Staging Intermediality and Queerness in Jasmine Gardosi’s Dancing to Music You Hate

In this article, I investigate the employment of formal fluidity and cross-arts experimentation in
spoken word theatre using Irina O. Rajewsky’s (2005) framework of intermediality along with the
concept of ‘transgenre’ to study the performance of transqueer narratives on stage. To this end, I
examine the show 'Dancing to Music You Hate' by the former Birmingham Poet Laureate (2022–24)
Jasmine Gardosi, using a combination of archival video of the show’s premiere at Warwick Arts
Centre in October 2021 and my own critical observations of the live performance at Birmingham’s
Symphony Hall in January 2023 as the focus of my analysis. My research is framed by two central
questions: 1) How does Jasmine Gardosi’s employment of an intermedial genre-fluid artistic strategy
communicate the themes of queerness and gender fluidity? and 2) How does Gardosi stage, perform
and express this queering of artistic boundaries to make it visible and audible in their performance?
I demonstrate the ways in which Gardosi’s genre-bending show incorporates a mix of beatboxing,
poetry and collaboration with a music band live on stage to facilitate meaning making. By utilising
Stephen Greer’s (2012) theory of queer performance and concepts of transgenre put forward by
Jay Prosser (1998) and Trish Salah (2021), I analyse the poet’s deployment of transgeneric queering
strategies in both the poetic text as well as the performance. Finally, I argue that the anxieties of
the closet and ‘outness’ extant in earlier parts of the performance and the concluding celebration of
gender euphoria significantly inform transqueer expression in 'Dancing to Music You Hate'.