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Article Excerpt
TO EXAMINE THE IMPACT OF ARTISTS AND CULTURAL WORKERS WHO ARE influencing social change, I might start by asking: What if as a middle-class, queer, white girl growing up in the United States, I had learned about the fluid and transformational nature of gender through creative, mind-provoking male cross-dressing performances? What if I had seen a Caribbean cultural activist talk to an audience about current events I never heard about on the 6:00 o'clock nightly news? What if I saw an out Argentine butch lesbian play a male monarch, commenting on social class, religion, and homophobia? How would my world have been shaped differently had I been exposed to performing artists such as Diyaa MilDred Gerestant, Imani Henry, and Susana Cook, whose performances and activism establish them as cultural workers?
Imani Henry, Susana Cook, and Diyaa MilDred Gerestant are performing artists based in New York City that produce original work addressing cultural themes related to sexual, gender, ethnic, and class identities. These three artists have been strongholds in many of New York City's alternative performance spaces, such as The Kitchen, La Mama, WOW Cafe Theater, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Dixon Place, to name a few. In these spaces, audiences can anticipate thought-provoking work that often challenges established theater norms. Audiences comprised of social activists, gender and sexual minorities, outsiders, and people with low or fixed income are, unsurprisingly, drawn to the work of these artists since it reflects their worlds. These worlds are different from the typical upwardly mobile status quo that many mainstream performing arts programs and Broadway theater highlight in content and/or form. I will consider these three performing artists as activists and cultural workers who persistently create political work in an artistic environment where many cultural institutions and alternative arts spaces struggle to keep their leases and maintain low ticket prices.
The work of each artist/performer reveals their mulitiplicitous identities, and explores and gives voice to racial, national, class, gender, and sexual identities that are not the dominant norm in the U.S. Such intersections of multiple identities make their bodies of work unique and allow audience members who share those identities to see images of themselves that rarely get front and center stage. Moreover, the artists' positions as cultural workers allow them to bridge activist movements and communities that might not otherwise form alliances. Besides the creative work itself, their activism extends to the creative processes in their work, touring with their work, as well as other aspects of their lives.
Susana Cook, a self-avowed butch lesbian from Argentina, celebrates butch/ femme lesbian identities and exposes class structures that exclude the working class from resources and power. She plays male roles to reveal and dissect the incongruence and instability of masculine identities. Using humor and ironic representation, her performances challenge the status quo. Diyaa MilDred Gerestant, a Haitian-American, queer (1) performing artist, made her name as Drag King Dred. Her sophisticated blend of styles raised the bar of expectation and anticipation for drag king performances. She dons gender from many corners of the spectrum, creating confusion in often unsuspecting audiences who are not keen to drag. Gerestant educates her audiences by elucidating her own potential to unmask gender and has begun to produce full-length plays that explore her own personal transformational path through gender, drag king performance, and spirituality. Imani Henry identifies as a queer, Caribbean, female-to-male transsexual activist and creates characters that express masculine gender identities in his plays, ranging from butch women to playing himself. He does not use gender in a playful way, as Gerestant or other drag kings might, but rather explores real stories through characterization. Henry finds creative ways to bring the attention of his audience members to current real-world situations that demand action. All three produce provocative work that asks audiences to actively engage with the material.
Each artist has consistently inspired me and I continue to admire and support their work. This led to my desire to speak with them about their perspectives on their work, how it functions as activism, and its place in New York City's downtown queer performance communities. Consider this article an invitation to acquaint yourself with three artists who have provoked my thinking and who may, in turn, challenge you in positive ways. A section on each artist begins with an interview, followed by a discussion section that addresses the intersections of performance, identity, and activism. Themes include how performers work toward social change by using performance as a tool of visibility and connection to raise consciousness; the participatory process that enhances the activism of performance; risks in exploring personal identities through performance; and self-identifying as a cultural worker, with an exploration of that term as it is used in a contemporary context.
Trans, Butch, and King: The Gender Lens of Three Activist Artists
I conducted face-to-face, in-depth interviews about art and social change with Imani Henry, Susana Cook, and Diyaa MilDred Gerestant, New York City-based performing artists and writers. Each is nationally or internationally known for a distinctive artistic style in work that is seen as a catalyst for social change. As artists with varying levels of outsider status--that is, outside the North American mainstream--their perspectives on the dominant culture and the current state of affairs are valuable to understanding oppression, power, sexuality, and political structures where dominant privilege may be taken for granted. Additionally, all are educated, accomplished mid-career artists, and people of color who identify as queer or lesbian.
Since audience members commit at least an hour to listen to what an artist has to say, performance becomes fertile ground for activating social change. These interviews focus on art and social change through the following questions and expand into territory organically produced in the interview process: How do these artists define themselves? What is the role of the artist who works for social change? How do these artists use their performance to encourage, inspire, or incite activism for social change, and what effects have they observed? Why are sexuality, nationality, gender, class, and race important subject matter? How do working class, communities of color, gay and lesbian, and queer communities intersect? I also draw upon my own experiences as a performance artist in this context.
In 1999, Susana Cook regularly produced and directed shows at the WOW Cafe Theater. One of the best-established women's theaters in the world, it is collectively run and has ensemble casts of mostly people of color. Cook asked three performers with whom she had not previously worked, Diyaa MilDred Gerestant, Imani Henry and myself, to perform in a second run of the highly successful play, Hot Tamale. I had known Gerestant before as Dred, a preeminent drag king in New York City, and a regular at Club Casanova, the first weekly drag king performance night in the country. Highly regarded as a performer, she was one of the kings who had inspired me to perform male drag myself. Imani Henry, in the midst of his own gender transition, had recently relocated to New York City and was eager to get involved with New York's downtown theater scene. Cook's play facilitated our first meeting.
As a playwright and performer who came out of the spoken word boom of the 1990s, I found drag kinging to be an important bridge between my work with text and work that incorporates the body. "Kinging" is a term Judith Halberstam (1998) uses to describe the performance of masculinity. Drag Kings bring masculinity into the theater as a spectacle, particularly through humor, and challenge the idea that male masculinity is unquestionable, authentic,...
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