Session 2

[Session 1 can be booked here]

Imogen Flower, Sarah McCabe & Nick Bonadies, Guildhall School of Music and Drama

About this Event

Three doctoral researchers, Nick Bonadies, Sarah McCabe and Imogen Flower, brazenly launch the entirely unofficial Queer Performance Department, making the case for a Queer Conservatoire. The second of two sessions will emerge from an informal collaborative research project with fellow queer students across UK conservatoires. A series of group conversations will provide the opportunity to reflect upon experiences of queerness in the conservatoire: how our identities might intersect with our artistry; how our institutions may or may not have supported these intersections; and how utopian imaginations of a Queer (or at least Queer-friendly) Conservatoire might be realised.

Imogen Flower (she/her) is in the middle of a PhD about Sex Worker’s Opera, a grassroots activist musical theatre project made by and for sex workers. She’s interested in the part that creating and performing music can play in sex workers’ experiences of arts activism.

Sarah McCabe (she/her) is studying the impact of open mics as run by and for marginalized artists and creators, and advocating for their use in policy and programming. By looking at how open mics can break down barriers and hierarchies in the arts community and address issues of inequity and inequality, she is aiming to understand what roles DIY performance spaces and open mics fill in today’s arts community, why these types of platforms are important to emerging creators, and how open mics might link marginalized communities with major arts institutions.

Nick Bonadies (they/them) is a pianist and full-time fabulist completing their DMus on queer/queer(ing) performance practice: Un-erasing and archiving how conservatoire-musicians can do ‘queer work’ in how they play works of the conservatoire-canon. Nick’s thesis develops a ‘queer listening’ of their own performance of works by J.S. Bach, including a big queer Goldberg Variations

What is ResearchWorks?

The Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the school and its guests with students, staff and the public.

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