by Llewyn Máire & Lisa Newman
Originally appeared in 2GQ #3, Portland, 2005, pp. 24-26.
We recently performed at the 11th annual Performance Studies international conference at Brown University, alma mater of renowned transsexual writer, performer, and gender outlaw Kate Bornstein. Kate hirself was kind enough to facilitate discussion with our audience and ask some tricky questions about what we had just done. We returned the favor after attending hyr brand spankin’ new and absolutely genius solo performance, “Queer and Pleasant Danger."
The show is Kate's first fully theatrical solo performance piece since Virtually Yours in 1996. She describes the full-length two act piece as "a solo performance exploring through story, video, and a couple of songs, the comedy and tragedy of a sadomashochistic transsexual dyke inhabiting the simultaneous identities of daddy, daughter, father, and son as put into motion through a fundamentalist lens." What follows is an interview about the new work.
2GQ: You asked us this question in reference to our performance at the conference, and now we’d like to ask you: How is “Queer and Pleasant” not reality TV? Where do the lines between performance art, theatre, and "show biz" cross? Or do they?
Kate Bornstein: Three things separate this new show from reality TV: it’s not on TV, no TV station would ever air it, and it’s scripted to within an inch of its life. But then again, don’t we all script our lives all the time? Is it called art because we rehearse it first? We rehearse our scripts until we’ve got it as close to exactly the way we want our audiences to see us naked? Other than that, it might as well be reality TV, only more bloody and much, much cuter.
2GQ: Though your writing and performances have been semi- and not-so-semi-autobiographical in the past, you’ve said that this performance is different from anything you’ve done before. Can you elaborate on that?
KB: When I’m doing one of my college talks, I stand on a stage and I tell my story. It’s part performance, part lecture—call it edu-tainment. But I’ve never direct-addressed a theater audience before, not as myself. I was trained in classical theater: Stanislavsky, Peter Brook, Chekhov, Shakespeare. It was all about playing a role written by someone else who was probably dead so you couldn’t ask them what the character was all about. And you create a reality for that character that makes sense in the world of the play, but it’s a character. It’s not you... it’s me. That’s what theater meant to me. Then I went through my gender change in 1986, and I came out the other side realizing that no one was writing parts for trannies like me, and I still wanted to go onstage. Acting as addictive behavior? I had to write myself into scripts so that I could then perform them and get my performance fix. But there was no playwright to blame if the character was unfathomable, or the script nonsensical, so more was on the line. But all my early pieces were through the veil of a made-up story. It was all metaphors. This show has a lot of metaphors, but it isn’t a metaphor for anything. That’s the big difference.
2GQ: What role does the audience play in “Queer and Pleasant”? Are they witnesses? Messengers? Does their admission pay the bills? You ask the audience throughout the performance, “Can you see me? Am I real?” Do you expect a response, or is this merely a theatrical device?
KB: The audience is the audience. They’re all there for different reasons, aren’t they? In all my earlier shows, I’d cast the audience in their own part, usually something familiar enough to play along. I’ve cast audiences as talk show audiences, performance art audiences, and once even as a computer-generated virtual audience. But in this show, it’s really just me and you. I’m searching the audience for my daughter. Constantly. That’s what makes contact with the audience so important. My daughter could be one of the audience. Maybe it’s you?
2GQ: You’ve spent several years deconstructing gender, gender presentation and identity. The roles/characters/avatars that you take on in this performance include your father, your own role as a father, and your past selves. You also address your fear of being perceived as clownlike. Because of these roles, you appeared more as a shape-shifter, a trickster, or a medium, rather than someone doing “drag.” Can you talk about this?
KB: Wow, cool. I had no idea how that would work out. You saw the very first ever performance outside my living room. So, I’m glad to hear the transformations worked. Before every show I do, I call in various spirits. One of these is Coyote, my sibling and most exalted trickster of them all. I call Coyote in to take over during the transformations. I do that before the show starts, and somehow s/he’s there when I need hir.
2GQ: Let’s follow up that last question. Performing as a man is more than just going through the actions of putting on different clothes, shaving your head, or gluing on a moustache. How did you prepare yourself to revisit your experiences as a “man” or, more importantly, to embody the memory of your father?
KB: I wrote from the part of me that’s a 57 year old man. Let’s face it, there’s that part of me. I just haven’t been living that part of me for nearly two decades, but finding that voice after all that time was surprisingly easy once I admitted it was there. And once I could write from that voice, it was a hop, skip and a jump to performing it. Dredging up memories of my father proved more difficult. I’m still working on those.
2GQ: What is the most critical feedback that you’ve gotten so far?
KB: Critical? Like someone who didn’t like it? No one’s told me that so far, and I’m hoping no one does! Or critical feedback, like really important feedback? That would have to be people who came up to me and said that they could empathize. It knocks me out that I can be the queer trans-thing pervert that I am, and the more I’m being that, the more wide a range of people can identify with what I’m talking about. So yeah, seeing people crying in the audience and finding out that a lot of the laugh lines worked. That was all good.
2GQ: What’s the best experience that you’ve had in connection with this performance?
KB: Well that performance was the first time in over a decade I’d been onstage in a solo performance. It was good to realize I could still memorize all those lines. It was just so gosh-darned fun to be up onstage again. It was so much fun.
• • •
Lisa Newman and Llewyn Máire are the co-directors of 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts, the non-profit organization that publishes this journal. In their lives as artists, they also collaborate together as the gyrl grip, and have performed in the Lá-Bas festival in Helsinki, Finland, the TransMission festival in Victoria, BC; the Lewis & Clark College Gender Symposium; the College Art Association conference in Seattle; the Full Nelson festival in Los Angeles, and most recently at the PSi #11 “Becoming Uncomfortable” conference at Brown University.
Kate Bornstein is an author and performance artist whose published
works include the books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
and My Gender Workbook. Hir plays and performance pieces include
“Hidden: A Gender,” “The Opposite Sex Is Neither,” “Virtually Yours,”
“Cut’n’Paste,” and “y2kate: gender virus 2000.” Kate’s books are taught
in over 120 colleges and universities around the world, and ze has
performed hir work live around the world—including two years at the
annual 2 Gyrlz-sponsored Enteractive Language Festival in Portland.
Kate identifies hirself as neither a man nor a woman. Kate is what’s called a transsexual person, meaning she was assigned one gender at birth, and she now lives her life as something else entirely. She was born male and raised as a boy. She went through both boyhood and adult manhood, underwent a gender change and “became a woman.” A few years later, she discovered that being a woman didn’t work for her any better than being a man had worked. So, she stopped being a woman and settled into being neither. For more information about Kate, see www.tootallblondes.com.
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