This year, we splice up our seasons: to our season of conversations on value and price of dance performance, we are adding one that has been on our minds for some time, one that we have been keen to discuss.
Queer is a season we have been meaning to do for a long time – and this conversation with Zvonimir was recorded during that preparation. Queer performance, which has been so important in defining queer identity, queer theory, queer practices, is having a powerful resurgence today. And yet – what is queer? What is not queer? How does queer exist in performance? How does queer performance exist in the world? What is its political power, and what its aesthetic urgency?
Zvonimir Dobrovic, the curator of Queer Festival in Zagreb and New York, is one of the seminal figures of queer performance today: curator, presenter, taste-shaper, conversation-shaper. Zvonimir was in Australia to give a lecture at Performance Space in Sydney and see some work at Dance Massive in Melbourne, and we jumped at the opportunity to talk to him. Queer Festival was very important in Croatia, both as a very visible part of the LGBT activism in the 200s, and for decisively redefining the notion of queer away from the narrow LGBT question and into a broader political gesture of resisting normativity. In this episode, we take time to talk about formative experiences, about being young, and about how arts festivals are so conducive to falling in love.
“Queer is everything outside the norm. It is subversive, but never violent.”
Discussed in this episode:
what we did in the 1990s, James Welshby’s HEX, what is gay and what is queer, the tabloid press, teaching tolerance in schools, barebacking in Australia, BalletLab’s Kingdom, Jerome Bel makes queer art!, single mothers are queer, heteronormativity, the monochrome Western uniform of LGBT sexuality, pulling flags out of your pussy VS lesbian pottery, whether art can really change the world, and how, if you must be gay in patriarchy, at least don’t be a bottom.
Listen to the episode:
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