Keynotes

Lynette “Lennox” Goddard

Performing Black Queer Joy as Activist Resistance

This paper assesses techniques of Black queer and trans activist performance as intersectional interventions into public debates about racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. I examine how the current raft of Black LGBTIQ+ practitioners 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. The newest generation of Black LGBTIQ+ practitioners are also tasked with creating work in response to the challenge against explicitly staging violent and traumatic images and instead promoting expressions of Black queer joy that celebrate Black cultures, lives, and experiences.

This paper first situates contemporary Black queer and trans performance makers within longer trajectories of Black LGBTIQ+ theatre and performance in the UK and considers the activist possibilities of Black queer joy, before going on to a close examination of the activist aesthetics in performances by Travis Alabanza, Mika Onyx Johnson, Tatenda Shamiso, and Temi Wilkey. I consider how these practitioners are using stand-up comedy, cabaret drag and music techniques as effective interactive devices in the quest for audience solidarity with Black queer and trans lives.

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. Installation art, theatre, performance and dance turned to queer history to find form and feeling to steer us through the disorienting present. In works such as Gideon Mendel’s The Ward Revisited (2023), Jack Holden’s Cruise (2021), Phillip McMahon’s Once Before I Go (2021), and Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy (2021), for example, deep and surface experiences of grief intermingled, surging into scenes of choreographed movement and dance. How has pandemic grief been filtered through queer loss, this lecture asks, and what might this suggest to us about the movement of grief, and grief as a kind of cultural, 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.