Adelphi welcomes transgender art

Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel is being transformed into a ‘Tranny’ hotel as part of a European-wide arts festival taking place in November.

The Exchange Radical Moments festival is a live art event that will see 11 events taking place simultaneously across Europe in countries such as Belgium, Austria, Germany, Sweden and Moldova on Friday 11 November 2011.

Organisers chose Liverpool due to the city’s year as European Capital of Culture year in 2008.

The event, named Tranny Hotel, is a weekend-long celebration of Transgender arts, which will take place at the Adelphi Hotel from Friday 11 November until Sunday 13 November.

Transgender performers and artists from across the globe will perform at the event including Scottish transsexual playwright Jo Clifford, who brings her piece The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven, an early version of which was originally performed at the Glasgay festival in 2009, to Liverpool. The piece will see small audiences meeting and interacting with Queen Jesus in a hotel room throughout the weekend.

Spanish artist REgina Fiz will perform her piece The Ritual Wedding which also demands an intimate audience in an intimate space. The piece aims to draw on tradition and precise ritual, and leave the audience evoking memories and past emotions.

Norwegian artist Ane Lan also brings her piece Irma’s Room, about Sigmund Freud’s patient Irma, to Liverpool. Small audiences of just one or two people will experience the piece at a time.

Other artists include Canadian folk performer Rae Spoon, drag, cabaret and performance artist Jonny Woo, Tom Shaw, whose piece Drag Mountain will see the stairways and halls covered in a string of dresses, before Shaw wears them simultaneously and American artist Lazlo Pearlman, will perform his piece Dance Me To The End of Love, which explores intimacy, love, partnering and the transgender body. A full line up of performers and acts will be announced shortly.

Tranny Hotel Liverpool also forms part of this year’s festival of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender culture by Homotopia, which successfully secured its £70,000 funding for three years from Arts Council England after making a complaint to ACE when it initially pulled funding.

Mandy Romero, event organiser, said: “I’m so excited that the Tranny Hotel project is going to be open to so many people. Not many projects made it into “Exchange Radical Moments” which is such an important Festival and I’m sure that our weekend of performance and events will be a good thing for Liverpool, for the arts and for the transgender community. It’s time that the presence of transgender people and the performers who express their world had the positive attention and appreciation they deserve and for three days in Liverpool we will do our best to advance the cause.

“It’s always good when Liverpool welcomes artists to the city and, like the Biennial here, we have a great line-up of performers in all sorts of unusual and stylish locations for everybody to discover. They’re coming from far afield, but we also have trans performers with local connections. Plays, concerts, strange and wonderful encounters in hotel rooms, most of them in the famous Adelphi Hotel – there’s something for everyone in “Tranny Hotel”. Thanks to our partnerships with “Exchange Radical Moments” and Homotopia we’re able to offer a really rich programme and I can’t wait to see how it all turns out. I hope that this will be one of those moments when transgender art moves to a new level and I’m proud that it’s all happening in Liverpool.”

For further details visit the event website here