every little nookie // program note (queerness on the horizon)
the other day philip geller, the assistant director for every little nookie, commented that this rehearsal hall was one of the queerer rooms they’d ever been in. neither of us were quite sure exactly how we got here, though thinking back it was certainly part of our queer agenda (—oh yes, there is a queer agenda).
in the days since, i’ve been turning over this question: how do you queer a space? a bar, a rehearsal hall—a home?
the answer i’ve come to: you invite queerness in and make space for it to work its alchemy. not just queers, but something slipperier, both more mischievous and more delicate—you invite in queerness itself.
a group of queers can go to a bar but that won’t make it a queer venue, just a bar with a bunch of queers in it. it’s not until queerness becomes the centre of how that space operates that the space lifts into the trashy, tender, sublime realm of queerness.
they say directing is 90% casting. (they never say what the other 10% is—maybe a mix of spreadsheets and wishful thinking?) on no project has this been more true for me than every little nookie. the gossamer spirit of this comedy lives and dies by the humour and heart of the cast, crew, and creative team gathered around this show, and every day i walk into this rehearsal hall full of awe and gratitude for the humans i get to collaborate with.
together, this group of artists, queer and otherwise, have invited queerness into the heart our process. and those shifts haven’t seemed all that major on the surface: it has meant being deliberate about doing things a bit differently, moving with more care, consent, and communication, encouraging experimentation, spontaneous dance breaks, and making room for everyone to be a little bit extra. this is the best dressed rehearsal hall stratford has ever seen. but queerness has also intervened more fundamentally, inviting us to regard the differences we come together across as the source of our collective creative power. as activist, writer, and fairy godlesbian sarah schulman might have it, queerness at best is not a monolith but a coalition, one that cares for the most vulnerable among them.
queerness is a trickster, sabotaging the status quo with earnestness and irony in equal parts. at its best, queerness reaches in from all the margins and reads the centre for filth. as queer thinker jose esteban muñoz wrote in cruising utopia, “we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. […] queerness is the thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” queerness isn’t interested in inclusion in the world as it exists, it’s about building whole new ways of relating to each other and the world; in sex, in intimacy, in politics, and in public and private spheres alike.
as i write this in early june, PRIDE INC. is aiming its glitter cannons at the massive market segment our community represents. the more privileged among us may have gone from pariahs to potential customers in mere decades, but being included as customers in catastrophic capitalism feels like winning tickets to a circuit party cruise on the titanic.
if queerness gestures toward possible ways of being, sunny’s play puts that into practice, offering new paradigms of how we might reimagine and reorganize our ideas of home and family. along the way, we’ve also iterated new ways of coming together as colleagues and collaborators, holding each other through griefs and triumphs, caring for each other through many melted pairs of pants, warpspeed quickchanges, thrifting sprees, and moments of dysphoria and euphoria alike, and we’ve made this theatre a home for the queer family we’re creating here.
so. welcome. we’re glad you’re here. it’s tender in here, and sexy, and a little bit messy. sorry if you thought the queer agenda was all rupaul and pride floats, but we have our eyes on the horizon.