S5E6 S.W.E.A.T. with Nancy Nutter

This month's conversation is with performer Nancy Nutter. Nancy’s artistry expands through visual, performative, musical realms. She is one half of the piano cabaret duo THE DAMES, the lead vocalist of trans-femme punk band GIRLS IN YOUR AREA, and head of performance at TRACEY. She co-creates TREASON cabaret club night, and co-curates the performance stage at WHOLE FESTIVAL.
Nancy teaches gender performance in various workshops, including the EMBODIED DISRUPTION series, KÖNIG, and at ARTHAUS. They are a costume maker, makeup artist, and drag star. A graphic designer, film maker, tattoo artist, and a painter.
https://nancynutter.net/
photo of Nancy by Javier Alejandro Cerrada
In this episode, Nancy and Mad Kate speak about parenthood, gender, drag, folk music, workers' solidarity, the aching vulnerability of performing your truest self in front of a room of strangers and the power of empathy. Nancy also shared some of their brilliant ideas on gender beyond the binary that she is outlining in her book-in-progress, working title Drag, Disruption and Descent
We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.
You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/
Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.