The Divine Fringe Presents…
Grace Quigley: On our backs
On Our Backs (Work-In-Progress) is a cabaret-performance-dyke-fever-dream following Dilly: a hopelessly devoted femme who’s often falling in lust. Desperately wants family and love. Dilly is barely holding herself together with cheap glamour and delusion. She’s learned how to use pretty things to cover the rot of her life so far.
Drawing from research at the Bishopsgate Institute and inspired by the radical 1980s lesbian magazine On Our Backs, folds queer archive into a contemporary, collage of femme performance. Dilly writes incessantly to Nina, an agony-aunt porn star/nurse from the magazine, searching for advice on sex, love, motherhood, and what a lesbian fairytale might look like. Through these imagined correspondences, archival fragments, and live confessionals, the show connects histories of dyke erotic expression, care, survival, and fantasy to the messy realities of queer life now.Seductive and camp on the surface, the work slowly exposes deeper questions around gendered labour, sexual politics, visibility, desire, and the exhausting logistics of being looked at. The body becomes spectacle, burden, and punchline all at once.
At its core, the show is about queer longing—for intimacy, for recognition, for community, for a future. Dilly wants to be adored, wants to be held, wants a baby despite never having seen a lesbian family that looked survivable. She flirts with the audience, depends on them, recruits them into her fantasies and failures. Who helps her, and why? What does care look like between strangers? Can desire produce solidarity? Can a cabaret room become, however briefly, a place where queer people actually meet each other beyond performance?
Rooted in archive and lived experience, On Our Backs celebrates the messy, excessive, deeply vulnerable realities of queer femme life. It asks how we carry queer histories forward—and what kinds of futures we might still build together: in heels and a red lip.
Duration: 60 minutes
THIS SHOW IS IN THE BASEMENT
Accessibility:
Sadly both floors of the divine are not currently accessible as we do not have a lift.
The ground floor, main bar of the divine has level access.
There is an accessible toilet in the main bar.
The cabaret and club space are in the basement of the venue, there is no lift.
There are 17 wide steps down to the basement with handrails on either side, this is where the show will take place.
There are two sets of gender-neutral toilets downstairs, they are not wide enough for wheelchairs.
If you need any further information please refer to the divine ‘about’ page on the website.
www.thedivine.co.uk
or email them direct on info@thedivine.co.uk
The Divine Accessibility Info & FAQs
Please note The Divine is a queer venue run by queer people, for queer people and their allies. We operate a zero-tolerance policy towards homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny and discrimination of any kind. Be respectful or you will be asked to leave. Strictly no office, hen or stag parties allowed.