Sexuality Summer School 2023: (Up) Against Nature
21st – 26th May 2023
The Sexuality Summer School is a week-long event comprised of a series of workshops for 40 postgraduate students, alongside a public arts events programme open to all.
Please see below for this year’s public events programme.
Sunday 21 May, 7pm
The SSS students will begin by attending BLUE NOW, a live screening based on Derek Jarman’s 1993 film. This new event is directed by Neil Bartlett and performed a cast of four performers – actor Russell Tovey (Years and Years, American Horror Story); artist Jay Bernard (Surge: Side A); theatre maker Neil Barlett (Orlando) and TS Eliot award-winning poet Joelle Taylor (C+nto and othered poems).
Venue: HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Pl, Manchester M15 4FN.
Booking required: Click here to book.
Monday 22 May, 3:15pm-5pm
Opening Public Lecture: ‘Organs of War’
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020), Director of the Center for Feminist Research and Associate Professor of English, University of Southern California)
Venue: The Anthony Burgess Foundation, 3 Cambridge St. M1 5BY
No booking required, all welcome.
Monday 22 May, 6pm
Film Screening and Discussion
Sediments (2021, Adrián Silvestre)
Venue: HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Pl, Manchester M15 4FN
Six trans women travel to a small town in León where they will explore unusual landscapes, as well as the ins and outs of their own personalities. Looking for answers about what connects them as a group, they will also learn to deal with their differences. Sediments is an engaging and fun story about empathy, individuality, and the need to belong. It is an examination of the experiences that forge our identity and tell our life story, and an investigation into how circumstances can intervene to inform who we are today.
This screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Jackie Stacey, Monica Pearl, Honor Gareth Gavin and Eden Foxon.
Booking required. Click here to book.
Tuesday 23 May, 7:30pm
Live Performance Event in Partnership with Contact: TransMission: SissyTV
Nando Messias (performance artist, choreographer and Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice at Central School for Speech and Drama, London)
Venue: Contact: Oxford Rd, Manchester M15 6JA
So many things. What to do with them all? How to get inside? Where to find my forbidden desire? Nando Messias invites you into their Narnian closet, a trans archive of exquisite ephemera, poignant stories and bodily wonders. Their TransMission is an intimate dance of self-confrontation, exhumation, immolation, lovingly bequeathing and fabulo-cannibalising, all from the inside of Sissy TV.
In an endlessly layered solo performance, Nando Messias discloses an extraordinary personal archive: a reliquary of sumptuous costumes, imperious fabulosity, unsterilised physicality and of course the trademark, legendary poignancy.
Booking required. Click here to book.
Wednesday 24 May 5-7pm
Public Lecture: ‘The Castrato as Culture Ghost’
Hal Gladfelder (Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing, University of Manchester)
Respondent: Noelle Gallagher
Followed by a wine reception in the Atrium of SALC Graduate School, 6:30-7pm.
Venue: SALC Graduate School Seminar Room C1.18, Ellen Wilkinson Building, The University of Manchester, M15 6JA
No booking required, all welcome.
Thursday 25 May 7:30pm
Screening and Performance: (Up) Against Nature
Venue: Contact: Oxford Rd, Manchester M15 6JA
Experience a screening of two filmed performances, one by Whiskey Chow, a performance artist and Chinese drag king, and the other by Ro Robertson, who explores the terrain of the Queer body, straddling sculpture, drawing, and performance for camera.
Whiskey will show ‘you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼’: a hybrid of performance, CGI animation and sound art, exploring queer body materialization and radical care; and Ro ‘birth build shift’ a performance for camera made on a beach popular with nudists on the Lands End peninsular, Cornwall.
Each artist will be present and will respond to their own work with a spoken piece, and the event will end with a dialogue between the artists and an audience Q&A, chaired by Jackie Stacey.
Booking required. Click here to book.
Friday 26 May 5:30-7 pm
Closing Event: Film Screening and Discussion with Sadie Lee, Libro Levi Bridgeman
Private View (2022, Sadie Lee, Libro Levi Bridgeman and Julie Dickson)
Venue: HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Pl, Manchester M15 4FN
A queer painter, a non binary writer and portraiture like you’ve never seen it before….
Two British Artists: lesbian portrait painter Sadie Lee and Non-Binary writer Libro Levi Bridgeman were born on the same day. This coincidence led to a friendship and a collaboration: a portrait of Libro. The short film details the overlap of their queer lives from the 80s on and eventually to the reveal of the portrait…. The portrait is a first for art, important for queer politics and sensational to see.
Booking Required. Click here to book.
Organised by the SSS 2023 Team:
Professor Jackie Stacey, Dr Sabine Sharp, Dr Janelle Hixon, Millie Lovelock (PhD student), Tasha Pick (PhD student) and Clare Patterson (PhD student).
To be added to our mailing list or to ask any questions, please email sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com
Image Credit: Sediments (2021, dir. Adrián Silvestre)
Sexuality Summer School 