PETER CRAWLEYreviews Queer Notionsat the Project Arts Centre, Dublin
As the first arts festival within Dublin’s Lesbian and Gay Pride celebrations drew to a close this weekend, it seemed worth considering the grand concept behind it. In short, what’s the Queer idea? Thisispopbaby and Calipo Theatre Company were never likely to offer a definitive answer over a week of separate events, but they did present a few intriguing suggestions.
The Queer aesthetic is many things. Ludicrous and tragic. Aggressive and vulnerable. Politically engaged and inwardly obsessed . . . None of this sets it apart from the norm, which can be just as contradictory, but the productions here deliberately combined such oppositions – sometimes within a single gesture. Niall Sweeney, for instance, presented the reigning Alternative Miss Ireland as part of his lecture on the 22-year-old drag pageant. Miss Smilin’ Kanker’s name alone announced a startling juxtaposition: part glamour, part cadaver.
If the Queer agenda is to subvert and unsettle, there can be no better example than Gourgeois Bourgeois's haircut. Short, side-parted, heavily lacquered and allied with a defiantly posh accent, it allows the singer of London's neo-cabaret act duo Maurice and Bourgeois to pass for a head prefect at Eton. His skin-tight, pink, polka-dot cat suit suggests otherwise, though. Presenting a revue of original satirical songs, most of them vigorously obscene, the pair's queerest gesture was to conclude the night with an entirely earnest and subdued song of loss and longing called Forget You. Following vituperative odes to stalking, drug addiction and sexual depravity, this was so directly and genuinely moving that it felt positively perverse.
For anyone unacquainted with Dublin's gay scene, your first encounter with the phenomenal drag queen Panti is a little like suddenly discovering there's a new planet in the solar system. Few acts could ever sell out the Project, fewer still with a work in progress, and having so artfully created a persona out of adhesive, padding, Max-Factor and an acid wit, Panti's new piece, Woman in Progress, is a sort of identity strip tease, peeling back some of those layers to reveal the creator beneath.
A similar agenda was at play with Niall Sweeney's Dancing at the Crossroads: Glamour Rooted in Despair, a scintillatingly detailed, multimedia history of Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI) which sought to trace the political and intellectual base beneath an elaborate superstructure of big hair and false eyelashes. If drag has often resembled a parody of femininity – something wickedly announced with a recording of Shirley Temple Bar's late 1980s Olympic ribbon routine – the more kitsch, aggressive or haunted drag acts of later years suggest a new development and a distinctly new identity. Between tributes to AMI's charity work, febrile development and fractious judging panels, Sweeney delivered a queer manifesto using a tone somewhere between low comedy and high seriousness: an aesthetics of camp, a poetics of trash.
Ah, but does he mean it? I routinely wondered this about David Hoyle, a uniquely endearing performer, slathered in outré make-up and bargain-bin drag, who says and does the most provocative things. By the time he was lightly lacerating himself onstage with a carpet knife, carving an inverted crucifix down his sternum and across his abdomen, I suspected he probably did. Hoyle, outraged by the church, contemptuous of pornography and appalled by the theatre, chastised anything that attempted to control, confine or punish individuals. He could have been the patron saint of this ferociously alternative festival. Screamingly funny and deeply disturbing, Hoyle barged through every comfort zone, bulldozed the mainstream and asked if it was really possible to create an exhilarating and terrifying space where anything was permissible?
I wasn’t sure. But what a Queer notion.
