Rose Cory & friends at Tate Modern: Queer night-life theatre turns “dark” into art

Misryoum previews a Tate Modern moment where queer performance, Japanese diasporic pop-punk, and radical live art collide—bringing nightlife into the museum.

A visit to Tate Modern can feel like a slow inhale—until a stage persona. a punk chorus. or a live-art provocation forces the building to breathe differently.. Misryoum looks at how this “dark” programming line-up turns marginal histories and club culture into something newly visible inside the museum.

Rose Cory. known through her stage persona Rose Wood. is part of a generation of performers who treat the night not as an escape. but as an honest mirror.. Her multidisciplinary work—built over nearly two decades as a featured performer at The Box in both NYC and London—leans into the unsettling edges of human nature.. Queerness. otherness. obscenity. addiction. violence. and “criminal insanity” aren’t used as shock for shock’s sake; they’re used as a method for dismantling what she calls false idols.. The effect is pointed: modern life erodes humanity, and performance can try to restore it by refusing polite distance.

That refusal to be absorbed quietly is echoed in the presence of Kazuko Hohki. whose practice carries the specific weight of migration and invention.. Moving to London from Japan in 1978. Hohki helped shape alternative spaces through the London Musicians Collective and through projects that blur the line between theatre and pop culture.. Japanese American Toy Theatre of London and the alternative pop punk performance group Frank Chickens are not simply footnotes to a UK scene—they’re proof that diasporic identity can be loud. funny. and fiercely collaborative.. Frank Chickens released five albums. toured widely. and even built a television footprint through Channel 4; the group received an award in 2010. and still performs with more than twenty members. many of them Japanese women.

In 2016. Hohki also began organising the annual festival “Ura Matsuri. ” a celebration of East and South East Asian (ESEA) community art and culture in the UK.. Misryoum reads this as cultural infrastructure. not just programming: festivals like this are how communities stay in the frame of public attention. how younger artists learn language for their work. and how shared heritage becomes a living practice rather than a display case.. Hohki’s theatre works. rooted in her experience of being a Japanese woman in England. and her site-specific shows with local communities and schools. extend that logic into everyday spaces.

The presence of Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson pushes the line-up from celebration into critique—without losing the heat.. Their speciality lies in the social contexts of contemporary performance. with an emphasis on queer and trans practices in festivals. nightlife. and Live Art.. Their work asks what countercultural practices actually do: how they generate community. how they resist assimilation narratives. and how they can open up radical methods of making and knowing.. Misryoum finds the emphasis on context especially telling for Tate Modern—because museums often present art as finished objects. while queer nightlife and Live Art are about ongoing negotiations between bodies. rules. and safety.

As a lecturer and Programme Director of MA Queer Performance at Rose Bruford College. Patey-Ferguson also helps shape how queer performance gets taught. not only performed.. Their editorial and network work—co-editing a special issue on Live Art in Contemporary Theatre Review (2024). co-convening the Queer Futures Working Group of IFTR. and contributing to research networks like The Night Club—signals that the work is part scholarship. part activism. part future-building.. At the same time. their connection to Duckie. a board role. brings an on-the-ground sensibility: academic rigour without stripping performance of its mess.

Completing the picture is Tamm Reynolds. also known as Midgitte Bardot. a performer whose title for “most glamourous coping mechanism in the world” lands like a wink—and then becomes a philosophy.. Since 2016, Reynolds has moved through cabaret, live art, drag, theatre, and club spaces across the UK.. Their current project. “Shooting from Below. ” is already framed through lived performance logic: a sense that looking from beneath the spotlight can reveal the structures that spotlight hides.. Misryoum also notes the recent credit in Royal Court’s “Sound of the Underground” (written by Travis Alabanza and directed by Debbie Hannan). which connects this line-up to a wider ecosystem of UK new writing and underground artistry.

The deeper story across these names is not simply that Tate Modern is “doing queer stuff.” Misryoum reads it as an argument about cultural authority.. Nightlife has long been treated as temporary—fun, messy, and forgettable once the lights go up.. Live Art and queer performance challenge that hierarchy by turning club energy into knowledge: a place where marginalised artists develop community grammars. resist assimilation. and rehearse alternate futures.. Bringing these practices into a major museum doesn’t automatically sanitise them. but it does raise a question: who gets to control the narrative when performances that once lived in basements. warehouses. and small stages move into institutional space?

There’s also a broader cultural shift behind the line-up.. East and South East Asian festivals. Japanese diasporic pop-punk performance groups. and queer pedagogies all point to a creative economy that’s less single-stream and more networked.. Artists aren’t just making work; they’re building ecosystems—venues, books, festivals, touring routes, and research communities.. When an institution like Tate Modern hosts artists who have spent years operating through those networks. it signals that cultural identity in the UK—and beyond—is being negotiated in public spaces more actively than ever.

If the museum is a place for permanence, then the night is a place for transformation.. Misryoum expects the tension to be productive: performers like Rose Cory and the artists around her don’t offer a neat moral. but a lived. complicated truth.. And in a cultural moment hungry for “visibility. ” this line-up insists on something sharper—visibility with friction. humour with edge. and heritage with a pulse.