Past FQCS

The first Feral Queer Camp was a pilot in 2018 in partnership with Outburst Queer Arts Festival and part of Queer at Queen’s, which was a programme Alyson established in 2010 at Queen’s University Belfast, to run alongside Outburst and build thinking and talking around queer work. Q@Q hosted the first conference in Ireland on queer performance in 2009.

Highlights were Cake Daddy and a lecture by Lois Weaver (Split Britches). This pilot set up the model of FQC around seeing work and talking about it, usually over food.

FQC 2019 was part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival, Belfast. As a group, we experienced works ranging from mainstage queer opera, to filmic celebrations of queer fat activism, to acts of grieving, hearing from both local voices and visiting queer artists from Egypt and Lebanon. As well as this, campers took part in panels hosted by Queer at Queens, and were able to see some works in development and attend post-show talks with artists such as Richard O’Leary.

2020 saw our first Feral Queer Camp as part of Midsumma Festival. As well as a busy program of seeing shows, we also offered workshops on Disability and queer performance with JulieMc McNamara and writing workshops with Lachlan Philpott. As well as this, we hosted a public roundtable discussion on queer performance, featuring Alyson Campbell, Stephen Farrier, JulieMc McNamara, Lou Wall, Tahlee Fereday, Krishna Istha and Lachlan Philpott. The camp received funding from the Creativity and Wellbeing Research Initiative at the University of Melbourne.

In 2021, we organised a hybrid version of the Feral Queer Camp. With an in-person cohort attending shows and an additional online cohort, we presented a series of international talks and workshops with queer performance specialists in the UK, including Nando Messias, Vanessa McCawley and Joe Parslow.

In 2023, we were in partnership with the Science Gallery Melbourne and ‘camped out’ at the Gallery for a weekend of discussion and workshopping.

This season of FQC included, among other activities: zine-making workshops with Hannah McCann, guest talks with Jo Clifford and Kath Duncan, and writing workshops with Peta Murray.

Sign up for news on FQC!