Queer Notions

Queer Notions is a soirée of queer music and literature by queer composers, writers and performers from Malta and abroad. Prose and poems are alternated with songs and instrumental music in an organic performance with space for improvisations between the performers. For tonight’s performers, Queer Notions refers not only to their identity but also to the diversity of styles and genres that we are presenting. Some songs and texts are light and gay, even sometimes naughty, others touch upon more serious or sad topics.

The music that will be played this evening is composed by three members of the POW Ensemble: Tom Armitage, Guy Harries, and Luc Houtkamp. All three have composed music featuring queer themes, based on texts and poems by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Arthur Rimbaud and Theognis of Megara in ancient Greece, and on the life of Alan Turing. With this programme, we play homage to the “other” queer music: jazz, classical and contemporary music.

Queer Notions will include a local literary element. In collaboration with MGRM’s Kitba Queer project, six queer Maltese authors and poets will take the stage and perform selections from their own work, highlighting the beauty of the written word and the charm of the spoken works. Kitba Queer is a Maltese project that aims to increase representation of own-voice queer people in fiction.