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KATYA celebrates gender fluidity with new single

KATYA, a singer/songwriter and performer from Russia, has partnered with The Phluid Project and House of Yes for a new single; a cover of Dead or Alive’s 80s classic You Spin Me Round (Like a Record).

 

The video for the single, which celebrates gender fluidity and expression of free identity through music, features 34 LGBTQ+ and ally dancers, and has been has been released in partnership with The Phluid Project, which empowers individuals to be themselves, and House of Yes, which aims to be a place where people truly connect, be themselves and express themselves.

From 2006-2010, KATYA was the lead singer of pop/dance group Hi-Fi, performing in 20 countries including sold-out shows on the Kremlin stage. Thereafter, she joined an all-girl pop act, Fabrika, which earned her a Golden Gramophone (Russian Grammy) and coverage in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Hello and Grazia.

KATYA says: “I like to fantasize about the future, one with flying cars and hoverboards, essentially a life without borders – a world without nationality, divisions, tags on people. I dream of a society without the games that rule us now.”

The full video will be released on Thursday, November 14.

For more info, visit:

REVIEW: The Lady Vanishes @ Theatre Royal

The Lady Vanishes

Theatre Royal

It’s what the boys’ magazines of my long lost youth would have called a “ jolly jape”. Put a lot of dysfunctional and largely unlikeable English people on a train in Austria in 1938 and wait for a mystery to develop.

And in true Hitchcock-style – as in his original film of this story – we are faced with a deeply puzzling situation. Gwen Taylor as a sort of tweed-clad Miss Marple makes her mark in the opening scenes , as a slightly dippy but likeable ex-governess who unbelievably speaks 10 languages.

A random group of characters interact with her , but as soon as we get to like her; she vanishes into thin air on a moving train . They all then deny her existence to the puzzled bright young thing Iris , played at full volume as if she were in the Albert Hall by Scarlett Archer, who had first befriended the mysterious Miss Froy.

It becomes clear that Iris – hit on the head rather nonsensically by a pair of skis at the railway station – is probably hallucinating. The  plot , such as it is, now twists and turns and we get lots of false clues . But the trouble is we don’t really care about these caricature people – 2 old fashioned English gents who re-enact a cricket match using sugar cubes; a bolshy young engineer who collects folk dances in his spare time; an eminent lawyer with his mistress, fearful of the publicity a divorce would bring. And of course a very nasty Nazi for everyone else to ridicule and hate.

It doesn’t transfer well from celluloid  to the stage and much of the action is not shown but spoken about. The scarcely veiled propaganda doesn’t wash with today’s audience and just descends to cheap laughs.

The opening scenic effect of a smoke filled railway station in silhouette is stunning, but the train compartment scenes are cramped and the actors end  up playing in a corridor of space.

Scenes alternate between the compartments and the train’s dining car, necessitating  the constant moving on and off of tables and chairs. Director Roy Marsden , himself famous as tv’s Insp Dalgliesh, should have found a better solution.

What the show does do is to play into the hands of the Poirot/Marple fan club and as such it will do well.

The Lady Vanishes is at the Theatre Royal, Brighton

Until 9 November as part of a UK tour.

Jonathan Harvey

Award-winning writer Jonathan Harvey talks to Brian Butler about the strong women of Coronation Street, working with the Pet Shop Boys and same-sex relationship teaching.

JONATHAN Harvey, creator of TV’s Gimme Gimme Gimme, and a large canon of stage plays and films, says he’s often plagued by panic attacks and anxiety. But sitting cross legged in the green room of the Spire community centre in Kemptown, he appears the epitome of self-confident humour.

He’s about to be cross-questioned by the Marlborough Theatre’s co- artistic director David Sheppeard, so this interview is a bit of a warm-up for him.

Born in Liverpool, Jonathan was a teenage sensation, winning a prize from the Liverpool Playhouse for his first play Cherry Blossom Tree just as he was finishing school. In his second year at university he had his first play staged in London.

“But I decided I’d better get a proper job just in case, so I became a teacher.” He describes Cherry Blossom Tree as a cross between Once a Catholic and A Taste of Honey – centering on a young girl growing up too fast in a Catholic convent school, and the girl’s relationship with a nun Sister Mary Gabriel.

It’s a theme that has often come back in his many works over the years – the role of strong women – particularly mothers.

He was surprised when he won the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award in 1994 but delighted because he got to get photographed with the Best Actress winner Maggie Smith.

“Awards do something for your reputation – they make you more marketable. It doesn’t look bad on your cv,” he jokes.

The plays have come thick and fast over the years. Hushabye Mountain was his first to deal with the issue of HIV/Aids. “It was the late 90’s. One of my friends died and then another friend became ill but was offered combination therapy and is still alive. I became aware of the irony of that unfairness, in a 3-week window of what happened to the two of them. The play covers that and a new relationship which the second man builds. It’s a kind of salvation.”

While teaching in Thamesmead in London, Jonathan started writing possibly his most famous play Beautiful Thing.

“It was the time of the unequal age of consent for LGBT+ and straight people, and the language of the time wasn’t helpful. It’s a simple story with someone ending up happy. It doesn’t feel like a political play but it’s an act of politics.”

Fast forward to 1999 and his wonderful TV creation for Kathy Burke and James DreyfusGimme Gimme Gimme.

“Kathy had directed one of my plays and I wanted to work with her again. She was also script editor on the series.”

“Television is well-paid but everyone has an opinion about a sitcom script. Victoria Wood once said that half-way through making Dinnerladies all she wanted to do was go into a darkened room and scream. I agree. It sends you a bit mad.”

He has clocked up over 260 episodes of Coronation Street since 2004, and still writes for it.

How does the process work?
“Writing is isolating but on Corrie once a month you sit in a room with 17 other writers and the producer and plan 20 episodes. You share your successes and failures; it’s a family feeling. I learn all the time from the other writers, though there’s no collaboration on individual episodes. You write them alone.”

“I kept turning Corrie down, but accepted on the third request. I became obsessed with it.

“The two storylines that stand out for Jonathan are the rape of David Platt and Aidan’s suicide, both of which received great acclaim.

He’s also written for old favourites – he wrote about Jack and Vera Duckworth’s 50th anniversary. The rich lineage of the show’s archive is not as restricting as it might appear and there’s a lot to fall back on.

Corrie is famous for its strong women – going right back to Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner.

“Tony Warren was a gay man and his characters are camp- he modelled the women on the drag queens going up and down Manchester’s gay area Canal Street.”

Does he have any advice for a young Jonathan?

“It won’t last forever – oh and give up drinking. I suffer from anxiety a lot and I’ve now learned how to deal with it.”

On same-sex relationship teaching and the current furore in Birmingham he is very clear. “I got married a few years ago – the idea that you wouldn’t tell the children in your family about having two dads is ridiculous. I’m appalled by it.”

The work still floods in – he’s just written an episode of Call The Midwife, and has just aired his second collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys – the first being Closer to Heaven and the new work- for actress Frances Barber is Musik.

“It’s a 60 minute one-woman show with 6 songs.

The central character Billie Trix is kind of Marianne Faithfull figure – a rock icon who has done far too many drugs and has far too many delusions of how good she is. Jonathan says: “the boys and I were still interested in what had happened to her in all these years.”

Theatre is his first love though he now writes novels too. “There are two emotions you can pinpoint in an audience – laughter and tears. You don’t want to write plays where all the audience does is listen.”

No chance of that with his great talent to grab the heart.

Why Britain Must do More to Protect Transgender Asylum Seekers Post-Brexit

As we consider what a post-Brexit Britain may look like, anticipated changes to trade and business, as well as immigration policies, are what the mind will first turn to.

HOWEVER, we must also consider how Brexit will impact upon the nation’s equality policies. Falling into this bracket are transgender rights.

With Britain still part of the EU, the nation’s LGBT+ citizens are protected by EU legislations such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Worryingly though, this is the only international human rights document that can legally and explicitly protect against discrimination of sexual orientation. And, if Britain does leave the EU, the government have stated they will be abandoning the charter.

The absence of this law will have significant ramifications upon the entire LGBT+ communities but in particular transgender members of the EU seeking refuge in the UK may find themselves in an enhanced position of vulnerability – even more significant to that which they currently face. And with discrimination against the community already a rampant issue worldwide, it’s not like gaining refugee status has been a simple task prior to Brexit.

As it stands, the asylum-seeking process is already an overly invasive process for most LGBT+ applicants. Individuals can apply in the UK by proving to the home office that their native countries are likely to persecute them for issues pertaining to religion, race, gender identity or sexual orientation. However, the process of giving evidence to prove as much, frequently leads to disturbing levels of exploitation and invasions of privacy.

For instance, a gay rights activist from Nigeria desperately sent a judge an intimate video to display evidence of her sexual orientation after being accused of ‘faking’ it. And a 2016 report by The UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group, entitled No Safe Refuge, spoke with LGBT+ asylum-seeking applicants being held in detention centres across the UK. The applicants told of the disturbing levels of discrimination and abuse they faced, revealing how interviewing officers would ask needlessly intrusive questions “that were targeted to gain explicit content”.

Another issue to arise from the application process is the simple fact that individuals must prove evidence of their sexual orientation or gender identity. This can be a highly difficult process for many, especially transgender asylum-seekers, as they have been unable to live openly and publicly in their home countries, for fear of persecution – which is of course the reason as to why they are applying for refugee status in the first place. After years of hiding their gender identity, transgender asylum seekers are then required to provide evidence of it to Government officials; it’s not hard to see why this could be both logistically and emotionally difficult.

The frustrating truth is that, after years of working towards a more accepting society, Europe seems to have regressed away from a position of tolerance. Indeed, a study of 49 countries belonging to the continent, ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) discovered a clear retreat away from policies protecting against sexual discrimination for the first time in a decade. In their 2017 report, Stonewall recorded an upturn in hate crime against LGBT+ individuals, and thanks to the recent stigmatisation of gender identity in the media, transgender people are becoming targeted further to vile levels of abuse.

An investigation by the University of Bristol lead them to believe that the UK may scrap transgender non-discrimination rights, post-Brexit, since they argue it is thanks to EU law that transgender identity is included within our framework. This is a worrying notion as future immigration policy is aimed to run a more rigorous regime. In 2017, a total 1,464 applicants out of 1,887 individuals seeking asylum based on their sexual orientation were refused entry into the UK. With all migrants set to be subjected to even more severe levels of scrutiny, one can only fear how transgender asylum seekers may suffer, especially without laws to protect them against discrimination.

The lingering presence of the hostile environment policy can help explain the reason behind Britain’s high immigration refusal rates. The Home Office introduced the policy back in 2012 with the intention of making the UK such an unwelcome environment, that migrants would struggle to be able to, or even want to maintain asylum status. The many examples of LGBT+ asylum seekers still facing clear discrimination on all fronts suggest that not much has changed in the nation’s stance; newly appointed home secretary Priti Patel’s voting record on matters of immigration and asylum also indicate that she is unlikely to show much sympathy towards migrants.

As it stands with Britain still in the EU, the process of a transgender person trying to seek legal refuge in Britain so as to avoid persecution in their own country is already a perilous one. Individuals are exposed to disturbing levels of injustice and exploitation in their pursuit of safety. And if the government fails to establish post-Brexit human rights legislation for the LGBT+ communities, then our own transgender citizens will face an unprotected future; let alone the even more vulnerable members of the wider European community in need of refuge. It’s time for the Home Office to both forsake any traces of the hostile environment policy and to introduce new laws that allow for the protection and progression of the Trans community within Britain; be that for our current citizens or for future citizens in the form of asylum seekers.

Hal Fish is a content writer for the Immigration Advice Service, an organisation of UK immigration solicitors providing legal support for those looking to migrate to the UK or hire overseas workers.

 

 

 

 

Peer Action: November events

Peer Action, the group for those who are HIV+ or are affected by HIV irrespective of who they are, have announced their calendar of events for this month, each designed for people to meet new people!

Tuesday 12, 19 & 26: Lunchtime Swimming at the Brighton Swimming Centre on Eastern Road. Cost £3 in cash to session leader on the day. How to join: drop-in session from 12.30pm, optional light-bite afterwards.

Tuesday 12, 19 & 26: Yoga with Alistair at the Hampshire Lodge, Hampshire Court, Upper St. James Street, BN2 1JF. Cost £3.50, mats provided. How to join: drop in session from 5.45pm for 6pm start.

Thursday 14: Planning Meeting at the Camelford Arms, 30-31 Camelford St, Brighton BN2 1TQ from 6.30-8pm, free too attend. How to join: everyone is welcome to attend and collaborate with Peer Action’s plans for World AIDS Day and all of their activities. Let Peer Action know if are coming by emailing contact@peeraction.net

Sunday 17: Bowling at Hollywood Bowl, Marina Way, Brighton BN2 5UT. Cost £12 for double game and refreshments. How to join: book on the Peer Action website.

Saturday 23: Wellbeing Day at Terrence Higgins Trust, 61 Ship St, Brighton BN1 1AE. Cost £5. How to join: book on the Peer Action website from Monday, November 4.

For more info on Peer Action, check out their website.

REVIEW: The Art of Moog @ BREMF

The Art of Moog

21st-century hyper-Bach on synthesizers

Sun 3 Nov, St Martin’s Church.

Robin Bigwood, Martin Perkins, Steven Devine keyboards

Annabel Knight wind synthesizer

Looking more like a Kraftwerk gig than a classical concert this event brought Bach’s eternal music to a seriously diverse Brighton audience. The band is made up of some of the UK’s best harpsichordists and baroque specialists who bring their combined skill and imagination to this thrilling re-colouring of Bach’s masterpieces.

It was a superb evening, a melange of sublime interpretations which shouldn’t have worked at all, but was more than the sum of their parts. Fine musicians with an understanding of the music,  who are practiced in the subtle arts of the baroque and early music performances unleashed on the most up to date technological musical instruments with a touch of retro synth thrown in giving us their all. Wrapped up in a well-balanced ambience of the high ethereal vaults of St Martins Church and some rather funky LED lighting washing the place in colour.

Full details of the music in the performance can be seen here

If computers could dream of  sheep safely grazing and sing to each other of the diode electric then this is surely what they would sound like.  As the first act closed to Chorus ‘Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben?’ from Cantata 8 I was in bliss, one of my favourite pieces of Bach, but heard in an entirely new way, with new complexities, new harmonic surprises and wonderfully, exotically daft.

The full audience were extremely pleased with the whole evenings performance giving the players some serious applause and BREMF should be pleased that such an innovative and fascinating night of experimental approach to such well-loved music was such a beautifully, refined and strangely moving concert. A fine tribute to Wendy Carlos and her pioneering work with Switched-on Bach 50 years ago.

Learn more about the Art of Moog

For more info about BREMF or to book tickets for up and coming performances check out their website.

 

 

PREVIEW: Trixie Mattell at the Brighton Centre in 2020

Trixie Mattell, drag queen, musician and stand up comedian, will be surfing into the Brighton Centre on Friday, May 22, 2020.

Trixie is not only a  pop culture figure but a stand up comedian and musician. Expect to feel that you’ve landed in a PeeWee Herman video, with some surf rock and a love of 1960s country music. She’s listening to a lot of Fountains Of Wayne and Apples In Stereo, collecting mod Barbie dolls and watching Brady Brunch reruns in preparation!

Trixie first rocketed to national fame when she competed on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s seventh season, and later coming back to win the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. She co-created and currently stars in the comedy web show UNHhhh in the US with fellow Drag Race alum Katya Zamolodchikova, which was later adapted into the Viceland programme, The Trixie & Katya Show.

For all tour dates and more info, visit:

Brazilian LGBTQ+ artist, Jusky, releases ‘Just Beautiful’

Rising Brazilian LGBTQ+ pop / R&B artist, Jusky, is set to release his new single, Just Beautiful, to promote internal beauty and challenge media stereotypes.

Inspired to write the song after someone told him his boyfriend at the time wasn’t handsome enough for him, Jusky is passionate that someone’s looks are not taken as the measure of the person within. With a video showing people of all colours, shapes, sizes, backgrounds and sexualities, it’s a track with a universal message and an effortlessly cool vibe.

Jusky, says: “No specific gender, race or social status are mentioned in my lyrics because differences are what make us beautiful. This song was written to promote beauty no matter the skin colour, body shape or any physical features. Beauty is far beyond what our eyes can see.”

For more info, visit Jusky’s website

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