Th 5.8.2021, 20:00-21:00, MDT
Fr 6.8.2021, 20:00-21:00, MDT
Well cum you black market queens, blob queens, fruits, donas, bitches, bulls, beans and bibis! How bona to varda your dolly eeks!
We would like you to sit down, relaxed and with open opals, so that you can see us, all tray of us. Let us show you how it’s done. It might be too much but worth it. (It could be yours if you flipped it and reversed it). Show us all the pots in your cupboard, open wide, so that you can receive the bold.
We want you to lean in and honestly cackle about what you’d like to do to us. But ssshhhh, you need to whisper, Betty Bracelets might hear us… so that we can feel like the only dish you’d ever eat, the chosen minge to wash you off your sins.
We’d like you to sit there, and receive (lall). Take in all that is us. From our plates of meat to our bijou bagadgas and our bona vardering minges, from our foofs to the top of our fortuni heads.
Alamo, and no flies! Savvy?
Nanti Polari! Lily Law! Gardy loo!
Polari was a secretive language used within gay communities in Britain from the beginning of the 1900s to the late 1960s. This language enabled queers to communicate with each other in front of straight people, in public. It enabled them to feel part of an exclusive group. This language, being full of camp, innuendo and sarcasm also helped form a resilient worldview in the face of arrest, blackmail and physical violence.
Marcus is inspired by this idea of a secret language as a road to community and safety, but also as a safe space in itself. A secret form of communication as a tool for expressing, sharing and performing queer joy, queer pleasure, queer intimacy and queer eroticism in public.
The expression speaking sex is borrowed from Anh Vo; choreographer, dancer and theoretician based in New York. They create dances and write about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality.
Marcus’ work involves movement and text. I his artistic practice he wants to find and/or create connections between the poetic/political body and a poetic/political language. The author of Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinstein, once write: “Gender is the poetry we make of the language we are taught”. In “Polari Speaking Sex” the movement and the choreography becomes embodied poetry created from the language we learn.
The project is supported by the Swedish Arts Council, Sweden’s National Touring Theatre, Köttinspektionen, the touring network Slingan and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
Marcus Baldemar is a dancer and choreographer originally from Kiruna in the north of Sweden. After many years in Brussels, Belgium he is now based in Stockholm where he makes work, dances in other people’s work as well as teaches dance and choreography.
Marcus’ work wants to communicate a non-hierarchy between the emotional, the physical and the intellectual. One recurring interest is to find and/or create connections between a poetic/political language and a poetic/political body. This as an open, ever changing, question that accompanies him in the work. Author Leslie Feinberg once said “gender is the poetry we make of the language we are taught". In Marcus’ work he also sees movement and body as the poetry we make of the language we learn. He often works with text but in the end the dancing body is the main communicator.
His starting point is often queer history and storytelling as well as the ambition to queer history and storytelling.
In his solo GALDR (2019) he looked at nordic mythology through a queer lens and danced/told an alternative story based on the Norse god Odin. With Polari Speaking Sex (2021) Marcus was inspired by a secretive language spoken amongst homosexual men in England from the beginning of the 20th century until the mid 1960s. Together with his collaborators they worked on the idea of a secret mode for communication that made possible to safely live and share queer joy, pleasure and intimacy in public. In the same year, together with Finnish dancer/choreographer Eliisa Erävalo, he created his first ever piece for children (ages 4-7). The work is bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) and is called Markus Lär Sig Finska (Markus Learns Finnish). Finally Fantastic (2022) shows a togetherness that leads all the way to death. How dying coexists with the imaginative, the joyful and the intimate. The piece can be seen as a meeting place and communal burial ground where a collection of people of different generations do and die together.
Idea and choreography
Created together with
Set-design, costume, make-up and lights
Co-production
MDT, Riksteatern Dans, Köttinspektionen
Residencies
MDT, Riksteatern, Konstnärsnämnden.
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