Organising the Finnish tour for ”Punch Up! – Resistance & Glitter” variety show

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

We will tour around Finland with our Punch up! – Resistance and Glitter club in the spring of 2020. Punch Up! is a show where we curate the most interesting drag, burlesque, stand up and rap acts, and challenge the artists to push their own and the audience’s preconceived ideas on their art form. Punch Up! is presented by artists James Lórien MacDonald, Juuso Kekkonen and Mira Eskelinen, who also perform at each show. For each show, we invite 2–4 local guest artists. The aim is to showcase a variety of styles, diversity of performers and points of view. We draw on our deep networks in queer arts, but also reach beyond to include people of colour and other minorities. Most of the performances are in English, with some in Finnish. We will be performing at theatres and other suitable venues with a capacity of ~150–200. We are currently negotiating with multiple venues. By reaching outside our own social and artistic bubbles and mixing traditionally separate genres notable precisely for their conventions and specificity, we recontextualise their meaning and provide new vantage points to receive the work. This provides not only an opportunity for the audience to experience something new, but also the performer, who is able to perceive a new way of looking at their own art. It could be argued that this mutual act of seeing things differently is a contributing factor to what many people have described as the “community” feeling they get from attending or performing at Punch Up!