RUSH
Enter a utopian club space and discover the wondrous ways that queer communities create new social worlds and connections.
(2022)
RUSH was an immersive performance installation that reconstructed the nightclub as a social system rather than a place. Set within a shifting, low-lit club environment, the work invited audiences to move through a series of live encounters, part performance, part conversation, part atmosphere, each hosted by members of Sydney’s queer community.
Developed through interviews and surveys across generations, RUSH drew on lived experiences of nightlife: what it offers, what it’s lost, and what it might still become. The result was not a single narrative but a field of possibilities, intimate exchanges, gossip, music, desire, awkwardness, generosity, held together by a continuous sonic environment of beats, voices and drift.
Participants could enter as clubbers, observers or something in between, constructing their own trajectory through the work. Meaning emerged through proximity and choice rather than direction. The piece oscillated between the mundane and the charged, hot chips, quiet conversations, fleeting intimacies, foregrounding the social choreography that underpins queer nightlife.
At its core, RUSH asked what happens when the infrastructures that once held these spaces together begin to shift or disappear. Responding to gentrification, regulation and changing cultural habits, the work reassembled fragments of memory, speculation and desire into a temporary utopian space, one that could be inhabited, tested and reimagined in real time.
Rather than documenting a scene, RUSH functioned as a live diagram of it, a collective portrait of how communities gather, sustain themselves, and invent new forms of connection under pressure.
Field Theory with Sidney McMahon and collaborators.
Carriageworks, Sydney | Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art
