CN Lester’s Transpose: SUBVERSE review: ‘An extraordinary piece’
"SUBVERSE is not comfortable – but my god, this type of work is necessary," writes Attitude's Vincent Jaskowski-Prowse
Transpose: SUBVERSE at the Barbican Centre’s Pit is a genre-defying immersive performance exploring trans and disabled artists “challenging dominant narratives” and defying binary expectations.
Directed by Trans Like Me author and musician, CN Lester, performances included Jamie Hale, ILĀ, Coda Nicolaeff and Ray Felix Carter, running for a limited time only from 12 to 15 November 2025.
Ever since CN first brought the Transpose festival to the Centre in 2016, spotlighting over thirty trans artists, here is our review of why this latest edition was so impactful.
“SUBVERSE stops the clock for 75 minutes and offers truth in high definition”
There are moments in queer cultural life that feel less like an evening out and more like stepping into a pressure point of the present. CN Lester’s Transpose: SUBVERSE is one of them. An extraordinary moment in time where trans and disabled artistry doesn’t just take the stage, but rewires the space around it. In the political climate trans and non-binary people are forced to endure, SUBVERSE stops the clock for 75 minutes and offers truth in high definition.
“It masterfully evokes the hyper vigilance the community is so often forced to live”
Above all, this is a masterclass in sound design. A ghostly, jagged, unnerving underscore haunts the entire 75 minutes, a kind of anti-meditation track that keeps the audience suspended in a state of raw alertness. It glitches, punctures, shivers; a suspended technical malfunction. It masterfully evokes the hyper vigilance the community is so often forced to live inside: hunted, watched, braced. This soundscape becomes the invisible antagonist, the aural recreation of knives casually thrown, of broken glass underfoot. It chills because it’s honest.
The Barbican’s Pit becomes an underworld – dimly lit scaffolding, ghostly silhouettes, performers emerging like phantoms in a half-built dimension. It’s gothic, sculptural, uncanny. And within this darkness, SUBVERSE offers moments of respite and breath: a sound bath cleansing, where artists walk into the audience with bells, inviting us into breath, surrender, and presence. The whole evening operates like a collective breathing exercise – inhale fear, exhale beauty; inhale rage, exhale survival. It is healing in its construction.
“Proof that music can carry pain, philosophy, and beauty all at once”
Vocally, the work is extraordinary. CN Lester’s operatic register hits frequencies that feel less like notes and more like transmissions from another realm. Their preview of new material from their forthcoming EP shifts between classical resonance and pop – proof that music can carry pain, philosophy, and beauty all at once without collapsing under the weight.
ILĀ and Coda Nicolaeff’s SECURESCUE and UN/BOUND, reworked live with synthetic voice and electronic pulsation, are arresting in their clarity: ritualistic, destabilising, technologically unbound. ILĀ’s collaboration with Ray Felix Carter, exploring dissociation as landscape, is simultaneously playful and disquieting: a reclaiming of a psychological state trans communities know all too well.
But it is the joint work by Lester and Jamie Hale, a reinterpretation of Frankenstein, that delivers the evening’s most unexpected blow. Hale’s recitation of Shelley’s text, paired with Lester’s sonic embodiment of the Creature, charts a being struggling to articulate their reason for existence, then evolving into a recognition of symbiosis, identity, and mutual becoming. It’s an impactful conclusion that gently brings you back from a deep state.
“Few mediums can achieve that”
SUBVERSE is not comfortable – but my god, this type of work is necessary. To really understand what our siblings are facing, you must lose yourself in the singularity. Let sound, silhouette, and vibration dissolve assumptions and societal constructions. Few mediums can achieve that. In the dim light of the Pit, the work becomes a kind of séance – summoning pain, beauty, terror, and possibility. An extraordinary piece.