Staging Decadence: Decadent Costume
Live at the V&A’s Friday Late, ‘Feminist Futures’, 26 April 2024
https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/vJdykk60bjv/friday-late-april
Gangrenous glamour! Fabulous filigree! For this Friday Late at the V&A 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.
#DecadentCostume @DecadentStages
Notes on contributors: https://linktr.ee/decadentcostume
This event was made possible thanks to funding from the University of Brighton, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UKRI, and the V&A, and with institutional support from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Poster design: Zed Gregory
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the fabulous Jolie Papillon prepared an act in place of the equally fabulous Tamm Reynolds.
Staging Decadence: Dress to Kill
Queen Mary, University of London, 24 May 2023
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, and Queen Mary, University of London.
Poster design by Tara Fatehi.
Nando Messias: Artist Residency
Goldsmiths, University of London, July 2023
In July 2023, we welcomed Nando Messias to Goldsmiths, University of London, along with their archive of costume spanning the breadth of their career as a performance maker as it made its way to The Museum of Transology at Bishopsgate, London.
Nando’s 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. For this Artist Residency with Staging Decadence, Nando will be exploring the politics and precarity of decadence in performance, with a particular focus on costume.
Poster design by Tara Fatehi. Photo by Holly Revell.
This residency was made possible thanks to the generous support of Goldsmiths, University of London, and from Knowledge Exchange funding from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where Nando is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance.
Decadence @ Iklectik
Iklectik Arts Lab, London, 29 July 2022
Begemmed bodies at the end of worlds, empires in the last of their decline, and tonight, darling, we dance...
This event featured Live performances from Oozing Gloop, Sigi Moonlight and Hasard Le Sin
With Coco Deville as our esteemed host, films by Miss HerNia, and sounds by Gin
Co-produced by Staging Decadence, British Association of Decadence Studies, and Anjali Prashar-Savoie.
Staging Decadence @ Rich Mix
Rich Mix Arts Centre, London, 21 January 2022
For this event, we marked the dawn of a new year in the depths of winter, welcoming a fabulous array of ungodly glitterati in an unabashed celebration of decadence!
It was a salon-style collaboration between Rich Mix and Staging Decadence featuring performances by Lucy McCormick, Darkwah, Owen Parry and Nando Messias, talks by Giulia Palladini, Ben Walters, and Adam Alston, and the delectable sonorities and emceeing prowess of Sadie Sinner.
The event followed a panel discussion celebrating the launch of a special issue of the journal Volupté on ‘Decadence and Performance’.
Generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Photos by Holly Revell, Eivind Hansen, and Pari Naderi.
Staging Decadence @ HERE Arts Centre
HERE Arts Centre, New York City, 9 September 2021
Do we live in a decadent society? Who is entitled to its opulence and pleasures, and how might it be reclaimed?
In September 2021, Staging Decadence teamed up with HERE arts centre in New York to stage a twenty-first-century salon. The night included the premiere of Nia Witherspoon’s Priestess of Twerk, inspired by sacred sex workers and ‘the “bad bitches” of hip-hop’, and Normandy Sherwood’s Psychic Self Defense, which riffed on endings and the decadence of theatrical objects. Hosted by the inimitable Murray Hill, Nia and Normandy were also joined by Dr Adam Alston and Professor Richard Kaye, who offered talks on sick theatres and the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, respectively.
‘A dangerous form of decadence’: decadence & the culture wars
Goldsmiths, University of London, 11 October 2023
Featuring Cherrie Kwok, Phoebe Patey-Ferguson & Kirsty Sedgman
Chaired by Adam Alston
In February 2022, an influential politician in the UK Conservative Party, Oliver Dowden, delivered a speech at an event organised by a rightwing thinktank based in the United States. Universities, he says, are responsible for promoting ‘a dangerous form of decadence’ that threatens the survival of democratic values at a time when war is again on the doorstep of Europe. At the heart of this danger is a ‘pernicious new ideology’ that has come to be known as ‘woke’: ‘awakened to the so-called truths of our societies. […] Just when our attention should be focused on external foes, we seem to have entered this period of extreme introspection and self-criticism, and it really does threaten to sap our societies of their own self-confidence’ (Dowden 2022). Moreover, it is not universities in general that’s the problem; it’s the study of arts, humanities and social science subjects that labour under the influence of critical theory and the pursuit of social justice.
This panel discussion took Dowden’s speech as a point of departure for considering the roles of cultural and educational policy and debate in the manufacturing of a culture war. We asked: What are we to make of the rhetorical use of ‘decadence’ in politics and popular cultural and political writing today, not least given the fact that ‘decadence’ is an antiquated concept outside of relatively niche scholarly and literary circles? What do these circles have to offer to our understanding of decadent rhetoric? Where else – and how else – has decadence been harnessed in the political arena, and the journalistic media that attends to it? And how might artists and writers respond, as well as those who research and study their work?
Co-organised by the British Association of Decadence Studies & Staging Decadence.
