The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted events around the world, including Circus and its Others’ planned activities: Our third conference, originally planned for November 2020, will now take place in November 2021 at the University of California, Davis. We did not want to wait, however, until late 2021 to continue our work and the movement of scholars and practitioners related to the Circus and its Others project! We are therefore offering a series of smaller, on-line, digital events, spanning from Fall 2020 to the summer of 2021. With these online events involving artists and scholars, we intend to bring yet more attention world-wide to our community and to our questions.
These panels are being organized by the academic and creative committee of the Davis 2021 conference: Charles Batson, Karen Fricker, Olga Lucia Sorzano, Veronika Štefanová, and Ante Ursić; and produced by Russ Martin.
The next event, Clown + Drag, will explore the intersection of clowning and drag practices and take place on May 8, 2021 at 1pm EDT, 10am PDT at Speakeasy-TV.com. It is being co-presented by Speakeasy TV, Toronto’s online drag bar. Details below.
What are the similarities in the work of drag performers and clowns, beyond bold makeup, bright colours, and character work? In recent years, there has been a growth of “drag clowns” who fuse together the two practices, perhaps primarily in performances in non-circus-specific venues. Part drag show, part scholarly inquiry, Circus and its Others: Clown + Drag will explore how artists and audiences can make meaning out of acts that combine clowning and drag – two art forms with specific histories. Following an opening clown-infused burlesque performance by Dolly Berlin, performer, scholar and dramaturg Dana Dugan will discuss the fertile creative ground where these performance practices meet and the drag clown’s potential for artistic disobedience.
Following a conversation with Dugan, artists Dainty Funk, Mx. Quest, and Lady Kunterpunt will each perform and join facilitator Russ Martin for an interview. They will then join Dugan and Martin for a panel discussion about the intersections of drag performance and clowning, exploring questions of queerness, race, influence, and artistic practice.
Facilitator: Russ Martin
Panel:
Maud (they/them), AKA The Dainty Funk, is an interdisciplinary spoken word artist and filmmaker who uses drag and the art of transformation to explore personal ideas about gender and blackness as well as reclaiming American clowning and performance. Dainty Funk is an all-encompassing aesthetic movement that describes the intersection between vanity and vulnerability, the soft and the grotesque, frill and fright. Their most recent project, Sonnet de la Négritude, is a poetry visual project that explores these dichotomies.
The “Exotic Commodity of Burlesque," Mx. Quest is a genderqueer, mixed-race, Indo-Guyanese activist and artist of many disciplines. They are the driving force behind queer clown collective #ClownsKillEmpires, as well as a member of Les Femmes Fatales Women of Colour Burlesque. Their work has been shown at festivals around the world, including but not limited to Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Bagel Burlesque Expo, Edmonton Burlesque Festival, Rhubarb Festival, Fierce! International Queer Burlesque Festival, Toronto Festival Of Clowns, Montréal Clown Festival, Toronto Burlesque Festival, and SummerWorks Theatre Festival. Check them out, with #ClownsKillEmpires, the third Monday of every month on Zoom!
Lady Kunterpunt is Toronto’s clown about town. Hailing from the West End performance troupe the Diet Ghosts, Lady Kunterpunt is a queer artist who mixes contemporary clowning and drag performance via bold, expressive makeup; clever, inventive stage acts; and a penchant for the colour green. She starred in season two of Drag Heals on OUTTV and Amazon and has graced iconic queer stages in Toronto from The Beaver to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Most recently, Lady Kunterpunt launched a new digital drag brunch series, Nostalgia, she co-produces with Tygr Willy in partnership with Glad Day Bookshop and PuntCorp, a satirical corporation that grew out of a staged narrative from a Diet Ghosts act. PuntCorp lays claim to hosting Toronto’s only ASMR-based news program hosted by a clown. Tune in on Twitch every Wednesday night!
Los Angeles native, Dana Dugan is a Montreal/Chicago based artist, mother, performer, scholar, and dramaturg. She was a founding member of the Chicago Contemporary Circus Festival (Chicago, 2014-15) and CirqueOFF (Montreal, 2017). She recently completed her Master’s Degree at Concordia (Montreal, 2018) under fellowship as a practice-based researcher investigating her circus body as a site for cultivating critical and productive tensions and dialogues through the concept and practice of (dis)obedience. Currently, as a doctoral student at Concordia's Humanities interdisciplinary PhD program, Dana continues her research through her physical practice to burrow deeply into her preoccupations with questioning her role as a performer in society, its dramaturgies, and its power for transformation. Her performances seek to provoke questions to re-politicize her body, incite commentary on the taboo, and dismantle over-determined political hegemonies. Her work reflects an agenda that advocates for socially conscious performances and alternative, utopian, queer, feminist, political narratives.
Russ Martin (he/him) is a writer, editor, and scholar. He recently completed his Master’s Degree in Popular Culture at Brock University, where his thesis work considered the impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race on Toronto’s drag scene. His journalism has been featured in the Toronto Star, Flare, the National Post, Xtra, and The Walrus. Russ recently contributed to Canadian Theatre Review’s drag-themed issue (vol. 185) and has contributed drag scholarship to forthcoming volumes from McFarland and Progressive Connexions. He is a research assistant and event producer with the Circus and its Other research project. Russ is also the founder of the drag zine and event series Feel Your Fantasy and is a producer and in-house researcher for Toronto’s online drag bar, Speakeasy TV.