Interview with Bianco & Spruzzy
For the heading 1TP5ArtMisie we interviewed two historical Drag Kings from the Roman and international scene.
White
Actress/actor, performer, director and storyteller. She began the drag king adventure in 2006, founding together with others* the ‘Butterfly Kings’ and then the ‘Eyes wild drag’. She creates drag performances and shows together with her fellow travellers and organises the international queer art festival ‘Genderotica’ until 2015.
In 2017, he wrote and staged the play ’Bianco - maschere a fior di pelle’ directed by Daria di Bernardo, whose protagonist is a drag king.
With the LABirinti association he does workshops and theatre performances for children and adults.
Spruzzy
From the forges of Eyes Wild Drag, Spruzzy is a non-binary8 gender-drag-person who performs, strums, shoots unlistenable shit but above all is queer.
He organised four editions of the international queer festival “Genderotica” (2009/2015) and toured the world with various shows together with Eyes Wild Drag (no longer active drag group). Currently retired, she occasionally collaborates with 8 other artists for workshops, theatre performances.
What is the Drag King and how did it come about?
White: It is first and foremost a political practice. Drag = to drag beyond, to bring to a boundary; King: the quintessential male. Gender is represented and narrated as performativity: the stereotype(s) of the masculine are acted out through posture, gaze, clothing and make-up in accordance with the cultural code of reference. The gender binary is questioned and the result is a “perfect male”! Revealing and clear is Judith Butler's famous definition: “gender is a copy without an original”.
It was born in the 1990s in the US, then in the UK and Germany, also landing in Italy with small experiences in Milan.
Spruzzy: Drag kinging is the desire, the pleasure, the fantasy of impersonating the masculine, using its stereotypes (even the most boorish) and overturning them to create new masculinities according to one's own feelings, one's own experience and one's own idea of masculinity, whether totally original or personalised or inspired by real “models”.
What are the main differences with drag queens?
White: The differences are manifold. The Queen sisters are certainly more famous. Their feminine is fabulous, often inspired by divas and stars of show business. The Drag King in many cases represents common, ordinary males, but always in a dominant, narcissistic position. Each artist gives original accents and inclinations to his king, but at the core are the male characters of control, occupation of space and phallic power, represented in a parodic or erotic function, or even both simultaneously.
Spruzzy: The times for make-up! Joking aside (not so much), drag queens have this fabulousness of camp stardom, there is an ostentatious exaggeration of make-up, aesthetics, costumes to take a femininity to excess that often becomes parodic, ironic and irreverent. Performing drag (whether king or queen) is not necessarily the prerogative of homosexual or transsexual/transgender people - in fact, there are also vaginomonger drag queens and drag kings, and neither sexual orientation nor gender identity are discriminating in this sense.
The drag king generally tends to exaggerate the stereotypes of the “mainstream male”, is sometimes grossly misrepresented and what he does is mistaken for mere aping of the masculine (many lesbians have accused us of doing this), but behind it all there is a whole discourse of personal experiences and the need to liberate one's desires and one's body
Personally, there is also an aspect that has in fact characterised an evolution with respect to the king approach of the beginnings; if initially I (and I think I speak for Bianco as well, or else he will correct me!) I went on stage as a naked and raw king, then, with the experiences I had over the following years, the exchanges with other contexts, especially abroad (Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, just to name a few), I had the chance and the luck to rework my ’drag persona“ (and also the persona without drag!) from a more queer perspective, where the boundaries between the (multiple) genres became more and more intangible and disorienting the viewer was the most fun and effective goal. A non-conforming body is subversive, it sends one into crisis, it gives back strong emotions anyway, for better or for worse.
Then, there is the political meaning (not always necessarily implied) whereby performing in drag has a relevance in terms of claiming and fighting against the heteronormativity and gender binarism imposed by our patriarchal culture - bringing out one's masculine and/or feminine, playing with these stereotypes and re-signifying them to create one's “drag persona”, in addition to generating an enjoyment that is highly autoerotic and liberating, creates the opportunity to reflect on how pregnant we still are* of the sexist, homo/transphobic and limiting culture in which we are born and grow up, and how necessary it is to subvert these norms in order to achieve real freedom of self-determination and expression.
How widespread is Drag King in Italy?
White: After brief experiences in the 1990s in Milan, it disappears to reappear in the early 2000s, this time in Rome. Local realities were born and died. The Eyes Wild Drag experience is certainly the longest and most incisive and took Kinging around the peninsula and around the world for almost 10 years.
Spruzzy: To date, if I am not mistaken, there is a collective in Milan, plus various singles scattered around Italy. Since around the mid-2000s, a number of king groups have sprung up in Rome, including Butterfly Kings, Eyes Wild Drag (which later evolved into “drag queer”) and Kings of Rome. The initial push to create a “king” story, quite absent until then, was certainly stimulated by the drag king workshops held at the time here in Italy by Paul B. Preciado and Diane Torr.
On average, how long does the make-up and costume phase take?
White: It depends. It is certainly shorter than the Queen's preparation. In half an hour the trick can be done. However, it is not in the make-up that there is King, but in the bodily awareness of being male.
Spruzzy: The make-up/costume phase is one of the most intense moments of the king workshop, it is in fact the actual transformation and the time required also depends on the ease or otherwise of realising the king you have envisaged for yourself. It usually takes at least a couple of hours, especially for the creation of beards/beards/beards, depending on which technique is most effective (e.g. mastic and chopped up hair to glue on or use of mascara). Keep in mind that I am referring to a “collective” context, with several people. Individually, the time may be shorter, depending on the familiarity you gain as you experiment.
Drag Kings work a lot on postures. How is this work done in your workshops?
White: We start by deconstructing our self-perception. In order to ‘dredge up’ the other's gaze, one must first change the gaze each person has on oneself through a real bodily crossing. It is not through a mental conviction that the masculine can emerge, but through a work of grounding and listening to oneself and to the other. This is why the encounter with Alexander Lowen's Bioenergetics was fundamental, why theatrical improvisations are fundamental. We start from an apex but the intention is to bring out our own experience and our peculiar male.
Spruzzy: Initially, we do relaxation and body “neutralisation” exercises, and then proceed to build the character by forcing a lot of what is notoriously conceived as a typically male stereotype; to give some examples, the stiffness of the neck and wrists, the gaze, the occupation of space, the posture of the pelvis, the shoulders, the type of walk, the facial expression, and so on. People act individually and interact with each other by implementing these forcings, thus creating an experiential synergy that involves the body and disrupts sensations. Often, as I mentioned earlier, this gives rise to a kind of self-satisfaction that leads to a form of auto-eroticism, especially seeing one's “new” image reflected in the mirror.
Is taking a male point of view empowering from a feminist perspective?
White:It is empowering for everyone. Our identity is relational and therefore multiple. Living in the cage of a role, be it male or female, limits our freedom and relational potential, and therefore our possibility to be happy. With the association LABirinti APS, of which I am a member, we use this practice for parenting support, for personal development and for workshops on gender-based violence. In the latter case, for example, crossing the female stereotype leads to a vindication of one's own erotic power and crossing the male stereotype leads to a conquest of a larger and more grounded space in the relationship, be it with a lover or with a neighbour at the bar.
Spruzzy: Absolutely. It is an experience that, on the one hand, makes you feel very different because as a “female” (pass me the term) you are often subject to the looks, comments, expectations of others that tend to invade your space and your determination. The external feedback, when you go out in the open in “king”, is many times astonishing: you go unnoticed, you receive different looks or none at all, there is an invisibility that leaves you bewildered, compared to what you experience in everyday life. Just reflecting on this helps one to be more aware of the inequality of privileges, personal freedom and expression. Many people (most of the 8 workshop participants are cisgender women), after attending a workshop, suddenly become aware of past actions, gestures, attitudes that they normally did not see as “overdetermining” them in certain contexts (e.g.: the greater credibility of a man rather than a woman, in family or professional life or in very heteronormative spheres). Interesting food for thought is created, more attention is paid to the expression of gender roles (male but also female) in everyday life, which before might have appeared as something taken for granted, taken for granted, but which is not. One observes and criticises more and this creates awareness.
Do you have future plans (Covid permitting?)
White: The Crossing of Female and Male Stereotypes workshops continue: a 2/3-day journey in which we consciously wear the mask and re-discover ourselves;
parenting support workshops ‘Wearing the look - as if it were love’ in which the game is to slip into one or the other of the two extremes, male and female, and practise choosing comfort and vitality.
Spruzzy: Covid permitting, we'd like to dust off the moustache and see what might come out of Bianco's class and Spruzzy's dementiality. In the meantime, in Genoa last October, we had a rehearsal, just for fun and maybe we'll mess around some more, who knows what might happen... we'll see! (but Spruzzy would also like to sonà!)
Thank you and we hope to see you live soon. In the meantime, let's watch your videos
