During the summer of 2010, I visited London on a Yale University international travel award. My project was an academic and performance based program on Shakespeare and his contemporaries at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. I foolishly thought that somehow I would be able to gather some knowledge and skills performing in drag, or at least playing female leads; however, my performances were called “too campy.” After class at LAMDA, I partook in a self-guided extracurricular exploration of London’s queer avant-garde nightlife culture. Through these early experiences, I began to view my research through an ethnographic lens. I began to wonder, why aren’t there spaces and events like this in Omaha? What makes it different in the UK versus the US? How can I create performance that is meaningful and impacting?
2 comments:
I think it is interesting how even though the author of the article identifies as bi-gender, the tone of the article is one of an outsider to the LGBT+ club performance world looking in. The experiences they describe they describe with what I perceived to be a sterile indifference. They ask the question, what makes the UK different than the US, but I feel that their experiences with LGBT+ night life may be specific to Omaha. I know for a fact that the clubs and culture of the clubs described can be found in the United States. Maybe not in Omaha, but definitely in the large cities on the coasts. Maybe they were going for a more academia approved tone, but to me it felt weirdly detached. Maybe I'm trying to read something that isn't there, but their switch from their drag performance in a academic setting to performance in a self-exploratory setting gave me the impression that they were not super receptive of the feedback they were getting from professionals at the drama school in London, so they went to find more positive feedback.
Hello Sydney,
I'm the author of the HowlRound article. Thanks for your comments. The article was written as a recount of several months of planned research. I think that your observation "the tone of the article is one of an outsider to the LGBT+ club performance world looking in" may just be your take on my particular writing style. I wanted to include as much as possible about all of the different facets, events, etc. that I was able to experience during my trip to London.
I guess that I perhaps didn't explicitly say that my goal is to make theatre and nightlife performance more inclusive to drag and trans artists. The project was written for a university grant and so I tried to compare things to my city Omaha, NE. I was hoping to use HowlRound as a platform to inspire and provide resources for those that perhaps don't live in larger cities, or think about gender, sexuality, and performance and their intersections often.
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