Let'sss

WHO ARE QUEER FAITH & THEMANY, “RADICAL FAERIES & PLURALS” ?

what do each of these words mean to us ?

- "Queer" : Reclaimed and derooted from it's original meaning of "Deviant", we call "Queer" whatever challenges norms in any way.
- "Faith" : We BELIEVE in Queerness as a powerful tool to counterbalance today's world social reality. We know it's happening. We see it. We want to be part of it until our last breath. :-) Aaand Faith is also the name of the one of us who writes most of our songs.
- "TheMany" : This is our system's name. Some of us have individual personal names, amongst them we have Faith, Fiesta, Phooka, Foolove, D, Itsik, Angel, Johnny Slap, Pickles, and Serge Slef, to name only the main "players" (also called "Fronters").
- "Radical Faeries" : This one is tricky to explain. We like how it sounds by itself. However, it does find its origins in a Queer, Spiritual and Global community called the Radical Faeries, which has changed our lives through some of its aspects, like self-identification, consensus practice and heart-sharing. We might say more about it with time, but as Faeries ourselves, we like some privacy around our "family", and the "Radical" part is rooted in principles such as Radical Inclusion, Radical Love.. etc. Our existence and our ways of navigating life today have been made possible by meeting this community four years ago. We're very grateful to our fellow faeries for how they have unlocked a deep understanding of ourselves, just by being who they are (and they are DIVERSE).

HISTORY

We have a past, before the Faeries, at a time when any introspection led to different kinds of internal confusion, when (we thought) we were ONE. Three decades of self-misunderstanding and weird chaotic and sometimes freaky phases of depression or delusion..But still, we managed to be functional and productive...AS AN ACTOR.
We visited a circus when the body was two years old, and kept going on and on about becoming a clown one day, until our little brain figured out that the traveling life with no anchor or fixed home at all would be too much (we didn't know anything yet about clowns such as Charlie Chaplin !), and we began looking for an alternative that would allow having a home somewhere whilst traveling as well. We have a sister who acts in films who made that option visible and seemingly possible to us, considering that she was having quite a big success and was managing a carreer that kept her secure financially.. Then, when the body was seven years old, we saw "Orlando" on stage, directed by Bob Wilson, with Isabelle Huppert (huge french star) in the flesh, and that was such an artistic shock/epiphany that the very next week we started our first theatre class, and never stopped. It took us a long time to identify the reasons why theatre was so important. We went from…
- "I want to become the characters and tell their vision of the world",
to - "I think I actually want to tell stories, more than character's lives, and I want to use different mediums", that's when we began to write again little stories, scenarios for video projects, etc...
to - "Oh my queerness ! We actually ARE several people, experiencing derealisation, depersonalisation on a daily basis, and now it makes so much sense that we are interested in intersectional projects, inter-subjectivity and reality being shaped and re-shaped by perspectives !!!" (Sartre coming back from buried school memories...)
to now being something more like : - "Ok, we're here, it's a mess because we have to re-interpret our whole lives and memories to finally find meaning in situations that were impossible to understand before, BECAUSE THE ONLY REPRESENTATION OF DISSOCIATION IN THE MEDIA ALL OUR LIVES HAS BEEN WHAT HOLLYWOOD SPREADS AROUND. IF WE HAD ACTUALLY IDENTIFIED WITH IT CONSCIOUSLY WE COULD ONLY BELIEVE THAT WE WERE DANGEROUS PEOPLE.”

Realising the disastrous consequences of misrepresentation on so many people's lives made us realise a very common goal we have: Being witnesses of these times, being mirrors to the depths of emotions this society buries with the people it neglects, to build emotional bridges and take down the boundaries between what the norm tells us is acceptable and the actual existence of such a diversity of human features and skills, perceptions and sensitivities.

We believe that human kind is some kind of "mega-system" within the system of the planet itself, we believe that we are all mirrors of each other, a multiplicity of the aspects which each of us could be or have become, or become and embrace.

That's a lot isn't it ?

Soooo let's get to the point of this letter to you .. :
WHAT ARE WE DOING ?
Even if our career as actor(s) keeps going, it goes slower since we have focused on our research around the above topics over the last few years. With no funding, we decided to create a show based on songs we had written for a loved one, widely inspired by the community of the RF, something that would break down binaries like Good-Bad; Masculine-Feminine; Old-Young; Foreign-Familiar; Human-NonHuman. Binaries which operate in this world, like doors that people open and close to themselves and others without further questioning, excluding people and experiences from crossing their path.
Our challenge was to create something that would stand between the realms of Magic, Paganism and triviality, something that would distract people from the classic binaries, but would still invite and allow them to connect emotionally.

"Queer Faith and TheMany - Radical Faeries" was born.

The project went through several different phases across France, Belgium and UK :

- Being performed in our RF community, in mountains and castles full of magical beings
- A weekly street performance on the market place of a little town
- Open-mic gigs in bars, building bridges
- A queer project performed in queer spaces.
- A show/ritual/performance in specific chosen places; LGBT centres, private spaces, gardens, hidden in cities...
- It expanded through video with the shooting of our first music video (currently in post-production and not yet released)
- Audio recordings. This took off when we finally acquired software that allowed us to sing together ! (we're still overly excited by this discovery and we're currently working on self producing all our songs....)
- Selves-made videos since the begining of Lock-down due to Covid 19.
- " A sWORDs CLUB " a series of videos platforming texts written by other neuroatypical authors writing about their own experiences of dissociative situations. We've set up a crowdfunding for this project , here :

https://crowdfund.edfringe.com/queer-faith-themany---radical-faeries-plurals

Here’s also our PayPal, if you feel generous and want to support us directly :
paypal.me/QueerFaithandTheMany

Love !
TheMany

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