As part of this year’s Outburst Arts Festival, the inaugural Outburst: Outloud this Saturday (November 14) will be a day long event of stalls, talks, workshops and music all with a feminist/trans/queer slant.
On the day there will be stalls, talks and workshops from Belfast Feminist Network, Hollaback, Sail, GenderJam, Anchor, Reclaim the Night, The Belfast City Rockets and more. There will also be zine-making and lyric-writing workshops, and a discussion based around the play Scorch (which is showing at the Mac). As well as all that there will be loads of bands playing throughout the day with headliners in Edinburgh’s Spook School and Dublin’s Sissy.
We spoke to Noíse Ní Dhuinn, one of the organisers, to get a better picture of what the day will entail and how it all came about.
How did the idea for Outloud come about?
The event as it stands is the joining of two ideas, from myself, and from Ciara of Go Girl.
Outburst had asked me to put together a music focused event for last year’s festival, but was pushed back due to an upcoming tour. Over the intervening year the concept of what I wanted to do came together around my encounters with an emerging queer punk scene, mostly throughout the UK, by the start of this year.
Around the same time, I believe Go Girl had approached Outburst with the prospect of running a Ladyfest event, so, as the ideas are closely related, Ruth brought us together.
How important do you feel events like this are? Especially considering where we are as a country at the moment?
During my exploration of queer music events around the UK and Ireland I came to the conclusion that this should be significantly more than just a gig.
My aim is for this kind of thing to be a part of building connections and community between radical queers and trans people. I think this is very important in this country, since I predict with the recent passage of marriage equality legislation and (distinctly botched and ineffective) gender recognition legislation in the Republic, and the current focus on marriage in the north, that our movement will see massive demobilisation with some of the most vulnerable left behind.
I also generally think it’s a pretty rad opportunity to bring people into an aspect of a community and music scene that I have a lot of love for.
Tickets are £10 for the entire day so get down early for the workshops and hang about late for the music.
