One Brief History of Drag
Date: Aug 25
7:00 pm
- 8:00 pm
Where: Theatre
Performance Art Series
One Brief History of Drag: Reacting to 25 Years of Performances by Mikiki
Newfoundland and Labrador artist Mikiki has planned quite the homecoming. Don’t miss this ground breaking series of performances by local, national and international talents presented over three nights at The Rooms. (Note there will be an additional performance on Sunday, August 27 at The Ship Pub).
Mikiki invited each performer to reflect on and interpret a work from their long artistic career. Fans of drag and anyone who remembers Mikiki’s Water Street Drag Races and boundary-pushing 24-Hour Art Marathon acts of the early 2000s will love this series of contemporary art performances.
This series is intended for an adult audience.
Tickets: $8 (plus HST) per person per performance or $20 (plus HST) per person for all 3 performances at The Rooms (Click here to purchase bundle). Free for Rooms Members but a ticket is required.
Note: Tickets for Sunday, August 27 at The Ship Pub are sold separately. Bring your tickets stubs from the nights at The Rooms to The Ship Pub for a discounted entrance.
With thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts.
August 21
Mikiki
Kai Bryan aka \garbagefile
Taka Taka aka Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos
August 23
Mikiki
Adriana Disman
Irma Gerd aka Jason Wells
August 25
Mikiki
Phoenix Inana Sankofa LaBeija
Peaches LePoz/Jordan Arseneault
Marita Bullmann
Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Black Duck Siding, Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland. They attended NSCAD and Concordia University before returning to St. John's to work as Programming Coordinator at Eastern Edge Gallery, later moving to Mohkinstsis/Calgary to work as the Director of TRUCK Gallery. Their work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally in self-produced interventions, artist-run centres, performance art festivals and public galleries. Their identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to their history as a sexual health educator, harm reduction worker and activist. Mikiki’s creative themes often address safety and responsibility, disclosure and self-determination, community building and reckoning with trauma and loss.
Mikiki has worked variously as a Sexuality Educator in Mohkinstsis/Calgary's public schools, Bathhouse Attendant in Sâskwatôn/Saskatoon and Drag Queen Karaoke Hostess in St. John's. Mikiki has worked in numerous capacities in the gay men's health and HIV response both nationally/internationally and as well in Odawa/Ottawa, Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto, working in harm reduction, bathhouse/street outreach and HIV testing.
Mikiki is irregularly found hosting their Golden Girls screening and queer cultural studies lecture series Rose Beef. Contemporary Art | Toronto | Mikiki - Performance & Video Artist (menshealthproject.wixsite.com)
Kai Bryan
\garbagefile
Kai Bryan is an award-winning visual artist and drag clown. Kai's movement practice includes aerial circus, dance, contortion, and clowning, all of which become tools for decadent, serious, and silly drag performances. As an installation artist and garment designer, Kai is keen to explore the ways these movement repertoires interact with their environment. Kai is a regular host and performer with many organizations and festivals including Lawnya Vawnya, Neighbourhood Dance Works, Wonderbolt Circus, and the St. John's International Circusfest. Kai adores collaborative practice, and is a member of St. John's most bizarre drag collective, the Phlegm Fatales. About - Kai Bryan (kaileybryan.ca)
Taka Taka
Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos (GR), a.k.a Taka Taka, is the godmother of the drag House of Hopelezz, sister for others, mother of the drag king House of Løstbois, proud daughter of Jennifer Hopelezz and co-founder of the non-profit Drag King Academy Amsterdam. Taka Taka identifies as a dragtivist, educator, queer theorist and independent curator who produces performances as art director for Amsterdam’s sex positive underground night club, Church since 2013. They were trained as a professional make-up artist, studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie followed by Master in Arts at the Dutch Art Institute. Currently researching drag mothering as an artistic educational model together with DAS support PhD program THIRD. Taka Taka sees drag as an amplified voice, whose purpose is to communicate, problematize and propose methods according to local conditions. They have shared their knowledge and methodologies for drag mothering, gendered character-based practices and its intersections with HIV through interviews, lectures, essays and workshops with various Dutch art institutions and art academies. They collaborated annually with SOA/AIDS Nederland, Global Aids Village, and more. As well, with their biological mother Dimitra Panagiotakopoulou, who is living in the Greek village of Saravali, and designing and knitting entire outfits for Taka's lectures and performances.
https://www.atd.ahk.nl/das-research/third/third-cohorts/panagiotis-panagiotakopoulos/
Adriana Disman
Adriana Disman is a performance art maker, thinker, and writer. The first love of her life is books. The second love of her life is performance art. She is Czech-Iraqi, born in Canada, and currently lives in Berlin. Since 2010, her solo work has been presented in numerous festivals and galleries across Canada, the United States, Europe, and India. Disman’s practice searches for minor modes of resistance as she seeks liberation – an interdependent and as yet un-imagined state – through refusing to adhere to the logics of power. Often engaging with self-wounding, her work is minimal, poetic, and intense. Having completed her PhD on the pathologisation of self-wounding in performance art from Queen Mary University of London in Jan 2023 (that’s Doctor to you, bro!), she turned her sights to writing a novel currently entitled “Enjoy Yourself, Enjoy Yourself, You Don’t Know How Late It Is,” which examines housing precarity in Berlin through obsession, faith and social justice rhetoric to ask what stops us from living together, differently? about - Adriana Disman
Jason “Irma Gerd” Wells
Jason “Irma Gerd” Wells is the “Beast from the East”, a celebrated drag queen across the country and now the world. Irma is a contestant on Season 3 of Canada’s Drag Race, the first ever from Newfoundland and Labrador as well as Atlantic Canada. They are renowned for their runways and humour.
Phoenix Inana Sankofa LaBeija
Phoenix Inana is an Arab-African performance artist in Montréal, QC. Phoenix has co-created and performed smutty and parodic plays such as Greasy and Turning Tricks that subvert pop culture and childhood stories for raw and ‘shockful’ entertainment. As a cabaret artist, Phoenix’s work is an eclectic mix of drag and burlesque, musical theater and agitprop performance. In the past years, she has been centring themes of her cultural identity within her work, and reclaiming bellydancing from the grip of Western orientalism.
Peaches LePoz/Jordan Arseneault
Peaches LePoz/Jordan Arseneault (b. Saint John, NB, 1980; based in Tio’tia;ke) is a socially engaged artist, performer, translator, and activist grounded in Montréal’s independent performance scene, employing song, spoken word, cello, drag, humour and movement in his staged work. His ongoing social practice project Disclosure Cookbook (2015-present, co-created with Mikiki) has been presented regularly in diverse contexts, as has his agit-prop poster SILENCE = SEX, newly acquired by the Smithsonian Institute, National Institutes of Health (USA). Both his performances (as drag practitioner Peaches LePoz) and participative projects address issues of criminalization, stigma, mental health, HIV/AIDS, addiction, biculturalism, queerness and community. SEROCENE, a staged performance co-created with multidisciplinary artist Matthew-Robin Nye, premiered at Montréal’s Phénomena Festival in 2016, and was presented at the MIX NYC: the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. He has performed or been featured in exhibitions at the MoMA, La Mama Galeria, the Rubin
Foundation (8th Floor), Joe’s Pub (NYC), Root Division Gallery (San Francisco), the Schwules Museum (Berlin), Sunbury Shores Arts & Nature Centre (St. Andrews, NB), and numerous theatrical and cabaret venues in Montréal, where he has worked and lived since 2000.
Marita Bullmann
Marita Bullmann is a performance, installation and photography artist living and working in Essen, Germany. Marita Bullmann – Artworks