Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies

Abstract

Theatre and live performance experiences can, if they are powerful, move an audience — to emotion, to thought, even (on rare occasions) to action. Like many theatre experiences, the moments described above ‘moved’ us when we saw them. We were aware that they resonated in a particularly profound way for us, in a way that was different from what we had otherwise experienced in our personal theatre-going histories. We recognised that these moments were transgressive, and that something was happening that felt out of place with our expectations. We were each moved to question what exactly had caused such a profound affective connection with the work. This ‘something’, we realised, was queer. For both of us, the search for an answer led us (eventually) to queer theory. But before we got to theory, we started with performance — as makers and spectators and, eventually, as academic researchers and teachers. In particular we recognised that our encounters with the spaces of theatres, gay/lesbian bars and queer cabarets, the performances we saw in them and the people we saw them with, were about us experiencing something on a corporeal, gut level in a specific location at a particular time and being attracted to it. We knew something had happened to us, and the people around us, and we understood that it was connected to sexuality, community and identity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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