She and her are my preferred pronouns.
And I love that you ask 'cause that's what we're dealing with in this piece.
So I'm most known for my character from RuPaul's Drag Race, Laganja Estranja, who was quite
infamous for her antics needless to say.
But because of that infamy, I was really able to build a brand and travel the world, create
an international, you know, high heels, masterclass and really expand from what people saw on
TV.
So being given the opportunity here at YoungArts to not only expand on that but to really break
the molds and not really involve drag in a typical way has been very freeing for me.
Not that I don't love drag or that drag hasn't been crucial to who I am as an artist, but
sometimes it feels very limiting because I'm portraying a character that I was on TV four
to five years ago.
So even though I've grown as a person, the character is kind of like a stamp in time.
So here at YoungArts, I'm able to leave that stamp behind and to really express what it
is that I find is unique about drag and that is the discussion of gender.
And the many different ways that people express gender.
I think now that gender is becoming much more neutral and much more of an open conversation
about expression, not so much about what's physically between your legs but how you feel
inside.
So that's kind of what I'm trying to explore while I'm here at Young Arts for my three
week residency.
And the piece is divided into several sections.
The beautiful jewel box that we're sitting in now will be the immersive part of the performance.
I'm calling it immersive dance theater.
I've also been explaining it kind of like a haunted house except it's not scary, it's
beautiful.
But when I say haunted house, people usually get the idea right away, like okay I'm going
to be going through something.
There's going to be actors or dancers or singers interacting with me.
And that's exactly what we're doing.
But it will be told in the story of gender.
It starts with Adam and Eve, and it works up all the way to the nonbinary.
So there is a linear portion.
But of course it's still very abstract.
We will send 40 up at a time to come through this experience.
The rest of the audience will be downstairs on the plaza were we're having another performance
that's on loop.
So every 10 minutes as someone comes up into the jewel box, there's another performance
downstairs that's looping.
So like I said, a cast of 13, four vignettes, a whole performance down there.
It's a lot of different moving parts.
With each vignette, I'm looking at gender as like a metaphysical thing.
So for me, in Adam and Eve in the first section, the original sin to me is gender, the fact
that we were codified and separated.
So instead of an apple, it's a red high heel.
And the man places it on the woman.
So in the second room, the second vignette, which is the one we're currently in, technology,
we wanted to think about this idea of loop because again technology gears, everything
runs on a loop.
And the glitch being a switch, in gender.
So the loop is male and female and the glitch is transgender, nonbinary, anything that steers
away from what people might think.
Of course it also has many different metaphors, how technology has affected the way we see
gender.
You know I think, trans wasn't even, transgender was not even a conversation we were having
until Laverne Cox on Orange is the New Black, until Caitlyn Jenner.
Again that was all through social media.
So technology has really informed gender in many different ways.
And I think for me, again since like I said, it's supposed to be kind of a linear story
of gender, technology was the next big boom that I could really pinpoint to think, okay
when did our ideas of male an female finally shift or glitch?
And that was when the introduction of technology.
When people started connecting across the world and discovering, oh you feel this way
too?
I'm not the only one that has these body, identity issues.
People were to communicate in a much broader scale.
So that's kind of the second vignette.
Loving alive.
So in the final vignette, we're really talking about exactly this idea of nonbinary, of neutrality,
of we're all the same.
It doesn't matter what's between our legs.
It doesn't matter how we identify our gender or our sexual orientation.
At the end of the day, we all want to be loved.
We all have to eat.
We all have to have a roof over our head.
We're all the same.
And I think especially now at the day in age we're in, xenophobia is at a huge all time
high.
The fear of that which is different from us.
I think that's why I want to make this statement about how we are the same.
And instead of trying to find our differences, we should really be trying to find our similarities.
So the final room, as you heard the song, it's bout being friends.
It's about revealing your skin.
That's the white room over there which all of the dancers at this point, they take off
their clothes to reveal their nude undergarments.
Very vulnerable and hopefully it will leave the audience with a sense of openness.