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Shows
Waow, that was quite a family happening!! Hundreds of participants from all over the world gathered at Rathaus Schöneberg to discuss sharp transgender issues. Vibrant feeling of belonging together still by being all very different. Tangible shared need for political action. And palpable sweaty emotions at the show and party in the SO36 on the last night.. Something magical. Watch the Gender Wall of Berlin breaking down:
My 100st time on stage. And this on the hype stage of La Flêche d'Or. Couldn't dream of any better location..
Very first time: singing in my native tongue and imagine: everybody understands!!! No need for translations on posters, projections, flyers, NOTHING. Just my voice and the audience. And this audience of course knows "le 3ème Sexe" or "Dure Limite", jumps on the dance floor and sings with me. Awesome...
Actually I was only there to shoot that beautiful film about a French dancer falling in love with an awesome Israeli choregrapher, and wanted to have a break after the shoot... jump into the Dead Sea and discover Jerusalem... but then it took me ages to have the show translated in hebrew and write it down on the rolls for the Homophobia multimedia song ;-)
So I had plenty of time to get more into the town and learn to love it more than I had thought first. And first experience as fully socialized as a gay guy. Gosh, the boys are really hot over there..
Ok it took some time to understand where the shows where, at all - but as I promised to come back in June, I will work some more on my hebrew!
At any case: I loved the name of the locations... Evita, Femme Fatale, and then No Limit! it could not fit better to me ;-)
Could there be a more beautiful name for a film festival? :-) Bilbao looks like my native town. Here the cathedral is white, there black, but the streets of the old neighboodhood are so similar I could mistaken and feel I am in France and not in Spain.
It is nice here, 19°C, sun and fountains, I'm so much travelling these days I can't even remember if we have spring or winter. It changes every months, the seasons have been accelerating like mad, I am now on my way for years already?
Again that feeling of urgency invades me. I would love to take all these impressions with me, back to Berlin, pack them in texts and notes, and sing and slam and play them soon...
The honour to perform for the Fiesta de Clausura is bound to a great challenge. How do I make it with 2 stages, one is 1.80m high and I must jump!?! The wall is black, the projection too dark, the subtitles won't show up, and there is no light?!? the DVD players are not linked to the speakers, and the DJ can't see me?!? An equation which will teach me. It is never about the technique, it is about the energy on stage... and this, I could give more than enough ;-) But indeed, chicos, sois fantasticos. Muchas gracias a Serafin, Pati y Xavier, los mas rapidos technicos que nunca he visto durante el tour!!
That was an exceptional show. No, no, not on stage, but all around the show!!
Because for the first time my brother was there, he who usually composes the music, he who never ever saw me on stage!!!!!!!!! A luxury to have him at the technique :-) following my voice every second, regulating the volume of the music perfectly all along the show, so enhancing the mise en scène of the concept.. and because it was his birthday!!!
Because it was the final party of the Roze Dagen Film Festival, where the screenings of Risk, Stretch or Die were hopelessly sold out, and so it was at the Hot Pepper Club too..
.. and because I met wonderful people, talking suddenly so personaly to me, thanking me for the inspiration to find themselves even more motivation to go on stage again, or to live even more between the genders. Amsterdam, your questions were the toughest ever at the Q&As, but your answers were the nicest to me. Thanks and see you soon - maybe already this summer!!
It hit me by surprise! Never thought I would be nominated for an Award as the personality who influenced most the Festival this year. The 3 nominees had a great pleasure licking the trophey of Tino!!! :-) What an eve to celebrate the end of the MIX Brazil 2007...
After the fantastic party with the girls last Saturday at the Gloria Club, I could not leave Saõ Paulo without checking out the boys.. :-)
The club is so OFF that the driver can not find it at once... I wonder why the club is so famous and said to be the most incredible transgender club on earth??? The Maîtresse de Maison, a very tall, slim, blonde Queen, is welcoming me warmly and shows me all around the place. Everything is true, there are little swimming pools and sauna places like séparées, misleading dark corridors, columns and stairs, I think this must be the cousin club of the Schwuz in Berlin - underground style.. I feel home.
The boys fraction of the filmmakers from the MIX Festival, from Buenos Aires, Los Angeles or Hamburg, are all here in the first row to support me and I see them glowing of joy and excitement. The screen is much too far away from me, i can not interact as I ususally do, but it seems nobody cares: I am the first Drag King ever to perform in Loca, they say, and again I must see the boys puzzled and hardly believing I can change so quickly... some of them will come to me after the show to touch my beard or even my chest (no, not more than that ;-) making me through this simple gesture simply and naturally one of them.
Garotos! Pomba! muito obrigado..
For a premiere it was quite one - Cris Barbie made an incredible job by customizing the party to the first Drag King Show in Sao Paulo! The doors of the Gloria Club, an ancient church (!!!), had to open one hour before to allow a thousand (awesome and beautiful) Paulistas...
I feel quite isolated from the ultra-loud party happening downstairs, where the most pretty girls I ever saw are kissing wildly on the dance floor, as my backstage is in the mezzanine, with 2 bodyguards in front of the stairs and of the curtain - an over-air-conditioned area where only very few selected VIPs have access. I wonder if I will be able, out of the blue, to give them a glimpse of what it is, what it feels like to blow the gender frames, as the flyer says, to be transgender..
The moment the spot follows me from the upper stairs to the stage, i see the bodyguards making the way free, and see, Paulistas, here you are, you give me your attention at once, I see you all being amazed and confused to see me as a boy, as a girl, as eveything inbetween, I see your eyes wide open and your cameras all lightened as I shave my second face half in the white spot, I feel you dance and jump with me on the 3rd sex sound, you gave me such an incredible energy and I go on, I nearly lose my voice on Homofobia, I see you shout and scream and raise your arms in front of the powerful clip of Saskia about the Parada Gay de Varsovia, I see you fight to get one of the flyers I throw all around the stage... and you say yeah! when I ask us to fight for our rights an freedom.
After the show i usually give one T-shirt to my hosts, but this time it is the only other drag king if the night, the oh so nice and cute Juliana from the Gloria Club, who gives me her own, I put it on at once to party "all night long" with the Mix Film festival crew...
Nobody would believe it but YES, I am shy, but so honoured to have been invited by Céline (Robinet) and Nicolas' Come4Event team to make that 1st part of our french Poetry Slam Stars Rouda & Lyor.. To cheer me up, Céline me dit "ne t'en fais pas, on ne va pas te vendre comme un poetry slamer! ;-)"
For this first work together it was about to experience the mix of a new style: the meeting of transgender performance with spoken word. And what a cool mix within a great event! The only snag of the evening: of our two new head-set mics only one decided to work. All right, for the 3rd show in a row with a mic' problem I think that might be the very last time. Because the next time I wanna have my very own and new one!
Je ne pourrais même pas dire combien les mots et les rythmes et les gestes et les yeux du Collectif 129h ont su me toucher ce soir-là, en plein coeur, comme une révélation que le slam pouvait aussi naître en moi.
Merci à Céline de m'avoir permis de partager ces moments forts.
Et merci à Anne pour la musique..
"Je chante.... dans le port de Vancouver..." I heard as a kid on the french radio Véronique Sanson singing that refrain so often that as I heard Risk, Stretch or Die was taken on in the Media &Arts Programme at IDKE9 PLUS the Dure Limite video clip as a performance at the Showcase: I HAD TO GO OVER THERE!!!www.idkevancouver.com
SHOWCASE / SATURDAY NIGHT
Tonight is the Showcase evening, a packed movie theater for a show of the superlatives: great performers from so many countries... Ireland, Australia, the States, Canada... we all rock the place, acrobats, multimedia performances, theater,... I only wonder how I could eventually be the only live performer?! But boy, what a show. The most professional I ever experienced certainely, the most demanding, and the nicest by far...
Thanks Tania for all the shots of the whole week-end that you shared with us all:
The photographer Lary Campbell I met by chance on the bus 2 days ago is there too and makes one of the nicest pics! He says: "Océan - on the picture, your body replaces the word "man". Fun, huh?" Thanks, Lary!
But the nicest, most pleasant moments are not to be shared here... or maybe a glimpse just to give you an idea of how it feels to meet brothers and sisters, get the warm feeling to be part of a welcoming community dedicated to define a new masculinity, with tenderness, openess and respect, far beyond the mere artistic creativity...
At any case: the sweetest hosts ever were Ed and Missy, thanks you from the heart for being so welcoming and so kind to me!
DRAGDOM / FRIDAY NIGHT The Penthouse Midnight Club is a... what do they call it... a gogo dancer club? a table dance club? whatever... I loved it at once :-)
The backstage upstairs is freeeeezing, and most of the time completely deserted from all performers... who of course don't want to miss the show hosted by Malaika Millions and Heywood!
Gosh, the audience is so excited and in a good mood... what a feeling to be challenged to bring them even further.. I was so happy as a nice couple from North Vancouver came to me and said: "you are bringing a new dimension here, because you are actually not only a drag king, we understood you as a man and a woman, we sincerely felt with you and in your body the real struggle between the genders".
As it is the rule, it was a Première for "Dolce Vita", an animation drawn by Martina Minette Dreier, illustrating best the theme of the evening - (T)räume. T for trans, Räume for rooms, Träume for dreams - Minette and I decided to take the briefing quite seriously and create a wonderful story between the paradize of protected rooms, the nightmare of illusion and segregation, and the challenge of hope...
"dolce vita" by Martina Minette Dreier
It took quite a while to paint the whole translation of the new song "Slow" on my body. Minette did it very thoroughly, we occupied the bathroom for quite a while. Of course everybody wanted to pee at that very moment!!
The perfomance in 3 parts has been conceived only for this exhibition of Minette...
www.doinggender.de A girl went straight to Lena after the show and asked her: "Is it a boy or a girl?" I could hear her question, so I stopped her in the corridor and said: I'm both, somehow.. She looked irritated, and for a little while, following her eyes looking for a more obvious gender sign on my body, I thought she might grab my torso or even between my legs, like the other person with the same question last year in Hannover... but she left, looking at me increduleously a last time before shouting the door.
ThanXXX Debra to shoot these precious moments... incl. best time ever in the bathroom to erase all these sad erotic words from my body with no guilty pleasure!!
Money is too expensive!!! i throw some T-CSD notes all over the crowd rocking around the stage. Yeah!
Thanks Debra for the piX rap style... ;-)
I like the Barbie Deinhoff, even if it has been changing and pretty much accused of gentrification since Lena left. But well - it is a place which reminds me of plenty of past shows and parties and beautiful, colourful moments shared with trans family and friends, a place where the first scene of the documentary has been shot, so somehow, I will like it forever...
Tonight, for the first time, I will show the most personal performance I ever conceived for the stage, I called it Torn, it is about the struggle between the genders... it is about travelling inbetween, so it was made for the travelqueeries party - a film shot by Eliatt Graney-Saucke.
I am always tensed before going on stage when I sing something for the first time, especially THIS time, as it is the first song I wrote with my brother together, the music seems to come directly from my heart and I feel like undressing my soul in front of the audience...
You said there is a place as wide as the sky Somewhere between the moon and the sea You said there is a place between dark and light A place beyond the he an the she
By performing it the first time, I dedicate the song to the TriQ Association working hard for the rights of transgender people.
www.transinterqueer.org And believe it or not: the ceiling is leaking... of condensed sweat!!! Is that the proof for a really great party?! ;-)
