Performance 1: Defining Gender and Sexuality

(pictures 1 & 2)

Performance 2: Performing Queer Utopia

For our performance, we decided to open by sitting at a table and silently eating for 60 seconds. We wanted to create the awkwardness of family dinners in which people are forced to be heteronormative. By silently eating around a table, we are creating an awkward atmosphere in the room. In “The Education of Lil Cis” by A. Finn Enke, Enke describes the frigid nature of heteronormative society and how draining it can be for people to educate those around them. We wanted to simulate this frigidity through the silence at the dinner table, representing the ‘before’ of our queer utopia, a place where people are forced to be uncomfortable and unable to be themselves. From the dinner table, the character of the ‘Cheshire Cat’ emerges and offers drugs to everyone at the performance, calling out how resistant to change everyone at the party is and how boring they are. We decided on this type of scene taking inspiration from Ellie’s witch character in Ellie, Jade, and Eliseo’s performance. Then, everyone at the party takes the drug and is taken into the different scenes of the idea of a queer utopia. 

MAKAELA’S SCENE:

For the scene with the paint symbolizing rain, we wanted to tie in the beginning comment of “crazy weather we are having…” and make it transform one of the tea party members. Since we are wearing boring clothes in the beginning, the paints add color and a sort of freeing moment for the last person to transform into a different costume. There is also symbolism in the set-up of the tea party in the beginning of being a restrictive, oppressive, boring environment. In Munoz’s piece about Utopian Performative, they say, “utopia is an ideal, something that should mobilize us, push us forward” (Munoz 9). The rain symbolizes this mobilization through the act of letting go of yourself and the environment around you, while also letting in the good, new, and weird. While the person is being rained on with paint, the Cheshire cat will be acting as the storm while throwing candy into the audience. This is inviting the audience to also share a moment of being rained on while Lady Gaga’s “Rain on Me” plays in the background. This also will lead into more audience engagement towards the end when there is an invitation for the audience to join the new tea party.