Review: Natural Behaviour by Thick & Tight

Part variety night, part biology lecture sprung to life, part clarion call of UK biodiversity loss, Thick & Tight’s award-winning Natural Behaviour is a gallery of performed portraits of human and non-human creatures. At the Corn Exchange it asked a deceptively simple question, what counts as natural, and answered it by celebrating the diversity that all life depends on. Its queer perspective is focused, 360° and 20/20.

The menu of subjects is gloriously odd: a pair of moths, a pantomime horse, the dust drifting through Quentin Crisp’s room, flies on a space ship wall, a mourning songbird, a single blade of grass and lesbian seagulls. The seagulls get the briefest slot, a short comic interlude with animatronics, but they carry real weight. Referencing a 1970s study that found female gull pairs nesting together in California, the sketch makes a point close to the show’s heart: research matters as much as visibility when challenging prejudice and data and evidence shattering the the god-given natural order. For anyone who has heard “unnatural” thrown as an insult, watching the word dismantled with such tenderness and mischief is deeply satisfying.