Curated by multi-disciplinary artists and performance makers SL Grange and E.M. Parry, The History Bois: Adventures in Time & Gender residency at ONCA Barge showcases a range of time and gender-queering events, including exhibition, live performance, poetry and workshops with contributions from guest artists.

Opening hours:

23 June: 6 – 9pm

24 – 26 June: 10am – 5.30pm

All events are free or by donation. It’s essentiatl to click through to the Brighton Fringe website to register for workshops, but you can just turn up for the exhibition and the launch event. Click here for info about visiting ONCA Barge, or email if you have specific access questions or needs.

• Wednesday 23 June, 6 – 9pm, ONCA Barge, History Bois: Adventures in Time & Gender residency launch party event hosted by Jacobethan drag king Mal Content. Historical fancy dress encouraged – go full Marie Antoinette, or keep it ruff n ready 😉 – prizes for innovation, effort, and starching.
• Wednesday 23 June – Saturday 26 June, ONCA Barge: We Elizabethans – a cluster of sibling works: Closet Dramas – photographic exhibition; Fag Ends // Fag Breaks -installation & performances; A Lucky Resurrection – live writing / seance.
• Thursday 24 June, 2.30 – 3.30pm, online via Zoom: Political Drag workshop with Leah Kirby AKA CYRO. Creating art inciting change & incorporating non-Western performance techniques, Leah Kirby/ Cyro explores socio-economic & political issues through non-traditional formats. This event will be supported by a BSL interpreter.
• Friday 25 June, 3 – 4.30pm, online via Zoom: Meeting the Unruly Dead with SL Grange. This online workshop run by poet, drag king and artist SL Grange is for folks wanting to connect with their Queer tr/ancestors.
• Friday 25 June, 7.30 – 9pm, ONCA Barge: Fag Ends // Fag Breaks performance / installation – Fag Ends // Fag Breaks lurks in the margins between performance, installation, seance, conversation, and queerly unravelling lecture. It is accompanied by A Lucky Resurrection – a live, improvised writing event by SL Grange.
• Saturday 26 June, 2.30 – 4.30pm, ONCA Barge: Show Thyself! – queer history self- fashioning workshop. SL Grange & E.M. Parry invite you to an exploration of historically-inspired queer self-fashioning. Combining creative writing with photographic portraiture and dressing up, expect 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. This event will be supported by a BSL interpreter.

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. 

Website

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.

Website