissemination. Walsh explores how this theatre and performance compels us to confront how the past weighs down a wishfully buoyant present, while calling on those of us who feel its force to share and lighten the load.