Tender Madness is an experiment in sublimation and revelation. In playing with the tension between what an audience perceives and what they understand, it challenges them to consider how the mechanics and aesthetics of queer expression have been shaped by the fear of erasure.
Anchored by Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Tender Madness uses music, poetry, ballet, and drag to explore the sublimation and revelation of queermasculine eroticism. How can images and ideas be made legible without an audience comprehending exactly what they’re witnessing? How can they be brought to understand an image or idea they never directly perceive? Is it possible for an image or idea to be tangibly, undeniably present in a performance but obscured entirely from the audience? What is the power and impact of an image or idea being immediately perceivable and understandable?
Julian Legere (he/him), AKA Betty Cocksure is a bisexual and genderqueer, European/Acadian settler artist on occupied Coast Salish territories. His practice articulates and inserts queerness in the Western classical tradition through interdisciplinary engagement with contemporary queer performance, moving fluidly between theatre, poetry, dance, drag, kink and burlesque. Motivated by a politically urgent need to reassert queer expression as threatening and subversive, Julian is interested in queer eroticism, assimilation and erasure, and relational liberation. His intention is to confront audiences with the presence and erasure of queerness across Western histories and cultures.
