VillagePeople
VILLAGE PEOPLE CAMP FEST
Can’t Stop the Music
(1980, Dir. Nancy Walker, USA, 124 min)
Saturday 18 June 2011 @ 3:30 pm
(doors open at 3:15 pm)
8 euro (day membership)/Free tea, coffee, and cake
The New Theatre, 43 East Essex Street,
Temple Bar, Dublin 2
(Entrance through Connolly Bookshop)
Fully wheelchair accessible venue
Probably the campest film ever made! Absolutely hilarious and mindless fun. Can’t Stop the Music! is a “biography” of the greatest gay-friendly band ever to make it to the mainstream, the Village People. Who said that the Dublin Film Qlub only screens serious art-house films? Camp exuberance is also part of LGBTQ culture, and we want to celebrate it with Pride!
The Village People, made of six spaced-out men from New York’s gay neighbourhood Greenwich Village, each adopting a favourite fantasy gay role (biker, cowboy, construction worker, policeman, indian, army recruit), took over the world in the eighties. They have inspired boys and girls, and anyone in between, for three decades now – from the ‘drag king’ explosion to The Petshop Boys. If you danced to the bouncy ‘YMCA”, “Go West”, “Macho Man”, and “In the Navy” when they topped the charts in the eighties, you will have a blast watching this movie. If you are too young to remember the Village People, we pity you!
Can’t Stop the Music! is a camp classic, and an unfairly forgotten celebration of a time when being gay meant life was fun-fun-fun! The film has an in-your-face silliness which has been often imitated but never surpassed. We guarantee that your jaw will hit the floor before you can say mamma mia. Let yourself be carried away by the insane fabulousness of those musical numbers, and (a bonus for Irish audiences specially arranged by the Dublin Film Qlub!), gasp at the unlikeliest version of “Danny Boy” you will ever hear.
After the seventies, which were strewn with hard battles to achieve even the most modest legal recognition and visibility for LGBT people, all hell broke loose in the eighties. Many queers gave up trying to join the mainstream, and instead decided to take it over! The Village People revolutionised the way gay people saw themselves and were seen by others. Greenwich Village had been the home to the modern gay liberation movement, triggered by the Stonewall riots on 29 June 1969 (the reason why we celebrate Pride!). But the Village People also made an important contribution to queer history, culture, and aesthetics. They may have started the commercial exploitation of gayness, but they also inspired a different kind of defiance in the face of oppression, and they promoted a playfulness around sexual and gender identity which would affect gay and straight people alike.
This special screening of Can’t Stop the Music!, in collaboration with Dublin Pride, will take place in a beautiful sixty-seater cinema which is fully wheelchair-accessible, centrally located in Temple Bar. The Dublin Film Qlub is a not-for-profit community group run by volunteers, screening monthly films of interest to the LGBTQ community and our friends. Season Two of the club will start in October 2011.