PhD Ahmed MUNOZ Homemade Mutant Hope Machines The PhD By Ben Walters Homemade Mutant Hope Machines The PhD By Ben Walters London 2020 [email protected] i Dr Duckie Homemade Mutant Hope Machines The PhD Copyright © by Ben Walters 2020 All rights reserved ISBN: 978-1-5272-6236-2 Graphics by Zed @ They Them Studios Based on Ben Walters, ‘Queer fun, family and futures in Duckie’s performance projects 2010-2016’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2018), supervised by Catherine Silverstone of the Drama Department, Queen Mary University of London, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Supplementary chapter not included in thesis submitted for examination Parts of Chapter Six are published as ‘Welcome to The Posh Club’, a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance: Volume Two, edited by Ananda Breed and Tim Prentki (Routledge, 2020) Parts of the Supplementary Chapter are published as ‘Being Among Bluebells: Amateurism as a mode of queer futurity at Duckie’s Slaughterhouse Club’, an article in Performance Research Vol 25 No 1 (2020) © Taylor & Francis, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13528165.2020.1747267 Other academic publications by Ben Walters: ‘LGBTQ+ Spaces’, in Urban Claims and the Right to the City: Grassroots Perspectives from Salvador da Bahia and London, eds. Julian Walker, Marcos Bau Carvalho and Ilinca Diaconescu (UCL Press, 2020), available online: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/131448 ‘“Once upon a time, there was a tavern”: doing things with the past at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern’, in Drag Histories, Herstories & Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2, eds. Mark Edwards & Stephen Farrier (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2020) ‘“Our strength comes from our connection to each other”: a conversation about resilience with Duckie employees Simon Casson, Dicky Eton and Emmy Minton’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol 26, No 1 (forthcoming, 2021) If you have trouble accessing these, email Ben Walters at [email protected] Look out for The Posh Club: Pleasure, Parties, Performance & Pensioners, a new Duckie book with an introduction by Dr Duckie, to be launched in conjunction with a new fundraising scheme when lockdown measures for older people are lifted. ii About Ben Walters / Dr Duckie Since finishing his PhD about homemade mutant hope machines, based on Duckie’s community projects, Ben has adapted his research into talk and workshop formats as ‘Dr Duckie’ for audiences and organisations around the UK. As part of RVT Future, Ben wrote the successful application to Historic England to make the Royal Vauxhall Tavern the UK’s first queer listed building, and he’s part of the campaign to reopen the Black Cap. Ben has produced cabaret shows including The Prime of Ms David Hoyle, Queer Fun: An Ivory-Tower Vaudeville and BURN: Moving Images by Cabaret Artists. His documentary films include This Is Not a Dream (co-dir. Gavin Butt), Vinegar to Jam (co-dir. Edward Lawrenson) and Cut To. Time Out London’s former cabaret editor, Ben now reviews cabaret at the Edinburgh Fringe for The Scotsman and blogs at NotTelevision.net. He’s also written books about Orson Welles and (with J.M. Tyree) The Big Lebowski. iii Foreword Simon Strange Producer, Duckie For 25 years, Duckie have been a homespun collective making up shows and clubs and events as we go along. We are careful to not become too ‘professional’ in a corporate way and our gigs are conceived through free-flowing group conversations in the pub and around the kitchen table. A few years ago, we changed the work. We turned from a trendy drunken nightclub into a social enterprise programme. We thought that was a good gimmick, a good trajectory, a new cultural development in the landscape. Catherine Silverstone at Queen Mary University of London spotted that and reckoned someone could do a PhD about it. We thought it would be good for it to be traced, witnessed, decoded, supported. So we got together and got funding. As a posh boy from Putney with a double first from Cambridge, Ben is from the wrong side of the tracks to represent the chippy, lippy, class-conscious Duckie. But he seems like a nice boy with nice shiny hair and he’s been sniffing around our stuff for donkeys, so we thought we would give him a go. He’s got a good take on culture and he can write. Better to have a hack than a boffin so people can understand what you’re on about. Ben’s nice and also challenging and he turns up on time – the class privilege of being high-functioning, I suppose. But we benefited from that class privilege. He put his heart and soul into it and he’s nailed the big ideas, about fun and hope and that. He showed the value of the work. I thought a PhD would be about small things – minutiae – but it’s about big, bold ideas. It’s been surprisingly useful. He’s looked at the work and discovered things about it and said, ‘Look, you could roll this out more’. This text is a tool kit, a how-to guide for inventing ‘homemade mutant hope machines’. We love that idea. It’s mostly about fun. It’s also about family, generations, community, hope, class and bentertainment, but it’s mostly about fun. Like art and friendship, life is temporal and fragile. We are only here for a few decades so we might as well have a right laugh and a right good dance. We reckon there’s incredible potential for this project to have an impact. It’s not just about us, it’s about other people making hope machines. Ben’s focused on ours and that’s nice. But now it’s time for him to go out there and encourage loads of new ones. It’s our job to help him get that on the road. iv Preface Ben Walters Dr Duckie What good is hope? It doesn’t always feel clear. Sometimes, the indifference, chaos and cruelty of the world weigh so heavily that hope feels like a con we play on ourselves, a deluded avoidance of the harsh, inevitable truth of suffering. The past decade has violently increased the space of suffering for many people, especially those already stigmatised or ignored by the power structures that organise our lives. And now, as I write these words in April 2020, a global pandemic heralds destabilisation orders of magnitude greater still, the worst effects of which will likely be visited on those least equipped to endure. To value hope at a time like this – to turn to an airy abstract concept when people are dying – isn’t that just kidding yourself? I believe not. I believe hope can be a pragmatic technology of civic change. This thesis tries to justify that belief. Hope, to me, is merely the belief that better worlds are possible. Not inevitable, not easy, not magically gifted from above, and not without their own problems. But possible. It’s the insistence that even in times of chaos – especially in times of chaos – a range of possible futures exists, some of which are more desirable than others, and that each of us can make choices and take actions that make those better futures a bit more likely to happen. Of course, this belief isn’t sufficient to bring about the change it imagines. But it’s a necessary start. It’s the thing that gives direction and sense to the concrete, pragmatic, routine kinds of action that might be small in themselves but really can bring those better worlds into being. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not an idealistic pipe dream. It’s proven fact. I’ve seen it happen, repeatedly. It’s what this thesis documents. And there are patterns to how it plays out that can be fruitfully applied to other situations. This thesis articulates those too. In essence, the argument goes like this. People living at or beyond the margins of what our society recognises as normal, validated, successful lives – people who v don’t have the ‘right’ kind of life/work/gender/home/love/sex/body/mind/ family/legal status etc – can make better worlds. This can happen through large- and small-scale forms and processes that emerge from lived experience, address real wants and needs, operate relatively autonomously and adapt to changing conditions. It helps if they harness the power of queer family (providing access to care, material support and lineages of knowledge), queer fun (helping to challenge existing power structures and start to make new ones) and participatory performance events (modeling new kinds of community and agency). I call these forms and processes homemade mutant hope machines. Homemade mutant hope machines are powerful not because they are conveniently obvious or perfectly efficient – they are neither – but because they are habit-forming and they yield results. They are practical civic technologies demonstrating that, if you routinely behave as if better worlds are possible, those worlds will begin to emerge. They will probably still be fragile and flawed. But they will be real. They will make real differences to real lives, and that will give them value. And they will have the potential to change and grow and combine with other hope machines, fortifying and multiplying their effects. They are uncertain but uncertainty is part of the point. It leaves room for manoeuvre. Hope means you don’t know but want to try. • This thesis and the research underpinning it formed an uncertain journey in uncertain times.