We sat down for an exclusive interview with Katy Baird ahead of her show Get Off coming to Edfringe at Summerhall, Main Hall | 20th – 25th August at 22:50
Part rave, part reckoning – a brutally honest trip through sex, shame and staying alive.
The show’s called Get Off — and people might assume that’s just about sex. But it also feels like it’s about so much more. How do all of the layers play together for you?
It’s interesting that the first thing it made you think about was sex – which definitely tracks with the show. I also think about getting off your face or get off my back, which both fit with the themes of the work: pleasure, excess, consumption, not fitting into a society that can be overwhelming and a little too much.
The show lives in that tension – the high and the comedown, the joy, the body and the pressure to conform. It’s also definitely a get off your high horse to people who have strong opinions about how others should live. It’s about claiming space and refusing to apologise for how you move through the world. As one of my inspirations and mentors, the late artist Adrian Howells, always said – it’s all allowed.
Shame and pleasure are both pulsing through this show. What’s your relationship with those ideas now — and how has it changed since you first started performing?
I’ve been making this show for five years now and it’s been a long journey. It’s very much about my relationship with the world we find ourselves in right now and how we navigate through it. I do wish we could let ourselves feel more pleasure and less shame, but it’s so often intertwined.
Growing up queer, you carry shame early on. So yeah, we party, we have sex, we have fun and that becomes a way to survive. A way to connect.A bold refusal to be ruled by shame. For me, the show holds all of that, the fun, the mess, the contradictions. It’s a space where those feelings can sit next to each other without having to be resolved. I think that’s what a lot of queer life is like – finding joy in the chaos.
What was it like working with Kim Noble — someone who also makes very powerful work? What did they bring to the process?
Working with Kim has been amazing. When I first approached him to work with me, I said I wanted to take my work to the next level and he totally got it and I think because he believed I could do it, I started to believe it too. It’s important to say that even though I am a solo artist, this is not a solo work. I have had the privilege to work with not just Kim but an amazing creative team, and it is our work together that has made this show something I’m really proud of. It’s a proper collaboration and you can feel that in the work.
There’s something powerful about refusing to make yourself palatable. Has that always come naturally, or was it a conscious shift in your artistic life?
Ha! This is a good question. Coming out in the late nineties in Glasgow was the beginning of that feeling of being an outsider and when you’re on the outside looking in, you start to see all the ways societal norms don’t make any sense and can actually be very toxic and harmful, and to be part of that – to be palatable – is something I have no interest in.
Unpalatable is also linked to class. Sometimes moving in the world of the arts – which is dominated by terribly nice middle-class liberal women of a certain age or cis gay men with their own networks I can never be part of – means there doesn’t always feel like a place for me or my work. It’s not palatable to them.
I heard once that a programmer called me ‘vulgar’, and I thought yes – yes, I am. And if you want to see vulgar, then you will see it. Here you go – here’s a whole show revelling in it. I never want to be palatable.
You’ve performed across Europe and now you’re bringing this to Edinburgh — what are you hoping people take away from Get Off?
It’s been amazing working with CAMPO to do a European tour. Taking my work – which feels so British – to places like Germany, Poland and Finland has been really interesting, because audiences get it, and it makes me feel like we’re more connected and united than we think.
I have to have English subtitles because of my Scottish accent, which I find hilarious. I know I live in England now, but I am and alway will be Scottish, and Get Off feels very much linked to Glasgow life to me, so I’m really proud to be representing us abroad.
I’m hoping an Edinburgh audience will be up for it – it’s on pretty late at night, so I reckon they will be. All I can ever ask from my work is that people recognise something of themselves in it – even if their lives look nothing like mine. I’m not trying to give answers or teach anyone a lesson. I just want to put something honest and messy and joyful on stage. If it makes people laugh, feel something, or go home thinking about their own life a bit differently – then that’s enough for me.