Jeremy Wade is a choreographer, performer, teacher, musician, curator, and social practitioner, as well as an acclaimed producer and host of collective experiments with bodies, publics, and forms. Emerging from New York’s queer club underground of the 1990s, and trained at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam (2000), Wade first broke onto the international stage with Glory (2006, Bessie Award, Dance Theater Workshop, NYC). This breakout was a brutal, actionist response to dance’s ableist imperatives and normative codes. As Jenn Joy wrote, Glory: “interrogated a unified or coherent conception of the body and representation, forcing an at times illegible and distressing vision of the inability of language and communication to account for his and our experience.”
Since moving to Berlin, Wade has built a 20+ year career in one of the most competitive cultural scenes in the world, collaborating with HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Sophiensaele, Mousonturm, Gessnerallee, Tanzquartier Wien, HKW, CCN Paris, and CNDC Anger. His works are disturbing and ecstatic, hallucinatory and precise: Fountain (2011), Death Asshole Rave Video (2015), Drawn Onward (2015), Between Sirens (2018), The Clearing (2019), Crisis Karaoke (2015/2020), Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death (2020), and the ongoing Puddles Rising (2020–25), an “Apocalyptic Piano Bar Drag Musical on Acid.”
Teaching is a central aspect of Wade’s practice. Across two decades he has developed a diverse set of pedagogical formats that merge improvisation, theory, and social practice into urgent experiments for learning. These include:
- Improvisation labs that use failure, grotesque humor, and contradiction as compositional tools
- Character- and world-building workshops where students invent alter-egos as dramaturgies of critique and survival
- Weird Lecture, a hybrid of lecture, ritual, and performance that stages theory as embodied and affective
- Seminars in Critical Somatics that put inherited techniques “on trial” against histories of nationalism, neoliberalism, and exclusion
- Curatorial labs such as Systems of Support, which treat event-making, access design, and community organizing as performance practice.
Across these contexts, Wade frames teaching as an ethic of gathering: convening publics, sustaining counterpublics, and rehearsing democracy under pressure.
Wade’s curatorial work operates at the same scale as his stage practice. With Creature Feature (2007–11) and Politics of Ecstasy (HAU, 2009, with Meg Stuart & Eike Wittrock), he created temporary communities of performance, lectures, concerts, and ecstatic parties. With the Future Clinic for Critical Care (2016–ongoing), he and collaborators host disability-led symposia, workshops, and rituals of impossible repair—where drag queens lecture on care, crip theorists DJ, and “battlefield nurses” lead spit rituals. His characters—The Battlefield Nurse, Dead Clown, and Puddles the Pelican—are threshold-keepers who destabilize power, host mourning and joy, and invite audiences into ecstatic solidarity.
Across these formats, Wade’s practice extends beyond performance-making into a network of speculative frameworks where teaching, curating, social practice, weird formats, even music operate as “future clinics” for diverse audiences but especially queer, disabled, and non-belonging bodies to generate new forms of relation. His oeuvre insists that performance can host publics at the threshold of collapse and invention. As Maximilian Haas writes, Wade “condenses contemporary forms of violence and destruction into a bleak vision of survival in the ruins of capitalism,” transforming failure into survival and laughter into strategy. From the cracked grin of Glory to the torch songs of Puddles, Wade’s practice is one of impossible repair: equal parts blood ritual, social work, queer science fiction, and bad joke—always inviting others into the turbulence of survival, resilience, and the possibility of being stranger together.