Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Camp Can Be Such a Drag: Approaches to Understanding Camp and Drag
No full textThis chapter considers why drag performance is sometimes camp. It addresses how drag and camp have a closely related history, and when trying to unpick the modern development of these terms, it appears they are quite complicated. Following US-centric attitudes to analysing camp in drag performance, this chapter addresses further perspectives and new approaches to interpreting drag performance as camp.
Initially, this chapter reviews the complexities of camp as a culturally situated and nationally determined concept. Most of the early scholarship on camp emerges within the field of popular culture in the United States, addressed as a phenomenon that reveals itself through the aesthetics of artifice and exaggerated frivolity (Sontag, 1964). In Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972), Newton even draws a comparison to drag performance being camp alongside Susan Sontag’s (1964) early musings. Newton identifies that ‘The Camp’ is a performed role in drag performance that involves incongruity, theatricality and humour. However, the performers in this text reject Sontag as she omits the historical lineage of camp within the drag and queer community. Following this, the development of camp and drag alongside each other runs slim, until Moe Meyer reclaims camp as the process of queer parody (1994). By reading the use of drag by queer political groups in the late-1980s, Meyer develops a theory of camp as a strategy for political activism.
This chapter considers less recognised historical understandings of camp that can be used to address drag performance. Drawing on Matt Houlbrook's Queer London (2005), working-class effeminate men understood camp practice as a lived experience, which can be seen the work of live drag performance with its witty rhetoric and bitchy demeanour, such as Newton’s early scholarship on ‘The Camp’ role.
Overall, this chapter argues that there is a transmission of camp energy seen in the bodies and repertoire of drag performers embodying a queer (or camp) subjective experience. To address this dynamic by looking at the complex layers of pop cultural expressions happening in camp drag performance and the bodies of the performers channelling such spirit. Camp drag performance repeats and eschews dominant and normative images from mainstream popular culture. However, the recognition of this comes from a queer subjective viewpoint, where drag is the form and camp is the function (or strategy). Read as a queer performative palimpsest; camp drag performance functions through parody, reappropriation and excessive over-identification with low-brow forms of cultur
Challenging Misogyny and Reducing Female Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) Perpetrated by Young Men: An Evaluation Report of Little Fish Theatre's Embrace Project.
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8 Tender Solitudes
No full textA short dance film made during the third UK lockdown in early 2021, evoking what we lost when we were no longer able to touch.
8 Tender Solitudes was created in collaboration with seven extraordinary dancers, each performing alone. Featuring a soaring score by composer Kate Whitley, it’s made from yearning and sensuality, anger and frustration, grief, memory and love.
Over the last year, we’ve had to learn new ways to connect with our friends and our loved ones. We’ve met each other at a distance, but rarely skin to skin. We’ve become fearful of breath, hugging and intimacy, and we’ve thought we might never be touched again.
When we’ve lived like this for so long, can touch ever be the same
Ways of Making: Artistic Practice Which Works Co-Collaboratively, Ethically and Which Celebrates and Extends the Conversation of what it Means to Live Well with HIV
No full textThis letter is the start of a dialogue about ways of making theatre cocollaboratively with women living with HIV. It offers a series of ideas of what I believe constitutes engaging and ethical practice specifically in the field of working co-collaboratively with women living well with HIV, and what is important to do, as well as what the basic non-negotiables are in establishing such a practice
Kinging the Stage: Male Impersonators and Drag Kings, Exploring Shared Historical Narratives
No full textThis Grief Thing: Evaluation Report
No full textAn independent evaluation report on Fevered Sleep's practice research project This Grief Thing (2018 - 2021