Get your rainbow paintbrushes and glitter cannons ready, because we’re about to create a festival that’s bursting with creativity, diversity, and a whole lot of sass. Let’s unleash the magic and let those vibrant colours shine brighter than a disco ball on a Saturday night! Get your groove on and let the fabulousness begin!
Avant-Gardening/Bijou Stories is launching a new project to sprinkle some glitter and groove into the streets of Lewisham and Greenwich. Get ready to sashay into the fabulous world of a queer arts festival set to hit the town centres of Greenwich and Deptford in 2024. So dust off your disco heels and let your true colours shine because this festival is going to be positively queer-tastic!
Starting in October we will be launching a programme of workshops and activities to engage the local LGBTQ+ community with the creation of their own Pride! Whether you want to create and show your art, showcase your musical talent or develop a piece of performance art we are here to help you to develop and showcase your skills. And if you are more of a ‘behind the scenes’ person we will be holding meetings and supporting project management and outreach skills that will enable you to be part of the development of a truly grassroots Pride, that celebrates and networks the queer communities of S.E. London.
Please consider supporting the development of Thames Pride Arts Festival. https://localgiving.org/charity/avant-gardening-cic/project/ThamesPride/
To kick start the project we will be hosting a programme of activities in early September
Raising the Wreck by Sue Frumin (rehearsed reading)
Sunday 3rd September | 1.45pm – 4pm |National Maritime Museum, Group Space
Join us for a rehearsed reading of Raising the Wreck, a play by Sue Frumin. Journey into the heart of a sunken pirate ship, where four fierce female pirates recount their stories with a woman who has fallen into a timeslip from 1980s London, where she is one of the women running a pirate radio station. We are excited to say that Sue will be joining us for the reading and will give a brief introduction.
The reading will be directed by Runa Augdal, a recent graduate from East 15 Acting Schools MA Theatre Directing programme.
The reading is part of Gay Sweatshop Revisited, a new project exploring the history and legacy of the LGBTQ+ fringe theatre of the 70s-90s.
Rehearsed Reading of the Gay Sweatshop play in Group Space at The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Sunday 3rd September 1.45pm for 2pm start. Tickets are free but need to be booked in advance from
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/15539/raising-the-wreck-gay-sweatshop-revisited
No Pair as Happy as we Two: Queer Love Token for Dead Lads
Wednesday 6 th September | 6-9pm | National Maritime Museum, Learning Space
Join artist and historian Ema Sala in this creative workshop where you will write and decorate love letters for long dead queer guys. You will be introduced to crushable sailors and their stories, while reflecting on gender variance in the nineteenth century by looking at examples of AFAB people sailing as men in the military and merchant navy.
Attitudes — A Nelson/Hamilton Affair
Thursday 7 th September | 6-9pm | Queen’s House
Join us for an evening of life drawing, live music, zine-making and conversation as K.A Harper, Jas Bevan Niss and Rose Power share the first iterations of their research from the LGBTQ+ Community-Led Project at Royal Museums Greenwich. With musical accompaniment from dark folk duo Buckner Building, a discussion led by queer historian and Nelson fangirl Jas on Horatio Nelson’s relationship to the Hamiltons, plus a zine-making workshop exploring cross-dressing at sea, this event offers a unique way of engaging with the Queen’s House and icons of maritime history. In collaborative exploration of the queer undercurrents in the Nelson/Hamilton ménage à trois, life model and performer K.A Harper pays homage to Emma Hamilton’s acclaimed ‘attitudes’ and reclaims the gaze, giving agency to the muse and the moment.
Thames Pride Festival Launch
Friday 8th September | 5pm – 8pm |The Albany, Deptford
#ThamesPride is a festival for, and created by, the LGBTQ+ community of Lewisham and Greenwich. Over the coming months participants will be invited to work with a range of artists, writers and performers to help shape and deliver a grassroots Pride for 2024. We will be partnering with a number of local organisations including The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich University, Protein Dance and The Albany to help with capacity building and to build exciting new networks and collaborations.
You can find out more at our launch part at The Albany in Deptford on Friday 8 September, where we will be joined by Ian Elmslie, a stalwart of London’s gay cabaret scene, and Abi Collins, who wowed the audience at our Sequin Sunday last year.
They will be joined by up and coming performers including:
Karma Obscura, the retrofuturist drag doll. @thekarmaobscura
Blaze @theblazecraze
Theodosia @the_theodosia
The event is FREE but we have a limited number of tickets available!
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/15785/thames-pride-launch
Poppies by Noel Greig (rehearsed reading)
Saturday 9th September | 12.45pm – 3pm | The Albany, Deptford
A rehearsed reading of Noel Greig’s Poppies, directed by Film-maker and writer, David McGillivray. The play, born of cold war fears of the early 80s explores the theme of how men kill each other because they do not know how to love.
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/15664/poppies-gay-sweatshop-revisited
A Polar Explorer’s Sea Chest: create a paper sailor’s outfit!
Sunday 10th September | 11:00 – 16:00 | National Maritime Museum | Family Friendly
Come and join us for this drop-in craft session and learn more about what polar explorers used to wear on their long voyages into the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
This event is suitable for all ages – everyone is welcome to sit with us and make paper doll outfits! Together we will explore examples of Victorian and Edwardian fashion – both civilian and seafarer clothing – as well as historical and more modern polar gear. We will also touch upon the role of drag and cross-dressing within the context of historical polar exploration.
Fag Ends and Smoke Trails
Sunday 10 th September | 4-8pm | Thames foreshore
Fag Ends is a durational piece taking place between low and high tide (4 – 8pm – times approx. (depending on conditions), with interventions from SL Grange’s Smoke Trails poetry improvisation.
Fag Ends is a multi-stranded, ongoing work, in which the artist stages the trans body as a site of un-remembering. Using centuries-old tobacco-pipe shards mudlarked from and returned to the Thames, they mark out a map of queer time, traced in the surrogate bones of the unknowable dead. Simultaneously, in Smoke Trails SL Grange generates text in conversation with these unknown others, allowing them to speak back. Voicing both materials and lives that have been
marginalised, discarded or erased, the resulting poetry also generates and leaves gaps into which the living and the dead dream each other.
It will be possible to engage with the event from the walkway above or on the foreshore itself; please note, the foreshore is unstable terrain and caution is advised. The performance will take place on the foreshore, directly in line with the Queen’s House.
E.M. Parry works with, through and for the queer body, squinting at history, flirting with ghosts & the things that go bump in the margins. Transient and ephemeral, their work flickers between durational performance, kinetic sculpture, drag act and ritual, blurring the lines between artefact & event.
SL Grange is a poet, performance-maker and queer historian whose work foregrounds conversational and emergent practices, often with and for the unruly dead, often in archives of all kinds
Bijou Stories 