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In 2021, Rhea Dillon presented a performance of Catgut – The Opera as part of the Serpentine Gallery’s Park Nights series. Dillon’s libretto ruminates on the conditions and capaciousness of Black performance as experienced through the Black operatic. Taking its departure from The Masque of Blackness by Ben Jonson, a masque commissioned in the early 17th century by Queen Anne of Denmark, the queen consort of King James I, Catgut convened three orators in classic soapboxing fashion. Throughout the opera’s three acts – the essay, the poem, and the poetic – Dillon denounces the idea that the Black performing artist should or could ever exist in the mundane. Jessica Lynne has written an emotional response in essay form, while Simone White has offered a poem to accompany the libretto. The book includes photographic documentation, and concludes with an extensive conversation between Dillon and Elaine Mitchener discussing the trials of performance as an artistic practice.
Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer and poet based in London. Examining and abstracting her intrigue of the ‘rules of representation’ as a device to undermine contemporary Western culture, Dillon questions what constitutes the ontology of Blackness versus the ontic.
Jessica Lynne is a writer, art critic, and co-editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism.
Simone White is the author of or, on being the other woman, 2022; Dear Angel of Death, 2018; Of Being Dispersed, 2016; and House Envy of All the World, 2010. She is Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Elaine Mitchener MBE is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist (2021–26), a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022), and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021–22). Elaine is founder of the collective electroacoustic trio The Rolling Calf (with Jason Yarde and Neil Charles).
Founded in 2022, Worms Publishing works across form and genre to bring experimental writers to the literary top-soil. Working outside of conventional publishing, Worms endeavours to support and cultivate underrepresented voices with a focus on female and non-binary authors and artists.
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