HOMO   FOMO

-PROGRAM           NOTE-

Some of us are afraid of dancing. Some of us don’t like ABBA. Some of us are old and out of fashion. Some of us have never been in fashion. Some of us just don’t get drag. Some of us are too femme. Some of us are too serious. Some of us don’t ‘love the nightlife’. 
 
Galvanised by a life of being a Bad Queer, Meta is on a mission to become a Good Queer, and is taking you with them. 
 
HOMO FOMO is a show exploring the rules that dictate ‘how to be a queer person’ and the ways they become fixed over time through repetition. It’s about nightclubs, which are more complex than usual representations of glitter, mirror balls and sweaty bodies suggest. Meta wants to know: what do these rules do and what happens if you break them? 
 
HOMO FOMO draws on intergenerational queer experiences drawn from community interviews and questionnaires to ask what it means to be part of ‘the queer community’ today, or indeed to feel that you are missing out on it. 
 
HOMO FOMO is co-created by Meta Cohen and Alyson Campbell, based on an original concept by Meta.

-CONCEPT-

The initial idea for HOMO FOMO came from personal experience: a fear of dancing and a desire to interrogate why this seemed to feel so much worse in queer spaces than in straight ones.

As I talked to more queer people around me, I learned that the phenomenon of feeling like a ‘bad queer’ – of failing a set of rules about queerness that we couldn’t remember having been taught (but somehow knew– was not unique to me. 

As part of the research for this work, I conducted a series of community interviews and questionnaires with queer people in and beyond my personal circle. I aimed to interview people from a wide range of backgrounds, generations, experiences and connection to the nightlife space, and the ages of interviewees ranged from 25 – 79. Participants were asked about their connection to queer communities and their experience of nightlife spaces, as well as experiences of ‘queer FOMO’ and thoughts about queer ‘rules’, including any rules they felt they might have broken.

Underneath humorous admissions of being ‘bad queers’ were more vulnerable testimonies shared very generously by my interviewees of queer experiences they felt they had missed out on, been left out of, or their queer life having passed them by. 

In HOMO FOMO, we were keen to find a form that could balance the camp modality of ‘the queer rules’ with the more deeply felt and poetic thread of perceived failure, FOMO and longing for queer joy. The result is a piece that seeks to move between states; that is formally fluid, but (hopefully) affectively strong.

-CREATIVE      TEAM-

META      

COHEN

Text, sound design, dramaturgy, performer

ALYSON                

CAMPBELL

EMMA               

LOCKHART-

WILSON    

FREDDIE               

FITZPATRICK-

LUBOWITZ    

Direction, dramaturgy

TOM                                         

VULCAN            

AMY                                         

HUME                        

KEIRA                               

MURRAY                  

JACOB                               

SHEARS                  

JULIE                                         

MINAAI            

ASTRID                                           

BRENCHLEY                  

Lighting, scenographic design, visual dramaturgy
Stage management
Production coordinator
Movement coach
Voice coach
Projection design
Venue technician and sound operator
Design assistant

-THE     HOMO     FOMO   TEAM   WOULD    LIKE    TO   THANK-

The artists who contributed to previous developments of this work: 

İbrahim Halaçoğlu, Peta Murray, Cohan, Maude Davey, Hayley Edwards, Zachary Sheridan, Nikki Viveca, Yuchen Wang, Rhys Morgan, Kerith Manderson-Galvin and James Wardlaw

Meta would like to thank their PhD team, supervisors Alyson Campbell, Zachary Dunbar and Nick Tochka.

They would also like to thank the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, particularly Artistic Operations and the Research Office, for their support of the creative work.