Jeremy Wade is the queen in service of Puddles the Pelican, “This bird has me working like a dog,” says he/him. Disruption, Excess, Hyper Vulnerability – Wade is an extreme performer and performance maker. His works, also incorporating curation and social practice, are disturbing and thought-provoking: they revolve around queer and feminist strategies of world making, the relational ethics of care, neo liberal critique and the violence that social norms cause on bodies of difference.
Wade grew up in a mill town in Southern Maine, USA, son of two social workers. After barely graduating highschool, he got on a bus to NYC, there, he quickly made a name for himself as a club kid, hooker, glitter mess and party promoter. “I was working my ass off by bartending, gogo dancing, painting apartments, turning tricks and barely surviving the Big (Badass) Apple. I worked at the original world famous The Cock on Avenue A. which back in the day was the sleaziest most amazing gay bar in the universe. Here, you got syphilis if you sat on the couch. I was doing a lot of drugs, having a lot of sex in dark rooms, dressing up wildly, crowd surfing naked at the Cock’s legendary Saturday night party called Foxy. Eventually I threw my own parties at The Cock and a Saturday Night House Party with Honey Dijon called Audio Nasty. Cruising, being an asshole at parties and dancing in clubs were my first experiences of dance, I realized that was the only thing I was good at.”
After graduating from the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, 2000 and receiving a Bessie Award for his first evening length performance “Glory,” at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City, 2006, he moved to Berlin and since then works in close collaboration with the Hebbel Theater, Sophiensaele, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Gessnerallee, Zurich. Recently, Wade has created “Fountain,” “Death Asshole Rave Video,” “Drawn Onward,” and “Between Sirens.” In May, 2019 Jeremy premiered a new solo titled The Clearing, with musician Marc Lohr, a three-act post- apocalyptic horror trip dealing with the death of hope that was hallucinatory, overblown, bizarre and absurd, with Wade as a garbage-busting android, a tragic sufferer and a scrappy Cabaret Queen named Puddles the Pelican performing on an apocalyptic Cruise Ship. His current focus is all things Puddles.is a performer, performance maker, curator and teacher. His recent works “Together Forever”, “Death Asshole Rave Video” and “DrawnOnward” explore queer theory, failure, the death of man, zombie subjectivity, strange modes of being and affective alliances to undermine the social codes that define and oppress our bodies. In 2017 he curated “Take Care,” a symposium in the frame of the No Limits-Festival Berlin on the relational ethics that disability culture demands and will direct a three-part performance project addressing care as a political strategy comprised of: “The Battlefield Nurse” (a drag lecture performance that investigates the work of fellow nurses on the battlefield), the “Future Clinic for Critical Care” (a world-making forum dedicated to art, activism and social work), and “Between Sirens”, a new trio processing supportive propaganda for toughened times.
LISTEN / SOUND & MUSIC
THE SILVER THRESHOLD TWILIGHT REVUE with Puddles and Sunny – a concert
Miss Puddles and her Sunshine Pianist Pal Sunny the Sea Anemone aka Quentin Tolimieri are back. It’s showtime! Since her debut at HAU in 2019 Jeremy Wade as pelican Miss Puddles has been working like a dog: She has been writing, performing and recording music with Sunny and their band. Together they are A Blood and Guts Concert Cabaret Odyssey coming to you live from the basement cabaret on the ninth lower deck of a cruise ship floating through hell. Their revue is a new twist for Puddles and Band as they rearrange memory through break downs, awakenings, and ah ha moments. A survivor of the Deep Horizon Oil Spill, Miss Puddles sits at the grand piano, telling stories of love, the dodo bird, the abyss, and the light. Eventually, the whole band takes to the stage to save the audience from Puddles’ obsession with pottery classes, playing songs in the dusk by the light of a torch.
Team:
Front Bird: Puddles the Pelican aka Jeremy Wade / Piano: Sunny the Sea Anemone aka Quentin Tolimieri / Drums: Liliana Zieniawa / Bass: Ranjit Prasad / Guitar: Erik Wong / Back Up Vocals: Zoe Jamileh / Back Up Vocals and Sound Design: Harald Stojan / Text: Allison Wiltshire & Puddles the Pelican / Dramaturgy: Maika Knoblich / Costume: Josa Marx / Light design: Matthias Rieker / Artistic Mento: Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy / Leitung Proben: Michael Rollnick / Vocal Coach: Alexey Kokhanov / Honorable Bird Friend: Ezra Green / Production, Collaborator in Crime: Darcey Bennett (fleeting.live)
English (UK) 
Deutsch