Crossings by The Erlangen Exchange Collective investigated gender performance and feminism through the lens of Public Space and Urbanity. Research took place in Erlangen, Germany at Universität Friedrich Alexander Nürnberg and was performed at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec (Fall 2018)
Inspired by Montreal’s drag king community and cisgender straight men who would frequent Concordia University’s Co-op Cafe Michael of The Mountains was born. The performance, Good Samaritan investigated performative feminist allyship and liberal misogyny through a guerrilla drag king performance.
Michael of the Mountains did a lip sync to Peter Frampton’s “Show Me The Way” took down his man bun like a rockstar and led a group meeting in the campus coffee shop on mansplaining and politics. Performed at The Co-op at Concordia University, Montreal Québec (Spring 2019)
The site specific durational performance Pilgrimage: Queerness as a Journey, took place in August 2019, and consisted of a pilgrimage 20 km long, across the city of Montreal. Gale’s two significant resources for research were, Edith Turner’s Pilgrimage: An Overview, Encyclopedia of Religion, Lindsay Jones ed. 2005, and José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: NYU Press, 2009. The performance connected the destination-less pilgrimages of the Irish monks known as Peregrini/ Peregrinatio in the Middle Ages to queerness itself as an endless pilgrimage of inevitable renewal and transformation.
Come Home, To Jerusalem written, crafted and performed by Eli Gale at Goldsmiths University of London, explores childhood perceptions of Home, Jewish Safety and Belonging through Shadow Puppetry and storytelling. (February 2022)
Commute written and voiced by Cat Winter, Eli Gale and Katie Lee Dunbar is a site specific performance audio walk that can be performed anywhere and by any person with the queer future’s automated guide Teari. Quoting Queer Theory discussing accessibility and queer utopia, Commute invites it’s participants to infuse their commute with somatic embodiment and queer potentiality. Click the art to be taken to the performance. Photograph taken at the performance in Bloomsbury, London with MA Performance Making Goldsmiths University of London in April 2022.
Ripples by Eli Gale and Katie Lee Dunbar the interdisciplinary performance piece, dives into the worlds of lesbian childhood, queer dreaming and queer parenting. Unearthing and reclaiming queerness from erasure and lack of representation: Ripples invites its audience members to question the dominant narratives that accompany youth, reproduction and aging.
Performed in the MA Performance Making Festival Blisters at Goldsmiths University of London in June 2022. Photographs by Sheila Burnett