IDKE.8 - Get Your Politics Off Your T-Shirt

From the IDKE.8 (Austin, TX) website:

GET YOUR POLITICS OFF YOUR T-SHIRT: RADICALLY CHARGING PERFORMANCE (Room 3.128 - Sinclair), 2:00 – 3:00, Nicole Garneau

Are you a drag king who is pissed off about how things are running? Do you want to put your acts in the service of social or political change? What do you want your drag performances to SAY? Get your politics off your T-shirt and work on integrating deeper levels of content into your performances. As a form of performance that utilizes the human body, especially the gendered/genderqueer/queer body, drag kinging could be called inherently political artwork. But what are our messages? How do we use our performances as a strategy for creating the world we want to live in? How do we actually practice and perform that world on stage? Engage in lively discussion and participate in exercises designed to generate new performance material with politically charged content. This workshop is for anyone who is interested in using their performance to combat oppression and fight for liberation.

About the facilitator:
Nicole Garneau was born in Chicago, IL , in 1970. In 1993-94, Nicole worked as an actor in the Theatre of Moscow South-West, performing in Russian. Since returning to Chicago, she has built an interdisciplinary performance practice of site-specific, movement-based solo and collaborative performance art that often addresses a political issue; text-based works; percussive music, singing, and gender performance. In 2005, Nicole created HEAT:05, a durational art project in which she performed every day of the year in order to mark 10 years since the 1995 Chicago heat wave disaster. For 10 years, Nicole has worked closely with Insight Arts, an arts organization located in the East Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago that is dedicated to increasing access to cultural work that promotes social justice and defends human rights. Nicole's work is informed by feminism; struggle against white supremacy; the politics of the female body; sexuality; spirituality; violence against women and children; the prison-industrial complex; the death penalty; her experiences living and working in Moscow, Russia; and the 1995 Chicago heat wave disaster. She is interested in creating performance and visual artwork that is directly political, critically conscious, and community building. For more information, please visit www.nicolegarneau.com.

See the whole page of IDKE.8 Conference Sessions

I think that out of the four IDKEs that I've attended (including IDKE.8), theconferencee organized by the Austin dragsters is my overall favorite. (Maybe when I have more time later I'll post about some of the other session highlights from conferences past.)

Before I even got to the room the session was being held in, I admired its starting premise. Rather than starting with the debate about whether or not politics should be incorporated into drag, "Get Your Politics Off Your T-Shirt" begins instead by asking how can we better integrate our political messages into performance. (While I fully recognize that it is important to continue having conversations about the place of politics in performance--after all, on this point we certainly do not all agree--it was nice to also be able to have the kind of discussion Garneau facilitated which takes that conversation to another level.)

Despite having a room practically (if not in reality) filled to capacity, Garneau quickly got to business--we did a quick (okay, well so it wasn't all that quick since there were so many of us) go-around of introductions and what drew us to the session. After that Garneau offered us a quick introduction where she referenced someone and a theater/performance theory/concept of theirs, but I can't recall it at the moment and don't have my notes in front of me... (Hmm...I think she also offered to email something out to participants...I should double-check with her.)

In any case, she then asked the attendees to shout out some of the various political concerns that we currently have--I remember being slightly surprised at what was and wasn't mentioned through this call and response. (I think that there were three or four different issues that we tackled, but again I can't recall them all...but my group was assigned the topic of same-sex marriage.)

Once we had a sampling of political messages that we wanted to portray, we assembled into smaller groups and were charged with the task of creating atableaua vivant of sorts depicting our topic. We had about five minutes to discuss how we wanted to construct our tableau, to actually do it, and then to review the tableau created by our fellow group mates.

It all happened very fast, and while I'm sure that we could have easily taken more time to discuss the issue, to share how group members understood and felt about the issue, and to brainstorm possible ways of depicting it, it was also really amazing to not have that time and to still be able to create a scene with anembeddedd political message. Having to do such quick work showed me that timely inclusion of such political incorporation is possible.

The discussions that we had afterwards about what people saw in particular positions and gestures of our performance made for interesting and enlightening dialogue. I liked this aspect of being both audience and performer, and having the space to talk about ourselves in both roles.

It also felt especially good to use our bodies/move in the course of a conference session. Talk about audience participation and active involvement!

It would have been amazing to see what else we all would have come up with given more time...definitely the kind of conference session I hope to see again at future IDKEs.