The "world's premier green, autistic drag queen" funded by Arts Council England

Oozing Gloop took part in Marlborough Productions' 'New Queers On The Block' programme

A page from Marlborough Productions’ website

Today I will tell you how the taxpayer funded the artist Oozing Gloop (above), described as “the world’s premier green, autistic drag queen”.

When I first read this description (without a photograph to go on), I thought “green” described someone who was into environmentalism. I had no idea that Oozing Gloop was literally green.

I discovered Oozing Gloop while trawling through the website of Marlborough Productions, “a leading UK producer of queer-led, intersectional performance, parties, heritage and radical community gatherings” based in Brighton.

Its values include “Queer”, “Decolonial” and “Caring”:

Here are some of its shows:

The Afrofuturistic space-church themed performance party

The Coast is Queer 2024 - “The UK’s Biggest and Brightest LGBTQ+ Literature Festival”

Highlights from 2023 include “Queer Ukraine” and “Why We’re Queer When We’re Not Having Sex”:

New Queers on the Block

Oozing Gloop (left)

Charitable activities?

You may be surprised to know that Marlborough Productions is a charity. (Welcome to the Charity Commission, where pretty much anything can qualify as charitable… more on this another day).

Marlborough Productions’ accounting documents (for the year ended 31 March 2023) sound very reasonable; vanilla even. The company wants “to advance education for the public benefit by the promotion of the arts, in particular but not exclusively the art of drama.”

But things get wackier further down (and not just the slanted photocopying). For instance, the theatre wants to “engage people in creative activities e.g. Radical Rhizomes our social network for Queer, Trans, Intersex, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (QTIBIPoC).”

Some of the things it lists under “Achievements and Performance” sound rather fun, such as Tarik Elmoutawakil, the Creative Director, taking “a research trip to Morocco supported by the British Council to begin R&D of a new collaboration with Hana Tefrati/Queens Collective.”

Elmoutawakil’s “current public work” is titled ‘Brownton Abbey’, an evolving Afro-Futures Performance Party that centres disabled QTIPOC (queer, trans and intersex People of Colour). Brownton Abbey reclaims and reinterprets QTIPOC spirituality and ritual, channelling it into an out-of-this-world, accessible party.”

How much?

As you can see below, Marlborough has had £86,450 in government grants (2021-2022):

It also receives £225,000 in annual funding (for 2023-2026) from ACE.

How Marlborough uses some of its funding

Since 2018, Marlborough Productions has offered individual grants worth £12,500 for LGBTQ+ performance-makers. An advert for the scheme in 2022 reads: “This phase of the New Queers on the Block project opens with a callout for LGBTQIA+ performance artists to apply for one of three £12,500 commissions to fund full-time residencies from January – June 2022. These grants aim to support three artists (or groups of artists) to embark on a 6-month development period with, crucially, no expectation to deliver a show or other fixed outcome at the end.”

So artists don’t even have to make anything…

Oozing Gloop

Here’s where Oozing Gloop comes in.

I don’t especially mean to pick on Oozing Gloop - who is now apparently living in Berlin - but you can see why my attention was drawn to this artist formerly commissioned by New Queers on the Block.… who’s green.

Here are some photos from Oozing Gloop’s Instagram:

Oozing Gloop even had a show at the (taxpayer-funded) Southbank Centre in 2021, titled:

Event bumf reads “GLOOPTOPIA! is a direct challenge to the notion that people with Autism ‘struggle with social imagination’ – and also challenges the simple fact it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

It continues: “Oozing Gloop’s practice relates primarily to the interplay of trash and transmutation over the body. He/she/it re-stages folkloric encounters to isolate the universal elements in our shared political landscape.”

Relatable…

In 2022 he/she/it also performed at Battersea Arts Centre, which is also funded by ACE (£706,665 per year):

Not even The Guardian was impressed, calling Oozing Gloop’s show “a tadpole that’s yet to become a frog.”

You think the taxpayer funding stops there?

Not only has Marlborough Productions been funded by ACE and government grants, but it receives other sources of taxpayer funding (2022-2023 accounts below):

For instance, the British Council has funded Marlborough - which receives grant-in-aid from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (making up around 15 per cent of its total income).

Marlborough’s accounts also say the theatre “Secured funding from Arts Council England and the Arts Humanities Research Council to support the production of Galatea, a trans inclusive pre-Shakespearean text”:

You can read more about this production here, which was already awarded £800,000 (in taxpayer funds) from the Arts and Humanities Council. My Telegraph article about it below:

Clore Leadership

One thing I found particularly interesting was Clore Leadership, which funded Marlborough Theatre in 2022.

It turned out that one of Clore Leadership’s principal funders is ACE. The accounts look as if two separate organisations funded Marlborough Theatre, but you could say it’s more like one (given that one partially funds the other).

Either way, the taxpayer is spending a lot of money on tadpoles…