In July 2023, Staging Decadence welcomed Nando Messias to Goldsmiths, University of London, along with their costume archive. The archive spans the breadth of their career as a performance maker and travelled to Goldsmiths en-route to The Museum of Transology at Bishopsgate, London.

This short film gives an insight into the performance and wider creative project surrounding the residency - TransMission: Sissy TV - and contextualises Nando's practice as well as their thinking around decadence.

Nando Messias’ work combines beautiful images with a fierce critique of gender, visibility and violence. They have performed at the Royal Court, The Gate, Hayward Gallery, V&A, Tate Britain, Roundhouse, Royal Vauxhall Tavern and the ICA, among other spaces across the UK and internationally. As well as a practitioner, Nando is movement director for Theo Adams Company and a researcher of queer theory and performance.

This film was shot and edited by Sam Williams: https://sam-w.com/

Nando's residency was made possible thanks to the generous support of Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where they work as a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance.

Gangrenous glamour! Fabulous filigree! For this Friday Late at the V&A on 26 April 2024, we presented a cabaret showcasing eclectic acts from artists working at the forefront of queer, trans, and non-binary performance. From aesthetic dissidents to feminist dandies, we asked: How might decadence be fabricated as an art of dissent? How might decadent garments be stitched, and dissolute stories weaved? And what are we to make of the decadent’s fascination with femme fatales, the undoing of gender, and ‘the Orient’? The night featured live performances from Hasard Le Sin, Jolie Papillon, Lilly Snatchdragon, E. M. Parry and Nando Messias (with music by CN Lester and garment design by Max Allen and Elliot Adcock); films by Angel Rose Denman and jaamil olawale kosoko; and with Sadie Sinner as our esteemed MC.

Filmed and edited by Siddiqui Media

Fabulous filigree, garments of disease, rumours of a colossal fatberg clogging the city’s sewers… For this special event – part of Queen Mary’s “Quorum” series – we celebrated the materiality of decadence on stage: its spectacular costuming, spatialisation, spillages, eccentricities, and the detailing of voluptuous rot.

The night featured live performances from Hasard Le Sin, Sadie Sinner and Miss HerNia; screenings of work by jaamil olawale kosoko, Toco Nikaido and Angel Rose; an exhibition of decadent costume by Julia Bardsley; a performative presentation by Adam Alston – and rounded off with a roundtable discussion.

A Staging Decadence event in collaboration with Quorum @ Queen Mary made possible thanks to the generous support of Goldsmiths, University of London, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Queen Mary, University of London.

Video shot and edited by Farhath Siddiqui.

Thumbnail credit: Tara Fatehi.

A night of rehearsed readings presented at The Albany (London, UK) on Wednesday 10th November 2021.

For this event, we selected some of the most innovative scenes from Remy de Gourmont’s Lilith (1892), in a new translation by Dan Rebellato; the first act of Jean Lorrain’s Ennoïa (1906), translated into English for the first time by Jennifer Higgins; Djuna Barnes’s brilliant one-act play The Dove (1923); and a little-known text that was well ahead of its time by Izumi Kyōka called Kerria Japonica (1923), translated by Cody Poulton. The curators and translators also offer short introductions to each of the performed texts. To skip through the recording, head to the original SoundCloud link here: https://soundcloud.com/user837792597/decadent-plays

Curated by Dr Adam Alston & Professor Jane Desmarais. Directed by Jonathan Meth. Roles performed by & shared among Lauren John Joseph, Georgia Sansom, Sadao Ueda, Yuriri Naka, Philip Arditti, and Adam Alston. Generously supported by Arts Council England, with additional support from the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Thumbnail credit: Mattew DeHaven.

Since being excavated from the Whitechapel fatberg in 2017, Miss HerNia has been sharing her sewage practices on stages and walls in and around London. The Fatberg Princess’s achievements include performing at Glastonbury (2019), a solo show in a shopping centre in Southend (TOMA), launching her jewellery line ‘Fragil’ by HerNier, curating Fatberg Femmetopia (VFD), screening films on Focal Point Gallery’s Big Screen and reaching the finals of The Glory’s Man Up with her alter ego HerNia Man. Miss HerNia also developed another persona called Bin Bag Girl, who is a tap dancing extraordinaire. Due to her contagious nature, she has a progeny that perform and make music with her, their songs include; ‘Trash Potato’, ‘Foot Problems’ and ‘Discharge Sandwich’, which have been performed at Arts Admin, Duckie, Folkestone Pride, Battersea Arts Centre, The Bomb Factory, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, Chaos Magic, and Monster Ronsons (Berlin).

This film is an edited version of an installation for ‘Decadence @ Iklectik’: a club night of performance held at Iklectik Arts Lab in London on 29 July 2022. Decadence @ Iklectik was co-produced by Staging Decadence, the British Association of Decadence Studies and Anjali Prashar-Savoie, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Thumbnail credit: Damien Frost.

Is a decadent utopia a contradiction in terms? In this paper, Adam Alston argues that the recent work of the British live artist Martin O'Brien lends itself to decadence and the utopian imagination, riffing on a number of counterintuitive couplings. All of O’Brien’s work is grounded in his experiences of living with cystic fibrosis (CF) beyond the age of thirty, which he was told would mark the likely span of his life. He frames the years lived since as ‘zombie time’. O'Brien's staging of zombies and zombie time conjoins sickness and desire, and celebrates a taste for abjection, morbid curiosity, the refusal of work, the disruption of chrononormativity, and a conception of futurity that resists the tempos and rhythms of intensified productivity and incessant growth and progress. In O’Brien’s work it is the kingdom of the sick – famously explored by Susan Sontag – as well as the temporalities of the sick that reign supreme, enabling us to catch a glimpse of what a decadent utopia might look like, and who it might accommodate.

Presented at the Utopian Studies Society annual conference, 13 July 2022, University of Brighton. With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous support.

Thumbnail credit: Holly Revell.

Artists Nia O. Witherspoon and Angel Rose comment on their respective practices in a wide ranging discussion addressing what sex work, reproductive justice and trans-rights movements have to teach us about our relationship to the erotic and to our bodies in the 21st century, and the potentialities and pleasures of excess. Expect reflections on Sumerian myths, the aesthetics of decadence in contemporary Black feminist politics, and why we should be serious about fun and ‘Excesstentialism’. You can find abstracts and a list of links discussed in the talk via the YouTube channel HERE.

This panel was held online on 24 March 2021, and was co-presented by the Decadence Research Centre @ Goldsmiths and Staging Decadence, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

This panel on theatre, decadence and the occult features three speakers: Edmund B. Lingan, Normandy Sherwood and Giulia Casalini. Expect discussion of esoteric practices and beliefs associated with the rise of the Occult Revival during the late-nineteenth century, and how it informed the development of decadently occult, iconoclastic and otherworldly performances; ruminations on talismanic trash and the decadence of theatrical objects from the perspective of a theatre designer; and reflections on trans/gender ‘terrorism’ and sorcery in Linn da Quebrada’s afro-Brazilian music and performance. You can find abstracts and a list of links discussed in the talk via the YouTube channel HERE.

This panel was held online on 31 March 2021, and was co-presented by the Decadence Research Centre @ Goldsmiths and Staging Decadence, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

In this panel, Adam Alston and Owen Parry discuss the staging of agitated bodies and super-saturated scenography in contemporary Japanese performance, and how trash, waste and excess have been taken up as a generatively queer methodology in expanded performance practice. It includes discussion of work by Toshiki Okada, Toco Nikaido, Ryan Trecartin, and Owen Parry, and how decadence and related concepts have been mobilised across a range of discourses and practices, from conservative diagnoses of the ‘decadent society’ and the ‘degeneracy’ of otaku superfans, to anti-productivism in Japan’s various ‘schools of decadence’, and the compulsive and anarchic ‘mouldy labours’ of Jack Smith. You can find abstracts and a list of links discussed in the talk via the YouTube channel HERE.

This panel was held online on 23 March 2021, and was co-presented by The Performance Research Forum @ Goldsmiths and Staging Decadence, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Starting with a description of Nando’s performance preparation, which in part involves the selection of a perfume, this talk uses scent as a framework and touchstone to explore some trails through queer solo performance’s indulgence with decadence. The talk seeks to follow the whiff of decadence’s sillage to explore the wake and reach of queer performance practice and its tradition of decadence. Nando and Steve trace their own association with scent to frame a connection with queer performance in terms of its historical relationship with decadence and to tussle with its (often literal) dry cleaning as it enters the archive. The talk, a mix of performance, paper presentation and playfulness, explores one potential way to sense the histories of decadence in queer performance. You can find abstracts and a list of links discussed in the talk via the YouTube channel HERE.

Sniffing Out a Past was held as an online webinar on 10 March 2021, and formed part of the Decadence Research Centre's (Goldsmiths, UoL) 'Staging Decadence' series, co-presented with Staging Decadence.

In February 2022, the Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party, Oliver Dowden, gave a speech to a right-wing think tank condemning ‘woke’ ideology in British culture and education as a ‘dangerous form of decadence’. Where does theatre fit in with Dowden’s diagnosis? In this paper, Adam Alston argues that theatre does lend itself to decadence, but not because publicly subsidised and experimental theatre makers tend to celebrate the progressive values decried by Dowden. It lends itself to decadence because: theatre is spectacularly useless, even though it has often been put to work in useful ways; theatre is wasteful (in the amount of energy that performers expend night after night); theatre is antiquated; and theatre is resistant to metrics that prioritise the economistic gains of intensified productivity. Added grist to Dowden’s mill, perhaps, particularly in times of financial difficulty – but these are also the very reasons why we might celebrate theatre as such.

Presented at the Theatre and Performance Research Association annual conference at the University of Essay on 13 September 2022. With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous support. Photo courtesy of Krys Alex.

This is a fabulous documentary by Charles Atlas looking at the life of the Australian-born fashion designer, performance artist and gay nightclub icon Leigh Bowery.

In this video, YouTube sensation ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn) discusses the aesthetic of owning everything. Riffing on the likes of Oscar Wilde, Susan Sontag, ‘Fräulein Immanuel Hildegard Marlene Kennedy Davenport-Kant’, Pepper & Junior LaBeija, and the inimitable DJ Sprinkles (Terre Thaemlitz), Wynn discusses what the American Dream has done to opulence (‘opulence is not abundance; it is the aesthetic of abundance’), realness (‘in the ballroom sense, realness has a subtext of defying injustice; you’re using artifice to create the illusion of a lifestyle that has been kept unjustly beyond your reach’), class (or, why new money is drawn to ostentation), taste (‘taste is pretty intimately related to power’), glamour (‘in our capitalist society, glamour is a “spell of opulence”’), envy (or, ‘the public relations of success’), and the idea of ruination (‘the gothic aesthetic is an aesthetic of dead and decaying opulence’).

‘Before Andy Warhol was an art star, there was Jack […]. And Jack turned his back on it’. Jack Smith might be best known for his work as a filmmaker, but after Jonas Mekas embraced Smith’s influential film ‘Flaming Creatures’ (1963) as a cult commercial venture, Smith became increasingly disillusioned with the art world. He embraced the ephemerality of performance to take seriously the prospect of eluding economies of reproduction. He didn’t stop making films, but Smith’s own New York loft - alongside his collaborations with the Play-House of the Ridiculous and various of its offshoots - became an important site of experimenting with and pushing his interest in a queerly ‘jeweled’ art, one of perpetual process, or, as performance scholar Giulia Palladini puts it, of ‘scenes of foreplay’ that elude commodified fulfilment. In this film, Penny Arcade offers a short introduction to Smith as ‘the daddy’ (in his acolytes’ words) of the underground arts scene in 1960s New York, which is a fascinating period of much relevance to the study of theatre, performance and decadence. Without Penny Arcade’s intervention, much of Smith’s archive may have been lost (itself the subject of an unfortunate legal dispute). She was a crucial figure in ‘Ridiculous’ performances of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and is an important solo artist in her own right. The film is best-approached as a kicking-off point for exploring Smith’s work in more depth, and is best-supplemented by checking out Dominic Johnson’s book ‘Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture’.

Some of Japan’s most important writers wrote plays that were either explicitly linked to notions of ‘decadence’, or might certainly be read in light of decadence: for instance, Hakushū Kitahara, Izumi Kyōka, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (an admirer of Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde), and Ango Sakaguchi. In this short film, another Japanese playwright and novelist, Yukio Mishima - also closely associated with Japanese decadence - sets out his thoughts in the English language on Noh theatre, cross-gender acting in Kabuki, and the relationships between beauty and death.

In 2011, the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned an exhibition of works by the artist George Chakravarthi. Chakravarthi works across a range of media, including performance, but this particular exhibition participates in a long lineage of ‘decadent’ depictions of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and heroines. As Chakravarthi puts it in his framing of the exhibition, his work does more than upturn the orientalist leanings of the white western cannon; he also reveals more by putting on more, and both stages and challenges perceptions of the post-colonial body as an exotic creature in Western theatrical culture.

This is a clear-sighted and accessible introduction to key philosophical takes on decadence, as well as art and literary practices associated with decadence in the nineteenth century.

In this 7-minute discussion, which was made to accompany Tate Britain’s Aubrey Beardsley exhibition, curator and art historian Stephen Calloway and academic and drag performer Holly James Johnston ask whether dandyism is performative, and an expression of a life-long commitment to performance.

Deep Trash’s videos are routinely censored by the usual platforms, so we can’t embed them in the usual way. Hence, to watch their videos, please CLICK HERE.

Decadence in art, literature and performance is not confined to the late-nineteenth century. A new generation of contemporary artists and performance makers are expanding how we might think about and understand decadence as a creative practice to be experienced live and in the flesh. Moreover, they are recalibrating the kinds of body and behaviour that might participate in the development of a decadent aesthetic, and in doing so invite us to rethink the political connotations and possibilities of decadence. The artists involved with these performances might not use the term, but many of these works are fabulously, messily, queerly and anarchically decadent. One ‘strain’ of decadence in twenty-first-century performance that we might draw on here can be found at the East London exhibition-cum-performance club night Deep Trash, which runs annually.

This documentary offers great insight into the East London drag scene. It’s currently available for free and in full via The Glory’s film archive (which is a fantastic resource). The documentary centres on the drag, friendships, friendly rivalries and struggles of The Glory co-founders Jonny Woo and John Sizzle, alongside East-London-drag stalwarts Scottee, Holestar, Pia and Amber, and others.

This talk on sickness and decadence in contemporary performance was first delivered by Adam Alston on 7 September 2021 with the Theatre and Performance Research Association's Bodies and Performance Working Group. It looks at how performers embody multiple connotations of decadence and sickness: at how these connotations are produced in discourse; at how they work upon and flow between different kinds of body (gendered, queer and ill); and at how performers are seen or choose to embody metaphors of sickness and decadence. What do the multiple connotations of sickness and allusions to societal ‘decadence’ do to perceptions of the sick body, and how have performance makers with lived experiences of sickness reacted? Through analyses of the collaborative work of Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose in the years leading up to Flanagan’s death in 1996, and Rose’s collaboration with the British live artist Martin O’Brien in the 2010s, I explore how the ‘unimaginability’ of aestheticizing cystic fibrosis – a disease of the lungs – might also become a platform for reclaiming alienating and demeaning sickness metaphors.

Generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

In this talk on decadence and public funding for the arts, Adam Alston looks at a controversial statue by Paul McCarthy that was eventually installed in Rotterdam when the global financial crash was wreaking havoc in 2008, and a 2010 piece by Wunderbaum called Looking for Paul, which responds to the controversy that McCarthy's sculpture provoked. It considers how multiple connotations of austerity and decadence play out across the bodies of performers and artworks at odds with conventional forms of use and productivity, and that undermine appeals to ‘common sense’. Perhaps a taste for the uncommon has something to teach us about the attribution of value, and why some people and practices are considered necessary or worthwhile, while others are marginalised as enervating drains on the health and wealth of a nation.

First presented as part of an online panel on 15 July 2021 with the Political Performances Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research's annual conference. Generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Staging Decadence is inspired by the work of theatre makers who tend to revel in the ruination of conservative and exclusionary traditions and values, but decadence has also been explored by conservative commentators to critique the perceived sclerosis or decline of a given society. Ross Douthat is one of the most recent examples to fall into this camp. Perhaps we might take this extended talk as an invitation to think about decadence itself a kind of stage on which competing interests and ideologies are played out.