Camp Visual Splendour: Nichole Fitch & Christopher Adams-Cohen on their kinky ballet about vengeful gay ghosts for AQNB’s Artist Statement podcast

, 4 August 2022
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“It’s a revenge fantasy,” says Christopher Adams-Cohen, about their current work-in-development with Nichole Fitch, a play exploring sex, sexuality and the artistic drive, called The Dew Collectors. “It’s like, what if we were in this hetero structured place, and we riled them all up into the gayest possible dance they could do?” Speaking to editor Steph Kretowicz for AQNB’s latest Artist Statement podcast, the two Los Angeles-based artists have managed to make their individual creative practices collide in a bawdy spectacle of extravagance and deeply reflective eroticism. 

Both growing up in Pasadena, Fitch and Adams-Cohen have been friends first and collaborators second since age 12, finding each other in their shared appreciation for classical theatre, and a particular kind of aesthetic sexuality that imbues familiar forms with a new spirit of queer celebration.

One is primarily a painter—whose often provocative and fanciful creatures have been popping up throughout LA over the past few years—and the other is an actor-director whose forays into playwriting have been presented in Berlin, New York and Los Angeles, leading to this current collaboration that began during a residency at London’s Soho Revue. With their current work in progress the two artists combine their love of camp and the classics to invade and transgress the canon with a kinky ballet about vengeful gay ghosts.

‘Camp Visual Splendour’ is the latest in our Artist Statement podcast series, with past episodes featuring Cristine Brache, Margaret HainesRuben Ulises Rodriguez MontoyaTerre Thaemlitz and more. The full episode is accessible to our subscribers right now on Patreon. Sign up now: www.patreon.com/aqnb.**