Out - The Bittersweet Scent of Ray Young’s Queer Affront Returns to the Stage
Ahead of presenting the Spring 2024 iteration of Out, an award-winning performance celebrating queerness through dancehall, the transdisciplinary experience-maker Ray Young speaks to us about the creative approach of their dynamic duet piece that celebrates how queerness intersects Black and Caribbean communities alongside confronting how homophobia and transphobia may haunts them.
Words by Ivie Uzebu
Azara and Bambi Jordan Phillips, the new stars of OUT by Glodi Miessi
When asked what they're most proud of, Ray Young responded, “all of my work feels like it’s my work and only something that I could have made.” Created with friend and collaborator, Dwayne Antony, Ray was keen to work with the Nottingham-based choreographer, producing Out after lengthy conversations about queerness and blackness in 2016. The work functions as a place for their respective practices of dance and live art to meet.
Originally performed with Antony and then alongside movement director Malik Nashad Sharpe, Young discusses the very different and unique energies each performer provided to the piece when asked about the rotation of artists, citing Sharpe hailing from the states and their shared Saint Vincent heritage, one of Ray’s parents and both of Malik’s, enriching the project and making for an interesting alliance. “Now I think the most challenging [thing] is to do the work and not to be in it at all.”
Having last performed Out in 2019, I asked about the thought process underpinning the decision to step back from performing and assume the role of creative director. Young details though it could have been plausible to return to the stage, perhaps the work would have taken on a different light, affirming that “there's space for bodies that aren't particularly young anymore”. However, following a discussion with a friend about archiving and documenting creative work, having people step into the work and sending it forward felt significant for Ray; “what might it mean to restage something that you made on yourself and another person, and how and what does that mean to pass that on?”
In response to how the latest iteration differs from previous runs of the show, Ray affirms that “the work itself remains, structurally, the same.” Though materially unchanged, choreography has been slightly adapted on the basis that they’re working with dance, and the movement of an individual is distinctive to that person. “Whoever's performing in it, whoever the dancers are…it will feel, and it does feel, different because you have these two new performers in the work – Azara and Bambi Jordan Phillips.”
I think, there's something about liveness that works really, really well for this particular piece of work…there is something about seeing the mechanics of the body working in the space that you have to be there to witness
In their search for a duo to carry the torch, the performance artist and casting consultant, Ri McDaid-Wren, saw a variety of performers. Young describes the casting day with amazement, marvelling at the immense talent and commenting on the incredible difficulty of the tough decision. But Azara and Bambi’s chemistry, and the pair’s embodiment of the piece, picked them apart. “They fit really nicely in the world of the work,” Azara having grown up breaking and experienced with the cabaret scene and Bambi being a house mother with extensive knowledge of the ballroom scene. The “beautifulness about that is that it opens the work up to an even wider intersection of people,” Ray declares, remarking on the different experiences both performers deliver to the piece.=
Restaging the performance, the earlier conversations had with co-creator Dwayne Antony, “were like the bedrock of the work. And actually, in order to get Azara and Bambi into that world, we had to start at a kind of similar place in terms of having the conversation because I think a lot of it is about your own personal histories. Kind of like laying the foundations for them to bring themselves, in whatever way they felt comfortable, to the work.” Young comments on the ways the piece still resonates as it did when first conceived back in 2016, “especially in this particular climate that we’re living in, when there's all of this really harmful legislation around queer and trans people. And it feels like, you know, you've got to pass the baton on.”
This imagery of inheritance threads its way through the work, the bittersweet scent of oranges, a defining characteristic within the performance, evoking for some, memories of parents or grandparents peeling oranges in a fashion significant to those who have witnessed the craft of nimble hands, an act Ray describes as “historical and passed down.” If you can perfect that, you are “tapping into the ancestral blackness.” Ray recounts growing up listening to dancehall and the realisation that comes with forming consciousness that, what you’ve heard, and “maybe even sung along to”, condemns your very nature, and the difficulty reconciling with this when seeking connection to your culture, because “even though parts of it feel warm and close, [you] also feel like it is expelling and pushes you away.”
A multidisciplinary artist routinely working with a library of mediums, Ray is always considering the emotional journey the audience will traverse and what they want to leave them with. “And I think, there's something about liveness that works really, really well for this particular piece of work…there is something about seeing the mechanics of the body working in the space that you have to be there to witness.” Ray reiterates, impassioned, “you have to be there to witness that.” The couplet motif continues well into the fabrics of Out itself. Described as a “conversation between two bodies”, on navigating the vulnerability of the work and cultivating a safe environment to explore the inherent intimacy within it, the creative director accepts there can never be a certainty of emotional security when embarking on deeply expressive work, but discusses the benefits of working with therapists and supports during the process, and “[tries] to lead with generosity and openness and compassion”.
Azara and Bambi Jordan Phillips, the new stars of OUT by Glodi Miessi
In a similar vein, an artist is at the mercy of a live crowd when faced with sharing deeply personal work. “You don't know what you’re making until you put it in front of an audience,” and get to see if it “resonates with the people in the way that you hoped it might.” When questioned on what stood out to them in the reception of the previous iterations of Out as it toured across different regions, Ray singled out the reactions up north. “I always quite like Birmingham. Malik and I performed the work in Birmingham. I think best performance because the audiences are majority black and they watched the show like they were watching TV – that is to say, they weren’t quiet, necessarily. But that was really great because you felt like they were there with you every step of the way.” There are moments throughout the piece “that you know that are for you.”
The experience maker is unapologetic about these beats within the performance reserved for black audiences. “I'm making the work for us…there is something in there for everyone, but particularly for us…I'm holding us at the centre.” Having spoken in the past about the apprehension that is territorial with performing pro-black pieces, especially one described as “smashing through our violent colonial histories,” to a white-majority audience, Young acknowledges that “sometimes the only space [we] have to talk about these things or express how we're feeling is in the art.”
Ray, reckoning with Out’s dichotomous character of being a “‘fuck you’ to the outside world” and simultaneously a “bid for acceptance,” believes the work’s ability to serve as a celebration of black queer joy whilst striving to take back agency allows for the piece to “try and hold those two spaces.” The performance artist challenges external validation, when asked what acceptance looks like within this context, believing it’s found within, stating that, having grown up in households rife with intolerance, it’s a question of “how do you reconcile those parts of yourself?” The only plausible possibility is that “you exist, and you be authentic to yourself, and that's what you have to try and do every day. And I'm not saying some days it isn't hard, but I think, if not that, then what? I don't want to think what, you know?”
For Ray, the work extends beyond the venues and the audiences. Referencing the Brighton-based QTIPoC group, Radical Rhizomes, (“they meet, and they have food together and they might do workshops, or they might have a free show, and I think more than anything, there's something in touring the work,”) Young considers a potential expansion of the project in the future. “I'm proud of the work, of the team, of people that have put it together. And I’m excited for people to come and see it.”
The performance will showcase at Sadler's Wells' Lilian Baylis Studio on the 25th & 26th April.