‘Our strength comes from our connection to each other’: a conversation about resilience with Duckie employees Simon Casson, Dicky Eton and Emmy Minton

ABSTRACT

Since 1994, the London-based queer performance collective Duckie has produced thousands of events, from its regular Saturday club night to larger-scale immersive themed productions and, more recently, long-running projects working with specific underserved groups. In this edited interview, Duckie’s three full-time employees, Simon Casson, Dicky Eton and Emmy Minton, discuss various forms of resilience underpinning the collective’s enduring success. These include its relationship with its audiences, its development of robust but adaptable ‘holding forms’, its willingness to explore new modes and sensibilities, its critical navigation of neoliberal structures, its embrace of uncertainty and failure, and its insistence on collective care.

KEYWORDS:

• Duckie
• resilience
• queer
• performance
• hope

Disclosure statement

Ben Walters completed a collaborative doctoral award in partnership with Duckie at Queen Mary University of London and occasionally works for Duckie as a freelance writer and performer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Walters

Ben Walters is an independent writer and researcher based in London. His doctoral research at Queen Mary University of London conceptualised a range of community-specific projects by queer performance collective Duckie as ‘homemade mutant hope machines’. As ‘Dr Duckie’, Ben shares pragmatic ‘hope-machine’ thinking through writing, talks, workshops and online.