This July, join the Royal Opera House for a special, live-streamed Insight. Actor and director Rikki Beadle Blair chairs a thought-provoking panel that features some of the UK’s most celebrated LGBTQ+ voices from across the creative industries.
This year marks 35 years since Princess Diana’s famous visit to Middlesex hospital, where she visited Britain’s first specialist HIV/AIDS Unit and shook the hands of an AIDS patient. This well documented moment preceded by stark health campaigns in the late 80s targeted at the population in response to its emergence and hopes of tackling the illness, but with it evoking confusion and fear. Inspired by this particular moment of history and his own experience of living with HIV, LGBTQ+ writer Bren Gosling presents award winning show Moment of Grace, which forms part of various events showing as part of this year’s Pride in London, a piece delving deeper into this pivotal hospital visit and the stories behind it – helping to shed light and demystify. Ahead of the production, Bren tells us more about exploring the narrative further, creating the show in association with The National HIV Story Trust (NHST) and what to expect from a post show Q&A discussion taking place on Saturday 9th July after the matinee performance which will be chaired by BAFTA-nominated TV and film producer and NHST founder and trustee Paul Coleman.
Sound has the power to shift mood, heal and evoke memory, soundtracks shaping many of our lives. Presenting an autobiographical one man show incorporating this element, as well as fusing projection and photography, theatre maker Victor Esses presents Where to Belong, an exploration of how to find your place within a rich and complex world of identity – as a Jewish-Lebanese Brazilian gay man, Where to Belong marks the journey to find home. Ahead of the show’s tour, starting at the Oxford Playhouse from the 7th September, Victor tells us more about how he’s found the process of creating this autobiographical work, what it means to him to be able to stage the piece and what audiences can expect.
Hi Victor, you’ll be touring Where to Belong from September. How are you feeling ahead of the tour?
Compiled from a year long period of research conducted by New Writing South, Dinos Aristidou’s digital performance ‘Hear Us Out‘ celebrates the stories of the elder LGBTQ+ community – a keyword from this performance being ‘visibility’; bringing to the fore stories that are often left untold. Dinos tells us more about how he’s feeling ahead of the show, his inspirations for the piece and the importance of verbatim within his work.
(Image courtesy of Rosie Powell)