extract from 'Destiny'
Hey friends and enemies alike,
I hope you all had a major bank holiday - if you didn’t make sure you subscribe to Fope’s substack so you can live vicariously through their never ending weekends.
I have recently dropped down my hours at the Piehouse (from 50+ to 35, so still a normal full time job lol) to focus more on my writing and my own creative outputs, as well as trying to more proactively bring organising outside of the venue back into my world.
I’d love to come and play your fundraiser, or show an extract from my new play, or read at your weird poetry night, or MC your event, or even debut my new and highly anticipated cake sit cabaret act - I am ready to be an artist again and not just a venue co-ordinator, it’s a very nice feeling.
Keeping it simple this week with a short extract from my new play ‘Destiny’. This is a short section delivered by the narrator to the main character as she watches Cabaret the musical whilst getting ready to go to the gay bar.
I get it. Without a doubt, there is a liberatory practice present when we are all together, sweating and dancing, unafraid to be ourselves, sexual and delicious, where lingering stares only equal desire and not violence.
That feeling can move us, it swells in our bodies and lets us imagine what it might feel like to live our true lives, be our true selves.
My problem doesn’t lie with the dance floor.
It lies in the cultural figure heads of the dance.
Did you know that Israel’s desperate attempts to legitimise itself as a real place in the UK and breed zionism within our communities is a cultural battle - one that takes place on the dance floor, and in the art galleries, on the stages of the theatre.
Funding bodies stacked on top of dead bodies, cultures song and dance on top of the chug of the war machine.
Fascism loves a song and dance.
Some of your favourite club nights platform DJs that play London one night and Tel Aviv the next.
But who am I to debate the cultural importance of privately educated young people descending into total hedonism, who am I to suggest that hedonism without revolutionary education running parallel is actually just - selfishness. Capitalism disguised as liberation. All that pink washing and nothing’s getting clean.