Roma Havers: LOB at Contact

LOB is a tennis, poetry bonanza at Contact about moving through sporting spaces as a queer body, written and performed by Roma Havers.

It’s the year 2000 and my grandmother, dreaming of Wimbledon glory, is devastated by my lack of prowess.

Having been obsessed with this memory for twenty years, now, with her trusty swingball set, Poet and theatremaker Roma Havers once again attempts to serve a LOB. Egged on by locker room banter, a Victorian ghost for a doubles partner and a masked ball that just won’t go to plan, at its heart this dance and poetry show prioritises the rearticulation of failure and shame and what it could mean to move as queer bodies in sporting spaces, even if you’ll never reach Centre Court.

With original music from Donna Loman, Movement Direction from Christopher Brown and Swingball from Nico’s balcony.

Roma is a poet, theatre-maker and tiger-mum-editor, who loves to make meaning work a bit harder than it wants to. Roma’s work explores queer inheritance, what it means to practise, and radicalising queer joy. In 2020 she ran a queer writing Festival in My House with MIF called ‘Paying Attention’; performed OUTscription about queering archives for Manchester Sexuality Summer School. She worked with Art With Heart’s Dial and with Young Identity, running workshops online, producing their new book Working From HOME, while having a LOB about.