Coming to Edinburgh Fringe next month, Here & Now showcase will bring together dance artists from across the world at the forefront of making bold dance works.
We are spotlighting a selection of dance artists presenting work at the festival including Luca Rutherford, Dickson Mbi and Ziza Patrick.
Wet Mess will perform their solo TESTO, a work where audiences can expect “dyke-y desires, moustache meals and choreography of guttural sexuality.”
Ahead of their performance as part of Here & Now showcase, we chatted to Wet Mess about TESTO and what inspires them as an artist.
Q: Tell me about your practice and artistic journey?
A: I am a drag and movement artist. I started my artistic practice at Edinburgh College of Art where I also began performing with the collective STASIS. After graduating I worked across painting, choreography, live art and theatre before I got into drag through a competition called NADC (not another drag competition). This was a six-week competition at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern where you create an act every week and people get eliminated. It is how most drag artists enter the scene by getting known through a competition.
From there I completely fell in love with the art form. It felt like everything clicked into place; a beautiful synergy of things I wanted to do: painting my face, creating movement, lip-syncing and exploring gender. I love its silliness, big aesthetics and politics. Since then, I have been working full time in cabaret, go-going and weaving Wet Mess into theatre shows.
For me drag has very much been deeply connected to my own queer journey, and in that process, my stage name became my real name. I think it’s quite a beautiful and complicated cycle using the freeing space on stage to find and redefine yourself.
“It feels that this is the time when we should be working the hardest, finding creative ways to spread information, raise awareness, have conversations, boycott, bring people together, and fundraise.”
Q: What drew you to presenting work with Here & Now as part of Fringe 2024?
A: I was nominated by Matt Burham at Cambridge Junction, so I applied and was successful. It is an exciting collection of artists, and the Here & Now showcase supports you in platforming the work.
The Fringe is so expensive and inaccessible, it feels essential to have that financial support. As well as that it promotes the work to international delegates as I would love to have a wider tour for the show.
Q: What can audiences expect when experiencing your work? What won’t they expect?
A: They can expect surreal spectacles, distorted camp, and dyke-y dance routines mixed with the mundane reality of the stickiness of conversations around testosterone and non-binary transition.
The show was sort of born out of a lot of questions and my desire to have conversations with people about their experiences of taking testosterone. I had so many hours of conversations it was really hard to narrow them down into the show. There’s some really honest beautiful words in there and some became inspirations for movement.
I think audiences won’t expect some of the vulnerability, as drag often gets categorised into humour and entertainment and my desire is always to bring in some messiness of existing.
Q: Who or what influences you the most?
A: Some recent and forever influences are my grandma’s mosaics, the moment where Sasha Velour reveals her bald head, Lou Sulivan’s diaries about being a gay trans man in the 80s, Mrs Doubtfire, the feeling of my shoulders getting bigger.
I feel fueled by the possibility that people might leave the show slightly changed.
Q: What makes art so valuable to society/culture/communities, in your opinion?
A: I think about the stage as a place where we can dream, and dreaming as a process of becoming. I think a lot of trans /queer people can relate to the feeling of needing to dream as means of escaping, reimagining and desiring. TESTO will be my first full length solo show that explores this very thing.
As artists it can feel that creating is futile, while there is a genocide happening. It also feels that this is the time when we should be working the hardest, finding creative ways to spread information, raise awareness, have conversations, boycott, bring people together, and fundraise.
I feel that we have a core need to communicate, connect, feel and understand through creativity and that ultimately the practices that we hold can comment, galvanise and contribute towards dismantling these oppressive structures that we live in.
TESTO by Wet Mess will be presented at Zoo Southside from Sunday 11 – Sunday 25 August at 8.30pm presented as part of the Here & Now showcase. Find out more here. Header image by Manuel Vason.