Gender Schmender - Damnation: The report
Saturday May 20th 2006 was the night of Damnation, a performance night held by the wonderful hard working folk at Gender Schmender. It was also the night of my first performance for many months, having been sidetracked by various other projects in the interim.
I was one of several other artists for the night, and, all in all, it was a wild success. We packed out the venue, Cherry Bomb, and at one point, the door staff told me we had 170 people at last count, and this was only partway through the night.
Everyone had a great time. The collection of unusual performance acts were well received and contained great variety. We had a great MC, a tranny stripper, a singing drag queen, a couple of very dashing drag kings, a couple of surreal clowns, a geisha with peeling body art, a big guy with unusual grace, and probably others who I've missed.
The audience also went to a surprising effort to participate in the theme - though some just took it as an excuse to dress up. We had a priest, a monk, a schoolgirl, a troupe of fallen angels, a wedding angel, a red horned angel, Robin Hood and Maid Marion (I think), a couple of nuns, a high society lady, someone in a full body devil suit, and a whole lot of others who I've missed.
My own act was received better than I could have hoped for, though I didn't know what to expect at first. The main idea was to perform a female to male switchover on stage - something that I'm sure would be rarely witnessed by anyone. Of course, this entailed taking off most of my clothes at some point, but I viewed that as an opportunity to shine rather than something to worry about.
The act comprised of dance acting to two songs one after another: Haunted by Evanescence, and Cherry Lips by Garbage. The first song was intended to get the audience comfortable with me as a female persona on stage, in preparation for the second segment, when the stripping would occur.
In my own judgement, my rendition of Haunted was decent, but nothing exceptional, so there's nothing to get excited about here.
Cherry Lips was where things picked up. There was a loud cheer when I took my top off, which got louder again when I dropped my skirt to reveal skin tight hotpants underneath. That was followed by me prancing and strutting around on stage. I loved this bit, but it didn't last long, as I then went to the rear of the stage, and with my back to the audience, slowly took off my bra, and then took off my breasts as well before turning around and revealing my chest. As the song closed, I put some male clothes on, took off the hair, did a once around the stage, waved, and exited stage right.
Talk about outing myself to an audience - again!
In the space of about a minute, I had switched from female to male on stage. The intention was to cause a sense of "What the ?" and subtle confusion in the audience, and I hope I achieved that.
Throughout the night, I received compliments on the act, from friends, fellow cast, and from spectators. It was very well appreciated, and I'm both glad and somewhat relieved. In retrospect, I flopped on Haunted, but more than made up for it in Cherry Lips. Good thing no one seemed to remember the first part!
I think, next time, I'll stick to what I'm good at.