Al Meggs

My creative practice thesis, 'Reclaiming cabaret. A queer haunted autoethnography of real, researched and imagined stories of cabaret past and present,' is in two parts. The creative element 'Ghostcards from the Meggs' is an autoethnographic novel recalling the life of a young male dancer in a small touring cabaret dance company in Italy in the 1980s, acknowledging an undocumented period in dance history. It also stories people and places from the origins of the modern cabaret in fin-de-siècle Paris, bringing the past and present together in a magically real space, where real, researched and imagined lives meet, haunt and interact within my lived experience. The critical element focuses on a new approach to autoethnographic and academic writing that offers a haunted, magically real text resisting the traditional patriarchal discourse of academic narratives through the use of an autoethnographic novel.