Dalston institution The Rio Cinema has been part of cultural life in Hackney for half a century but in more recent years, it has been facing one existential threat after another. After a banging and successful first edition, you can do your part to help keep the doors of this cinematic institution open by coming to the second GASH! fundraiser on Saturday 5 April. And, bonus, you get to stay in an old cinema right until the early hours of the next morning. It’s like Night At The Museum, except Dick Van Dyke won’t be there. Or if he is he’ll be dressed entirely in rubber and dancing to Miss Nicky Trax.
Local artist/DJs of the local goth/queer community (and GASH! residents), Proteus and Ruby Quick, are organising the all-nighter to be held at the Rio itself, Kingsland High Street, near both Dalston overground stations, which starts at 11pm and ends at 4am the next morning.
Guest DJs include Tsuniman, Faux Naïf, Princess Julia, Becky Stroke and Less Than Human. There are exhibitions from the Bishopgate Institute’s UK Leather and Fetish Archive, and Cultural Traffic presents PRELUDE: Transgression In The UK, by Toby Mott. Last but not least there is a film programme and I feel, in terms of firing up the reader’s imagination, the Rio’s own content warning – “nudity, pornographic depictions, impact play, bondage, BDSM, verbal humiliation” – does a better job than any description I can come up with.
