Manifesting the Metaphor: It’s The Climax for Me

by Harold Steward

If revolution is romanticized riots and rotations, then queer folks are destined to be our greatest accomplices in a quest for new radical realties. So any talk about a revolutionary theatre should include queer ideology and strategy. Ergo…

  • …freedom as a metaphor transforms that which we thought was not applicable into something attainable. 
  •  
  • Freedom as a feeling, is ephemeral, but worth chasing or longing for. 
  •  
  • The culmination of the metaphor or poetic desire and the feeling or sense of affirmation is the climax. Indescribable through a descriptive analysis but cathartic.
    Orgasmic even.
  •  
  • Like freedom on freedom on freedom
    Like rights be a low bar and power be the move
    So what is freedom cubed
    Or the power of the desired
    The power of the applied
    And the power of the indefinite
    You know what I mean
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  • Like the first freedom, the metaphor, be hella self-determinate.
    The metaphor is manifested as a second freedom, a feeling or a belief, which then creates a sense of balance.
    There is no climax or third freedom until the metaphor is achieved and acknowledged.  
  •  
  • Like that third freedom (climax) be the first plural odd.
    Like climaxes be queer and shit.
    Climaxes like queers be about collectives
    Like multiple energies
    Like multiple ideologies
    Through multiplicity, climaxes shift circumstances and shit.
    Like a cultural amalgamation that consistently changes circumstances and breaks
    norms, they birth new realities, give a new set of circumstances and new desires or
    longings for a constant. 
  •  
  • Like balance be temporary
    Like metaphor be abundant
    So queer niggas stay chasing climaxes
    Like queer niggas be longing for freedom.
    Say things like: godchildren stay gaudy pursuing dream sequences at after parties.
    Like that’s a butch queen’s prerogative.
  •  
  • Queer culture be the amalgamtion, queer climaxes be the pusher and American Theatre be the constant
  •  
  • American Theatre been longing for liberation but American Theatre be Normative AF
    Been sustained by hella dominant norms
    Been transfixed by that which oughta been temporary
    Been needing a orgasm, needing to cum
    Catch this – American Theater is the only western artistic discipline that does not
    prioritize the works of those who have broken away from or never subscribed
    to European form.
    Like American Theatre keepin’ appearances and shit
    Like Miss Thing, again you’re LATE
    Like realism ain’t realness, aint moving the crowd
    Like realism is European social science not real queer social imagination.
    Like queer niggas fuck with but not intrested in being drowned by eurocentic dogma
    Like where the Black queer metaphors at?
    What Black queer desires do we constantly disenage with?
    Where is the banjee stage?
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  • Like some queer theater niggas, I’ve been longing for liberation on American stages, too.
    Like been gang gangin’ on a queer trap aesthic in American theatre that is 
    • •  queerly affirmative and challenges respectability
    • •  engages the queer literal and the queer linear
    • •  challenges legibility and how Blackness & queerness is read and expressed
    • •  engages queer synthesis
    • •  centers the idiosyncratic
    • •  prioritizes fecundity and fertility
    • •  and transcendence
    •  
  • Like I’ll tell you what That New New Revolutionary Theatre is to me:
  • Queer.
  • Fight me.

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