DIY: 2015 – Eilidh Macaskill & Rosana Cade ‘Sex and Children’

Radical Queer Live Art for Young Audiences

Project Summary

How can we use performance to explore sex, sexuality and gender with children, and what might a radical queer live art practice for children look like? In a safe group environment, we will ask difficult questions concerning taboos, stereotypes and archetypes within performances for children, and question where the boundaries lie between safe/subversive/wholly inappropriate.

Making use of the National Theatre Studio’s costume store, documentation of existing work, and our own experiences, we will explore characters/personas/personalities that are already on offer for young people, and will question how to create an ethical persona that is radical in terms of its approach to gender and sexuality purely through its display of identity. We will explore how to translate the practice of queer subversive drag into a radical practice for young people. 

Application Deadline: Deadline passed.

Dates, times and location
National Theatre Studio, The Cut, London
Tuesday 27 – Friday 30 October
10-6pm. Plus one evening TBC

The Artists 

This workshop is lead by Eilidh MacAskill and Rosana Cade.

Eilidh is a live artist who often creates performances for children and wants to see how her work can be more challenging and queer to better reflect her lived experiences. She’s currently a Research Artist supported by Imaginate (Scotland’s organization for children’s performing arts) to explore gender, sexuality and queerness in Children’s Performance. The project is called Gendersaurus Rex.

Rosana is a queer artist based in Glasgow who has been making work exploring gender and sexuality for the past eight years. She has never created a performance that she would deem suitable for young people, but is interested in exploring how this might happen, without compromising her aesthetic or politics.