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Polari Speaking Sex

Well cum you black market queens, blob queens, fruits, donas, bitches, bulls, beans and bibis! How bona to varda your dolly eeks!

We would like you to sit down, relaxed and with open opals, so that you can see us, all tray of us. Let us show you how it’s done. It might be too much but worth it. (It could be yours if you flipped it and reversed it).
Show us all the pots in your cupboard, open wide, so that you can receive the bold.

We want you to lean in and honestly cackle about what you’d like to do to us. But ssshhhh, you need to whisper, Betty Bracelets might hear us… so that we can feel like the only dish you’d ever eat, the chosen minge to wash you off your sins.

We’d like you to sit there, and receive (lall). Take in all that is us. From our plates of meat to our bijou bagadgas and our bona vardering minges, from our foofs to the top of our fortuni heads.
Alamo, and no flies! Savvy?
Nanti Polari! Lily Law! Gardy loo!

Polari was a secretive language used within gay communities in Britain from the beginning of the 1900s to the late 1960s. This language enabled queers to communicate with each other in front of straight people, in public. It enabled them to feel part of an exclusive group. This language, being full of camp, innuendo and sarcasm also helped form a resilient worldview in the face of arrest, blackmail and physical violence.

Marcus is inspired by this idea of a secret language as a road to community and safety, but also as a safe space in itself. A secret form of communication as a tool for expressing, sharing and performing queer joy, queer pleasure, queer intimacy and queer eroticism in public.

The expression speaking sex is borrowed from Anh Vo; choreographer, dancer and theoretician based in New York. They create dances and write about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality.

Marcus work involves movement and text. I his artistic practice he wants to find and/or create connections between the poetic/political body and a poetic/political language. The author of Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinstein, once write: Gender is the poetry we make of the language we are taught. In Polari Speaking Sex the movement and the choreography becomes embodied poetry created from the language we learn.

The project is supported by the Swedish Arts Council, Sweden’s National Touring Theatre, Köttinspektionen, the touring network Slingan and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.

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Idea and Choreography: Marcus Baldemar

Created Together with: Viktoria Andersson, Mariana Suikkanen Gomes, Daniel Åkerström Steen, Pyo Soon Caroline Byström, Adam Seid Tahir och Anh Vo.

On stage: Marcus Baldemar, Viktoria Andersson, Mariana Suikkanen Gomes.

Set-design, costume, make-up and lights:
Daniel Åkerström Steen

Coproduction: MDT, Riksteatern Dans, Köttinspektionen

Residens/Residencies: MDT, Riksteatern, Konstnärsnämnden