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Duckie began as a group of drag artists and their drunken admirers. Now this 'post-gay' phenomenon is going nationalRupert Smith
Guardian
Tuesday May 14, 2002Once upon a time, in a dog-rough gay pub nestling against some railway arches in south London, middle-aged gentlemen used to dress up as ladies and lip-synch to Shirley Bassey records. Out of this scene came one genuine star (Lily Savage, who didn't mime and actually had talent) and a lot of endearing grotesques (Tilly, a four-feet-tall drag queen who mimed to Dusty Springfield while attacking the audience with a dildo).
Then the audiences grew up and moved on, and a new generation started propping up the bar at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, for whom I Am What I Am no longer seemed to be cutting edge. While the rest of the gay world migrated to the chi-chi bars of the newly gay Soho, the Vauxhall crowd remained resolutely lowlife, preferring lager to ketamine and demanding entertainment.
Into this vacuum stepped Duckie, a club night that added a new twist to the old beer-and-drag formula. The average turn at Duckie was absurd, confrontational, piss-taking - a mutant hybrid of pub drag and performance art. Duckie's biggest star, the Divine David, looked like Liza Minnelli after a car crash and delivered streams of obscenities intermixed with insane conceptual riffs. The two DJs, the Readers' Wives, played anything from Slade to the Stooges - anything, that is, except house and techno. And the crowd were refugees from the muscle-and-tan monoculture of the mainstream gay clubs. For "homosexual refuseniks", as the Duckie organisers call them, the Vauxhall Tavern became an oasis of abnormality from an increasingly homogenous world.
Six years on, Duckie has become an institution in its own right. Those early, drunken experiments in "anti-gay" entertainment have been recognised by the Arts Council to the tune of £60,000 a year over the next three years. Duckie is branching out from its Vauxhall home into other London venues; it is even undertaking a national tour. Its sights are set on the heart of high culture. It has even started working in the ICA.
"I was bored of skating about on broken glass with a load of drunks every single night of the week," says Simon Casson, Duckie's promoter and full-time conceptualist. "We've always had ideas above our station; we were putting performance art into a gay pub, for God's sake. This new season is really nothing to do with sexuality at all. We spent six years putting men on stage in a dress, or women on stage wearing a big dildo, so for us it's completely exhausted. Our new work isn't about queer stuff - apart from the fact that all the artists are homosexualists, so it's informed by that. We only say we're gay when we put in for the funding, just so we can tick the right boxes."
Duckie's new London season, Nightbird, comprises eight diverse performances that show every sign of having been born out of frustration with available styles of entertainment. The opening event, One and a Half, put posh contemporary dancers in the filthy, crumbling Vauxhall Theatre, where beer flew, drunks heckled and the performance received a screaming, standing ovation. Future events include Lullaby (an audience sleepover), The Old School (six hours of sitting in a classroom, with teachers), Fragrant (doing the flowers in a south London church) and The Crystal Ball, a fortune- telling event at the ICA. None of it is particularly gay, but it's all very queer - in any sense of the word.
"I'd say there's a gay sensibility behind these performances only insofar as we're blurring boundaries and looking at existing things from an oblique point of view," says Casson. "Duckie has always mixed the pretentious with the lowlife, the arthouse with the doss-house. I don't know whether that's particularly a gay thing. Certainly for most of the commercial gay scene, like Mardi Gras and all that rubbish, it's about bringing everything down to the same bland level. We're nothing to do with that."
This is where the Duckie ethos gets a little confusing, at least on paper. They're gay, but they're not gay; they're steeped in theatre up to their necks, but profess to despise theatre. They cling to a working-class identity, but are quite at home in the ICA.
The Duckie experience, however, is a lot more convincing than the rhetoric. At the Vauxhall Tavern on the opening night of the new season, contemporary dance group The Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs presented two pieces, with nine dancers crammed on a tiny stage and a two-piece band playing to a pub full of eager drunks. For the first piece they were made up as grinning, rotting corpses, and twitched in elegant death throes for 20 minutes. This inspired one keen punter to start bellowing Michael Jackson's Thriller loud enough to beat the band. For the second piece, all the dancers, male and female, were dressed in exaggerated Weimar drag - five-inch heels, corsets, riding crops. As each androgynous creature began its erotic contortions around the stage, the audience screamed louder. Then the DJs played Roxy Music while one over-refreshed regular attempted to lure people into the bogs. It really was a grand night out.
"Dance looks a lot better when you're drunk," says Joshua Sofaer, one of the artists working under the Nightbird umbrella. "If you go to a regular dance venue, you sit in the dark and applaud politely at the end. If you see it in a pub, with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other, you're allowed to scream and shout, you're allowed to look at the dancers in a more sexual way. Clubs are erotic spaces; people go there to feel sexy, and dance makes a lot more sense in that context."
In order to spread the word, Duckie is promoting a short national tour of One and a Half, with all the performances taking place in dingy gigs in large cities. "I've got no idea who will come to any of this stuff," says Casson. "In a way, it's commercial death, because we're putting things into the 'wrong' venues, quite deliberately. If people go because they think it's a gay night, they're going to be disappointed, and if the traditional arty audiences go, they're going to be horrified." He doesn't sound the least bit unhappy about this.
"I'd call what we do 'post-gay'," he says."'Gay' was a cultural movement that started in the 1960s, and one day it will be finished. People will still have same-sex partners, of course, but as far as the cultural side of it goes, 'gay' will just fade away. We're the future."
· Duckie is at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Kennington Lane, London SE11 every Saturday night. The Nightbird season continues with Lullaby on 17 and 18 May at The Circus Space, Coronet Street, London EC2. One and a Half, featuring the Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs, plays at The Irish Club, 14-20 High Street, Deritend, Birmingham, on 31 May, and then tours. Details: 020-7737 4043.
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