All Circa Queer Histories Festival photos by Nicolette Jackson-Pownall.BLUE
“Currently in development
Co-created by SOUL Performance Collective
(Dudley Saunders, Paul Outlaw, Sharon Udoh, Sara Lyons)
First work-in-progress presentation
October 2026: Circa Queer Histories Festival
(ONE Institute), Los Angeles, CA ”
The failure on our part to accept the reality of pain, of anguish, of ambiguity, of death has turned us into a very peculiar and sometimes monstrous people.
James Baldwin, “The Uses of the Blues” (1964)
Sometimes the fragments make more sense than the line. Blue, the first collaboration by SOUL Performance Collective, is a performance work that re-embodies queer legacies of blues music through music, storytelling, testimony and improvisation.
SOUL looks to buried blues heroes of the past—including queer and queer-presumed pioneers like Elvie “L.V.” Thomas (1891–1979) and Geechie Wiley (1908–1950), Tony Jackson (1882–1921), Bessie Smith (1892–1937), and Clifford Hayes (1893/1895?–1941/1955/1957?)—to fashion a new blues for the 21st century in real time.
Where is our anguish, where are our desires and pleasures that threaten and repulse, where is the joy that somehow grows in inverse proportion to frustration and fear? By inhabiting and breaking the form of the blues, this work will locate collective feeling in twelve bars and beyond. It’s a song of survival. A song for those whose stories can’t be finished.
Currently in development, Blue takes the form of a blues concert and will combine the direct testimony of the artists’ lives (in the form of concert “patter”) and the fictional narratives that bloom from them in the form of experimental, cross-genre songs. Songs that begin with deep blues twist out of the blues tradition to take on new forms that reflect what the queer ghosts of the hidden blues past have become in a new queer millennium. Unnameable identities that found form in the blues become, in this piece, what no one could have imagined.