The Final Performance
By Samra Mayanja
Samra Mayanja grieves the passing of another Leeds cultural institution, asking why some institutions survive whilst others disappear, and sharing some personal reflections on a venue in which she grew up both artistically and as a person.
Listen to Samra reading this piece here.
CLAY (Centre for Live Art Yorkshire) was a space for live art and performance, with a full rig, a chipboard bar and eight or so artist studios in the back.
On the train from Glasgow to Leeds I devised my farewell performance for CLAY. A fake funeral for a blasé art hun called HOLLLIDAY. The character transmutes complex emotions into silly little laughs, hijacking the event and staging her own death. Disguised as the executor of her estate, HOLLLIDAY reads her LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. She restates throughout:
We love in doorways darling, we love in doorways.*
By which I mean, those of us who have learnt to love in temporary havens will continue to do so.
*A riff on an Audre Lorde poem, A Litany for Survival.
Breakfast in Bed
My first night as a punter at CLAY was in 2017, and for once, I didn’t feel like I’d been left behind. Instead I was exactly where I needed to be, with a myriad of gorgeous selves reflected back. From that point on, I worked the odd bar shift there, saw countless shows, performed, and programmed the Leeds Queer Film Festival (LQFF). It was all an education in liveness – or what it is to create a context in which to be witnessed.
One night in 2018 I slouched in my bean bag and watched Breakfast in Bed, a film by Ethan Folk and Ty Wardell shown at LQFF. The premise of the film is simple: a teeny-denim-shorts-wearing twink whips up a smorgasbord in his idyllic flat. First he shoves a stick of butter up his arse, then he pops his shorts on and rides into town on his bike, over cobbled streets and curbs. He buys a long baguette and cycles home. In anticipation of a lactic accident we giggle amongst friends and strangers. When our shopper returns, he toasts the bread and places it in front of a faceless observer. He climbs onto the table, pulls his shorts down and releases the melted butter neatly onto the toast.
I gagged.
One evening, as I served drinks, Mykki Blanco jumped onto the bar, grabbed the recently filled water jug and soaked herself. David Hoyle was compèring that night. One Christmas, Age of the…, a drag collective based in the city, staged a full nativity play with two topless nuns in bowl-cut wigs leaping across the catwalk.
I think that resonances between the performer and audience aid self-actualisation on both sides: witness and receiver are both changed by the process and by emotional transference. It sounds dramatic but I mean it – for some of us art isn’t just a job, it is a way by which we appear to ourselves.
Trauma Dump
We live in a world that is traumatised. As in, we are routinely stretched away from our bodies, our support networks and our land. Whether that is a ‘difficult’ child excluded from school, the incarceration of a loved one, or fleeing a genocide that British politicians turn a blind eye to. Our relationship to our bodies, each other and our land exists within a history of invasion, a culture of severance and ongoing carcerality*. Trauma happens to the body and under a State (law, police, education, media etc) that exacerbates harmful conditions. Through its apparatus, the State is able to inhibit genuine opportunities for self-knowing by demarcating certain people as immoral or criminal. (If I am ‘bad’, perhaps I will spend my life running away from myself.)