Gabrielle Martin chats with performance artist, experience maker and writer Ray Young. Ray is bringing two works to the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival: Thirst Trap, which will be presented throughout the festival in conjunction with the frank theatre company; and OUT, which will be presented on February 8 and 9 at Performance Works, in conjunction with the frank theatre company and Here & Now.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Ray discuss:
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How did you create “Out” and what is the significance to your artistic trajectory?
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What are the complexities of blackness, queerness, and age, and how can they be worked through the body on stage?
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Why remount it for PuSh and how has the work evolved?
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Why is important to be visible and seen on your own terms?
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How are you exploring notions of care and rest in “Thirst Trap” and other works?
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How do you create an immersive experience for 24 people in a swimming pool?
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Does form always come after concept, or is it sometimes the other way around?
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Where are you at in your career at this point? What are the challenges and opportunities?
About Ray Young
Ray Young is a transdisciplinary performance artist, experience maker, and writer, widely recognized for their groundbreaking work at the forefront of activism, queerness, race, and neurodiversity. Their practice is centered around creating a safe space for those who exist at the intersection of multiple realities, through collaboration and resistance to traditional forms.
In recent years, Ray’s work has been focused on exploring and shedding light on notions of rest, care, and recovery in art, particularly as it pertains to the experiences of neurodivergent artists. Ray has been working towards creating a more holistic practice that draws together art, nature, and technology, as they seek to challenge traditional capitalist ideologies of production that prioritize speed and productivity over creativity, care, and wellness.
For 2024 Ray is bringing back OUT, an interdisciplinary performance that defiantly challenges homophobia and transphobia across our communities. OUT is a duet – a conversation between two bodies, inspired by ongoing global struggles for LGBTQIA+ rights. It is a defiant challenge to the status quo, bravely embracing personal, political and cultural dissonance.
Ray’s other works include BODIES, an immersive water, light, and soundscape installation that investigates the embodied experiences of our relationship to water. Through this work, Ray seeks to explore and understand the complex and multifaceted nature of our relationship with water, and to engage viewers in a transformative sensory experience that encourages reflection and introspection.
Another recent work, THIRST TRAP, is a meditative sound piece that explores the correlation between social and climate justice, and how our actions and choices impact the world around us. Through this work, Ray invites viewers to reflect on the interconnectivity of our lives and the world we live in, and to recognize the importance of taking collective action towards building a more just and equitable future.
Ray’s work has been presented widely across the UK, including in London, Cambridge, Brighton, Leeds, and Edinburgh, as well as internationally including Portland, Mexico City, and Venezuela. Their groundbreaking contributions to the field of performance art have earned them numerous awards and accolades, and their work continues to push boundaries and challenge conventional notions of what art can be and do.
Ray also works as a lecturer, mentor, and outside eye for other artists.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver. Ray joins the conversation from Nottingham, UK.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Show Transcript
00:01
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabriel Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights stepping into one's power and immersive design.
00:16
I'm speaking with Rae Young, the artist behind Out, which is being presented at the Push Festival February 8th and 9th, 2025, and Thirst Trap, which is available throughout the festival. A luscious, fierce, and defiant dialogue through space, through struggles, through communities, this performance doesn't simply stand in solidarity with global 2SL GPT QIA Plus movements, it dances alongside them,
00:42
breaking down violent histories to imagine something new in a succulent celebration of desire. That's Out. And Thirst Trap is part narrative and part meditation, a 30-minute sound piece for audiences to experience in the bath along with a specially designed pack of multi-sensory resources to transform their physical environment.
01:03
It invites audiences to consider the correlation between climate and social justice, and to recognize the importance of taking collective action towards building a more just and equitable future. Rae Young is a transdisciplinary performance artist, experience maker, and writer, widely recognized for their work at the forefront of activism, queerness, race, and neurodiversity.
01:25
Their practice is centered on creating a safe space for those who exist at the intersection of multiple realities through collaboration and resistance to traditional forms. Here's my conversation with Rae.
01:39
When I started here in 2021, and I was thinking, okay, what are the projects I've seen in the last years that I would love to bring to push, Out came to mind, so I'd seen it at Impulse Dance in 2017, and it just had stuck with me.
01:55
It's such a powerful and just brilliant thing. performance that really like moved me and then we've been in conversations since then pretty much about making this happen it's been a long path but it's finally happening I'm so thrilled so yeah just to say a long time in the making and I'm really thrilled to sit down and chat with you a bit more about your process where you're at in your career yeah so before we jump into it I will acknowledge the land that I'm joining this call from this conversation so I'm among the stolen traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh I'm settler here and I have a responsibility to continual learning and self-education and I owe a lot of that education to the Yellowhead Institute which you'll hear me regularly give a shout out to And I'm just going to share a little bit on today's kind of reflections,
02:58
which are on with regard to indigenous alternatives to climate risk assessment in Canada and What has really stood out to me is this comment on how Western silence science silos society and the environment.
03:14
And so often we see nature as a place to visit on the weekends. Rather than a dynamic and interrelated part of our daily lives and this contributes to this paradigm of progress and the capitalist model of extractive economic growth, which has resulted in the failure of the last 30 years of climate policy and so This report is Really Thought provoking and well researched and also ties in how Western policymakers neglect indigenous understandings of time,
03:49
space and scale. So that, you know, while climate change is a problem for all of us. We often only focus on start and it's inevitable end and we view it as a linear Process or trajectory with unavoidable effects and then forget that our present role.
04:07
We have responsibilities and shaping what will come next. So Those are kind of some of today's learnings and Ray, I know that we'll probably talk about some of this with regard to Neo colonialism and relationship to land and in some of your projects.
04:30
But first, I'd love you to share where you're joining the conversation from today. Well, I am in Lots of kind of gray, not raining Nottingham. Which for those of you don't know somewhere in the east Midlands of the UK, not far from Birmingham.
04:51
Yeah. Thank you. Can you talk about the impulse to create out and its significance in your trajectory as an artist? Yeah, um, oh shit, so funny when I hear you talk about impulse dance because it feels like a lifetime ago.
05:08
Sometimes those pictures flash up in my phone and I'm like, oh my god, look at me so baby faced. But I was, because I didn't actually know anything about, uh, I didn't know very much about impulse dance at all before I went there.
05:20
It was Dwayne that knew a lot about it and was like super gassed and I was like, oh wow, okay. I was just super excited to be invited somewhere to kind of, yeah, to perform the work. Um, I think one of the significant things about out is that I, I set out to make a piece of work through the body because Dwayne and I at the time had been having like lots of conversations about blackness and about awareness.
05:47
And, um, I guess like Yeah, the complexities between those two sides of our identities being of like a certain age. We'd have these conversations all the time. And I guess like I was really interested in working through the body some way and felt like this particular project would be like really fertile ground to kind of do that.
06:15
I feel like often when I start to make a new project, yeah, I'm seeking to like challenge myself in some way. And so yeah, this time was like, okay, so what does it mean for me to kind of do a piece that's like purely physical when that is not, yeah, kind of not my training, isn't there?
06:38
I think the other thing was it felt like some of those conversations would be really, really hard or had been hard with experts and being hard with our families. So it just felt like, okay, well, let's kind of like, yeah.
06:51
Physicalize the things that we want to say to our families and like more broadly. A lot of that was thinking about like, what is like a culturally traditional like dance forms, like the stuff that, you know, social dancing felt really, really important to us.
07:10
Because these things aren't usually seen in like highbrow dance studios or dance spaces. And we want it to kind of like translate that feeling into the performance space. I can remember being younger and going to like a dance or a rave and being probably dressed in something that I didn't necessarily feel comfortable in.
07:34
And then having like this bright light, this kind of video light, like frost into your face, like all up close and personal, but also just like the vibe of being in that place and it being like really, yeah, really community focused and like kind of everybody kind of like, moving as as as one and also obviously also that base kind of like ricocheting through all of your your bones and kind of like vibrating all the way through your body feels like sort of like I don't know like ritualistic in some ways or like a shedding of something so yeah kind of wanting to take that to a performance space and then also I guess there was conversations around like the music and dancehall that hasn't in the past been very favorable to towards kind of like queerness and yeah and kind of like wanting to kind of like subvert that somehow or just reclaim reclaim the music yeah and I was reminded of I went to a club night in London.
08:44
I think it was called Boo's Delicious. I've been there sometimes and it was like the first time I've been to like a queer like a bashment night and everyone was queer and I was just like wow this is amazing.
08:54
So yeah all of these things kind of like went into the work and we tried work with an amazing dramaturg and had like yeah some really amazing conversations and yeah and then I guess the yeah the work was kind of born although there was like a really early iteration and the first time we actually did the work we went all the way to Glasgow to Buscott Festival to do it because it was the furthest away that we could be from Nottingham.
09:26
We were like oh yeah we're not ready for family to see the work yet so let's go do it somewhere else and it was a really amazing experience. I think that's you know you don't know often you know you can be into a thing but you don't really know how it's going to land until all the power of it until you put it in a space of people and that was a really really stripped back piece of performance.
09:52
I mean I feel like the work is anyways mostly about the connection between the two bodies and then there are a few objects in the space but the people are kind of like it's very emotive and that's just like through the sheer power of the performers in the work.
10:06
Yeah and then I guess it kind of just grew from there really and we just like carried on to developing the work and brought yeah there was more people involved and yeah I think by the time you saw the work at Impulse Tampa, it's gone through that it's a really rigorous kind of like process of refining and distilling down and yeah and I you know I actually just really really enjoyed the process of making that piece of work.
10:38
I feel like yeah there's I think and also bringing it back now. It's really interesting being where I am now and knowing the journey of that work and kind of just like seeing the evolution of the work but also the evolution of like myself and the way I feel about it.
10:58
And also it's crazy how I think some of the things that we're fighting for, standing up for are still really as important and prevalent today. I think that part feels a little bit sad but all the more reason why as many people as possible should kind of like get to experience the work here.
11:24
And so this is the remount that's coming to push and yeah, why remount it? How has the work evolved with through the remount? And you've spoken to your feelings towards the work or yourself as an artist evolving over this period, can you just talk a bit more about that?
11:46
It was when I started to be unapologetic. When I started, when I made out, there was a piece of work that I was making at the time. And again, that went through low, I think it was this really point of like transition, where I kind of knew where I wanted to get to, and I was maybe a little bit afraid and I wanted to kind of push myself in ways that hadn't before.
12:04
And, and, and so I remember doing this piece of work, the one that came before that, and everything had to happen in the way it did in order for me to be like, okay, I have the courage to kind of make this piece of work now.
12:14
But it was kind of where I threw, I kind of threw away the blueprint a little bit and just decided to kind of like, do something else. And I suppose actually, this is the journey where I start to kind of, oh, this is the point at which I'm starting to kind of switch form a little bit and think about, I used to use comedy quite a lot to talk about really sensitive subjects.
12:35
And that was really great, because we all love, we all love a laugh. But this time I felt like, no, it's not funny. And also, it's not funny. And also maybe there's space for us to be able to hold, hold this and, and also kind of using the body as activism or using this idea of like, the show feels relentless at times, but so does kind of going out into the world in the UK, sometimes it feels relentless.
12:59
So I think there's kind of like a feeling of that in the world that we've in the world that we've created. There was something about standing in my power and standing in my authenticity that I really like.
13:13
I don't think that I will be the artist I am or the person I am now without that show. That's like literally how important it is to me. So maybe when people view the work and they speak of its power, maybe that's what they're seeing.
13:27
That's what they're experiencing, you know, that like real time evolution. I think like, this is one moment in the show where it is, I call it kind of this machine moment where there's kind of, you know, this is movement that happens for a long period of time.
13:41
and each time I approach that it never I don't suppose it never feels easier it's just but it is this this this is always for me there was always a sense of achievement of kind of like getting to the end of of that moment um and I suppose then when I fast forward to kind of like remounting the work this time um it was like well how do you how do you put that work on other bodies when it has been when it comes from such a personal personal place space and so a lot of what first of all it was like finding it was I guess it was like remembering what the essence was about the work and how that might need to shift for kind of the audiences of today or shift for where we are at politically making sure that the casting the representation was really really right in terms of the bodies I felt like I wanted,
14:40
you know, there's only two performers in the work, but I wanted those bodies to be equally celebrated and to be different from maybe what we see usually in a piece of work. And then it was trying to go through that process of, you know, finding the right performers with the right chemistry, and then also taking them through the journey of, well, look, this is how we started to make the work.
15:01
These were the conversations we were having. Let's have some of those conversations first, and then let's try on the work and let's not try to, and I think it's difficult, right, because there's an expectation.
15:13
If you've seen the work, there's an expectation from, I guess, like a programmer that's experienced it for it to be as is. And I suppose also for me, because we've kind of reached that iteration, a new kind of had really spent time finessing it, it kind of felt like shape-wise it needed to kind of, the journey of it needed to kind of remain the same, but we also kind of needed to kind of be generous in there to kind of like play around with the movement language that we had and elaborate on that a little bit more so that the new performers felt like they had a place in it.
15:55
Right. So diving back into both the movement language and the conversations that had inspired the work and those conversations were really about like the intersection of queerness and Caribbean identity.
16:10
It was a bit of a crash course, I guess, for them, because obviously, you know, I had so much time to kind of get to grips with it and they were being asked to perform this very emotive work and put their selves in it and also come up against some of those frictions and some of those feelings that I, the challenges that I'd also felt when I was performing in the work.
16:32
It's no mean feat, but they've done an amazing, amazing job. Because of these sections, like the machine section, that is, is like a bit, you kind of like trance-like and grueling or how both in terms of the content that it's addressing and also in the physical demand.
16:51
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, we danced in heels in the work. I can't tell you how many times I thought to myself, even when I was in it, why, why did you, why did you make this choice? I was naivety, but there was something about like teetering on the edge and the fragility of that kind of finding your footing always and just them asking that as someone else and also asking them to trust you, trust you,
17:16
trust the process of the work, trust that I know what it is, it will be on the other side. And if, you know, I think that, you know, there will be this kind of element of like transformation. It has the power to do that once you get to kind of the other side.
17:31
But yeah, they, you know, they've really embraced the work and it's changed because they are different. and they have a different experience and actually in some of the conversations that we're having you know those performers are quite a lot younger than Dwayne and myself and so their experience of being black and queer and growing up in London which is a very different experience from growing up in Nottingham you know it was very that was it was different and so yeah I think because there's less I mean you spoke to how the work is still so relevant because there hasn't been as much shift with regard to the society homophobia these things and in since you created the work but then working with the younger cast from a more like a larger more metropolitan international city was there was there a disconnect there in terms of like the intensity of the the experience of the that intersectionality yeah I mean they you know they go put it yeah they go up in a city where there were lots more people that looked like that and were also queer and they had it that that club night I talked about you know that was my first opportunity to go there and that was when I was can't remember what age but they were able to experience that from a really really young age and feel that uh like feeling that places as as as a safe space for not only queer bodies but for trans bodies as well and talk about that as being like I guess the foregrounding in terms of becoming who they were seeing other people like them and then knowing that that is okay to you know to kind of live in their authenticity and then we're in a time I think last year felt like have we moved forward at all because it feels like we're in a time where governments are pitting people against each other and so last year particularly for like there was a focus on really tearing down trans people in a way that I found utterly disgusting and so transparent as kind of like what you know what you know what the agenda was and I still think and and I you know obviously I think that I mean yeah I just find it disgusting actually it felt really really really the right time to kind of be bringing this work back into the world yeah to be like we're not going to be quiet we're not going to go away you know we're here we deserve to be here we deserve to take your space it's about being invisible being really really seen I think I didn't speak about that but it was about being seen on our terms and about strength and fragility because I don't think that people get to be fragile a lot of the time you know and so the softness that's kind of like yeah there's all of it.
20:40
Yeah and in your recent work you focused on exploring notions of rest, care, recovery in your in your art. What it means to both create and receive art while centering care and intentionality. Can you talk about what that looks like in relation to your projects, thirst trap, bodies and plow?
21:00
Yeah I think that um I think I was tired. I think I was tired. I'm a neurodivergent artist and maybe because of that and because of kind of sitting on these different uh sit in the midst of these kind of different identities or whatever.
21:27
I'm also living in this world, this world that is I think I was talking to before about like empathy. Like where has that gone? Um I I guess like I needed a rest and so therefore I created a work that would allow people to experience it in a restful state and often actually the first trap in private.
21:53
Um and I wanted people to be able to uh have space and time to think. To uh to see each other, to um you know these these works of thinking about uh like climate and like our part in that and I feel like they're all interlinked because you can't have private justice without having social justice.
22:20
Like those two things you know um it's impossible and and so yeah I I needed to slow down. I kept saying maybe lots of people said a lot that I'm not going to go back to working how I did before and I in some parts did do that as much as much as I could.
22:44
But also I suppose for me in that moment in time, I took myself, the key thing is that I decided to take in order to do that restful thing, I took myself out of the work. Because when your body is a site of trauma, and it's also the thing, and then it's also the material in the work.
23:04
And it's also the thing that people want to talk about when they want to like critique the work and your lived experience, which is personal to me, but also I know through having friends and family, it's not that personal to me, because these are the things that we talk about often.
23:26
I still wanted to be able to give, but not in a way where it took from me, and it was taken a lot from me. you So yeah, I created these two pieces where I ask the audience to be the performer in the work, I guess, you know, I asked them to do the work.
23:48
It doesn't exist actually, unless the work isn't, yeah, it doesn't exist really, isn't alive until there are people in the work performing for being the stand-ins of those things. Because in Thirstrap it's the audience, an audience of one in a private space is led by prompts, it's following a narrative, it's experiencing something that they are
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