Stare power: Mark Edward in character as drag queen Gale Force

A researcher at Edge Hill University will take a film about his alter ego ¨C Gale Force, drag queen and former child star ¨C to the International Federation for Theatre Research Conference in Barcelona this month.

Now senior lecturer in performance, Mark Edward has had a long career in contemporary dance and also worked as a drag queen in the 1980s. As he came off stage one evening, somebody mockingly called out: ¡°Council house movie star!¡±

He was offended at the time, ¡°but later I said to myself: ¡®I¡¯m actually going to have that title¡¯ ¨C Gale Force was a reaction against the predominantly white female classical dance background I have experienced. The persona started to come from that.¡±

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Reaching his mid-thirties had also caused Mr Edward to re-evaluate his life, since he ¡°felt in a state of flux and didn¡¯t know where I?wanted to go within the UK¡¯s youth-driven agenda for dance¡±.

This led to practice-based research on ageing performers and drag queens¡¯ ¡°precarious relationship within contemporary gay culture¡±. Last year Mr Edward secured funding for a 30-minute film, Council House Movie Star, starring Gale Force in a run-down flat smothered in kitsch 1970s decor. Her only interaction is with a rat that she occasionally chases with a meat cleaver.

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¡°The house is like an archive of her that is deteriorating,¡± he explained, ¡°and she¡¯s clinging on to memories from the past.¡± In the film, she remembers how as a young boy in the 1960s she was ¡°beaten up by a guy who jumps off a Chopper bike and gives her a bloody nose in the alleyway in a terraced cobbled street¡±. Although she now looks ¡°horrific¡± in the mirror, she dreams of herself looking ¡°glamorous on stage in her heyday¡±.

Council House Movie Star was screened at the launch of last year¡¯s Homotopia ¡°festival of queer arts and culture¡± in Liverpool. The film¡¯s set then moved to the city¡¯s Camp & Furnace gallery, where Mr?Edward lived in character for two weeks. Visitors found Gale Force asleep, drunk, in a strop, singing old favourites with a friend or ¡°re-enacting her Omo washing powder moment¡± as the child star of a television advertisement.

Despite her grotesqueness, Mr Edward found that ¡°people do relate to her. When I did the installation and Gale would tweet ¡®I could do with some vodka¡¯ or ¡®I¡¯d love some jelly babies¡¯, people would come by with vodka bottles and jelly babies.¡±

At the Barcelona conference, Mr Edward plans to show Council House Movie Star and to discuss the research behind it. Unlike academics who can write their papers and ¡°shelter behind a desk¡±, he declared, his form of embodied research means ¡°putting myself out there as a queer marker¡±.

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matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com