This week, Eli Lewis and Joe Garbett will debut their new work Plue, a queer disappearing act that examines queer visibility and intimacy.
Ahead of the premiere, we sat down with Eli to find out more about Plue and its intentions to be a quiet act of neuroqueer resistance…
Q: Tell us about Plue and how the work came about.
A: The duet between dancers Joe Garbett & Jay Yule fuses dance, illusion and object play to look at how queer people appear and disappear as they adjust and re-position in relation to others’ gazes – the dance of what, as queer people, we choose to share, what we feel pressured to hide and what we don’t want to hide even if we could.
Plue is a performance that fiddles with that intimacy/privacy dimmer switch, rolling through hyper-visibility, feeling seen, masking, invisibility and redaction, all in relation to things that inform queer people’s experience of visibility like consent, dis/connection, play, privilege, comfort, security and joy. Plue seeks to occupy and explore the gap between how queer people feel, and how they’re seen. It speaks to processes of intimacy, how we bare and reconfigure ourselves to connect with others, and all the incremental ways we work to bridge distance to hold each other close.
Joe and I are a neuroqueer/non-binary couple and Plue is our first collaboration. Our collaboration is an unlikely one merging two very different ways of thinking about and doing dance. Somehow, in the playful five-year tussle making Plue, choreographically we’ve found strange new common ground!
Plue came about back in 2019 during the pandemic. Joe and I were isolating together in rural Somerset, away from our queer community in London and coming into our queerness / transness hard. During that time there was no access to the fleshy, IRL, queer spaces where queer people would normally go to play, experiment and evolve. Cut off from these spaces, like so many queer people we felt an urgent need to connect with other LGBT+ people, to feel close & seen. So Plue was born out of that urgency. It started as a way we could use our practice to bring rural queer people together in solidarity during the pandemic & form community.
During Plue’s early activity we connected with a wonderful group of LGBT+ individuals living rurally to reflect on the pandemic’s effect on our queer visibility, intimacy and expression. The conversations fuelled some of the initial ideas we brought into the studio. Although the concept behind Plue has since evolved away from a pandemic-centred exploration of queer visibility; 5 years on, using Plue as a way to connect with rural LGBT+ communities remains a core commitment of the project, having just finished Plue’s first rural south-west tour in Devon andCornwall with Villages in Action and Carn to Cove.
Q: We live in a society that silences queer voices, with the mainstream media painting specific representations of the queer community. Why did it feel important to create Plue and to utilise movement as a way to counteract this silencing?
A: In some ways, Joe & I made Plue as a quiet act of neuroqueer resistance. We wanted to offer an alternative to the narrow, often reductive representations of queerness and transness mainstream media circulates today, that often centre trauma, spectacle and boundless hedonism (not that we don’t enjoy a bit of boundless hedonism now & then!)
With Plue, we were intentional about representing a side of queerness that feels deeply personal to us and to other neuroqueers – one that is soft, reserved, structured, playful, slowly changing & at times clunky. This resonates with our own evolutions of queerness / transness and its inexorable intermesh with our neurodivergence.
Joe and I also made Plue in reaction to how queer and trans people are often made hyper-visible, yet are often absent from the decision and policy making that shapes their lives, security and representation. This comments on a legacy of LGBT+ people being misrepresented andredacted from history – disproportionately effecting QTIPOC people.
Homophobia and transphobia are rising in the UK. Trans people especially are used increasingly as political fodder, their rights eroded and LGBT+ people seeking refuge in the UK face increased racism and xenophobia. In the midst ofthis climate of divisiveness, it felt urgent to create a work that affirms queer and trans experience, supports LGBT+ people to connect, and invites broader audiences in to spark meaningful conversations about queerness. And it felt important to do all this through dance.
Movement can be powerful. It can transcend barriers of bias and support people to access ideas from new angles. Dance is deeply subjective, which leaves space for people to reflect on and connect with unfamiliar ideas in ways they maybe haven’t before. This felt important when creating Plue. We wanted to make something that invited audiences to slow down, zoom in and reflect deeply – something that gently breaks through the polarised, external noise & invites people to feel something.
Q: Who have you been collaborating with to bring the piece to life and what have they added to the process?
A: Over the past five years, we’ve had the privilege of collaborating with an extraordinary team of creatives to conceptually and bring Plue to life, including: Dramaturg Orrow Bell, Choreographic Support from Jay Yule (also a performer in Plue), Natifah White, Riikka Lakea, Neve Harrington, Ania Varez, and Kit Hall, as well as Illusion Consultant Neil Kelso.
Alongside myself (Eli Lewis) & Joe Garbett, this team of majority queer creatives have been the driving creative force behind Plue, shaping its evolution through multiple iterations. Together they challenged Joe & I to widen the aperture we look at queerness through in Plue beyond our own specific angle of experience and introduced us to new ways of translating these ideas into movement.
Neil Kelso helped us weave illusion play into the choreography, injecting moments of wonder. The nature of working with illusions locked us into a hyper-precise, rigid way of working – Orrow Bell disrupted that, loosening the rules we’d made & got caught in, and challenging us to expand our view of what Plue’s choreography could be.
We also worked closely with a brilliant design team to create a cohesive visual and sonic world to set Plue’s choreography in. Set designer Hannah Sharp crafted a sparse, off-kilter world for the choreography to inhabit. Costume Designer Berthe Fortin designed half-pink, half-blue costumes emphasising a binary that underpins Plue’s illusion work and that we go on to disrupt through Plue’s choreography. Sound designer Edvin Langfeld developed a dream-like score exploring themes of redaction and erasure through white noise, silence, and sudden sound drops. Lighting Designer Jo Palmer shaped Plue’s lighting to explore queer visibility using blackouts, overexposed pulses of light & haze to play with how visible the performers appear on stage.
Orrow Bell & Shivaangee Agrawal developed & facilitate post-show conversations with Plue’s audiences, inviting people to reflect on the LGBT+ themes explored abstractly in Plue and grounding those themes more firmly in real-life LGBT+ experiences.
We also worked with Shivaangee Agrawal, who developed Plue’s touch tour & audio description with consultancy support from Lesta Woo – so Plue and its highly visual illusion elements is accessible to blind & visually impaired audiences. Shivaangee brought a sensitivity & rigour to this process, challenging us to articulate aspects of Plue’s choreography we hadn’t previously fully defined.
Beyond the creative elements, the care of Plue’s team has also been an important consideration throughout Plue’s project activity. We collaborated with care consultant Dais Hale, with support from Nicolette Wilson-Clarke, Shivaangee Agrawal and Orrow Bell, to develop a structure of care for our predominantly queer, trans, and neurodivergent team throughout both the making and touring of Plue.
Plue’s Audience Connector Lucia Fortune-Ely has worked to build us lovely, warm audiences throughout Plue’s UK tour – and Plue’s Producer, Alison Thomas did much of the behind the scenes organisational heavy-lifting of bringing Plue to where it is today. Without her resourcefulness, energy & care making Plue would not have been possible.
Q: How has it felt to explore the act of ‘disappearing’ through movement or dance – which is largely understood as such a physical and present art form?
A: Although we describe Plue as a queer disappearing act, we’ve come to think of the way we explore disappearing in the work more as redaction. The audience always knows there’s a person behind the panel, but that person is being masked – redacted from view. Even when the performers are hidden from the audience, they in some way feel present. The audience’s attention stays on them, even in their absence.
At times in the performance, Joe and I wanted the grey panels to take on the performer’s presence when they are hidden from view, almost as if they are an extension of the performers – standing in for the various metaphorical masks we carry and wear in life. At other times in the performance, the redaction of the panel is something that is forced onto a performer. We’ve come to see the grey panels as two additional performers on stage, shaping the choreography and sometimes stealing the limelight.
Working with the illusion of disappearance on stage has presented some unique choreographic challenges. Illusions often rely on fixed sight lines, but in Plue, that wasn’t always possible. Instead of fighting this, we leaned into it. Depending on where someone sits in the auditorium, they will have a different experience of the choreography. Someone sitting in the centre of the auditorium might see the full money shot of an illusion, while someone seated at the extreme right might catch an intimate, behind the scenes glimpse of the choreography ‘backstage’ of the panel. We wanted this to reflect aspects of queer experience – how if a queer person feels they need to mask parts of their identity around you to feel comfortable / safe, you’re only experiencing a fraction of their story.
The mechanics of making this work on stage require a great deal of precision & focus from the performers (Joe Garbett & Jay Yule). Working in this way has been equal partsplayful & frustrating for them. At times the precise nature of illusion work has made it necessary for us to carve out moments of boundless dance during rehearsals to counteract the restricted contortions Joe & Jay do behind the panels to make the illusions work. Interestingly, Joe & Jay have said that during Plue the ‘back stage’ space behind the panels have become somewhere they can have brief out-breath moments away from the audience before stepping back into view.
Q: What do you hope people will feel when experiencing Plue?
A: Throughout Plue, the two performers (Joe Garbett & Jay Yule) repeatedly try, and often fail, to bridge the distance between them, leading to moments of clunky tension, awkwardness and humour. But in the end, their slow, incremental efforts build toward a tender connection andintimacy. Ultimately, that’s the hope we want Plue to leave people with – that it is possible to navigate the barriers & differences that separate us from connecting with others and our ever evolving-selves.
We want to connect with our audiences and show them something intimate, playful & tender. We want to invite people to slow down, zoom in & reflect deeply, and hopefully create an environment that supports people to notice the wonder of subtle, incremental change. We want Plue to offer audiences space to reflect on the complexities within themselves and others – the multiplicities that people contain, whether they are visible or not, and how this could chime with queer experiences. We hope this provokes empathy, as many people who are not queer may have different intersections with the experience of hiding, dimming, emphasising parts of yourself, and adjusting depending on the context. And we hope we do this in a way that leaves space for people to reflect on whatever emotions this brings up for them.
Plue comes to The Place this week from 4-5 April. Get your tickets here.