Community Exercises for Sanctuary Spaces
Brendan Drake
Community Exercises for Sanctuary Spaces is an interdisciplinary work for five performers using movement, original text and sound to unearth how iconography and worship within designated queer spaces plays a crucial role in shaping modern queer identities.
Directed and Choreographed by Brendan Drake in collaboration with the performers
Composer Matthew Ricketts
Featuring: Quentin Burley, Lena Engelstein, Shannon Nash and Calvin Tsang
The work investigates how emulation and impersonation can function as a coping mechanism for navigating modern systems of gendered power dynamics and homophobia. Drawing explicit connections between the benediction of the blessed sacrament in Catholic Mass tradition and the ritualistic nature of building queer communities through mutual adulation for female icons and shared trauma, we show how the psychological understandings of this type of fantasy and worship both helps and hinders the development of social communities.