Thick & Tight
Combining dance, mime, lip sync, drag and satire, Thick & Tight make queer-focussed work which entertains, whilst challenging elitism and stigma in the arts, and in wider society.
Comprising performers Daniel Hay-Gordon and Eleanor Perry, Thick & Tight were formed in 2012 and have presented work at venues including Sadler’s Wells, Wilton’s Music Hall, The Tate, Royal Vauxhall Tavern and here at the Southbank Centre.
They regularly partner with Corali Dance Company, a London based dance company whose artists have a learning disability, and have produced works that range from duet formed through an imagined meeting between John Cage and Elaine Paige and a bawdy dance interpretation of Rasputin, to their current work, a short film about Derek Jarman.
‘To be involved with an organisation such as the Southbank Centre, that combines so many art forms and presents so many amazing artists is fantastic’
Within their Southbank Centre Studio Thick & Tight will be beginning a new collaboration with the contemporary classical music makers Manchester Collective. Together they’ll look at nature and ecology from a perspective of queerness, creating performed portraits of non-human life forms, or looking at humans from the perspective of nature. The duo explained that ‘these works will be interrogating what we consider natural or unnatural and why. Our Southbank Centre Studio will support this new collaboration, allowing us to work with dancers and musicians to experiment and create.’
The pair continued, ‘This opportunity comes at a brilliant time, when we are rethinking our way of working and imagining what our next body of work could be. It’s wonderful to be given space and resources to support this; it will have a huge impact on what we do next.’ Thick & Tight hope that come the end of their residency they will have the bones of their new show, not just new material, but a new concept that’s unlike any of their previous work.