A
bit about me, a bit about Deliq.
I've
been writing about theatre and music for nearly 20 years now: that's
a long relationship to have with ephemeral things. This blog/website
is an attempt to make that work more tangible, to frame it and give
it a home. I took up music and then theatre as an escape and a drug;
I overdid it, took time off, then came back to theatre because it's
become necessary to me: as a mirror of who we are and how we live,
and as a dark window through to where we might be going. The writing
I do in relation to it might seem all monologue, but it comes from a
commitment to dialogue and collaboration.
What
else? I'm excitable and easily bored. I want to do everything and
live in permanent frustration at how little gets done. I have two
kids who are hurtling towards adolescence with a speed I find
terrifying. I cry a lot and laugh a bit and listen as hard as I can.
I'm a feminist but the anti-capitalist kind, dedicated to lifelong
learning but outside of the academy, and often wish I were painting
instead. I was born working class to immigrant (Cypriot) parents and
live in a constant state of confusion that I'm now so very white and
middle-class. It takes a lot of effort to inhabit contradiction, but
I'm trying.
Oh,
and I know the blog name is daft. At least it's abbreviated from
where it began (explanation here). I've kept it because I'm stubborn,
and because deliquescence speaks so flamboyantly to the fluid thought
inspired by theatre.
Note added 10 July 2021: I started this blog shortly before starting to work with theatre-maker Chris Goode as a critic in residence or critical writer within his newly formed company. Following the discovery that, through the seven years I was working with him, Chris was consuming images of child abuse,
I've tried to go through each post and, where his appearance wasn't essential, have deleted references to him and replaced them with an X. Posts that focus on his work, whether directing a Chris Goode & Company show or the ensemble Ponyboy Curtis, have been retained, but with a new introduction linking to two blog posts that emerged from my own self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did
with him. That process began in 2018 and in this post from December that year, I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he
caused,
for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him,
fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who
criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in
softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more
detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young
men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these
harms and police reactions. I'm not removing posts that fail to recognise Chris's abuses of power because to do so would be to attempt an impossible erasure. It feels important that I'm honest about how I responded to Chris's work; but it also feels important to keep saying: this happened, it constituted abuse of power, abuses of power happen in rehearsal rooms across the country, let's dismantle that power.
