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.
Queerness has always been slippery. Visible and invisible at once, present and imagined simultaneously. Combining Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass using practices and vocabularies from drag and ballet, Tender Madness explores how form can sublimate and reveal expressions of queermasculine eroticism.
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.
