'1989 was 34 Years Ago' performed at Hey Mum for Lambeth Fringe Festival at The Bread & Roses Theatre, London, 15 October 2024. Photo: Lou Avlonitis-Perrin.
Unbecoming Chorus
A day of reading, writing, and performance in three acts, featuring performance by Alice Gale-Feeny and readings from selected writers.
Plural, dissonant and non-conforming selves will be explored across three sessions of reading, guided writing and performance. Focusing on contemporary experiments in autofiction and autotheory, Unbecoming Chorus moves between the collective and the individual in fluid configurations where readers and writers, listeners and performers entangle and dance. By creating a range of intensities and textures, rhythms and temperatures – from silence to speech, cacophony and chorus – the programme encourages varying levels of public engagement and attention.
SCHEDULE
17:00–17:10 – Introduction
17:10–18:20 – Act I // READ WRITE RETURN
18:20–18:30 – Break
18:30–18:50 – INTERRUPTION by Alice Gale-Feeny: 1989 was 34 years ago
18:50–19:00 – Break
19:00–20:00 – ACT II / AUTO POLYPHONY
ACT I / READ WRITE RETURN features out loud group readings from recent queer, feminist and trans-informed texts that challenge and complicate binary and other essentialist understandings of identity and selfhood. Together we will read out loud selections from:
Kathy Acker, ‘The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula,’ 1974
Jay Bernard, Surge, 2019
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, 1982
Sharon Hayes, ‘Certain Resemblances: Notes on Performance, Event and Political Images,’ 2011
Hesse K, ‘Debts unpaid,’ from Disquiet Drive, 2024
Paul B Preciado, Testo Junkie, 2008
Sin Wai Kin, ‘Part Three/Cthulhu Through the Looking Glass’, from ‘Narrative Reflections on Looking,’ 2018
Maud Sulter, ‘Calliope’ from Zabat, 1989
1989 was 34 Years Ago is a new iteration of an artwork by Alice Gale-Feeny. The evolving work traverses different registers: reading x homage x show and tell x chant x art history lecture. This sculptural performance and recitation is inspired by the artist’s research at the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths. Exploring dynamics of citation and porous subjectivity, it amplifies art and writing protesting Section 28, the anti-gay law passed the year before Gale-Feeny’s birth.
ACT II / AUTO POLYPHONY: Underlines and Echoes features a chorus from texts shared and devised across the event, creating a mood of repetition and haunting. Guided by writing prompts, participants will contribute new writing to a collective text.
Devised by Anna Barham, Tatiana Bogacheva, Anna Bunting Branch, Jane Frances Dunlop, Catherine Grant, Athina Petsou, Helena Reckitt, Trish Scott, E Scourti, and Ana Vicente, in dialogue with Beth Bramich and the Auto collective. Auto is a reading and writing collective formed as part of the Feminist Duration Reading Group’s 2025-2026 residency at Goldsmiths CCA.
Taking place as part of CCA’s Deptford X Fringe programme.
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BIOGRAPHIES
Alice Gale-Feeny makes performance via dance, sculpture, drawing and facilitation. Her work evolves out of improvisations alongside costumes and objects, informing the writing of monologues / scripts. She draws from her lived experience, LGBTQIA+ social histories, the conventions of artistic disciplines and new materialist, post-human and Buddhist philosophies. She has a material practice that emerges out of, and feeds back into her performances. Alice trained at Nottingham Trent (BA Art); Laban / Independent Dance, London (MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional Practice), Meisner Acting technique (Foundation), and Angel Comedy (stand-up comedy). She has performed across London including at Camden Art Centre, Seventeen, and Hey Mum, Lambeth Fringe Festival, and with Emma Lindsay at Fabrica in Brighton.
Unbecoming Chorus builds on the Feminist Duration Reading Group’s decade-long practice of out loud public reading of texts from outside the dominant feminist canon. The event draws inspiration from Feminist Chorus for Feminist Revolt, a reading performance by Lucy Reynolds commissioned for the 2015 Now You Can Go programme at The Showroom, London.
Auto is a reading and writing collective formed in February 2025 as part of the Feminist Duration Reading Group’s 2025-2026 residency at Goldsmiths CCA. It was launched with Writing to Undo the Self, featuring readings from the work of Marquis Bey and E Scourti.
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