JOURNEY

PERFORMATORIUM FESTIVAL OF QUEER PERFORMANCE 11 •
QUEER CITY CINEMA FILM FESTIVAL 20

September 12-14, 2024

Its been a journey. Just a small town girl. Just a city boy. From mediation and appropriation to representation and assimilation. Take the midnight train. Go anywhere. Everything in a little black case. Chart the course. A singer in a smoky room. Revolution hiding in plain sight.

From inauthenticity to authenticity. The smell of wine and cheap perfume. From indirect and illegible to proud and raging. From sublimating and modulating to authorial. Left to your own devices.

From campy, sincere, matter-of-fact and resourceful to ceasing as category. A palimpsest that goes on and on, and on, and on. Shadows searching in the night. Streetlights, people. Living just to find emotion. Hiding somewhere in the night. Transformation. It’s (its) about time!

– Text by Jamie Cooper, August 2024 - with lyrics from Don't Stop Believin' by Journey

To journey is about time. We begin and end and in-between we do something. What that something is, is a combination of personal circumstances and characteristics, and a seismic mix of other social and cultural inspirations and aspirations, influences, barriers and interferences.

For some Queer and QTBIPOC identities, our journeys are particularly and unavoidably harrowing and exhausting - requiring us to understand that our differences can provoke hate, while learning how to navigate, accept and love our own identifications while being challenged, thwarted and confronted by an unending xenophobic terrain.

Searching for meaning, seeking reassurance and finding a way through and overcoming the phobic bramble and muck of the world is, for better or worse, part of our journey.

Through the thick smog and climate of hate, we somehow locate each other, where we embrace and nurture our difference, our funk, our strife, our fierceness, our fearlessness, our queerness and our fuck-you-ness. In turn we celebrate the joy and pleasure of being other and in doing so, engender change, resolution, revolution and arrival.

Our journey is simultaneously informed by invisibility, struggle and activism of the past, the gains and accomplishments through visibility and the pro-active presence of now, and disturbingly, a seemingly uncertain and disconcerting future.

This years festival addresses all of the above as a means to ponder what it means to journey, how the word journey evokes romantic ideas with regard to time, existence and ‘being’ and journey as a framework to disseminate the work of Queer and QTBIPOC artists and their expressions and identities through film, live art and discussion.

Enjoy your time...

Gary Varro
Executive & Artistic Director
Queer City Cinema & Performatorium Festival of Queer Performance

speaking of time and journey - this year marks QCC’s 30th year of germination!!