“And I
And I said 
And I said, where are all of the gay
I said, where are
And I said to him, where are all of
I said, where are all of the gay, or why are there no
And I said, where are all of the gay, or why are there no queer

I just asked him, I was like hey, where all of the gay or why are there no”

…says Nora Sharp—their voice and words intentionally cutting in and out of the microphone in their hand, or as they point out the microphone attached to their face, or maybe even some hidden microphone wired up through the stage. In this moment Sharp’s voice loops like a merry-go-round—our understanding coming closer and then cutting to become even further away.

Sharp’s Cosmic Docks, which premiered the weekend of March 13th, 2025 at The Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago, delves into the notion of how we come to know something integral about who we are and our relationship to the world around us. Sharp describes the work as “a trans tall-tale about orbiting the sources of yourself and yearning for clarity in a broken world.”

Cosmic Docks is one part standup special, one part loop-pedal-karaoke, one part dance-with-an-uppercase “D.” Nora finds themselves in a dumpster, they tell us, in the alley behind Dr. Alison Shore’s Office (Andersonville’s premier top surgery clinician). In this story, Sharp is digging because Giselle (the receptionist) cryptically told them to. Fulfilling Giselle’s prophecy, they find a USB stick with a document titled 17 Alternative or Unexpected Indicators Slash Explicators of Queerness and or Transness. This USB port is where we leave our spaceship moored for a while.

In the opening scene of Cosmic Docks we see Sharp in the back corner of the stage, their arms and fingers stretched straight up in the air and they are jumping. They are bouncing up and down repeatedly, only the tips of their hands grazing a bright light, seemingly just out of and at the same time just within reach. It isn’t close enough for them to fully grasp it; yet now we are all looking at it. It becomes a portal to the same ways understanding can be elusive and also something we freely jump towards. It also becomes a platform, which reveals and reflects the other sources of light in the space, such as: the safety strip lining the stairs, the bright red EXIT signs, the mirroring of the track lights on the stage floor, Sharp’s metallic pants, and the echoes of the giant full moon that just happened to be in the sky over the lake that same night. This introductory moment is a glimpse into the multiple ways we come to knowledge—like the things in the corner of our eye or recesses of the subconscious.   

Then (as is often a device found in Sharp’s performances), they almost immediately break the fourth wall; Sharp asks for the house lights to be brought up and thanks the audience for being with them on the journey of Cosmic Docks. The back screen floods with text and everything becomes multiplied. We hear Sharp speak and we see the words translated immediately into captions—both for accessibility and as a creative choice. There becomes a duplicity and supersaturation of information. Yet, Sharp meets us in this potential overwhelmedness and speaks to us about shifting focus and the possibilities intrinsic to attention. They encourage us to think about the multiple ways we access something: saying, “[this is] a lot of information.” And then, goes on to say, “Focus wherever you want to focus…this is where we are going to be living.”  

Returning now to 17 Alternative or Unexpected Indicators/Explicators of Queerness and or Transness that Nora tells us they found in the dumpster. This is the blueprint, the outline, the skeleton, the scaffolding for the work of Cosmic Docks and we spend the next hour or so moving through its contents. This document is the roadmap that every queer person kind of secretly wants—an undeniable set of instructions on how to interpret your past as the pathway towards your future. 

When it comes to such significant, life-altering decisions, there are so many reasons to doubt oneself. One might forget to eat for half a day and then want to jump off a bridge. It’s so much easier to trust the authority of an outside source—a random stranger, our horoscope chart, the red pill instead of the blue pill in the Matrix, organized religion, or in the case of Cosmic Docks, a USB stick from some aliens.  

We sloganeer and say “queerness isn’t a choice.” And that’s true, we suppose. But somebody still has to call the clinic and set up the consultation. When you are holding your finger over the call button, it really does feel like a choice. Yes, an impossible, ego-destroying, life-altering choice.  But can a choice be, in some ways, a gift? A thing that reminds us we have agency, autonomy, and power to move towards something more of who we are.  

A life, for better or worse, is a series of those active and obligatory choices slouching and sometimes declaratively rising toward ourselves. Even if the map is incomplete and tattered, we have got to follow something. And who’s to say that, as Sharp’s 17 Alternative or Unexpected Indicators suggests, childhood identification with animals isn’t as good a map as any? “Indicator, Explicator,” Sharp sings in one of the show’s many musical interludes.

Half-way through Cosmic Docks, Sharp gestures with their hands to draw an imaginary frame on the wall of their grandparents house. They tell the audience what can be found in the image inside the photo: their grandparents in drag at a country ball. They remember this photo from some frame on some wall somewhere and know that it holds some kind of proof—an indicator, a genetic thread of queerness. 

They describe this photo in the show in great detail—how great their grandfather looks in a dress, and how dapper their grandmother looks in a suit. The photograph begins to exist for us, the audience, in our mind, just like it exists for Nora in their mind. 

In their book On Photography Susan Sontag argues that every photograph is an illusion. What the photograph captures, Sontag says, is not a version of reality that we ever experienced, but instead a kind of abstraction. The photograph’s redaction of a lived experience often has the function of rewriting/altering memory. 

Memory is already a malleable, evolving representation of reality, that is to say, memories change. A photograph rewrites memory by functioning as a placeholder: when you think of a particular moment your brain retrieves the photograph, and this becomes the thing that shapes your reality. In Cosmic Docks, Sharp moves in the likeness of Sontag’s thoughts in On Photography. 

In conversation with Nora about the show, one of the first things they offer is that their work has “always been ahead of me.” They first wrote about finding an alien message in a dumpster behind a top surgery office back in 2022. This was two years before setting up a top surgery consultation for themselves in the same office they had previously, fictionally written about.  

While it’s hard to make generalities, we’ll be bold and just say that this is a common experience for trans people. You find the little clues that you gave yourself. In line with this idea, Corey Smith notes, “When I was 21, I performed, as you do, with a short-lived punk band. Our last gig was the first time I had ever worn a dress. I wore it onstage, which was a way of leaning into the plausible deniability of the stage—I said I wanted to be like Kurt Cobain.” Sharp’s Kurt Cobain is number 13 on the list of 17 Alternative or Unexpected Indicators/Explicators of Queerness and or Transness: the family photograph from their memory.

Except, here’s the thing—this photograph isn’t real. This is the reveal at the end of the show—this thing, the bit of definitive evidence, was something their memory had spliced together from clips of other memories. 

Nora Sharp: “[If I used the creative freedom to make the audience believe that the photo actually existed] that would be a lie, and it would make the show a lie. The show would be making this lie that ‘its ok…you can come up with whatever meaning you need to come up with,’ when actually the truth is: you can try and you have to try, but don’t expect that to bring you to some other alternate universe where everything is ok. That isn’t going to happen.” 

Rachel Lindsay: “I think it speaks to the un-binary-ness of everything, even truth. Truth is incredibly complex. That photo did exist, for you, for maybe a long time, and that shaped a particular reality. But the photo also didn’t exist. The bit [Nora spoke of] at the end about ‘some people would see your grandfather as being in drag, but also some people would just see it as a man in a dress.’ That nods to the fact that our versions of reality are so on a spectrum. And then, what is actually real in all of this, I don’t know. It is really…ok, it is beautiful and also a total dumpster fire.” 

In the end Nora’s photograph didn’t actually exist. But it did. But it didn’t. But now it does in our minds. But also, then it doesn’t.

As unfortunate as it is, there isn’t a history—personal or political—that actually makes sense; too many gaps in the memory, in the archive and in the zeitgeist, but those gaps are where the future gets made.

And of course it’s fake. Aliens aren’t real, you dork. There isn’t meaning in the universe, it’s all random processes and God isn’t listening and any coherent formation of self is layers of self deceit all the way down. Everyone is making it up. And that’s true about everything—all our experts, all our politicians, all our parents, all our dogs and cats, all our insurance policies, all our communities, all our laws, all our borders, all our flimsy attempts at pretending stability is even possible. And still, we get up in the morning and put on the show. The work is ahead of us. It knows more than we do.

…

Cast & Crew of Cosmic Docks:

CHOREOGRAPHER, WRITER, & PERFORMER: Nora Sharp

LIGHTING DESIGN: Christine Shallenberg

PROJECTION DESIGN: Ruby Que

SET DESIGN & BUILD: Bluestem Building & Restoration – Erin Bliss, Gisselle Dorado, and Bryan Saner

ORIGINAL SOUND: Nora Sharp

ADDITIONAL MUSIC: Remi Wolf

PERFORMANCE DEVELOPMENT: Sophie Minouche Allen & Zachary Nicol, with earlier support from Charlotte Long & Will Davis

PRODUCTION MANAGER: Jessi Barber

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