divine madness
“And I must say that this saying is not true, which teaches that when a lover is at hand the non-lover should be more favoured, because the lover is insane, and the other sane. For if it were a simple fact that insanity is an evil, the saying would be true; but in reality the greatest of blessings come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the gods.”
Socrates — Plato, Phaedrus, ~370 BC.
Divine Madness is a semi-scripted cabaret show written, directed and curated by archi with an exclusively trans cast. for each show the performers are given a character from ancient mythology and asked to connect them to their queerness through any medium of their choosing. the idea came from my love for greek mythology (mandatory as a queer person) in the way it depicts life before monotheist and patriarchal organised religion. concepts of good and evil in today’s society stem from christianity and its impact on the western world, intertwined with colonisation and white supremacy. queer people refute those societal concepts, and have forever been connected to nature, spirituality and art, in ways that are considered wrong or worse: sinful. those sins did not exist 2000 years ago, but queer people did, and we are still telling those stories today.
Divine Madness strives to be a place where artists can explore new ideas and practices, bridging the gaps between cabaret, performance art and theatre. it will also always be a political space (Divine Madness 2 had palestinian liberation at its core) and with the all-trans cast being a constant, we believe the audience can have deeper and more emotionally complex conversations with us.
with two editions in 2025 at the pleasance theatre (london), the aim is to see it grow and evolve organically with each passing season and the world we’re performing in. the first show was in march and with spring came trans joy and community; the second show was in september and as the days grew colder, so did the themes of the show. already 9 trans artists have shared the stage with me and i cannot wait to meet more of them, in other communities and cities and countries. some of them will be back too!
News about Divine Madness 3 will be coming soon…
“We are evil because we’ve started praying for ourselves. We are evil because we’ve chosen to become God, and our friends are God, and our body is God, and every time we pray to ourselves, we kill God. We’ve chosen heaven to be now. We’ve attacked the most sacred thing christianity tried to make us guilty for: ourselves. We’ve changed our bodies, we’ve invented new names, we freed ourselves from the guilt when we freed ourselves from gender, from borders, from money, from family, from fitness, and all of us, queer or not, we kill God when we find a little corner of society where there is no guilt, only unlimited, chaotic and indescribable pleasure.”
Archi, Divine Madness — March 2025
“The people who have invented nations and their borders are the people who have invented gender and its borders. The people who want to colonise our body are the people who have colonised the world. The seed of fascist hatred I have for myself is implanted in my core like Israel is implanted in the middle of the most important region in the world. And that is what I mean when I say Free Palestine. It’s not a distant dream, it’s not even right in front of us, no, it’s inside of us. The freedom, and the chaos and the beauty, our freedom, their freedom. Our freedom.”
Archi, Divine Madness 2 — September 2025
A R C H I 