Presented in partnership with Krannert Art Museum
Pump the Beat: Queer Nightlife at the Edge
What do you want from queer nightlife? Combining music, storytelling, gossip and dance, this sweaty performance lecture is also an invitation for you to catch the beat. Black queer dance floors have always thrived at the edge of imagination, a place we invent other ways of gathering, of imagining new ways to bend space and time, to exist at the edge of feeling. This performance manifesto underscores nightlife as a method of living in and through the five-alarm fire of Black queer life that is about more than resistance, surviving, or getting by but about chasing the edge in pursuit of a dream for a more beautiful life.
…and then we twirled.
madison moore (any pronouns) is an artist-scholar, DJ and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. madison is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the five alarm fire of everyday life. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. madison has performed internationally at a broad range of art institutions and nightclubs, including The Kitchen, BASEMENT (NY), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, SFMOMA, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Somerset House Studios London, Tate Britain, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and beyond. In 2022, madison held a nightlife residency at The Kitchen in New York in concert with the artist Sadie Barnette’s installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an ode to the first Black owned gay bar in San Francisco. In February 2023, he guest co-edited a special issue of the arts journal e-flux on BLACK RAVE with McKenzie Wark. Currently, he is currently working on a second book project, HOW TO GET YOUR (NIGHT) LIFE (under contract, Yale University Press), focused on Black queer nightlife as a method of living.
