Composer and songwriter Phoenix Rousiamanis premiered a new audiovisual piece paying tribute to Manchester’s queer communities and ballroom culture at Low Four Studio on Saturday.
Prior to the performance and throughout, two television screens played grainy videos of Rousiamanis, lit by a nocturnal fluorescence as she dances in what looks like an empty park.
Before she took the stage, these videos were accompanied by an unsettling soundscape of twinkly electronics moving to deeper distorted strings and layered with whispery, babyish vocalisations.
Low Four Studio is a trendy little venue, hidden away from the crowds of Christmas shoppers on Deansgate Mews. As Rousiamanis took to the piano at the centre, a voiceover explained that she had begun the project with an intention to make dance music, but felt compelled by the “melancholy” of the queer experiences at the heart of the piece, to perform a series of three ballads instead.
The ballads that followed were delivered with an intensity that suggested they were being sung from a place of personal experience. It’s difficult to pick out the subject matter of songs with any precision on first hearing, especially when some of those subjects are so dark, but abuse, family, fetishisation and bad relationships were all in the mix.
Behind Phoenix and the piano, a simple projector screen provided a backdrop of accompanying visuals. These varied from light-hearted, and incredibly endearing home-video-style footage of friends, to nude videos interspersed with footage from a daytime graveyard, and a group voguing, seemingly in a car park at night, where joyfulness of the dancing was inevitably undercut with a sense of the vulnerability of their setting.
There was so much about the performance that was intriguing that it might have benefited from a more sustained visual focus – or else a more concerted interweaving of Rousiamanis’ own experiences with the broader history of ballroom communities.
Ballads concluded, Rousiamanis accepted her applause whilst apologising for the ‘crazy intensity’, and ushered in the dance music portion of the night.
Local DJ CVNT Traxxx began with one of Rousiamanis’ own pieces. Having demonstrated her obvious proficiency on piano, the pounding, crunching sounds of a dance track cracked the solemnity of the previous half hour in moments.
The show still feels like it’s in a developmental stage, but Rousiamanis is clearly an incredibly thoughtful, fantastically uninhibited and experimental performer – one to watch.
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