Queerly Beloved Pride
Manchester Pride 2023
Manchester Pride's 2023 Parade celebrated a landmark moment — ten years of marriage equality in the UK — under the joyful theme Queerly Beloved. Each year, the parade's opening section is led by a community group of volunteers drawn from Manchester's LGBTQ+ community, setting the tone for the entire event. In 2023, I partnered with Manchester Pride to design and deliver this lead section — a dance section choreographed by Ruth Jones and performed by 26 community volunteers, with the support of 5 professional dancers moving amongst the group to lead music cues and bolster confidence.
One of the first things that struck me when I heard the theme was an almost disbelieving "oh my god, is that all it's been?" — and that feeling became the creative heart of the project. I wanted the section to honour the fact that queer love, queer joy, and queer celebration are nothing new. They have always existed. The legal recognition is recent; the history is long.
Manchester Pride were clear that they didn't want the section filled with traditional bride-and-groom imagery. My response was to pitch a wedding party of guests so queer, so flamboyant and fabulous that any one of them could have been the bride or the groom. All guests equal, all celebrating each other. For inspiration, I drew strongly on the New York ballroom scene — perhaps one of the boldest and most joyful expressions of queer celebration in living memory. It felt important to honour some of the giants on whose shoulders today's queer liberation stands.
The ballroom scene resonated with me for this project in particular because of what it represented beyond spectacle: chosen family, community bonds formed by people who had often been turned away from their own. Celebration in the face of a society that did the opposite. The spirit of the ballroom also felt deeply connected to wedding pageantry and ceremony. But also with the drama and the mess and the realness that any wedding carries too.
With that in mind, it felt essential that every participant had genuine agency in how they were represented. I collaborated one-to-one with all 26 volunteers (as well as the professional dancers) to create costumes that felt right for each individual — their identity, their aesthetic, and how they wanted to move. I provided the group with a curated pool of reference imagery and designs as a starting point, and the resulting costumes were both deeply individual and cohesive as a group.
Because the section was also a dance section, collaboration extended beyond costume design. I worked closely with the choreographer and with individual participants to ensure that every costume facilitated and accentuated the dancers' movements — costume as a partner to performance, not a constraint on it.
The radiating heart led the parade at the section's head, and the response said everything. Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, and Mark Fletcher the CEO of Manchester Pride described the section as "Pure Queer Joy!!"
One of the first things that struck me when I heard the theme was an almost disbelieving "oh my god, is that all it's been?" — and that feeling became the creative heart of the project. I wanted the section to honour the fact that queer love, queer joy, and queer celebration are nothing new. They have always existed. The legal recognition is recent; the history is long.
Manchester Pride were clear that they didn't want the section filled with traditional bride-and-groom imagery. My response was to pitch a wedding party of guests so queer, so flamboyant and fabulous that any one of them could have been the bride or the groom. All guests equal, all celebrating each other. For inspiration, I drew strongly on the New York ballroom scene — perhaps one of the boldest and most joyful expressions of queer celebration in living memory. It felt important to honour some of the giants on whose shoulders today's queer liberation stands.
The ballroom scene resonated with me for this project in particular because of what it represented beyond spectacle: chosen family, community bonds formed by people who had often been turned away from their own. Celebration in the face of a society that did the opposite. The spirit of the ballroom also felt deeply connected to wedding pageantry and ceremony. But also with the drama and the mess and the realness that any wedding carries too.
With that in mind, it felt essential that every participant had genuine agency in how they were represented. I collaborated one-to-one with all 26 volunteers (as well as the professional dancers) to create costumes that felt right for each individual — their identity, their aesthetic, and how they wanted to move. I provided the group with a curated pool of reference imagery and designs as a starting point, and the resulting costumes were both deeply individual and cohesive as a group.
Because the section was also a dance section, collaboration extended beyond costume design. I worked closely with the choreographer and with individual participants to ensure that every costume facilitated and accentuated the dancers' movements — costume as a partner to performance, not a constraint on it.
The radiating heart led the parade at the section's head, and the response said everything. Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, and Mark Fletcher the CEO of Manchester Pride described the section as "Pure Queer Joy!!"
