Ansuman Biswas and Joshua Sofaer on their time with the Heteraclub-Team

Ansuman:

As a performer, the Heteraclub has been a revelation and a liberation for me. It has been an opportunity to open my heart and serve the goddess of love in whatever form she chooses to present herself. By serving so many Queens, of all shapes, sizes and temperaments, I have learned to love and respect the essence of the feminine. The Heteraclub has been a space in which to invent a new way of being together, free from the customary relations between men and women which have trapped us all.

Joshua:

I have never felt less involved in a project that I was involved in. I am not an expert in the needs of the audience clientele, the motivations of the performers, the subject matter, the psychological imperative, or the wider social context. I did not have the idea. When I entered the rehearsal room (a room which was to become the salon of the club that was yet to be built) I entered into a space which was somehow the opposite of the toxic masculinity that we have come to expect of heterosexual masculinity. It was a space in which my friend and colleague, Sibylle Peters, was the Queen. She shifted between contrasting roles: disrobing in order to fulfil the function of test audience participant, introducing a critical academic text for discussion, setting up the conditions for consent. I quickly settled into my task, which was to facilitate a transformation of the harmonious, loving, non-toxic, desire-led exploration of sexuality, and give it a form that could be called ‘art’. The evening conversations with Sibylle around the necessity to have an option for female orgasm, on the part of the audience, lacked the feeling of exceptionality after day 1. But as with many experimental artworks based in performance, the likelihood of it meeting the audience with success was unclear to me. That is something I still have to accept as hearsay, as after my week in rehearsal, I left.