GL RY
2014 | Melbourne, AU: AIDS 2014 Conference (Pilot version)
2016 | Belfast, NI
GL RY in Belfast was made as part of Outburst Festival in 2016. It encompassed three main works: GL RY:US, a headphone walk around the city; WHoLE, a durational installation in a shop window; and the Tea Cell Dance, a one-off cabaret/afternoon tea event. It built from the work undertaken in Melbourne in 2014, bringing some of those key ideas along with it.
Belfast version:
The curated audio work GL RY:US takes the listener on a guided walk around various locations in Belfast city centre listening to experiences of people living with HIV as you walk. Some of these pieces are direct, verbatim testimonies of people living with HIV that we have interviewed, and some are poetic responses by the project writer Lachlan Philpott and the creative team. It began with discussions and interviews with people living with HIV in Northern Ireland, and sets out to respond in different ways to the experiences we heard about.
Created in collaboration with: TheatreofplucK
Lead Artist: Alyson Campbell
Text: Lachlan Philpott
Performers: Ross Anderson-Doherty, Matthew Cavan
Designer: Niall Rea
Sound Designer: Dave Bird
Contextual dramaturgy & consultant: Andrew Goyvaerts
Production manager/dramaturgy: Martin McDowell
Guest performers: Miche Doherty, Jo Donnelly, Marie Jones, Neil Keery, Jonny McMillen, Eleanor Methven, Carol Moore and Brenda Winter-Palmer, Nicky Harley, Mary Jordan and Kate Guelke.
Dramaturg & Consultant (WHoLE): Kim Davis
Melbourne version:
The basic premise for GL RY came from conversations between Alyson and long-time collaborator Lachlan Philpott. The aim was to take the idea of the glory hole and transport it from its connotations of anonymous sex into a metaphorical realm. The provocation given to the collaborators was:
‘The project takes the idea of the hole as a metaphor for transmission and transformation: what histories, secrets, stigma, information, art, affects might slip through a small hole?
Part installation, part performance, the structure at the heart of GL RY will host durational performance, video work, storytelling, information, intimate one-on-one encounters and impromptu cabaret spectaculars.’
GL RY was a performance-installation project made fast and dirty with a large group of graduate and undergraduate students at the Victorian College of the Arts in partnership with Living Positive Victoria for the AIDS conference in 2014.
Very much a pilot piece, realised more fully in the Belfast version in 2016, it nonetheless unleashed the creative ingenuity of all the collaborators involved and led to a deep relationship between Campbell and her mentor on the work, Kim Davis.
Lead Artist: Alyson Campbell
Dramaturg: Kim Davis
Artists:
Ross Anderson-Doherty (lesbian bear chanteuse)
Will McBride, Penny Harpham (durational performance BED)
Anna Kennedy (Alice)
Tim Phillips (spit fairy)
Dagmara Gieysztor (designer)
Cathy Hunt (maker/production)
Georgia Symons (writer/maker)
Iris Gaillard (HIV head after David McDiarmid)
The Melbourne iteration of GL RY took place during the International Aids Conference, 2014.
Photos by Iris Gaillard and Dagmara Gieysztor
Research
Alyson Campbell,
GL RY – A (w)hole Lot of Woman Trouble: HIV Dramaturgies and Feral Pedagogies (2018)
In Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alyson Campbell and Dirk Gindt
This essay stems from a Practice as Research performance installation, GL RY, led by the author in a public square throughout the 2014 International AIDS Conference in Melbourne. The essay argues that there is a gaping hole in representation of women living with HIV in contemporary performance in countries like Australia. The essay proposes two main concepts: conversation—in form as well as process—is a key part of a contemporary dramaturgy of HIV; and, building on that, this dramaturgy of conversation might be productively merged with queer ideas of kinship and family to form what I am calling ‘feral pedagogies’: a queerly de-domesticated idea of how we teach and learn, in this case about HIV.
Other Publications
Georgia Symons,
GL RY: adventures in public art, HIV discourse and queer aesthetics (2014)
In HIV Australia | Vol. 12 No. 3