POTBANK
This is your last dance of the evening, and this is your last chance of the evening
‘Jimmy wears an ill-fitting nylon suit. Flared trousers that stop well before his shoes. Hair slicked back across his head, shiny with Brylcreem, flicking up at the back on his red, wrinkled neck. He might be forty – might be seventy – hard to tell. Coarse thick black eyebrows swoop skywards, fag dangling from his lip, the ash permanently threatening to fall on to his brown kipper tie. He wields a small metal drum in his hand, waving it from side to side as he executes a circle around the small dancefloor. He dusts the floor with French Chalk to allow the dancers to glide. The evening is underway.’
POTBANK* is a multi-disciplinary installation and performance work rooted in autobiographical memory, queer ritual and working-class history - an ambitious culmination of my evolving practice to date. An exploration of how memory and space shape queer existence. A space and an experience both epic and intimate. A punctuation mark within a working process, on a significantly more ambitious scale than I have previously made.
*A Potbank is the colloquial name for a pottery factory in North Staffordshire used to make bone china, earthenware and sanitaryware, thought to have originated in a business model employed by the pioneering industrialist Josiah Wedgewood
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POTBANK aims to present a place, that like the unique space of the factory canteen turned working-men’s club, is accessible, welcoming, a home-from-home, a space for dancing, activism, learning, singing and drinking. A recreation of a specific time and place in my own personal folklore. Where is the collision between the camp working-class boy in this place in the 1970’s, queer ritual and the Neolithic?
“There’s a streak of camp that operates on gay men on a completely silent unconscious level, that is not received from society. You could grow up on a farm in the middle of Norfolk, having no social contact at thirteen years old being thrilled by Bet Lynch, thrilled by Joan Collins. I was, sat on my settee in Swansea I had no idea that the Wizard of Oz was a camp classic. Those words didn’t exist. I just loved it. I loved her, I loved those strong women in the soaps. What is it? One day we will understand.”
Russell T Davies
POTBANK will be touring from 2027 onwards. Please get in touch for more information
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