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Queer Performance
by Alyson Campbell
All performance is about identity, in some way or other. It may not see itself that way, particularly if (in the Global North) it exists within the assumptions of white heteronormativity, which is still the case for the vast majority of mainstream work – at least in the UK and Australia, the contexts I function within. Both those arts communities are trying to find ways to address this, particularly around ethnicity, and there is a keen awareness around gender imbalance woven throughout the performing arts ‘industry’ – even if change in each case seems to be taking an excruciatingly long time to come. But heterosexuality – or ‘the heterosexual matrix’, as Judith Butler put it – still flies overwhelmingly under the radar of ‘identity’; it’s so ingrained it does not see itself as an identity at all.
I have been working for over 20 years in the field of queer performance, both as a practitioner – a director, mainly – and then as an academic trying to work out what that was exactly, if there could ever be an ‘exactly’. This is what Stephen Farrier and I wrangled with in our edited collection Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave, 2015), where we tried to upend the usual hierarchy and start with performance and see where it led us in queer theory, rather than performance being instrumentalised to demonstrate queer theory, which often seems to be the case. Queer performance responds to experiences of life that sit outside of dominant culture, and engages with audiences who have no investment in mainstream normative work that does not know them and rarely even acknowledges their existence. Queer performance springs from queer makers, who make work from their own felt and known positions. In the book Steve and I fumbled towards a definition of queer dramaturgies as being, ‘of course, about aesthetic composition and the narrative content of the work, [but …] also intricately bound up with the identity of the maker/s (self-identifying as queer), the making processes and the context in which they are seen’ (2015: 13). This often means a resistance to national and state theatres – and the money and prestige they give to the artist – and instead a celebration of ‘low’ art forms such as drag and cabaret in non-elitist spaces such as pubs and clubs. Indeed, when purportedly ‘queer’ art becomes so successful in a mainstream environment as the recent work (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) of Taylor Mac, for example, it forces us to question what happens to (its) queerness? Is it ‘de-fanged’, as Margrit Shildrick puts it, (in Queer Dramaturgies, 2015:258) or domesticated to the point of demonstrating or performing queerness for non-queer people, rather than being a shared queer experience? At the same time, does that suggest that queer-identifying artists are meant to work forever without adequate pay or conditions?
My current research area is around this domestication – in theatre but, more immediately for me at the moment, also in the academy, where the queer-identifying scholar can feel placed in perpetual crisis about what is happening to their queerness when they are subsumed in the elite, largely heteronormative and, in the UK and Australia at least, white institutions of academia. How does the queer-identifying scholar stay inside and what can they do? In my chapter for Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century, (co-edited with Dirk Gindt, Palgrave 2018) and in a new chapter in The Routledge Companion to Political Theatre (editors Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan, forthcoming/2018) I have suggested that one way to respond is to go ‘feral’: acknowledge the domestication that has occurred and find tactics and strategies to de-domesticate oneself and run wild. This might happen in the ways we speak out about our own positionalities, repeatedly, in the increasingly corporatized environment of our academic institutions; in how we insist on being seen and heard, for our own sakes and for the sake of our queer-identifying students and colleagues. It might also happen in how we use the privilege of our education to take our knowledge outside of our neoliberal institutions and engage in a sort of feral androgogy – the teaching of adults – outside academia’s hegemonic frame. In my case, this means engaging with queer theatre makers and festivals, and trying to find ways to build our own connections and communities in order to teach and learn from each other outside what Sarah Schulman has critiqued as the gentrification of creativity (The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, 2013). In doing this, we might find new ways to perform our identities – in our quotidian lives as well as on stages – and to articulate this to ourselves and each other. Not less rigorous work, but different – knowing our own stories and finding the dramaturgies to tell them, and knowing also the cost of leaving them unspoken and leaving queer lives invisible.
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Bibliography
Schulman, S. (2013) The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Los Angeles, Berkeley, London: University of California Press
Alyson Campbell is Associate Professor in Theatre (Dramaturgy and Directing) at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Queer Dramaturgies, co-edited with Stephen Farrier, is available now.