Show Thyself! At this workshop, multi-disciplinary artists SL Grange & E.M. Parry invite you to an exploration of historically-inspired queer self-fashioning.

Saturday 26 June, 2.30 – 4.30pm, ONCA Barge. For Barge directions and accessibility information click here.

Combining creative writing with photographic portraiture and dressing up, we will guide you through a gentle, playful process that invites you to explore an alternate self, play at being someone else, and/or meet your unruly dead tr/ancestors by becoming them. Bring clothing items, props, objects, materials, food, images that inspire you, or connect you to your heritage, or a queer ancestor or historical queer figure you feel drawn to. The workshop is inspired by our research into early modern practices of self-fashioning, but can offer a way in to exploring and connecting to any historical period or heritage, past, present and future selves. As well as running the process and helping with photography, the artists will provide photographic equipment and basic craft supplies.

This workshop is open to all regardless of historical expertise, but LGBTQIA+ experience, identity and history will be foregrounded within a queer space, and LGBTQIA+ identifying folk are particularly encouraged to apply. Book your place via the Brighton Fringe website.

Accessibility:

• The workshop takes place in a wheelchair-accessible space.
• There will be BSL interpretation.
• SL Grange is a trained audio describer and can support blind or partially sighted participants.
• We welcome neurodivergent folk.
• This event will be run in a COVID-safe manner.

About the artists

E.M. Parry is a transgender, trans-disciplinary artist, working with, through and for the queer body, squinting at history, flirting with ghosts & the things that go bump in the margins. Drawing on their background in theatre-making, and interest in the social and material history of marginalised lives, they use vocabularies of theatre and drag in intimate interactions with costumes, objects, spaces and other bodies to track queer and trans embodiments in the negative spaces of the historical archive, staging playful dialogues with queer communities and bodies of the past, present and future. Transient and ephemeral, their work flickers between durational performance, kinetic sculpture, drag act and ritual, blurring the lines between artefact & event. 

SL Grange is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer working mostly in live performance contexts with an eclectic background in poetry, theatre and art practice. Ess is currently undertaking a doctoral research project investigating improvisatory performance practices as an ethical way to meet the queer/unruly dead – specifically Mary Frith aka Mal Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl. Recent work includes ‘A Note to Mary Frith’ for Shakespeare’s Globe, ‘and of his family’ for Fly the Flag, and co-founding QAF Space – an online LGBTQ+ community and 24/7 zoom room Ess is Research Associate at Improbable where they also facilitate Open Space events. Ess occasionally performs as drag thing Tawdry Hepburn, and is co-founder of performance company The ELMS with E. Mallin Parry.