Keynotes
Lynette “Lennox” Goddard
Acting Against Homophobia and Transphobia: Activism, Human Rights, and Solidarity in Black British LGBTIQ+ Performance
This paper uses the work of Mojisola Adebayo and Travis Alabanza to assess techniques of Black activist performance as intersectional interventions into public debates about racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. I argue that as twenty-first century Black LGBTIQ+ practitioners, they have evolved models of performance that have moved away from identity politics into representations that foreground the importance of witnessing and building solidarity through interacting with and activating theatre audiences. I first situate Adebayo’s and Alabanza’s work within longer trajectories of Black LGBTIQ+ theatre and performance in the UK before going on to explore how their performance modes of interacting with the audience is an interventionist aesthetic in some of their other key plays: Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic, Muhammad Ali and Me and STARS, and Alabanza’s Overflow and Sound of the Underground. My paper then develops to a close examination of Mojisola Adebayo and Mamela Nyamza’s I Stand Corrected (Oval House, 2012) as an activist performance that calls British audiences to stand in solidarity against practices of corrective/‘homophobic/hate rape’ on LGBTIQ+ people in South Africa and I explore Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz’s as a call for women’s solidarity and action against transphobia. I argue that both practitioners use stand-up cabaret aesthetics as effective devices for audience interaction in the quest for national and transnational solidarity.
Lynette “Lennox” Goddard is Professor of Black Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their teaching and research documents and analyses contemporary Black British theatre through the politics of race and representation and the careers of performers, playwrights and directors. Their publications include Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics Performance (Palgrave, 2007), Contemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream (Palgrave, 2015) and Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (Routledge Fourth Wall, 2017). They co-edited Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama (Palgrave, 2014) and the play collections The Methuen Drama Guide to Plays Black British Writers (2011) and Black British Queer Plays and Practitioners: An Anthology of Afriquia Theatre (Methuen, 2022). They are currently planning their next book on Black activist theatre and co-editing three collections: the two-volume Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century British Theatre and The Cambridge History of Black British Theatre and Performance.
Fintan Walsh
Dances with death: Grief as a kind of movement
Artistic responses to the Covid-19 pandemic drew on queer culture’s deep archive of grief, to try and navigate the ocean of loss that engulfed us. In particular, theatre, performance and installation turned to queer culture’s histories of loss to find form and feeling to help steer us through the disorienting present. The surfacing and intermingling of old and new experiences of grief called into question how and when we tend to our losses, and if the past might guide future responses. How has pandemic grief been filtered through queer cultural histories, this lecture asks, and what might this suggest to us about the movement of grief, and grief as a kind of artistic, social and political movement?
Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Head of the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. Recent books include Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (Methuen Drama, 2023) and the anthology Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents (Methuen Drama, 2025). He is a former Senior Editor of Theatre Research International.
