December 29, 2010

Tiara Sensation - avant-drag pageant



Tiara Sensation
Dec 5, 2010
@ Temple (in San Francisco)


The 1st annual Tiara Sensation avant-drag pageant was birthed into the world by the SomeThing team of VivvyAnne ForeverMore, dj down-E, and Mr. David aka Glamamore (pictured above). It was an only-in-San Francisco, queer-freaks-do-it-better, oh-no-she-didn’t, genius night out. As co-host Mr. David stated just before the pageant winner was announced, all the queens were gorgeous and gave fabulous performances. That wasn’t just generous, it was necessary. Experimental, messy, and postmodern drag in San Francisco (since the Cockettes, since Klubstitute, since Jerome Caja and Phatima at Uranus, since Kiki and Herb, since the early days of Trannyshack…) means that almost every queen or king invents her own genre of performance. That makes pageant judging either ridiculous, impossible, or ummm intuitive. How to compare Alotta Bouté’s sophisticated and super confident Harlem renaissance approach to burlesque with Phatima’s minimalist reciting of Journey’s Don’t’ Stop Believing? Bouté is a high-femme diva with massively voluptuous and real T & A whose wig and costume owe as much to Patti Labelle, Josephine Baker and the un-named black femmes of history as to anything that drag queens (of any race) have originated. Phatima is a gender-queer life artist famous for legendary go-go dancing at Uranus in the 90s. Neither of these performers would ever be included in most drag contests, especially outside of San Francisco. Of course with today’s post/feminist queer eye, Patti is a faux queen and Baker is recognized as pioneering the re-appropriation of minstrel that contemporary SF queens now take for granted.



We’ve seen a faux queen win a major drag title in San Francisco. At Trannyshack we weren’t surprised when drag kings were included in the performance line-up, and we grew to expect all manner of queens with diversely gendered back-up dancers. But when Fauxnique won Miss Trannyshack 2003, she cleared a path not just for other women-who-dress-like-men-who-dress-like-women but she participated in a movement of RG’s (real girls to some, cisgender females to others) queering gay male spaces and stages. Female roles at the drag bar expanded from butch drag king and adoring fan fag-hag to include femme dyke fashionistas, faux queen dignitaries (incl. Scissor Sister Ana Matronic), transwomen, and the new gen of women – queer and hetero, with their boyfriends or boi friends – who feel at home in gay spaces, some who have been bff with queer boys since middle school. It feels awfully suburban to try to describe this scene or give some historical context to explain how a drag pageant in SF could have among it’s four judges, a faux-queen called Hoku Mama Swamp who said she was looking for performances that were retarded or offensive (in a good way), Gina LaDivina, an icon of late night queer San Francisco and celebrated as the $65,000 silicone wonder, and Sister Roma, a local drag celebrity, journalist and community organizer with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters are simultaneously a real holy order, a camp political satire and an international community.

All this attempt at context, but how to describe the performances? Co-hostess VivvyAnne ForeverMore opened the show with an insane number. She and Mona G. Hawd appeared on giant stilts extending from both arms and legs, like lady insects with massive thorax/abdomens. They looked fucking weird, or fucking great. The audience screamed. Cross-species drag. Snap. The red veil and plastic wig kept falling to obscure Vivvyanne’s face. In this kind of poor theater drag show, we expect this kind of home-made craft disaster. In fact we love it. And the only thing better is when the queen figures out how to fix or destroy the failing headdress without fucking up the lipsynch. Snap snap snap.

Contestants were judged in two categories, presentation and talent. For presentation, ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess arrived in gold lamé spandex lyotard and tights with a light bulb on her head and an 8 foot plank of lightbulbs held across her shoulders. A gold six-pointed star made of craftily painted cardboard was attached at her crotch. Nodding her head to the music, the lights came on sequentially, one for each day of Chanukah. Drag as living menorah. She was only the 2nd queen on the stage but many of us felt that we were already looking at the winner.

Political critique flourished at Tiara Sensation. Phatima’s presentation outfit involved a one-of-a-kind, DIY couture, plaid jacket. On the back was a quilted swastika of American flag stars. ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess and Monistat both cited queer protest history in their background videos. ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess took the ‘It gets better’ campaign and flipped it furiously, seizing the youtube airwaves from the insincere politicians and popstars and giving it back to the fierce actions of those who took the streets from MLK Jr to ActUp. With a gospel choir in rainbow-colored robes, ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess led the full congregation in an ecstatic church revival of revolutionary gay pride, lipsynching ecstatically “everything's gonna be all right. It's gonna be okay,” from Dolly Parton’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning. And somehow she used camp to trump irony (just like Dolly!) and we clapped along, healing ourselves and honoring the ancestors by raising energy in the queer Temple. Elijah Minnelli and two backup queens wore full drag face and long wigs with giant six-armed cockroach costumes. After a video of Minnelli crying over spilled milk, the roach queens emerged from behind giant replicas of the milk, cereal and sugar in the video. When Destiny Child’s Survivor burst from the speakers the crowd roared. The cockroach as survivor; the queer as cockroach. The adamant repetitions of “I’m a surviver, I’m not gonna give up, I’m gonna make it” speak as much to a showgirl’s efforts to triumph as to the every-queer in the audience knowing that we have to fight just to survive. Like the cockroach we have always been here and always will be. (Of course the Destiny’s Child video of this song is noted for its silly blacksploitation and sexploitation, a neo-minstrel of black female exotica so problematic that it survives as a cult classic and therefore a drag classic.) As for every queen inventing her own genre, I recognize that there were two numbers in one evening where interspecies drag resulted in glam lady insects.

I’m tired. It’s 3am. The buzz has worn off but I haven’t finished telling you about all the crazy wonderful surprising performances that happened. Mercedes Monroe performed a virtuosic lipsynch (Ella Fitzgerald perhaps?) that seemed it might be too-classic-drag-for-this-pageant. I didn’t pay attention for a couple of minutes but when I returned my gaze to the stage it was clear that something extraordinary was happening. This number was like a work of endurance art, a slow burn that grew in importance to those patient enough to focus. Try to imagine memorizing and replicating an extended vocal jazz scat improvisation of hums and oohs, growls and moans, eees and ayayays. This bitch (as in superstar diva showing us all that we don’t work hard enough) hit every note, every slurred syllable. This was cirque du soleil, you’ve never seen this before, kinda shit. The longer she endured, the closer we gathered together to focus on her mouth’s mimetic acrobatics. At about the 6 minute mark she pulled the mic from its stand and raised the energetic stakes. We went with her, twitching to every perfectly timed pelvic thrust and shoulder punctuation, continuing to marvel that she was still perfectly aligned with the vocals. When the song finished, she was triumphant, and we made a lot of noise in gratitude.

By the way, ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess was crowned Miss Tiara Sensation, and she deserved it. And yah, the whole event was near perfect thanks to the outrageous dedication and vision of all contestants, hosts, judges, and crew. People who think they need to win grants to make art (or community or revolution) really need to visit a weekly drag bar or annual pageant. The audience at Tiara Sensation was really cute and well-dressed despite their sometimes trendy conformity but they were too few in number and I blame that on the too-expensive tickets not on the rain.

PS.
The expensive tickets hopefully generated some profits that will be shared with The Offcenter, a burgeoning crew of queer artists working to establish a venue for queer performance in the wake of the demise of Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory. The Offcenter’s next project is a co-production with my own Zero Performance, a 10-hour marathon of queered performance called Too Much! Jan 23 2011 at Dance Mission, SF. Last year’s Too Much! was legendary by its 5th or 6th hour. Don’t miss it.

Photo of the SomeThing team by Cabure, retouched by Juanita MORE!

4 comments:

foobe Barbe said...

Mr. Hennessy has a talent for combining deep research and impeccable word craftsmanship to re-claim history and design contemporary culture to empower those he recognizes as marginalized, in this case: the queers who reek havoc and genius upon the hegemony of heteronormativity in art and entertainment, and more specifically the drag divas of SF. And this is how all the histories have been written, with skilled writing, research and a claiming of what what happened, designing the parts of the story in a way that are in part truthful and support 'his' vision, and leaving the parts out that either 'he' doesn't care about or 'he' just still simply does not get.

We all know the heteronormative hegemony in art and entertainment that is under queer artistic attack is white male dominated. And under artistic attack rightly so because of the oppressive, destructive, and violent status quo that heteronormativity perpetuates.

Here in the SF drag scene there are three notable female gendered woman: Mona G. Hawd, Fauxnique and Bouté. Fauxnique is the only one who has begun the dialogue of what the relationship is between a female drag queen and gay men and drag queens in her art, and Mona G. Hawd once addressed the dignity of the feminine--in its most culturally oppressed circumstances where she may have some privileges but no rights, even to her own body--in her performance at This is What I want in July.

It is a great but sadly ingrained irony and continuation of the hegemony in the whole sensation of the SF queering up drag--"cross-species drag", to "Drag as living menorah", to diy disasters while staying in synch, all brilliant but--are not in open dialogue with female gendered women, (queer identified, straight or otherwise-it really makes no difference) with all the male/boy/boi/cis/btog/ who dominate the scene of acting out female-ness in the most mocking, minstrelized, and in some very rare cases embracing-of-the-feminine ways.

Queers have to fight to stay alive like cock roaches and women are still not considered in the conversation without earning their way--by arbitrary male dominated drag queen standards--into a male formated female minstrel show of women. Black face or Face, somehow a real and thorough connection is not really being made, is tragic and extremely conspicuous.

The only real value I find in this word crafting and culture designing/defining of the whole spectacle of the Tiara Sensation by Keith Hennessy's missive is this: "People who think they need to win grants to make art (or community or revolution) really need to visit a weekly drag bar or annual pageant."

foobe Barbe said...

wow its really difficult to edit and repost here. my first three posts were "too long". Too bad the responses can not be half as long as the blog itself.

This is an edit of the last three paragraphs of my response:

It is a great but sadly ingrained irony and continuation of the hegemony in the whole sensation of the SF queering up drag where the queens and divas do not have an open artistic dialogue with female gendered women concerned with the same hegemony--as it applies to women (queer identified, straight or otherwise-it really makes no difference). The males/boys/bois/cis/btogs/ dominate the scene of acting out female-ness in the most mocking, minstrelized, and in some very rare cases embracing-of-the-feminine ways.

Queers have to fight to stay alive like cock roaches and women are still not considered in the conversation dominated drag queen standards of a male formated female minstrel show of women. Black face or Face, somehow a real and thorough connection is not really being made, is tragic and extremely conspicuous.

The only real value I find in this word crafting and culture designing/defining of the whole spectacle of the Tiara Sensation by Keith Hennessy's missive is this: "People who think they need to win grants to make art (or community or revolution) really need to visit a weekly drag bar or annual pageant."

Keith Hennessy said...

Hey fB
Thanks for the comment. Let's talk. I think our perspective/attitude has more in common than you might think.

PS.
You missed one of the other values you got from my review, that it got you inspired (or mad enough) to write and post your comments where others (at least a few) will read them. I'll send the link to Mona and Fauxnique. Maybe there's a public conversation/debate/creative happening that could grow...

foobe Barbe said...

go ahead, talk. how does our perspective/attitude have more in common than I might think?