Saturday night on Sauchiehall Street and happy revellers lurch and totter past. Lads yell to mates across the road, girls tug at miniskirts to just-about cover their bums. It’s a familiar booze-fuelled blur. At a club night inside Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) however, there’s no alcohol to be found. Not because there isn’t a bar, but because the punters have boycotted it in solidarity with staff in the midst of an employment dispute.
The water-only policy doesn’t dampen spirits. On stage, one woman performs a fusion of classical Indian dance and burlesque, a man adorned with flowers is attached to ropes the audience can pull and control, and a pair of trans performers (appear to) inject each other with oestrogen on stage. This is Buzzcut festival, on the edges of live art, dance and queer club culture. Something organiser Karl Taylor calls “a scramble of ideas”.
