ARC, Stockton Arts Centre, will be hosting ARC is Curious as part of this year’s Curious Arts Festival along with a new and updated art exhibition from Words Bare – first shown in Newcastle in 2016.
Curious Arts Festival is an annual celebration of LGBTQ culture across the North East. A five day multi-venue festival which aims to explore and celebrate LGBTQ culture through the arts. Increasing visibility, dialogue and understanding of the LGBTQ community.
About ARC is Curious
Curious Arts bring the festival to ARC on Thursday 5th July for an evening of live performance, dance, comedy and cabaret. The audience can expect a colourful, energetic and varied night, exploring and celebrating LGBTQ culture, featuring David Hoyle and work from leading LGBTQ artists from across the region and beyond.
David Hoyle is an English performance artist, avant-garde cabaret artist, singer, actor, comedian and film director. His performances are known to combine many disparate elements, from satirical comedy to painting, surrealism and even striptease, much of which is aggressive in nature. Hoyle’s work has often focused on themes in the LGBTQ community, attacking what he sees as dominant trends in “bourgeois Britain and the materialistic-hedonistic gay scene.”
Perhaps best known for his colourful alter-ego David the Divine, his performances have led him to become “something of a legend” on the London cabaret circuit
About Words Bare
Since the 1950’s, the UK’s LGBTQ community has been part of a radical movement. It is because of this that the LGBTQ community in the UK now live in a society that is moving away from the centuries of discrimination, towards social acceptance.
However, many of the LGBTQ community are still victim to prejudice, regularly challenged through social comments and actions, simply for being who they are.
Words Bare is a self-initiated exhibition that was first shown in Newcastle, October 2016. It is an ongoing research project and new works have been created by the LGBTQ community in Stockton on Tees for the exhibition at ARC. Words Bare’s aim is to gather research from the LGBTQ community across the UK, asking what challenges and experiences they have faced in society.
Words Bare aims to put LGBTQ experiences and social challenges into the limelight. The artwork aims to question why these views are still very present today and the exhibition will be in ARC’s gallery space between Monday 2nd July and Saturday 18th August.