- Title:
- Blue. Strap. Sit., Jacob Coppedge
- Author:
- Joshua Edward
- Date:
- 17.03.26
Jacob Coppedge’s Blue. Strap. Sit. debuted through Performance Space Sydney’s Queer Development Program (QDP), “a two‑week professional development program focused on practical and creative skills for queer performance‑making,” culminating in the QDP Showcase on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 May 2025.
A queer person is a queer person and by extension, any creative output they produce is inherently queer. That framing should define a performance‑development program for queer artists. Yet this program too often produces works that feel overt rather than nuanced, performances that read like cabaret caricatures of queer identity rather than genuine embodiments. Still, there are moments of brilliance: a collage of flashing, swapped, moving, swiping memes and online content—wry, artful, clever; robotic cockroaches doing donuts near our feet. But there is also expanding foam and iPhone cables tugged confusingly from a performer’s vagina. It’s very Second Wave—a little late. Nonetheless I have to be glad the work exists.
Let’s consider Jacob Coppedge’s Blue. Strap. Sit. (2025)—I should tell you, Jacob Coppedge is my boyfriend. Someone also said that I only review my Girlfriend’s Art—I remain attached to my favourites. I will be honest about the work— it’s a fault, I admit, to love the moral truth.
This review comprises three sections, Blue. Strap. and Sit. They are prompts for elements of the performance as the artist sees it, evidently.
Jacob Coppedge, Blue. Strap. Sit., 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers.
Jacob Coppedge, Blue. Strap. Sit., 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers.
Blue.
Blu (leaving the e behind for a moment) is one of the performers’ many monikers and one of their two names, Jacob Coppedge is Blu to some, Jacob Coppedge to others and Blu AND Jacob Coppedge to some others…
Blu as a name is like the colour, it is sad, but it is also very cute.
Coppedge’s work evokes that “blue depth:” “At first there is nothing, then there is deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.”1 I’ll avoid tension for now—just let me speak of falling, which the audience experienced like vertigo. Crucially: the documentation fails the work—it renders it flat, a dorsal view that robs the piece of its monument. You won’t fall while watching the video; but if you were there, as many of us were, you’d be agape in the vacuum. There were no hoots during Blue. Strap. Sit., unlike the pieces before or after—it was more dance than satire.
Derek Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation (1985) describes Klein’s blue as sanctuary—a place to dissolve amidst the AIDS crisis, a final refuge.2 In this I mean Blue is a place to hide. “Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions... blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they... are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.”3 Coppedge holds us inward—all that internal gravity, essential Blue.
Jacob Coppedge, Blue. Strap. Sit., 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers.
Jacob Coppedge, Blue. Strap. Sit., 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers.
Jacob Coppedge, Blue. Strap. Sit., 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers.
Strap.
Central to the performance is tension, which is delivered through a length of blue nylon webbing, taut—briefly invisible, then suddenly urgent—very there throughout the performance. The tension becomes a counter-leverage, the performer’s own weight creating torque against the material, against the architecture. The building zooming in in IN on the performance.
Piano, rhythmic, small distant grumble, a thunderstorm beyond cloudline—I watched the performance, it rained; beautiful to watch something elegant and firm in performance again—Coppedge’s posture remains refined, the band demands a negotiation of authority.
Shifting a practice is never a clean break and it feels dishonest to do this here. The framing is outdated: queer bodies performing as though they have to be entertainment. I say this after spending two days taking very seriously—the cake for the performance—at the night club—where we—push each other—into the cake. It is not the same, the people watching didn’t want that, the music was good before and that’s the difference.
Here, it’s so cuddly, where is the queerness in the room of self-congratulation? We’re bolder. It may as well be the same thing that kept us in disguise, an oppression which turned to seduction, sex on the margins.
We are more tightly bound by shame than we have ever been.
The question isn’t “How do you perform sadness about being gay?”
but rather, “What does it mean to fully inhabit control?”
This is not nostalgia, it is persistence.
Jacob Coppedge, Blue. Strap. Sit., 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers.
Jacob Coppedge, Blue. Strap. Sit., 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers.
Sit.
Coppedge…somewhere along The River, a tooth of asphalt anchoring the strap… It’s raining. Drops land on my hands; damp pills escaping in my bag. The small grumble, this time pianos behind the cloudline, reversal: private-school rowers trace silent lines, construction workers watch too—wondering if the performer will dismantle something or simply exist… there.
This setting—unbranded, incidental, ordinary—leaves the work candid. I asked to come and watch Jacob today with this in mind: the performance isn’t separated from the world; the world doesn’t pause—the performer briefly disappears behind a wall—remerging in circles at the thin of the landscape, making large, deliberate gestures that extend into the wet day.
Cars hum on Batman Avenue. Heavy rain slicks the asphalt, turning, turning, into a slip that reads eveningwear. The performer’s body alternates between expansiveness and retreat: at times larger than the space, at others protective, folded inward—slower rhythm—a waltz, suspended—then more rain.
This looping movement feels powerful, unbothered, posturing not performing. Coppedge embraces themself—the gesture becomes intimate, literal, as if sucking in an audience immaterial. I feel like a journalist—an ethical one. Compressing softly, rising and falling, building and crumbling, fighting and submitting, it is all there in the clouds.
All Coppedge’s failure and recoiling at the feeling of—doing it wrong, so full of humanity. The work intends to grapple with the world the artist finds themself in and here, in the rain, they do grapple with the thing of it. The place, its people, the construction worker who was everyone’s dad, trying to understand the art, it was triumphant. Real—it was beautiful to watch the unfolding error, the work scooting closely to the mundane mise-en-place. In watching, Coppedge grants us a moment outside of our symmetrical realities, and this is a gift.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964).
Jim Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 200–201.
Yves Klein, “Lecture at the Sorbonne, 1959,” Studio International 186, no. 957 (1973): 43. Quoted in David Batchelor, Colour (London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2008), 58.
Joshua Edward is a visual artist, creative consultant & editor. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, they have exhibited in Australia, Germany and the United States.
Joshua is Co-Founder and Editor; Fine Art at no more poetry, an independent poetry and fine-art press. They have a particular interest in fictive brand systems as artistic instrument. Their ongoing project RoutineDarling operates as a brand framework producing an edition of fifty t-shirts collectively constituting one artwork.
Joshua attempts to subvert domestic form through shifts in scale, function and material tension — building imagined worlds from recognisable silhouettes, vernacular fragments and popular iconography to render unfamiliar conditions visible.
From 2017 to 2024, Joshua exhibited collaboratively as IchikawaEdward alongside Ichikawa Lee.
Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.