The audience sits on sand while an artist simulates giving birth. Each one of their limbs dunked in a separate bucket of water, jutted in a prone crabwalk position, they declare that it is not the physicality of pregnancy that scares them, but the aftermath. What if, they wonder, their own child refuses to call them Dad? Families pass on the boardwalk. Fathers and children scatter across the beach. Birth seems like much more of a miracle than an hour before.
For Kellindah Bee Schuster (known within the drag community as Theydy Bedbug), pregnancy will always be a marvel. The artist, nonbinary but assigned female at birth, can become pregnant, physically, even if the decision goes against the foundation of who they are. This, they tell us, would require going off testosterone for two weeks – “the only thing that made me feel right in my body” – for the estrogen fertility shots to take hold. In seapony, one of six pieces to premiere this summer as part of Transformer DC’s Siren Arts residency program,
Schuster asks why pregnancy is an experience defined by gender. Imagining being both father and mother, they squeeze their stomach between their hands, rippling thick tattoos.
Mother and father are only two versions of Schuster. Over the fifty-minute, one-person performance, they play roles from overall-wearing, Southern-accented Earl to shy nerd Timmy wearing an umbrella hat. Playing themself, Schuster includes moments from their childhood, while other, more fantastical scenes include Earl catching a Siren at the end of a fishing line. Schuster throws a lot at you, not all of which coheres – a dance sequence, which despite its use of ocean imagery, is distinctly unmemorable.
Generations of fun-fact seekers have been drawn to male seahorses because they represent a human impossibility, rupturing neatly defined gender roles long before Homo sapien attempted the same. Timmy, a specialist in sea facts, is scared of the ocean but can still deliver the crux of seapony – how male seahorses give birth. The information is loaded with the potential of a nonbinary pregnancy. The men here, Timmy tells us, get too much credit – women still carry the eggs – but they prove one does not need to be a mother to give birth. Who says that you have to be any one thing at all?
Schuster gives the Father special attention. Amid all of the characters and surrealist, unconnected moments of performance – a mermaid game show, a shy puppet seal – we get a glimpse of honesty when Schuster remembers the relationship with their Dad: “He wouldn’t let me be afraid of the water,” Schuster tells us in the second scene of the show. They wonder why would a person who made them scared of so much – even accidentally injuring them as a child – never allow for aquaphobia. The answer, of course, lies in their father’s Whitman-like multitudes, expansive and contradictory–.like Schuster themself. Both parent and child are parent and child.
Schuster, who writes surprisingly tight recurring moments amidst randomness, latches onto this idea. The very word, ‘Daddy,’ which they use as a verb, requires doing and undoing at once, encompassing meanings that should be opposed. “I’m proud of you,” Schuster says, playing the role of daddy, before an instant later switching to tell us we are deranged. In order to be sexual, the word must be divorced from its domestic context, made into something distinctly un-fatherlike. Unless, Schuster smirks cattily, you’re into that. Words contain multitudes, just like the performer.
Not everything Schuster does is in service of this idea, or, indeed, any one idea at all. They first emerge from a tent with four large tentacles dangling loosely from their shoulders. This, one imagines to the “drag puppetry poetry ritual,” mentioned in the performance description, but does little else. Before the show starts we are asked to write down a dream on paper collected by the artist, and this Ursula-like octopus character is supposedly here to grant them. When later we dunk our wishes in buckets of water at the end, it plays like a childish afterthought. Schuster empties them over their head.
The sea is something between a safe space and a stereotype for the queer community. Tentacle inspiration herself, Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, is famously based on drag queen Divine, played by Glenn Milstead. The sea witch was many families’ first exposure to the overdrawn eyebrows and voluptuous queer confidence: Ursula’s hip thrusting “body langu-agee” has, reportedly, been the sexual awakening of more than one young gay. That she’s the villain? An act of camp, not cruelty. The movie ends with Eric impaling her with a distinctly phallic ship bow. You can almost hear the echoes of the jokes Divine would have cracked. While Schuster only makes one Ursula reference, the purple icon must have been an inspiration for them during this process.
When not onstage, Schuster is a queer educator, teaching adult classes on drag and youth programs on gender expression. Drag is, as Schuster teaches, a way to transform and connect to one’s most empowered self. When they first began performing, they broke down gender binaries that exist even within drag, conceptualized as an art form where one gender (male) transforms into another (female). Through this process, they discovered that they were trans. They begin seapony by telling us it is a combination of both Kelindah Bee and Bedbug, two equally important parts of who they are. The seahorse questions the idea of a gender binary by its very existence, challenging the basic biology of man or woman.
Siren Arts highlights the work of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists by bringing these artists to the Jersey Shore to perform. Transformer’s artistic director, Victoria Reis, is a native of the area and has helmed the program for the past eight years. The residency, located halfway between Washington and New York, hosts six different artists for five days throughout the summer, culminating in an original beach performance each Thursday. This year featured a Black artist dragging cloth along a washboard in memory of ancestors, and a queer multidisciplinary performer performing their own sandy death. Asbury Park residents and tourists alike come over to watch.
The setup on 2nd Avenue Beach includes a series of towels laid out in front of the artist for audience seating, while other passersby bring their own chairs or sit with their jeans in the sand. Reis tells me that there are about fifty regulars in the community that show up week by week, but a good portion of their traffic comes from unsuspecting beach-goers. Siren Arts interns, armed with brochures, are instructed to approach anyone looking over on the boardwalk to invite them to the show. This kind of guerilla art, running smack dab into your life, is a refreshing callback to what experimental performance is supposed to be. At a Marina Abramovic showcase last fall, someone dropped a note on one of the stages asking to ‘make performance art public again.’
Each one of these Siren Arts performances has a kind of DIY quality about them, in part because of the beach, in part because of how silly it is to be so serious away from a proscenium stage – Schuster’s earnestness, for instance, required by the show, takes a second to get used to. Siren Arts is not the first art collective to use the beach in performance – Beach Sessions Dance Series, for example, just celebrated their tenth season at Rockaway Beach – but Siren’s work surpasses a singular genre of expression. The emphasis on performance art is distinctively postmodern.
When Schuster finishes, they run into the ocean, inviting anyone who wants to join them. They are followed by their queer family and friends from Brooklyn who have made the hour-and-a-half trek to watch their story of pregnancy and parenthood, the same people who will be in the audience whenever seapony becomes, as Schuster promised, a full-fledged ensemble piece. Will they be back in Asbury Park soon? It wouldn’t be surprising. Siren Arts feels, in a word, cool, like you are such an arts insider that the metropolitan art scene cannot satisfy your avant-garde cravings. It’s fun to tell your friends you’re going to a “drag puppetry performance ritual” on a beach in Jersey, if not just because of how contradictory it sounds: accessible yet niche.It is impossible to escape the multitudes.
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