Artistic Director: CN Lester
Director: Jamie Hale
Since its creation in 2011, CN Lester’s Transpose nights have combined singing, performance art and smatterings of club culture featuring many trans and non-binary artists.
Previous iterations of Transpose have felt more like cabaret evenings, showcasing individuals and their specific crafts. This latest iteration, Subverse, takes a different, more collaborative approach. Guest curator ILĀ oversees an evening in which sequences flow together, resulting in a 75-minute show that feels like a cohesive whole.
It’s also much darker than previous iterations, both literally and figuratively. All the performances share a dimly lit stage of scaffolding, and with most of the costumes featuring black as their key colour, the underworld (or “submerse”) that ILĀ creates is the colour of pitch. This also feels like a response to the current times, where trans life has become less about pride, celebration and confidence and more about safety, survival and finding a way to vent some justified rage.
ILĀ and Coda Nicolaeff (co-founders of Trans Voices, the UK’s first professional Trans+ choir) contribute two works from the choir’s repertoire, Securescue and UN/BOUND. The latter was previously part of the Barbican Feel the Sound art installation, and has here been reworked as a live piece, backed by processed voices and electronica to great effect.
Securescue, a portmanteau of “secure” and “rescue”, further taps into the sense of oppression and anger prevailing at the moment. Lines about how people are “doing everything with the lights on” speak to an increase in overt expressions of prejudice and transphobia, acts that should inspire far more shame than any which such people insist that LGBTQ+ people, and trans people in particular, should feel.
ILĀ also collaborates with interdisciplinary artist Ray Felix Carter to continue expressions of dissociation through a similar soundscape to that of the preceding works. Here, the underscore contains crackles that one can never quite discern are intentional or faults of the sound system. That may speak to the themes of the work, but it is certainly distracting.
More effective are CN Lester’s own contributions to the evening. A preview of some songs from a forthcoming EP is haunting, Lester’s operatic voice applied to a songwriting structure that hews more closely to the pop repertoire.
But the highlight is the evening’s concluding piece, as Lester teams up with show director Jamie Hale for a new interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Hale adopts the persona of scientist Victor Frankenstein, reciting lines of Shelley’s prose around his act of creation. This is complemented by Lester’s operatic take on the creature, who starts off struggling to articulate their sense of identity and a reason for their existence. In the short sequence, the characters migrate to an acknowledgement of their symbiotic relationship. Each has made the other; for Victor, his creation was literal, but without the creature, he is nothing and has no existence of his own.
It is a remarkable, fascinating interpretation of the work. It feels like a tester for a full-length exploration of Shelley’s work and its themes. One hopes that such a piece will emerge soon.
As Frankenstein draws the evening to a close, there is little doubt that the closer collaboration between acts on the bill has created a version of Transpose that feels slicker and more cohesive than previous iterations. But with that comes a loss of variety. The darkness and sense of beleaguered rage are understandable, but moments of light alongside might shine a light on areas that need it.
Runs until 15 November 2025
