Infamous drag supermodel Rupaul once said ‘I’ve dedicated my career to fighting the mundane…’
Alistair Mason aka local baby drag Kodi Pendant shares the same penchant for battling the sluggish grip of normality.
‘I like the shock factor,’ he said ‘I want to keep upstaging myself and everyone else… I want to be the white sheep amongst the black sheep. A white sheep covered in blood.’
His alter ego Kodi Pendant is deeply estranged, macabre, warped. She is reminiscent of the ominous black-haired fiend from the Ring films.
The Perth baby drag is also the recent winner of the ‘Drag Till Death Do Us Part’ competition and spoke to OUTinPerth about what he thinks it takes to cut it on the Perth queen scene.
‘It’s just one big art form,’ Mason said.
‘It’s exactly the same as a sculpture or a painting, its freedom of expression… in a way it’s living contemporary art.’
It should come as no surprise then, that one of Mason’s inspirations is Lady Gaga.
‘I don’t want to sound like a big old bucket of clichés but I’d say Gaga; she is just out there… [When] she first did Paparazzi and started bleeding from her stomach, covered in blood, I re-watched that about 50 times,’ he said.
‘Her facial prosthetics that she has out now, the facial horns… I’ve been trying to perfect mine.’
Kodi Pendant debuted on the Perth scene less than a year ago when she made her first appearance at the Court Hotel’s Amateur Drag night. In listening to Mason describe the nature of local drag; he speaks with a conviction reserved for queens who have worked the circuit.
‘Don’t start out as what you want to finish as,’ Mason said ‘If you start out as fully-fledged character that walks out on stage and pours a bucket of blood [on yourself], you won’t really be accepted as much as you would be if you started out as a number pumping drag queen.
‘What they are looking for right now is people who can work in the clubs.
‘You can get lost in just being a club hopper… but I’ve tried to keep myself in between the two.’
Mason said the hardest thing about drag is trying to keep it separate from your real life.
‘Next step is that I want to do as many shows as I possibly can. I’ve been developing her character more and she is becoming more of a person than a character,’ he said.
He has locked in future shows with Ash Baroque and Fab Panache; she will also feature as one of six queens in the upcoming production, Drag. The baby drag said he was ‘stoked’ about his role in the show.
‘It’s an amazing production with six amazing girls and in my number in the show, I get to be who I want to be,’ Mason said.
While Kodi’s menacing aesthetic pushes on darker frontiers than what most other baby queens would gamble on, it appears that the punt has paid off. The battle against the mundane continues.
Benn Dorrington
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