about the festival
The Gender House Queer Arts Festival is back and raring to go, presenting a small but powerful programme of three queer contemporary drag performances that will blow you away. Celebrating an art form that is inherently queer, this year’s festival brings together artists working across satire, somatic performance, contemporary dance, and large-scale musical spectacle. Marking the fourth edition of the festival, the programme presents three distinct approaches to contemporary drag — from drag king satire, to embodied somatic ritual, to full-throttle post-apocalyptic cabaret.
The festival is excited to present for the first time on Danish soil, Canadian drag artist Pearle Harbour, known for her acid wit, fearless humour, and electrifying cabaret. She brings her performance Agit-Pop!, a high-voltage doomsday drag spectacle that combines live music, demented storytelling, and bold re-imaginings of 20th-century pop hits by David Bowie, Britney Spears, the Beach Boys, and more. Like “Judy Garland at Carnegie, on acid,” Pearle confronts a world in crisis with spectacle, satire, and musical virtuosity — a truly unforgettable performance.
We are equally excited to present a powerful double programme of Danish-premiering works on the small stage. From Berlin (Germany), drag queen and choreographer’s Olympia Bukkakis and Maria F. Scaroni bring Unsex Me Here, a 70-minute duet blending contemporary dance and drag. Through somatic drag, ritual, and physicality, Olympia and Maria explore queens, witches, and outsider feminities in a performance that is immersive, playful, and full of excess, making its Danish premiere a must-see.
Joining them, Norwegian choreographer and performer Ann-Christin Kongsness, through her drag king alter ego Robin, presents a pre-premier of Minority Man, a razor-sharp solo satire on masculinity in crisis. Witty, inventive, and unapologetically provocative, Robin hijacks society’s expectations of men to create new and revealing fictions of manhood. Together, these two premieres form a dynamic small-stage double programme, where drag is critical, embodied, and endlessly inventive.
From Canada, Norway, and Germany, these three premieres celebrate the richness, inventiveness, and power of contemporary drag. Across post-apocalyptic cabaret, somatic dance-duet, and drag king satire, the festival shines a spotlight on three radically different ways drag can move, provoke, and enchant. This fourth edition is a truly international celebration of queer performance, where boundaries are pushed, genres are blurred, and the art of drag comes alive in all its irreverent, daring, and unforgettable forms.
shaping this years festival
For the first time in the festival’s herstory, this edition of The Gender House Queer Arts Festival steps away from sole curation by Artistic Director Andreas Constantinou. Instead, the 2025 edition emerges from a collective curatorial and advisory process, inviting new perspectives on what contemporary drag can be, and where it can go.
With the ambition of bringing a wider spectrum of international contemporary drag practices to Aarhus, the festival assembled an external advisory and curator team composed of both working artists and curators: Michael Caldwell, Fu Kuen Tang, Anders Duckworth, Ann-Christin Kongsness, and Olympia Bukkakis. The group was formed to create a dialogue between artistic practice and curatorial vision - between those who make the work and those who frame, host, and support it.
The formation of this expanded curatorial structure was developed in collaboration with former producer Sigrid Aakvik, who played a key role in bringing the advisory and curator team together. Aakvik has also co-curated previous editions of the festival alongside Andreas Constantinou, contributing significantly to the festival’s programme.
Over the course of a year, the team met through a series of online conversations, culminating in a shared research visit to Aarhus in 2025. Here, the collective encountered the festival’s spaces, contexts, and ambitions first-hand. These meetings became a space for exchange: discussing the urgencies facing queer performance today, the shifting languages of drag as an expanded art form, and how different artistic and curatorial positions could shape this year’s programme together.
The intention behind this collaborative structure was not simply to select performances, but to build a curatorial process that mirrors drag itself: relational, hybrid, critical, and constantly in motion. By bringing artists and presenters into the same room, the festival sought to open multiple points of entry into the making of the edition, allowing lived artistic experience to sit alongside curatorial strategy.
Throughout the year, the festival pursued funding to realise a large international programme of contemporary drag, envisioned across the city in collaboration with multiple venues. However, this full-scale vision could not be realised within the available funding outcomes. Nevertheless, the team chose not to cancel this year’s edition. Instead, these conditions became a productive turning point. Rather than reducing ambition, the focus shifted toward proximity and encounter: assembling a programme of three works that create intimate, immediate, and deeply felt experiences of how contemporary drag is evolving today.
The result is an edition shaped as much by dialogue and adaptation as by artistic vision, a festival built collectively, responding to real conditions, and grounded in the belief that drag remains one of the most inventive, critical, and transformative performance languages of our time.
OUR AMAzing partners
With great gratitude and acknowledgement, Himherandit Productions would like to give thanks to all collaborators and supporters over the years, and especially to all those making The GenderHouse Festival#3 happen. Without both human and financial support the festival would not exists. THANK YOU ALL!
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