Queer community, performance, and a living archive.

That night at Centre 151, with Pharos and a circle of student performers, we kept one. Let me show you a different archive: memory danced, not framed; joy practiced, not captioned. Think of a dance-floor archive, basslines as index, breath as ink, kept by moving bodies, not glass. For those just arriving, follow me into a run of queer performances, odd, campy, serious, gloriously experimental, where the record is made in real time. Ephemeral — yes. Luminous — also.

Why I went

It had been one of those student weeks, emails multiplying, readings breeding in the margins, a low weather front of anxiety parking itself behind my ribs. So I did the only sensible thing: I packed my worry into a pocket and threw myself into the night. I headed to Centre 151 in Hackney a Vietnamese community hall that, for a few hours, would become something soft and bright.

Who was making the night (and why)

The room belonged to Pharos — a queer label born in Beijing, now strung across London by visas, degrees, and night buses. Many of them are students (RCA, UAL, KCL, LSE, etc.). They’re here to study, yes, but also to stitch a scene: to make a place where ESEA/Chinese diaspora queers and friends can test work, find each other, and build a social life that isn’t just survival. A paper sign at the door read consent first, care always. The volunteers learned your name, then said it right the second time. It didn’t feel like a brand. It felt like a lighthouse you walk toward.

Myth, mischief, and becoming

Before the lights dropped, a quick introduction, so you know who’s who.

• Mars (they/them) is part of the Pharos crew — a drag/theatre maker now studying in London. Their work doesn’t impersonate so much as reassemble: classical motifs are dragged side‑ways into queer elsewheres until they start to feel like a future you can touch.

• Mercury (she/her) is a performer and host whose practice swings between camp mischief and ritual refusal. Also a London‑based student, she thinks with pop, with myth, and with the lingering afterglow of the dance floor. (We’ll come back to her later tonight.)

Onstage, Mars introduced Crossing the Sea with a smile: “This isn’t your traditional drag show, it’s a theatrical queer experience: odd, campy, silly, serious, ridiculous, experimental, and, above all, fun!” They began with a sentence many of us carry from childhood — 八仙过海，各显神通 (The Eight Immortals cross the sea, each showing their powers) — and tilted it toward now: “the queer future is right before our eyes.” It landed less as citation than incantation. The Eight Immortals weren’t national icons to salute; they were vessels to ferry us through displacement, memory, and the not‑yet‑home. Later, Mars would put it this way: the sea looks like a boundary, but it isn’t — wet feet already mean the future has started.

In another piece — Big Ball Small Ball Drop on the Floor — a Tang‑poem image of pearls on a jade plate was dragged into the club and joyfully misread. Nothing here tried to prove “authenticity.” Chineseness was treated as a sensorium — something you feel through misalignment and remake while crossing borders and bodies.

By then I understood: I didn’t need the night to tell me who we are; it was letting me feel what we’re becoming. And when Mercury returned later for Peach Escape, that lesson only sharpened.

Later, Mercury (she/her) returned as the youngest of the Seven Fairies — the one who is never allowed to descend, who never receives her sacred peach. The piece, Peach Escape, turned Centre 151 into a handmade heaven: paper cranes bought on the cheap, gauze ribbons, pink light too sweet to be divine. Harnessed to wires, she stepped off the balcony in a flare of fog and fabric

The crowd (and the “WE” we built)

Between numbers, the room revealed itself in small gestures. Outfits were careful and free — sequins beside denim, sharp eyeliner beside bare faces. No one was ranking anyone else. Respect was the dress code: people made space for each other to move; someone cleared a path without being asked; when a phone camera appeared, others stepped back; a tech knelt to fix a cable and asked consent before touching a mic pack. 

I didn’t feel I had to perform “cool” to deserve a place in the room. It was enough to be present. Strangers passed water without ceremony; friends checked in with a look. When someone was overwhelmed, a steward guided them to the side to breathe. It was a gentle crowd — attentive, friendly, capable of joy without sharp edges. That is how a we takes shape: not by spectacle, but by a hundred quiet acts of care.

After the show (and what stayed)

I left alone and wandered south through night‑wet streets — past Vietnamese cafés closing their shutters, past a bus I nearly missed and then didn’t, toward the centre. It was still early enough to go home and do something unglamorous and necessary. In my headphones, the bass line from the hall blurred into other nights I’ve known: back in undergraduate, studying to electronic dance music until midnight; Shanghai, Julu Road, drinking with a friend; Beijing, a bar table where a career question became a chorus of advice.

Performance spaces like this are liminal — edges that let memory and worry rise. It felt a little Dionysian: come dream with us, push joy to the edge, make a poem from the margins. Not because there’s no future, but because everything is temporary and we must make the joy we need.

If you’re just arriving

Maybe you won’t “understand” every piece. Maybe there isn’t a right answer. Go anyway. Stand near the circle and sing off‑key. Offer water; ask for help. Leave when your body says leave. Return when your heart remembers the route.

Pharos reminded me that so many of us here are students — migrants in progress — trying to build a community in a borrowed room. We came to LSE to study futures; nights like this are how we rehearse them. At Centre 151, myth stopped being a symbol and became a bridge.