Performing Failure / Remembering Joy

Honouring the activist tradition of the LGBTQ+ Pride movement, this performance explores the relationship between performance and failure as a gateway to queer joy and its memory. While failure is often seen as something negative—to be avoided or concealed—trans queer theorist Jack Halberstam reminds us that when we fail to meet expected social norms, on stage or off, we open the possibility to “imagine other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”
Embracing the creative potential of failure, the performance draws from John Cage’s Song Books—a musical repertoire devoted to breaking conventions and exploring what lies beyond them. These songs are interwoven with a performative lecture on the memory of queer joy, beginning not with remembrance, but with the inability to remember.
Why can’t we remember queer joy? Why are its traces so scarce? And why must LGBTQ+ people so often bear the labour of realigning past memories with present identities?

Performers:
Jonatan Alvarado
Nuno Atalaia