Digital Programme: Transpose Pit Party – SUBVERSE

Running time: approximately 75 minutes (no interval)

Age guidance: 16+

Content warning:
Contains references to adult themes and adult language

Presented by the Barbican

SECURESCUE was commissioned by Sacred Sound 360/Stroud Sacred Music Festival

UN/BOUND was commissioned by Barbican Immersive for Feel the Sound

Images by Sophia Stefellé. 

Accessible Performances
All performances are Relaxed and Captioned.
Caption Designers and Operators Jess Senanayake and Carla Ng

BSL-interpreted performance
Saturday 15 November, 7.30pm
BSL-interpretation by Yusef Gojikian

Post-show talk
Friday 14 November, free to same-day ticket holders.

During rehearsals for Transpose: SUBVERSE, the five artists kept a group chat running between them, reflecting on the theme as they were experiencing it through each others’ work.

These aggressive, distorted sounds are like a tear in between worlds.

Frequencies pulsating and crashing into each other.

When you sing, I feel it – the vibrations through my bones as though it was my voice, singing.

The night in a bright disguise

Let the sounds resonate in your body and call movement that flows out from your heart to
your limbs, move, make noise –
a visceral thing.

Doubled up rage
amid rage
amid rage

I wonder how your rage feels – transformed – passed body to body?

Viral
Visible
Confronting

Shouldn’t it be contained?
Couldn’t it be held?

What kind of containers are we? Fragile, leaking, shattered? Capacious & whole? 
Filled up with ourselves?
Permeable? Allowing contagion?
So the rage flows from one to the others... and perhaps the joy

How much can fit inside a body
Folded, condensed into coded?

Where does one begin and another end?
We’re so entangled

No one body can express the totality of all that we are, that we are becoming

but when we come together

we become
(some amalgam, some greater being, some unhuman, some creation)
(some greater potential for joy and sorrow)

obliterated
Remade
over and over

What can be beautiful about that?

Everything.

CN Lester

Artistic Director and Performer
CN Lester [they/them] is a multi-genre musician, author of the critically-acclaimed Trans Like Me, and founder and artistic director of the groundbreaking arts event Transpose at the Barbican. Classical performance engagements include: work with Wigmore Hall, BBC Radio 3 and 4, Kings Head Theatre, Spitalfields Music, and extensive work with Tête à Tête festival.

Composition commissions include: National Youth Choir, Fourth Choir, CRIPtic Arts, and Britten Pears Arts. As an ensemble singer they work across a broad range of projects with TRANS VOICES and London Contemporary Voices, from new experimental commissions for the Serpentine Gallery to backing vocals for Kesha.

CN Lester holds an interdisciplinary performance/research PhD on composer Barbara Strozzi, and publication of their original work on her life and music is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Academic research and teaching interests include performance and composition, gender and music, and the history of gender and sexuality. They work internationally as a trans/queer/feminist educator, writer, speaker, and activist. Words and alternative music appearances include: Newsnight, ITV, the Guardian, SBS, Sydney Opera House, Southbank Centre, Royal Exchange, The Arts Club, and arts and book festivals, radio, and print worldwide. They made their fiction debut with the 2023 collection Furies, alongside Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, and Emma Donoghue.

CN is currently working on their next EP of songs, Fellow Travellers, their second popular non-fiction book, a full-length work of fiction, and their Strozzi opera The Unknown Goddess.

@cn.lester | cnlester.com

Ilā Kamalagharan

Curator and Performer
Ilā Kamalagharan (ILĀ) [they/she] is a London-based artist, producer and vocalist whose work merges quantum computer music, AI and human voice to explore sound, identity, and liberation.

As guest curator and artist for the Barbican’s Pit Party: Transpose: Subverse, ILĀ brings together leading trans and non-binary artists in a night that fuses club culture, performance, and choral experimentation. Their installation UN/BOUND, created with TRANS VOICES and MONOM for the Barbican exhibition Feel the Sound, earned 5★ from the Financial Times, who called it ‘the standout’ of the show.

In 2025, ILĀ and TRANS VOICES feature on HAAi’s forthcoming album HUMANiSE and immersive live film at Drumsheds, performing alongside Jon Hopkins and Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip). They’ll also release Quantum Computer Music – a collection of tracks composed using quantum processes, DNA sequencing, and hybrid AI synthesis.

As co-founder of London Contemporary Voices, ILĀ has collaborated with Alt-J, Imogen Heap, U2 and Florence + The Machine. Their voice also features on Guy Sigsworth’s (Björk, Madonna) debut album, Stet.

Blending technology, philosophy, and emotion, ILĀ crafts new sonic languages that move between the club, the lab and the body.

IG @hausofila | hausofila.com
IG @transvoicesuk | transvoices.co.uk

Jamie Hale

Director and Performer
Jamie Hale [they/them] is an award-winning part-human, part-cyborg director, theatre-maker and poet, whose work grapples with the intimacy, agency and urgency of life. Their work reclaims wreckage, building liminal, intimate spaces that concentrate and refract universal themes.

In 2021, Jamie Hale was named Director / Theatremaker of the Year at the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Awards, and was shortlisted for Best Spoken Word Show at the Saboteur Awards, both for their solo show, NOT DYING. That year, they were also a Jerwood Poetry Fellow, Verve Poetry Press published their pamphlet Shield, and founded CRIPtic Arts, the award-winning development and production organisation they run by and for disabled creatives. Since then, they have curated, written, performed and directed at venues including the Barbican Centre, Roundhouse, HOME Manchester, Glastonbury Festival, and more.

In 2025, they were shortlisted for the Sky Arts Award for Theatre, recognising their body of work at CRIPtic Arts.

IG @jamierhale | jamiehale.co.uk
IG @cripticarts | cripticarts.org

Coda Nicolaeff

Performer
Coda Nicolaeff [she/her] is an interdisciplinary artist and creative leader exploring intersectional identity and collective solidarity. She is the co-founder of TRANS VOICES, a pioneering creative organisation reclaiming spaces where trans perspectives are rarely heard.

She has performed at Tate Britain, Kew Gardens and the Barbican Conservatory, and has co-led projects including a Guardian documentary and a SXSW London showcase. She has also collaborated with the University of Sheffield’s music and CS departments to study the physiological and creative impacts of transition on the voice.

She recently co-composed the Barbican-commissioned installation UN/BOUND blending choral performance with 4DSOUND spatial audio, AI tone morphing and quantum sound synthesis. Recognised by the Financial Times as a highlight of its parent exhibition, UN/BOUND was later released as a studio EP.

Coda Nicolaeff is a recipient of the Arts Council England programme Developing Your Creative Practice and HM Next Level grants, and was spotlighted as a community trailblazer in the award-winning #borntomix digital campaign by M&C Saatchi.

Ray Felix Carter

Performer
Ray Felix Carter [they/them] is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice intermittently spans illustration and comics, poetry for the page and for performance, sound installation, costume-making and drawing. These various forms are tools to traverse multiple realms and realities, to imagine new possibilities for existing in the world, to metamorphose and transform, and to connect with the self and the other.

Their most recent performance, unbecoming, for Queercall festival, supported by Marlborough productions, explored unmaking, grotesquery, rage and gender failure through poetry, movement and costume.

rayfelixcarter.co.uk

Marcella Rick

Co-Assistant Director
Marcella Rick [they/them] is a director and writer from Liverpool. Proudly queer, scouse and disabled, they are passionate about new works and telling stories from unique perspectives in non-traditional ways.

Marcella's debut play, Potato Milk, a scouse comedy about polyamory and milk alternatives, was met with a sold-out run at Liverpool's Playhouse Studio last year. Their recent work includes: Rooted (as co-director, 2025); Sober Curious (as writer and director, 2023/24); and Twelf Night (as writer, 2024).

Alongside Assistant Director Claire Beerjeraz, Marcella Rick is the founder and Joint Artistic Director of Turning Worm Theatre, a disability-led theatre company currently exploring international approaches to creative access.

Claire Beerjeraz

Co-Assistant Director
Claire Beerjeraz [they/them] is a director, writer, facilitator and creative therapist. Disabled, global majority, and very dykey, they tell stories rooted in lived experience, blending creativity with activism for healing, positive action and authentic representation. Claire is passionate about reducing barriers to the arts and amplifying underrepresented voices.

They’ve directed film and theatre for the past four years, collaborating with organisations including 20 Stories High, Unity Theatre and Liverpool Everyman Theatre. Recent work includes: Rooted (as writer and co-director) at the Unity Theatre and The Dukes Lancaster, 2025; Mrs Dalloway (as assistant director, 2025); Love and Information (as assistant director, 2025) and The Wind in the Willows (as director, 2024) all at Storyhouse.

Luke Rogers

Production Co-ordinator
Luke Rogers is a clown, producer and theatre-maker from Essex, working at CRIPtic Arts as Project Manager and Assistant to award-winning poet, performer and Artistic Director, Jamie Hale. They're a passionate storyteller who advocates for working-class, queer and disabled representation in the arts.

Before CRIPtic, they trained in Acting at the University of Chichester, graduating with a BA First Class with honours, completing their training the following year with an MA in the same subject.

As an actor and performer, Luke Rogers’ work spans TV, theatre and video games. In theatre, their clowning show, There Will Be a Party, toured nationally, being highly reviewed as ’a true spectrum spectacular’, with clowning being a huge part of Luke’s exploration of their disability in performance.

At CRIPtic, Luke has worked on sold-out shows at the Barbican Centre and as a producer for Liberty Festival 2025 in Wandsworth, in addition to assistant producing on Jamie Hale’s solo show, Quality of Life is not a Measurable Outcome, at Watford Palace Theatre and Glastonbury Festival. Currently, they are co-producing Transpose at the Barbican Centre and working on the next version of CRIPtic’s The Acts at the Bristol Old Vic.

Stevie Porter

Lighting Designer 
Stevie Porter [he/him] is the Head of Lighting at the Barbican Theatre and the Pit, where they have been a dedicated member of the team for over sixteen years. With a deep commitment to supporting artists and creating evocative visual worlds, Stevie’s work combines technical precision with a genuine passion for collaboration.

Relighting work includes: Antigone (world tour) and Obsession (European tour), both directed by Ivo van Hove, and Avalanche – A Love Story directed by Anne-Louise Sarks at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney. They have designed lighting for Transpose since 2022 and describe this ongoing work with the Transpose team as 'always a pleasure and such a joy. Every year brings a different and exciting energy.' Other lighting designs: include A Night Woman, PappyShow (2022–2024), An Anatomy of Melancholy (directed by Netia Jones) all in the Pit at the Barbican; and Lip Gloss (by Simon Armitage) in the Barbican Theatre.