Honcho Disko: The Documentary: The Lecture: The Musical

What happens when you leave a filmmaker-academic alone with 28 hours of queer performance footage for an entire pandemic? This party-turned-show-turned-film-turned-lecture-turned-musical will try its best to explain.

A COVID-brain musical lecture that keeps getting interrupted, Dr Patrick Kelly shares an entire summer’s worth of footage at Honcho Disko, the queer performance party that took over the eastern seaboard to become “Sydney’s best queer party” in 2018. From local favourites to international superstars, this show draws back the curtain on Honcho Disko over the summer of 2019, as Dr Kelly attempts to embody what it was like to gaze through the lens that captured it all. Ultimately, this is a love letter to Honcho Disko and broader queer nightlife.

This show invites you to join the search for queer community (partially guided by Halberstam, Butler and Sedgwick) even as the navigator ends up increasingly isolated and weird. Dr Kelly’s party-turned-show-turned-film-turned-lecture-turned-musical seeks to engage with the problematics of what a queer screen production practice might look like. Joyfully embracing the possibility of failure, Dr Kelly highlights the problem of ownership of queer stories, demonstrates how kinship can develop through creative collaboration, and hopes to open up new possibilities for queer creative screen practice. But also: drag! With some very special appearances by some very special guests, it’s sure to be the highlight of the curriculum!