Queer Powerpoint: Deep-diving into the Obsessions of Gays Everywhere

F.O.L.A. [AKL] has a lot in store for Auckland this weekend. Self-dubbed as “your gateway drug to the wildest, most exciting Queer and BIPOC artists in Aotearoa and beyond,” the festival takes over the Basement Theatre from 11th-14th June with “performances, exhibitions, rituals and dance floors by fearless artists who make you feel like your heart is on the line.” One of these chaos-embracing events is Queer Powerpoint, a series of corporate presentations that has essentially been steamrolled by the gay agenda, turning it into a night of performance lectures on the weird and wonderful interests of the queer community.

The creators and hosts - Harriet Gilles, Xanthe Dobbie, and Thom Smythe - have finally brought their enormously popular touring show to Auckland, and have invited members of Auckland’s queer community to take a deep-dive into a particular fascination, and share it with their audience. The catch? They must communicate it through the transcendental artform which is Microsoft PowerPoint. 

This writer was lucky enough to interview Gilles and Dobbie before their upcoming shows. Now a cult hit that has toured Australian and Asian venues, Gilles explains that Queer PowerPoint “was born out of the [Covid19] lockdowns,”with the goal of “creating an event where the queer community could come together and have some fun” amidst the general gloominess of the pandemic. But unlike the lockdown puppy everyone seemed to adopt in lockdown and then immediately forget about, this event continues to bring queers together even four years later - proving, as Gilles says, “that what the world needed, and none of us knew, was a space where queer people could deep-dive into very niche and very individual interests.”

In fact, the event not only consists of Gilles and Dobbie’s own PowerPoint performances, but each show features a few members of the queer communities local to the event, allowing them to info-dump their nerdy passions on the world. “Queers are weird wherever you go,” Dobbie points out, and despite some variations in tone or presentation, “the show, surprisingly, manages to remain pretty much the same regardless of language barriers or format” - thanks to the international mediator that is Microsoft PowerPoint. This corporate cornerstone which has been the business-man’s bread and butter for decades is what makes the show so accessible and adaptable - sort of like a “sewer rat that can be anywhere,” in Dobbie’s own words.

Of course, basing so much of the event on the incorporation of multimedia and screen technologies can seem to some as straying from artistic traditions, but Gilles stresses that “we live in a world where, increasingly, our interactions and our time is spent in a virtual space, and it would be remiss to not acknowledge that in the art world and the theatre world.” The magic of PowerPoint, in fact, is in its ability to communicate via the “digital lexicon, that is how we all communicate these days.” 

PowerPoint itself also happens to be the perfect vessel for these queer musings, because, as Dobbie explains, the idea of such a dry corporate lecture is already such a joke, that it becomes “ripe pickings for a queer community which has historically defined its identity through the upheaving or undermining of these capitalist or patriarchal symbols.” In fact, the queers not only adopt the form, but they push it so far away from its bland functionality, that you can and should expect to see as many animations, star wipes and gifs as is physically possible. And while “high camp excess” is greatly appreciated, Gilles also mentions that some of the best presentations have come from re-appropriating graphs and diagrams to examine “the increasing value of a Prada handbag that you buy off Craigslist, or the legal definition of what Daddy is.”

The value of projects like Queer PowerPoint are not lost on students and the university community either - as Dobbie points out, “we often can feel pretty negatively about where our institutional spaces are going - becoming corporate machines, but when you can undermine these tools the way that we do with Queer PowerPoint, you open up a space for new conversations, and realign the attention span of our time,” leaning into the technological advances to “start having way more fun in those university contexts.” Gilles adds that “imagination is a really important thing that people often forget about when they come to university,” and urges students to use the tools they learn whilst studying not only to follow the paths set by the institution but to pursue their own interests. 

When asked about the future, both artists said that, though they never expected the show to become as popular as it is, especially when it only represents a fraction of their creative output, they have no intention of stopping any time soon. Gilles explains how much it means to them, especially in “teaching me to stay interested in things and to stay true to what makes you tick or floats your boat.” Dobbie also underscores its lesson to “roll with the punches and see where that creativity flows,” while insisting that “as long as there are queers and screens, we will be here interrogating them or celebrating them in some way.”

To end, both Dobbie and Gilles urge everyone to attend F.O.L.A. in any way you can! The variety of events and creatives involved make the festival such a unique experience right in the centre of Auckland - especially when so many of the shows are free, or pay as you wish. Queer PowerPoint itself is on at the Basement Theatre on 12th and 13th June, at 6pm and 10pm respectively - and even though I know we’re all stressing about exam season, do yourself a favour and peel your tired eyes away from your lecturers’ silly little slides and behold the chaos and glory of Queer PowerPoint.