A sudden global pandemic has disrupted everyone’s life. It has also exacerbated the contradictions between queer identities and this heteronormative society. Facing increased stress and mental health issues, a monologue play with humour seems to be an antidote.

Jiaxi Wang and Maki Omori present The Slug Show, which is a solo tragicomedy that presents a sluggish life at the intersection of autism, queerness and immigration while examining the performativity of being normal. Slug is navigating their life with newly found identities and having some belated realisations on their relationships with people. Slug shares their bizarre experiences of the neurotypical and hetero-normative world, slug also cares about your mental health and self-worth. Slug tries so hard to make you laugh that the jokes get inappropriate.

Concurrent activity: Jiaxi also leads a writing workshop, helping us to explore self-identity through writing.

Festival Opening Speech

Dr. Bao Hongwei (he/his), he is associate professor in media studies, faculty of arts at the University of Nottingham. He writes and edits a column, Queer Lens, for the Chinese Independent Film Archive website, and co-edits the Bloomsbury book series on Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities.

Qiuyan Chen (she/her), she is a LGBTQ+ rights activist and artist. She established Queer China UK and launched various programmes to empower the community including UK-China Queer Dialogues, Deconolozing queer tours in Mandarin and Cantonese and Transnational Chinese Queer Leadership Programmes.

Heshen Xie is awarded the Doctoral degree in Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. His research interests covers film festival studies and queer studies.

The Slug Show (40mins)

A solo tragicomedy that presents a sluggish life at the intersection of autism, queerness and immigration while examining the performativity of being normal.

Slug is navigating their life with newly found identities and having some belated realisations on their relationships with people. Slug shares their bizarre experiences of the neurotypical and hetero-normative world, slug also cares about your mental health and self-worth. Slug tries so hard to make you laugh that the jokes get inappropriate.

Writer:

Jiaxi Wang (they/them) is a Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. They are researching and questioning the assimilation and tokenism in staging queer lives, (mis)representation of neurodivergent lived experience, as well as the activism potential (or the lack thereof) of theatre and performance art. As a practitioner, Jiaxi makes identity-led performance, public participatory shows, and writes interactive fiction.

Performer:

Maki Omori. Maki was the performer for The Slug Show at Camden People's Theatre, 2021.

Date:

1 June 2022, 3pm-5pm UK Time | 4-6pm CEST UTC+2 | 10pm-12am China Time | 10am-12pm NY Time

Location:

A48, Sir Clive Granger Building, University Park Campus, University of Nottingham

also online via Zoom

Please come, enjoy the show, meet the community and celebrate the pride together!

queerchineseartfestival.com