The idea of this performance emerged primarily from my own difficulties reconciling the long and storied history of drag with the many ambivalent stances on the art form held by many members of the trans community. I have heard stories of trans women misgendered by queens or being mistaken for queens at drag shows and a general discomfort with men who at times flippantly or crassly inhabit femininity which is vastly different from the trans experience. The struggle of ‘passing’ in trans circles often mandates enveloping oneself completely in stereotypes and sexism to embody femininity as defined by the patriarchy. Thus, trans women cannot so easily mock the stereotypes and hyperfemininity that is the basis for drag, but instead have to take it as a warped gospel to be accepted by a hostile and unforgiving society. When you’ve spent thousands of dollars on surgery and years of your life on voice training and meticulously replicating the mannerisms and movements of women, it can be much more difficult to accept the critiques put forward by drag, which is why trans drag performers are of such great interest to me. They fly directly in the face of this conflict and seem to find for themselves a place both in the drag world, and the queer community as a whole without losing touch with their self-conception and gender expression.

Mastering the art of exaggerated femininity, at times even highlighting the dissonance of masculine features in a hyper-feminine performance, while still being able to find a stable and healthy womanhood without cognitive dissonance is an incredible feat to me. Exploring the world of the trans drag queens whose testimony is the foundation of this piece, you discover that drag was essential in their discovery of their gender identity along with other kinds of both cross-dressing performance.

Central to this piece is the use of tape, and the use of clashing audio clips and the ways that the older technology of this piece informs the timbres that are created. The tape players at times completely obfuscate the words being said to the point that they essentially exist as colorations in the background to the words played by other cassette players. The distortion was not initially an intended aspect of the piece, but given the ways in which spaces such as Twitter and conservative media seemingly exist as machines of hatred and harassment through distorting and misrepresenting the words of the marginalized, it seemed much more appropriate. In many ways this piece is my reflection on what it feels like being exposed to such a mass of conflicting, at times fully distorted to the point of incomprehensibility, ideas, opinions and art from the past and present.

The lo-fi aesthetic of the piece is meant to evoke the guerilla form much queer media has taken in the past, and the clips from older queens such as Vaginal Davis, Divine, and the Divine David reflects the varying places of privelege and intentionality these drag performances emerge from. There is a radio that plays static throughout the piece, which is meant to symbolize the ignorant majority of the audiences to modern trans and drag performance. The antenna ‘takes in’ the words of the various tapes and consumes and dilutes them into white noise. The lack of empathy and capacity for understanding from both of cishet audiences and even many priveleged queer folk often results in these conversations never reaching beyond our community despite our efforts to do so.

The RuPaul controversy is a central conflict in this piece that serves as an excellent example of how genuinely important conversations in our community are often merely sensationalized for drama, meanwhile our community is left trying to heal in the face of bombardments of media scrutiny. The increased visibility and platform of drag queens enabled by RuPaul has bolstered visibility while simultaneously diluting our definitions of what drag is and what drag and be. Hence the piece contains testimony from countercultural and dissidentificatory queens and trans/queer performers like Divine David, Vaginal Davis, Natalie Wynn, Jackie Shane, and contributors to Paris is Burning.

The diversity of trans and drag performers depicted in both their art, time period, and background centers around a desire to show the ways that all these forms are connected and are actually in dialogue with each other at all times. Terms such a ‘glamour’ manifested by RuPaul and his form of contemporary drag are placed in direct conflict with the countercultural queer terms of ‘opulence’ and ‘realness’ which articulates the performative wealth of Ballroom as a means of disidentificatory critique. These ideas necessarily brush shoulders with one another by virtue of belonging to the same community and capturing the different approaches to drag, resistance, and marginalization through performance. The piece itself is a confusing blend of so many different ideas and opinions, put through audio channels which deliberately obfuscate their clarity to both highlight the metaphorical struggle and also to enable the timbres of each voice and sound to shine through and blend together more seamlessly.

The improvisation of the piece is generally minor and comes more out of a desire to read both the audience, and obtain creative control over the unpredictable elements of the technology at play. Certain pieces of technology do not initially work and need to be hit or shaken or tampered with in order to elicit the desired sound. Sometimes the desired sound ends up being completely unexpected, hence the design of the score to contain only open ended instructions.

While the works greatest impact is in its positioning of various voices through space, the video and audio file will attempt to capture some elements of this for the sake of clarity. The piece exists very much in its physical space and creates a white noise of cacophony that washes over the audience before gradually being pulled back and vanishing with the flick of a switch. While this cannot be so easily captured on film or without the ability to move around, the audio recording and elements of the video (both are entirely separate entities) enable some of the effects within the piece to still make sense.