Young Critics Collective: Natural Behaviour

Thick & Tights’ Natural Behaviour is both hilariously funny and inspiringly powerful; a performance that takes you on an emotional rollercoaster throughout. Through ballet and contemporary dance, and elements of queer performance, Natural Behaviour explores the beauty in nature and all things queer; yes, even lesbian seagulls. The performance is incredibly accessible for anyone hard of hearing or visually impaired, as throughout the whole show is a black screen with white text that describes the actor’s appearances and what will happen in each segment. There is also a voice-over of the text as it appears on the backdrop, which feels like a performance in itself with its detailed descriptions that create the impression of poetry.

Natural Behaviour begins with a bang and a ‘hoof dance’ that had the whole audience in stitches as soon as the pantomime horse resembling Donald J. Trump walks out onto the stage dancing to disco music. As the chorus of the song rolls around, a voice-over of Trump saying ‘drill, oil, drill’ plays whilst the tail of the horse moves to reveal an orange-painted face lip-syncing underneath. This hilariously clever segment is a satirical commentary on Trump’s plans for oil drilling, bringing light to a topic through comedy and pantomime. Another hilarious segment named ‘Lesbian Seagull’ comically explores homosexuality in nature and uses humour to teach that queerness is not unnatural.

Other segments of the performance use contemporary dance to show the profound beauty found in nature. Especially the ‘Ode to the last Nightingale ’, where Annie Edwards does an incredibly beautiful dance to slowed-down sounds of bird songs; her body control and movements really highlight the bird songs and just how rich in beauty nature really is. ‘Creeping Bent’ and ‘Two Moths in Real Time’ tell the story of how nature can be misunderstood, just like all of us, through two amazing dances that show the incredible technique of El Perry and Daniel Hay-Gordon.
Daniel’s ballet in remembrance of Graham Evans from Ambient Jam is truly an emotional work of art. The dance is intimate and vulnerable as Daniel moves gracefully to the soft piano in the music, teaching that dance has no gender and that it is the emotion and the story that ballet brings to the audience that truly matters. Azara Meghie’s ‘Baldwin’s Room’ is powerful and inspiring as a mix of the voice of James Baldwin, a black, queer American writer and civil rights activist, and Azara plays as they dance within the light on the stage, which resembles a crack on the floor. There is a part where the lights turn red, and Azara seems unable to stop breaking, creating a powerfully emotional performance.

Natural Behaviour ends with Jahmarley Bachelor’s inspiring segment named ‘Dust’, exploring how Quentin Crisp, an English writer, actor and raconteur, believed that it is a waste of time cleaning your house, as after three years the dust doesn’t get any worse. ‘Dust’ shows that what others might deem strange or peculiar is natural to another person, and raises the question: what exactly is natural behaviour?

Thick & Tight’s vitality shines again through a curated line-up of the boldly funny and deeply profound. Co-directors Daniel Hay-Gordon and El Perry centre community, spotlighting disability and queerness with features from incredible artists such as the Camberwell Incredibles. From such an impressive and varied bill of performances I’ve highlighted only six, but others including the lesbian seagulls sharing a beer or El as a leather shorts blade of bent grass, will not be forgotten in a hurry. This is an outstanding product of Thick & Tight’s queer performance through contemporary dance and theatre. A space for reflection, laughter and protest, Natural Behaviour is an essential breath of air in a very smoky world.

Donald Trump the horse is up first. As with much of their work, Thick & Tight promote community celebration and accessibility with spoken and projected introductions. These visually describe the performers and their movement before it happens. Instead of dampening the mad horse’s entrance, however, this built some intense anticipation. Comedic shock slapped us in the face, as “drill baby drill” was mouthed out the horse’s arse. In hysterics we also faced the dystopian reality, finding entertainment in one of the most powerful global figures. How can we be so at ease with the unnatural?

Annie Edwards’ three-part solo began with violins playing slowed-down birdsong, and she became part of their soundscape. Music and movement intertwined, with every shift in note and rhythm mapped onto her body. Each phrase became an endangered bird, with her presence not only visually imitating a bird’s movement but embodying it. There was no false pretence of flying but a tangibility that looped and curved, carving protest for the natural world in a call for its protection.

Dan’s piece was made in memory of a dancer whose movements are remembered in choreography, and he described how it had been performed so that people with dual sensory loss could experience it. Dan also mentioned an exploration of identity through dance which often contradicts stereotypical expectation. Initially a lot of ideas at once, it all became clear when Dan stepped onto stage. To Brahms’s third piano concerto Dan twice scooped the air before his face and carefully crowned his head. We were still before his regality. In his rehearsal clothes he tells of complex human emotion; facing mortality with grace in the everyday.

A crack of light drew us towards Azara Meghie’s James Baldwin, a mouthpiece for humanity at the doorway of the world. She mouthed along to the soundtrack impersonating Baldwin’s voice and strength, ‘you can’t tell the children there is no hope’. Brave people can perish in love that holds the world together, and we were urged to keep holding. Having noted her coming section of fast-paced break dance in her introduction, we didn’t just receive her performance but moved with her, treading the cracks in the earth and weaving them shut. Her passion was fiercely innate, spurring on action and love and art. Sometimes the line of performance must be stretched to reveal what is most natural.

With farcical force, bin bag and pipe cleaner flies Dan and El took to the stage again, enduring Katy Perry’s commentated trip to space. A brutally dissonant Also sprach Zarathustra played as Katy admired our Earth whilst publicly plunging us further into darkness. The flies rubbed their legs together and in desperate relief, ejected and escaped into red smoke. Natural behaviour had gone full throttle out the window.

After journeying through a large portion of humanity and other species, Quentin Crisp’s dusty room brought us gently home. Jahmarley Bachelor wore a purple fedora, meandering their way across stage as the Camberwell Incredibles narrated from a projected window above. ‘Dust, dust, dust to dust…’, we are all unified in its indifference. We will return to where we came from, stripping humanity to our most natural state of being. In slowing breaths glittery specks of dust fell through spotlights onto Jahmarley, and the whole cast bowed as it settled at their feet.

Thick & Tight teach us to be insistently alive in all our silliness, grief and rage. The world is violent and full of the unnatural but we’re stubborn, and joyously so. You can’t silence our voices. You can’t tell me my naturality is wrong. ‘You can’t tell the children there is no hope’.

Thick & Tight’s Natural Behaviour arrived at Nottingham’s Lakeside Arts on Friday 16th October. Described as “a collection of performed portraits of human and non-human life forms”, this wonderfully weird anthology was named The Guardian’s ‘Best Dance Show’ of 2025, so it arrived at Lakeside with great expectation. The collection consisted of 9 pieces of varying length and subject exploring what it means to be natural.

The crown jewel of Natural Behaviour is undoubtedly Ode to the Last Nightingale, performed by the fantastic Annie Edwards. The introduction to this piece explained that the music was inspired by slowed-down bird calls, with a focus on bird species that have experienced severe population drops in the UK in recent decades, such as the turtle dove and the puffin. As the music shifted from bird to bird, Edwards’s demeanour expertly captured the mannerisms of each bird in quick succession, and the bare stage only emphasised the loneliness of the titular ‘Last Nightingale’, calling out fruitlessly. In one particularly harrowing moment, Edwards opens her arms to embrace something that vanishes the instant she reaches it, her arms closing around her own torso instead.

The show’s comedy was well received by the audience as a whole, although some gags became repetitive and relied on a pre-existing dislike for certain celebrities. ‘Lesbian Seagull’ was hilarious, presenting two animatronic seagulls as a couple at the beach enjoying some “tinnies and chips”, set to Engelbert Humperdinck’s anthem of the same name. This piece employed a clever usage of lighting, flicking between pitch black and not, each time revealing a new item for the seagulls to enjoy. In my view, this celebration of queer love works better in the collection than the pieces laughing at Katy Perry and Donald Trump, which were only funny at their subjects’ expense. Visually, the costuming of the flies (who see how long they can listen to Perry speak until they physically cannot) and the pantomime orange horse (who literally speaks out of its arse) were great visual gags, but ultimately each idea was a single joke repeated.

After the rehearsal room look of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, which evoked stark feelings of intimacy and honesty, Azara Meghie’s ‘Baldwin’s Room’ was a darker turn. It was striking and received the largest applause of the evening. While Meghie embodied Baldwin’s mannerisms accurately, with some energetic breaking interspersed, much of the power of the routine came from Baldwin’s words themselves. While the recording played, Meghie moved along a jagged strip of light struck on the floor. The audience’s applause was certainly warranted, but for me it was more for the powerfully emotive and assertive James Baldwin recordings than for the performance as a whole. Baldwin, known and celebrated for his essays addressing race and identity, stole the show with his lamentation of the power and danger of love, edited effectively to repeat important sections.

The final piece, ‘Dust’, found Quentin Crisp in his dusty bedsit, joined on film by community arts collective for adults with special needs Camberwell Incredibles. ‘Dust’ focused on the unavoidable presence of dust everywhere, and its inseparability from ourselves and our skin. The audience was enthralled by the final shot of ‘Natural Behaviour’, as Jahmarley Bachelor (as Crisp) sits silently, unperturbed by the falling onslaught of dust from above as the sounds of deep trumpets fill the room.

Natural Behaviour is at its strongest when it shows the costs of being ‘natural’ in a world of prejudice, and after a night of lonely figures, Crisp’s acceptance feels like a victory. The show leaves behind the sense that despite society’s demands for conformity, being comfortable in your own skin can appear a radical act.