CELEBRATING QUEER CULTURE

Our Sliding Scale Tickets

For the last 18 months we’ve offered sliding scale tickets for for all our events. This has been made possible through generous donations by our community when buying tickets, our limited edition pin badges, or through our fantastic raffles! (Huge thanks to the local Sheffield businesses, who have donated their goods towards this)*. We believe that everyone should have access to fantastic live performance, and feel welcome in warm, accessible spaces where they can be part of their community.  

We’re really pleased to say that our Arts Council funding is enabling us to add more options, so a wider range of people can enjoy our live events. Our next event at Theatre Deli will use these ticket bands, so we ask you to be honest with yourself and your financial situation when buying tickets – that way those who really need the discounted tickets will benefit from the reduction in costs. A fuller description of each ticket band is below.

Huge thanks to Leeds Queer Film Festival who originally inspired us to introduce sliding scale ticket prices, who in turn adapted their ticket bands from The Green Bottle Sliding Scale by Califia Collective (califiacollective.org). A massive thanks also to the Andro and Eve Community who continue to contribute to our Pay it Forward Ticket Fund as well as the excellent Tickets For Good who have supported us throughout and whose booking fees support good causes. Everyone mentioned has helped make it the success it is, just keep at it! Queer solidarity forever! x 

* Thanks to Birdhouse Tea Company, Pip and Peel, Truffle Pig Vegan, Cocoa Mester, Beer Central, Hard Times Vegan, Zeds, Our Fave Places, Showroom Cinema, Sheffield Theatres. 

Celebrating Two Years

Today marks two years since the first Andro & Eve event at Cafe #9 with a screening of But I’m a Cheerleader. Last night we celebrated that anniversary in the best possible way, surrounded by the community we care so much about, at a special edition of A Reyt Queer Do.

When starting out, we had no idea we’d be producing events on the scale we are now, and we’re so pleased to be making space in Sheffield to celebrate queer culture. In the time since we founded Andro & Eve, the world can sometimes seems more hostile. Spaces where those often marginalised from the ‘mainstream’ can come together to celebrate and feel free, somehow seem more vital, and in a weird way, more radical. Our events are about creating a physical space where many different people can come together and enjoy culture that speaks to them. Welcoming new and familiar faces to the events gives us LIFE!

We want to say a huge thank YOU to everyone who has supported our work over the last two years. Whether that be through buying a ticket, pin badge, telling a mate about us, sharing one of our tweets, or contributing to our accessible ticket fund, you’ve helped this endeavour grow.

Special thanks go to our volunteers, without them we would not be where we are today. And one in particular who was our only helper for the first year of the venture! It has been brilliant welcoming new volunteers and building a team who help us create quality events that audiences love.

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Some of the Andro & Eve volunteer team with co-founders Rhiannon and Katherine

We also want to say thank you to the artists who have travelled to Sheffield to perform and brought such joy to our audiences. A special mention to Adam All and Apple Derrieres, creators of Boi Box in London, who supported us in creating our drag king cabaret – The Kingdom Come. And we want to mention the venues and organisations we’ve worked with who have given us space for free, or seed funding to cover event costs. These are Walkley Community Centre, Theatre Deli Sheffield, Broomhall Community Centre and She Fest. Thank you for believing in what we do and supporting our work.

We’ll be taking a break from running events over the summer, but we have plenty plans and much behind the scenes work going on, so watch this space for announcements about our future coming soon! You can also sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear news from Andro and Eve first.. Just sayin…!

Meet The Locals!

We’re reyt chuffed to have been featured on the revamped Our Favourite Places, in their ‘Meet The Locals’ section. In case you’ve not comes across it, Our Fave Places, is an online Sheffield Culture guide that features all you need to know when planning a visit to the Steel City. With the lowdown on everything from exhibitions to pubs, theatre, music, coffee shops, film screenings to unique events, all written by in –  the – know Sheffielders. The new Meet The Local’s section is a great way to find out about the people creating things and making good stuff happen in Sheffield.

They say, ‘An immediate success, Andro and Eve’s events were clearly just the kind of thing the city’s LGBTQ+ community and their friends were hungry for – friendly, positive, and above all lots of fun’.

Read the full interview here.

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Women and The Word

On Saturday 27 January we curated and produced a special event in Sheffield focused around the film, The Revival: Women and The Word, directed by Sekiya Dorsett. We originally saw this documentary at SQIFF in 2016 and fell for its warmth, humour, honesty, and unique perspective on an often overlooked part of the LGBTQIA community. The film follows a group of Black lesbian poets on a salon style tour of the US organised by creative force and entrepreneur Yaani Supreme fka Jade Foster.

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Jonquille Rice aka Solsis and Bea Steadwell. Credit: The Revival: Women and the Word

Documentaries like this allow you to imagine a different world, one where Black, queer womanhood is centered, celebrated and given space to breathe. We felt it was important to not only show the film, but make sure the Black British community was celebrated, while giving our audience a taste of the talent that exists within the UK, by showcasing poets of colour on this side of the Atlantic.

To do this we worked closely with Manchester’s Rainbow Noir and Sheffield’s Our Mel to programme artists, and help Andro and Eve reach new audiences. We cannot praise Rainbow Noir’s organisers enough for their generosity and support of our aims for this event. It was also awesome to work with another grassroots organisation in Sheffield, through Our Mel, and realise we have many of the same ambitions of creating special events where our communities feel free to express themselves.

Annalisa of Our Mel hosting the event

As massive lovers of zines and indie publishing we also curated a stall selling the words of women of colour.

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Classic zine stall

The event sold out a week in advance, and on the night over 70 people from across the UK turned out to our specially chosen, (and secret) Sheffield venue to enjoy the evening. As ever, we were thrilled that so many people had made the journey out on a cold night to attend, and we want to say thank you for those who supported our work in this way.

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Some of our wonderful audience!

Thanks also to all the people who have been contributing to our accessible ticket fund. This was the first event where we were able to offer discounted ticket prices for those on low incomes, and we can say it certainly encouraged some new faces to attend.

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DYLEMA (Do You. Let Every Man Adapt).

The poets, Ella Otomewo, from Manchester and DYLEMA from East London, performed their captivating poems after the film, making quite an impression on our audience and us. It was so rewarding to listen to the comments from those that had gathered together for this event, and realise the hard work had paid off.

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Ella Otomewo performs her poetry

We’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking, but special thanks should go to Rainbow Noir, Our Mel, LAS Sheffield, QTIPOC Notts, Enjoy Your Homes Press, our fabulous volunteers, and last but no means least, photographer Ndrika Anyika, whose images you see in this post.

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If you missed this event, hopefully we’ll see you at The Kingdom Come #3 on March 10th! Tickets are on sale now. 

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_V3A4831Some of our awesome audience members! _V3A4528_V3A4524_V3A4511_V3A4526_V3A4553_V3A4534

Calling Kings of the North!

We’re VERY excited to announce we’ll be bringing Drag Kings to Sheffield before 2017 is out! But this time we want to program some fresh talent! Have you got a Drag King act you can’t wait to share with the world? Are you fairly new to drag and want to test out an act in front of a very friendly and supportive audience? Calling all Yorkshire / Northern / East Midlands based drag kings. This is your chance to perform at a new night organised by Andro and Eve. Just drop us a line using the contact form on this website before 25th October 2017 and we’ll be in touch to share more information. Thanks!

If you’re one of the folks who has attended our already very popular drag king night The Kingdom Come you’ll definitely be interested in this new night. Announcements about what we’re planning coming very soon! You can sign up to our mailing list (using our contact form) to be the first to hear this and plenty other updates!

Featured images by Ndrika Anyika.

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Could you be the next Romeo De La Cruz? Or Adam All?

 

 

 

Whats in our name?

Why Andro and Eve? Let us tell you where our name comes from!

Well we love a pun for starters.. But this famous origin story of Adam and Eve called for a reworking in our minds… Something that reclaims the ‘woman’ from ‘man’ and says women can be so much more than the ancient stories we were told. Andro and Eve is a name that recognises women don’t need to be femme. We are androgynous, butch, dykes, tomboys. Also the divine feminine and ‘Eve’ character is also just as powerful as the archetypal man, masculine woman or genderfluid person.

We like our name because it acknowledges the blurring and broad spectrum of gender identity, and we seek to ensure our events and ethos are inclusive, and for us, queer community is about building a family outside of heteronormativity. We are about uniting different identities across race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and age. Lastly, our name was also chosen because we are keen that all women have a space they feel safe and free to explore queer culture, and break down some barriers that sadly, sometimes exist between different women and other marginalised genders.

Now we just need to remember all that next time we get asked about our name!

In this post, we’d like to acknowledge the pioneering and wonderful work of those who’ve gone before us, and were / are part of the inspiration for making spaces that promote queer and women – centered culture. In no particular order… Kate on Autostraddle in ‘Butch Please‘, Leslie Feinberg, Miss Major Griffin, Ani D Franco, Kate Bornstein, Bitch Planet, Susanne Sondfor, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Patricia Highsmith, Cheryl Dunye, to name but very few…

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