Sometimes, your lover will stab you in the back and kill you just to steal back their sunglasses.
And sometimes, the thing they’re stabbing you with is a fake banana.
FAGGOTICA was everything it promised to be: a transsexual, horny, goth celebration of the power nightlife. There were also some bonus Authentic Nightlife Experiences for attendees: waiting in line for over half an hour, getting herded together with a bunch of people dressed in black, watching hot dancers grind on each other while you stand politely off to the side.
If you’re feeling impatient, I can sum up the show in one vignette. It’s a slow-motion sequence where the performers are illuminated in partial silhouette, pushing toward the audience. The lights blaze behind them, and the scene is set. Aeon is deifying the thing that everyone is afraid of: a body that is different, that disobeys the rules of desirability, that you are attracted to despite the world telling you it’s wrong. Out in the audience, we are mesmerized by the halo-glow of leg hair, the asymmetrical cut of a shoulder, the curves and edges of bodies that choose to exist otherwise.
But that was just a few minutes of an hour long show. There was also a knife fight run like a boxing match, a weighty will-they-won’t-they duet, a monologue from a bodybuilder intent on looking as hot as they can and swallowing the world, and many many one-second gags that delighted the audience to no end.
Early in the piece, Jae and Noel mirror each other in a duet, crossing themselves and swinging their limbs over the backs of their folding chairs. They slip up to standing and snake through the metal legs, but mostly they look at each other. There’s a joke among people who are too genderfucked to ever be Straight that heterosexuality is dating someone who’s completely aesthetically different from you, and homosexuality is dating someone who looks like your twin. No one on this stage looks the same. In the unison, in the mirroring, there is an unmistakable tenderness for difference. For the numerous, often minute ways that we can never match each other.
In another duet, Maxx and Miles pin each other to the wall, landing in a taped out square conveniently labeled “AIM HERE.” They fall into and over one another, sharing weight in ways that are both intimate and showy. I don’t think cis people understand how much propaganda is out there telling trans people they need to worry about whether a cis person will ever date or fuck them once they transition. What if everyone’s goal was to be desired by someone who is trans? What if we as trans people love and fuck each other so hard that it inspires other people to join us?
Akane steps forward and describes a dream where they are massive; grotesquely and frivolously muscular. They pop their muscles out as the audience screams, and I think about a version of the Olympics where no one is investigated for their hormones and everyone takes as many drugs as they can to see what they can become. It’s queer in that Oscar Wilde way, queer like beauty over sense, and beauty like excess over restraint.
Jae extends a pointed toe then ripples their arms out like wings. They glide in and out of the floor, collapsing then recomposing perfectly poised again. I am already thinking of the Dying Swan when later in the show Akane burst downstage, flexing as that cello from Carnival of the Animals swells and I find myself on Wikipedia after the show trying to figure out if the composer Camille Saint-Saëns was a freak while he was alive (results: unclear).
It’s a hard balance, mixing dance and nightlife together. There are the moves the audience cheers for, and there are the moves that are genuinely difficult, and these categories don’t always overlap. The audience will cheer for a pose or a split, but what about the virtuosity of keeping your spacing in a cramped venue, or staying still while a spectator is breathing down your neck, or placing your hand sequentially on the floor in slow motion while supporting the weight of your whole torso?
Aeon pulls the curtain back just a bit. Most of the dance sequences are heroic and flashy, but midway through the show the music cuts out, and the cast goes through a familiar bit of choreography, chatting their way through the moves as they re-perform it for us. A reminder that there are people behind the gods you see on stage.
Speaking of, here’s a little ode to each of the performers: Maxx, somehow smiling like the boy-next-door while wearing a diamanté netted crop top and a skirt with the word FAGGOT spray painted across it. Jae, never troubled and always flawless. Noel, nimbly stepping between elastic and unruly. Akane, raging with sincerity and longing. Miles, almost neurotic in his commitment to constant mugging and picture-perfect movement.
The threads that tie us together are strange, secretive experiences that first appeared in the recesses of our minds, often pushed away for years before we decided to wear them on the outsides of our bodies.
Here’s to performing your Self, but only for the people who get it. Here’s to becoming something shocking, terrible, and beautiful.
Leave a Reply