In a back room at The Blue Room Theatre amongst discarded furniture and long forgotten props, local drag queens Fab Panache and Swish Eveready mark through choreography for the upcoming theatre show simply titled Drag.
Eveready, one of the busiest performers in the business has been away from recent rehearsals and is soon to jet off to engagements interstate, meaning she’ll have just a few rehearsals to catch up with the rest of the cast before the opening.
Eveready picks up the newest choreography immediately, and quickly offers suggestions on how the moves can be improved making it easier for the performers to transcend from one sequence into the next. Eveready highlights alternative stances that will make the performers look more ladylike, Panache agrees and alters the routine.
One by one the rest of the drag performers who make up the cast bound into the rehearsal room. Free of their costumes and make up the remaining 20-something year olds who make up the cast are casual in jeans and t-shirts after removing layers of raincoats and jumpers.
Panache updates them on the changes to the show’s closing routines. Some of the performers are quick to adapt, picking up the new steps. While others find a change in foot placement or direction confusing and learning the routine seems to have returned them to square one. Pressure is mounting, in just a few weeks the show will open for a three week season, taking the performers out of their usual haunts of The Court and Connections and onto a new stage in front of new audiences.
‘Back when I was doing club shows… I thought there’s got to be more to this than getting on stage and doing this for just three or four minutes.’, explains Producer Ryan Schulz, better known as his alter ego, Fab Panache.
‘I did my internship at The Blue Room learning about producing for six months and at the end of that I thought maybe I can produce my own show.’
Schulz sees the show as an opportunity for the local drag scene to break free of repetition ‘We’ve only got the two clubs and I think that the people that they hire to do their drag shows just want to be Britney or be Lady Gaga… the only way they can do that is by miming to their latest camp song out…they’re after fame and after attention.’
‘What this show strives to achieve and show is there’s so much more to drag… we’ll even be doing things that don’t even involve music. Drag used to have a real magical element to it and I don’t think Perth has touched on that at all, apart from in the show’s done by Strykermyer and Ash Baroque that have brought more of an artsy scene to the community.’
Schulz explains the inspiration for the show, ‘I thought back to the Shakespearean times when men played female roles and how that developed over time’. Schulz outlines how the show structure zooms in on various parts of drag history.
To create a work that is more for the theatre than the club atmosphere, the performers have teamed up with local writer John Aitken, whose recent work includes R&J, which was at The Blue Room last year and The Enchanters, which opened at the State Theatre Centre earlier this month. Originally Aitken signed up to write the show, a process that involved the creation of a narrator to link the different sections together. After playing the role of the narrator in a read through, the performers have invited Aitken to take on the role and join them on stage.
It’s guaranteed there will be a lot of interest in the show come opening night: can our local drag artists create a work that transcends the club experience and fits into the world of theatre? Do the performers have the stamina for a show that is over an hour long? And what will regular theatre-goers make of the show? All will be known when the curtain rises later this month.
Declaration: it’s a small world, the Producer of Drag Ryan Schulz is an employee of OUTinPerth, he looks after our distribution of the paper. Graeme Watson, the Editor of OUTinPerth is a member of The Blue Room and was involved in the selection of work for the current season. Graeme was involved in the selection of work prior to joining the OUTinPerth team, and before he met Ryan. They have 22 mutual friends on Facebook.
Graeme Watson
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