The Thesbian Condition: Echoes of ShakesQueer

Produced by Mei Wah Chan

The Thesbian Condition: Echoes of ShakesQueer is a night of vocal music that leans into play, feeling, and transformation. It’s about queerness, fantasy, and the joy of inhabiting other selves, themes that feel as alive now as they did in Shakespeare’s time.

This concert brings together five Melbourne-based young artists, Phoebe Daisy Paine, Sofia Imperatore, Mei Wah Chan, Tessa McKenna, and Johnny De Simone, with Isaac Mouskovias at the piano. Across art song and operatic repertoire, they explore love, longing, mischief, disguise, and desire, refracted through a queer lens and performed in the intimate setting of the gallery.

Following two previous seasons at Artemisia Gallery and growing out of the ShakesQueer concerts presented during Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival 2025, this program is a continuation of an ongoing conversation between past and present, text and voice, performer and audience.

At its heart, The Thesbian Condition is about what happens when singers are given space to be theatrical, tender, and a little unruly, and when classical music is allowed to breathe, shift, and echo with who we are now.