ABSTRACT
This chapter will interrogate the work of four contemporary British artists who have forged an oppositional sense of agency through performance in response to an experience of rejection or marginalisation. I will argue that my chosen artists Rachael Young, Lucy McCormick and Project O recreate or borrow from a club aesthetic in order to transform conventional theatre spaces and create an oppositional, heterotopic space-within-a-space. This alternative space has the potential to foreground normative expectations and draw attention to the way social context exaggerates cultural meaning. This work occupies a space of ‘failure’ because each performance draws upon an experience of rejection, and can be seen to animate José Muñoz’s sense of ‘queer virtuosity’. By deploying tropes of amateur performance, impossible tasks and metatheatrical confession each practitioner draws upon, what Sara Jane Bailes has described as the praxis of performing failure. They draw upon a negative experience in order to create an alternative world, setting out to deliberately occupy the margins of mainstream culture. Each production is galvanised by Young’s assertion that ‘nightclubs should be places where we can let go and allow our unbridled selves to be free, they should be spaces of liberation and revolution, not spaces of oppression’ (Prashar-Savoie 2018).
