On a snowy pre-pandemic New York night, the backroom of Starr Bar in Brooklyn is hosting a burlesque show. Juniper Juicy, a go-go dancer with bright green hair and pointed faerie ears, who self-identify with the gender-neutral pronoun “they,” is allusively shaking their round buttocks, encouraging the audience to slip one-dollar bills in their fishnet stockings.
It’s the first act of Compost Bin!, a recurring performance by a troupe called brASS Burlesque – as in brown radical ass burlesque. The show’s description promises “liberation, justice, love” and freedom of expression for “people traditionally on the margins” and “queer people of color.”
The host of the show, Don DickRealis, a tall drag king with a purple Prince-like suit and thick black facial hair painted on a feminine chin, introduces the show as a “radical-ass political cabaret to deal with the world, because there is a lot of shit to compost.”
Don DickRealis is the drag king persona of female performer Aurora BoobRealis, known as Dawn Crandell in her everyday life. During the show, Don acts as a man, while seductively revealing a woman’s body, and then simulates intercourse with drag queen Munroe Lily. The gender confusion is of a piece with a show in which people undress, deploy glitter, and make strong political statements.
During the show its three creators, Dawn Crandell and the sisters Michi and Una Osato, stand on stage with a brown compost bin and asking the audience to shout names of things, so that they can be thrown into the bin, sprinkled with turquoise glitter and given back as empowering art during a future performance. Among the items listed by the audience are voters’ suppression, weak prosecution of cops, transphobia, and jails, cages and borders. Then, the three performers, with bare breasts and painted beards, dance to the sound of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World.”
Italian version for The Submarine:
Quando il burlesque incontra la lotta femminista - 11 October 2020