Journey through first loves, road trips, breakups, coming out and death, with a car transformed into a confession booth, dance floor, shrine and grave. Ride or Die is a queer interdisciplinary performance created by Cheryn Frost and Emma Kew, and we need your help to bring it to Liveworks in 2027.
Cheryn and Emma sat down with us to chat about the work, how PSpace has been part of their creative story, and what your support means this October.
Can you describe your performance practice as a duo?
Our creative partnership sits somewhere between theatre, drag and film - where we like making conceptually bold, hyper-queer and seriously silly work. Our work is also often site-specific and responsive. We love working with unconventional environments and letting the place itself become part of the creative process. A lot of our previous work has been comic, camp and deliberately excessive, playing with gender expression through parody and the grotesque. Our personas tend to be hyper-masculine, hyper-sexual and hyper-active, which gives us a playful way into characters and subjects that might otherwise feel taboo. That’s been a really comfortable and exciting space for us to work in, which is why it’s been so interesting to start pushing ourselves somewhere new. At the moment we’re delving into more sensitive territory and asking what happens when we take some of that playfulness and turn it towards something more sincere.
How has PSpace been part of your creative story?
Performance Space has been a huge part of our creative stories. We were lucky enough to receive the Stephen Cummins Residency as part of the 2025 Queer Development Program, which gave us three weeks to really dive into our practice and start developing our new work, Ride or Die. It was an incredible incubator and springboard for the next stage of our creative partnership. The mentors were world-class artists who generously shared their experience and knowledge, while the PSpace team gave us the support and space to properly chase our ideas. Our QDP cohort was full of brilliant, generous and wildly creative artists who have since become friends and collaborators. Having that dedicated time to stop, experiment and rethink what our practice could look like was hugely valuable.
We were then invited to join the ECC (Experimental Commissioning Consortium), which has opened up another incredible network of artists and organisations across the country. It’s given us the chance to share the early stages of Ride or Die, connect with new collaborators and think about what the work might look like beyond a rehearsal room.
What is Ride or Die? Why should we be excited about it?
Ride or Die is a queer, vehicular installation and performance that looks at the car as a space of transportation and transformation. We journey through first loves, road trips, breakups, coming out and death, while transforming the car into a confession booth, dancefloor, shrine and grave. It becomes a space for intimacy, transition and revelation. We’re bringing together projected archival footage, stories from Queer elders and a thumping soundtrack, all centred around a humming, automotive heart. We’re interested in the rituals and rites of passage that shape our communities, and the roads that have carried us there. What’s particularly exciting for us is that this is a new direction in our practice. We’re used to making work that is comic, camp and satirical, so Ride or Die is an opportunity to be more sincere and vulnerable while still holding onto the humour, absurdity and theatricality we love.
In real creative terms, what would support of Ride or Die this AusArt Day mean for the project?
Supporting Ride or Die through AusArt Day would help us realise this ambitious vision, while taking some real creative risks along the way. We’ve assembled an incredible team of artists and collaborators to bring the work to life, and support for the project directly supports that team and the time, skill and experimentation that goes into making something like this possible. We think some of the most exciting work happening in Sydney right now is coming from performance artists who are willing to step outside the usual rules of theatre-making - working across disciplines, challenging expectations and making work that doesn’t fit neatly into a box. That’s what we want Ride or Die to do.
Risk-taking is a privilege in the current arts economy. Support through AusArt Day gives us more room to experiment, build something technically ambitious and make the kind of weird, generous, boundary-pushing work that might not otherwise get the chance to exist. If you’re excited by artists making bold new work - we’d love you to get behind Ride or Die.
