Lee will engage visitors in a multimedia experience combining live performance poetry and moving visual imagery to introduce them to the underpinnings of his work. How he uses the mechanisms of comedy and humour to create a form of autoethnographic storytelling that subverts and challenges. The experience will demonstrate a sophisticated usage of language in the form of camp, innuendo, and double-entendres to speak of personal narratives often raw, often painful but always generous and authentic.

Lee will then explain how his interest in Polari was triggered when he attended a Polari-writing workshop in Manchester several years ago where he was encouraged to write his own Polari phrases and how this led to the eventual development of a poem he wrote called The Tale of Benny Harris written entirely in Polari slang this year. 

Visitors will then be given printed out copies of a Polari dictionary which Lee will use…