A solo performance that transforms the human body into a living archive.
What does a century of queer life feel like on the body?
Not in theory, not in textbooks, but on the skin, in the weight of what sticks, stains, blurs or refuses to wash away.
We often talk about queer history as something “lost,” “erased,” or “hidden.” Yet queer and trans people carry that history internally - in gestures we inherit, in fears we recognise without being taught, in joys we find despite everything. This performance makes that invisible inheritance visible. Layer by layer, decade by decade, the body becomes the archive.
Paint, in this work, is not a symbol. It is a collaborator. It drips when it wants to, spreads too far, mixes unpredictably, overwhelms without warning. It mirrors the uncontrollable forces that have shaped queer and trans lives over the last hundred years: secrecy, danger, resistance, desire, community. The dramaturgy comes from surrendering to what the material does - and noticing how the body adapts, refuses, softens, or survives.
What begins as clarity gradually becomes distortion. What begins as visibility becomes overwhelm. The performer disappears into a smear of colour, then into the thick opacity of the final smothering layer. And yet, at the end, the eyes remain. That is the heartbeat of the work. Not triumph - but presence. Not a neat ending - but a refusal to vanish.
This piece is made in conversation with queer ancestors, with trans futures, and with everyone who has ever had to make themselves smaller or louder to survive. It is an act of witnessing, a ritual of accumulation, a queering of historical narrative through the very material that threatens to consume the performer.
Ultimately, Smeared insists on one truth: The body records it all.
Doors open at 19:15, performance starts at 8pm.
-
Part of the Lemons, Laws and Secret Doors exhibition by the Hastings Queer History Collective. Running till 30 August. Full exhibition events programme.