Plural, dissonant and non-conforming selves were explored across sessions of reading, guided writing, and performance. Focused on contemporary experiments in autofiction and autotheory, ‘Unbecoming Chorus' moved between the collective and the individual in fluid configurations where readers and writers, listeners and performers entangle and dance. By creating a range of intensities and textures, rhythms and temperatures – from silence to speech, cacophony and chorus – the programme encourages varying levels of public engagement and attention.
ACT I / READ WRITE RETURN featured out loud group readings from recent queer, feminist and trans-informed texts that challenge and complicate binary and other essentialist understandings of identity and selfhood. Guided by writing prompts, participants contributed new writing to a collective text.
Readings
Together we read out loud selections from:
Kathy Acker, ‘The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula,’ 1974
Jay Bernard, Surge, 2019
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, 1982
Sharon Hayes, ‘Certain Resemblances: Notes on Performance, Event and Political Images,’ 2011
Hesse K, ‘Debts unpaid,’ from Disquiet Drive, 2024
Paul B Preciado, Testo Junkie, 2008
Sin Wai Kin, ‘Part Three/Cthulhu Through the Looking Glass’, from ‘Narrative Reflections on Looking,’ 2018
Maud Sulter, ‘Calliope’ from Zabat, 1989
ACT II / AUTO POLYPHONY: Underlines and Echoes featured a chorus from texts shared and devised across the event, creating a mood of repetition and haunting.
‘Gen S28. Push Up/Fold In’ (working title) is a new iteration of an artwork by Alice Gale-Feeny, originally titled 1989 was 34 Years Ago . The evolving work traverses different registers: reading x homage x show and tell x chant x art history lecture. This sculptural performance and recitation is inspired by the artist's research at the Women's Art Library, Goldsmiths. Exploring dynamics of citation and porous subjectivity, it amplifies art and writing protesting Section 28, the anti-gay law passed the year before Gale-Feeny’s birth.

SCHEDULE
17:00–17:10 - Introduction
17:10–18:40 - Act I // READ WRITE RETURN starting with Pauline Oliveros ‘Tuning Meditation’
18:40–19:00 - Break
19:00–19:20 - PERFORMANCE by Alice Gale-Feeny: ‘Gen S28. Push Up/Fold In’ (working title), 2025
19:20–19:30- Brief Break
19:30–20:00 - ACT II / AUTO POLYPHONY starting with Pauline Oliveros ‘Tuning Meditation’

Alice Gale-Feeny makes performance via dance, sculpture, drawing and facilitation. Her work evolves out of improvisations alongside costumes and objects, informing the writing of monologues / scripts. She draws from her lived experience, LGBTQIA+ social histories, the conventions of artistic disciplines and new materialist, post-human and Buddhist philosophies. She has a material practice that emerges out of, and feeds back into her performances. Alice trained at Nottingham Trent (BA Art); Laban / Independent Dance, London (MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional Practice), Meisner Acting technique (Foundation), and Angel Comedy (stand-up comedy). She has performed across London including at Camden Art Centre, Seventeen, and Hey Mum, Lambeth Fringe Festival, and with Emma Lindsay at Fabrica in Brighton.
‘Unbecoming Chorus’ draws inspiration from ‘Feminist Chorus for Feminist Revolt,’ a reading performance by Lucy Reynolds commissioned for the 2015 ‘Now You Can Go’ programme at The Showroom, London.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39547