Part queer courting ritual - part hypnotic disappearing act, Plue playfully examines queer visibility and intimacy, exploring the fluctuating degrees LGBTQIA+ people feel seen and pressured to camouflage. A collaboration between Eli Lewis and their partner, choreographer Joe Garbett, Plue was spurred on by Eli and Joe’s pandemic experience as a queer / non-binary couple living in rural England. Eli and Joe are interested in the nuanced ways queer people signal and / or reveal their queerness to different people in different situations, how you can feel seen or invisible depending on who is in the room with you, and queerness’ mischievous tendency to expand beyond the parameters it’s given and spill out in to view. Through a series of flirtatious peek-a-booings and coy disappearing acts, Eli and Joe want to occupy and play within the space between ‘who people assume you are’ and ‘who you know yourself to be’, and explore the awkward disconnect of how it feels to be visible but not seen.

Eli Lewis (they/them), a queer, neurodivergent performance artist, is an award-winning British choreographer making performance that playfully straddles dance and live art. Currently a Work Place associate artist at The Place, in recent years they have been interested in how people hold & process risk, occupying precarious spaces, and re-finding agency and playfulness within states of not knowing. Their practice examines where precarity intersects with queerness, ecology, collapse, intimacy and care. They are interested in the relationship between humans and objects and much of their performance work uses large pieces of set design to explore these themes. Eli is driven by a desire to support people to reclaim risky spaces, and carve out space to slow down, re-find agency and play. Their practice is slow, inclusive and care-centred. They work to provide positive, queer-led spaces that connect communities in creative exchange and facilitate queer joy.