ABSTRACT

This chapter is written from the position of the queer-identifying theatre practitioner-scholar and interrogates their relationship to the institutions of theatre, funding bodies, and the academy.

The queer-identified artist, like the queer-identified researcher, is always functioning in a deeply ambivalent position. What does it mean when one of the fundamental principles of queer is that it sets itself up against what is normative, for this queer-identified person to exist within, be paid or salaried within, or seek approval from, one or more of these institutions? What happens to (their) queerness?

The parallels between theatre and the academy are close and multiple, and I suggest this is particularly so around the field of queer Practice as Research (PaR). The chapter examines a recent example of the author’s PaR work on HIV and AIDS in performance, GL RY/WHoLE (Belfast 2016), to argue that the uncomfortably placed queer artist-scholar might appropriate a ‘feral’ modus operandi in order to radically de-domesticate the domesticating strictures and privileges of these institutions. In other words, to take the money and knowledge and run wild.