Entering Glory Whole feels like being sucked into a steamy post-apocalyptic rave cathedral — equal parts sensory assault and sacred ritual. A powerful collaboration between brutalist sewer-pop trio Grecco Romank and drag-creature Copper MaeSteal, the work unfolds as a queer fever dream.

We are immersed into four visceral scenes stitched together by bodily forms and fluids, strobes, and sonic pressures. The space is configured as a cross, MaeSteal as a central provocateur who divides audience and performance into quadrants. No stage, and no distance from actions as such.

We move with the performers, sometimes too close for comfort. Before we know it, we are orienting our bodies with movements that dissect and cross the space.

Each performer inhabits a distinct mode of psychological intensity. One walks an endless treadmill, runway-ready and slowly unravelling, perhaps a critique of bodily perfectionism in motion. Another thrashes at their synths like a possessed rave-scientist. Vocals veer between the one with gravel-throated growls to the other with operatic highs, anchoring and lifting the room’s energy betwixt and between.

And then there is MaeSteal: commanding, sexy, masked, spiked, oozing — a creature of latex, kink, and drag. They are slicing across the room with confrontational and tender interventions, disrupting and exposing our voyeuristic urges.

MaeSteal’s costuming and scenic logic are world-building at its most tactile: distorted appendages, melting plastic, apocalypse-informed silhouettes. It’s grotesque, glamorous, and wholly queer — challenging beauty standards, fitness and plastic surgery cultures.

Masking softens and distorts human features to invoke alien and hybrid life forms. Other form designs subvert normative gendered silhouettes, asking us to reconsider our assumptions. MaeSteal reminds us of the origins of the use of ‘queer’, intended as an insult

of the abnormal, strange or monstrous, here these traits are honoured, ritualised.

Soundtracked by Grecco Romank’s industrial, sweaty, dungeon-club sonics (think 90s goth warehouse rave meets a contemporary withdrawal into the sewers of society to escape the hysteria above ground), Glory Whole oozes with dark seduction. There’s tension, danger, and various sex theatrics of torture and consensual enforcement. 

Strobe-heavy and unrelenting, all your cells vibrate when near the speakers. The show may have felt overwhelming for some, magnetic and hypnotic for others — yet in true rave form, you carve out your corners in the experience to breathe. It’s confrontational, yet also cathartic. 

This is queer subcultural communion, a temporary coagulation of bodies and electro bangers. Steamy, anarchic, and unforgettable — Glory Whole or other productions by this collaboration are a must-see, be ready to melt, move and mutate.

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