Do you ever get the queer urge to… spend a Friday night at a LBGTQ+ club for an evening of queer performances filled with lively music, raucous dancing, and to see some drag performers play with a random assortment of props?
If so, then hopefully you made it out to Queers in Motion at the Cuff Complex this past weekend. The event was produced and curated by Miss Texas 1988 of High F@ggotry with Shane Donohue and Elby Brosch of The Drama Tops. You may have noticed that there’s been a very endearing and growing cross-pollination of the drag, performance art, burlesque, social dance, and contemporary dance scenes, and this producing trio is exemplary of that blending. The Drama Tops have built many of their full-length performances through developing acts at drag shows. And Texas has been adding more and more burlesque technique and dance choreography to her numbers in recent years. So it makes sense that as producing artists, they wanted to create a show that brings these performance communities together.
Starting off the night, Miss Texas 1988 is our hostess with the mostest. She takes us down memory lane through a rolodex of popular dances from bygone years: the Macarena, the Chicken Dance, the Electric Slide. Knowing her crowd, and the high percentage of modern dance historians present this evening, she pulls audio clips from the Bird Cage, where Robin Williams says “You do an eclectic celebration of a dance. You do Fosse Fosse Fosse, You do Martha Graham Martha Graham Martha Graham, Or Twyla Tharp Twyla Tharp Twyla Tharp…” while dancing out the corresponding iconic moves. With no less than three costume reveals, and no more than five decades of archived dances, the audience is ready for more and the show is just revving up.
Descending from the top of the stairs down into the floor level of the stage, Akoiya Harris graces us with a coy and disarming solo. With a wink, and a tease of the shoulder and collarbone, Harris’s limbs fluidly untwine and stretch through the air. As she leans backwards arching over the railing, Harris moves with pleasure of being witnessed.
Stasia Coup is up next to run us through the gambit of all the different things you can do with a can of Pringles. Interspliced with archival Pringles commercials, Stasia lines up a row of Pringles tubes and body surfs across them on the floor. Fresh off of her TUSH competition win, Stasia has an enviable knack for adding sophistication to stupid, and her silliest ideas always go the extra mile in effort, prepwork and finesse. Whether she’s trying to catch potatoes with Pringles tubes for hands, playing skip-it with the tube, or smashing the chips under her feet as she runs across the stage, her platinum blonde ponytail is always sleek with not a hair out of place.
If all those potato crisps left you wanting more to munch on, Chad comes to entice you with his hard long-shafted carrots. Rabbits are well-known for their tenacity for copulation and their love of a particular crunchy orange root vegetable, and Chad’s alternate persona Jacked Rabbit is no exception. After a crowd-rising strip, Jacked Rabbit really puts the playboy in bunny, as a volunteer from the audience is brought onstage for their daily dose of Vitamin A to suck the ranch off a carrot.
As always, dani tirrell came to dance. dani brings a deeply embodied presence with movement that invites us all to sink into the layered rhythms and vocals of the music, a 1963 live recording of “Barefootin’” by Jackie Shane. dani looks to the ceiling and undulates as the music and movement fill the nightclub. When the song abruptly cuts out, dani pulls out a phone and plays the music from the quiet speaker, returning the sound to the personal sphere, and exits a bit more subdued but just as tapped in.
Closing out the evening, Cherdonna enters in a poofy dress and pussybow, with large yellow plastic scissors and a dismembered hand. She begins bopping her hips from side to side, to the delight of everyone present. After a few minutes of this candy-coated cheer she looks to DJ Dark Wiley to stop the track, saying that she doesn’t want to listen to that music anymore. Then prompting the audience, she asks us all to set a timer for 4 minutes and 24 seconds. In on the task and in on the joke, we giggle and watch Cherdonna, dropping any pre-meditated plans with the scissors, letting her impulsivity that we know and love cut loose!
While this was currently a one-off event, tickets sold out fast and the demand is clearly there, so stay tuned to see how this programming evolves. When asked about a sequel, Texas jokingly offers “Queers on the Moon!” but grounds us back on earth by highlighting the importance of programming like this as a crucial step in “building out an interconnected queer arts scene. It expands and connects the community, and we really need to be connected, mobilizing, and thinking big right now. It’s great in an arts sense, and it’s crucial in a unified resistance sense.”
In conversations around gender, sexuality and art, I love the interplay between the words queer and abnormal – not the negative connotations, but the creativity and transgression of “deviating from usual or average.” We don’t go to see art to watch normal. We go to see something that sheds light on or questions normalcy and norm culture. Queers have always been at the foreground of questioning and testing normalcy. We need that more than ever right now. It is unsurprising, if not integral, that queerness has been and will continue to be deeply intertwined with performance. That we come together to celebrate, defend and express ourselves. And even if you didn’t make it to the show, remember that you can always listen to and satiate the queer urge to be in motion.
Queers in Motion took place Friday January 16, 8pm at The Cuff Complex.
