Be You
Dancing Qweens
Wednesday 30th January, 2019
Dancehouse
Presented as part of Midsumma Festival
Choreography & Performance: James Welsby/Valerie Hex
Collaborators & Performance: “Mad Fox” Maggie, Ally Cat, Joel Bray, Rolly (performed by Alex Xand)
Lighting designer: Sarah Platts
Costume designer: Tristan Seebhoms
Dancing Qweens: Queer history lesson with Valerie Hex, my response drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
There is a photo of me dancing in the lounge room of my family home. My arms are flung wide overhead, making the Y shape to the Village People’s Y.M.C.A.. My mouth is parted in a smile, mid pronunciation of the letter Y. Caught in a moment of bliss and expression on the imaginary dancefloor before the fireplace. I am dancing with my younger cousin, following the playful choreography. The letter M: let your elbows point like rabbit ears on your head. The letter C: hug a beach ball to the left-hand side. The letter A: arms overhead once more, fingers touching to create a triangle. My favourite record is spinning, and I am happy. In the adjoining room, the grown-ups are presumably talking about grown-up stuff, missing all the fun, until my Dad picked up the camera and recorded this moment for posterity.
The year captured in the discoloured photograph is 1980. I am five years old. My memory can no longer tell me what costume I imagined myself to be wearing but I feel certain there were feathers and sequins in there.
* * *
“Patterns or sequins?” enquires “Mad Fox” Maggie. Sequins, please, I think. Anything, I say. “How about this black dress with sequins on the hip?”
I am at Dancehouse for Dancing Qweens presented by Dancehouse and Midsumma Festival. In the theatre, long racks of cloths create a wall before the seats. A friendly invitation to put on a costume, if you wish. A friendly invitation to dress as I Am What I Am. Be Disco. For a spell. Forever. Whatever.
A wardrobe, a dreamscape, courtesy of the “KonMari Method”, announces “Valerie Hex,” James Welsby’s alter ego, from the stage. The audience now clothed in the purged second-hand items that no longer “spark joy” for the previous owners have become a part of a marvellous sea of sequins and a fair amount of non-breathable fabric. At the end of a red-hot day, Dancehouse is an oven for the continued cooking of one’s limbs. Sweat poured down my back and made a mop of the dress tied about my hips with the sequins visible.
We have gathered for Hex’s history lesson. Some of the class sit on a handful of seats arranged in the area which normally serves as a stage. The remainder, myself included, sit cross-legged on the floor. To my right someone in a fluorescent ruffle-sleeved bolero makes a fan from their program, and I inch forward to catch the breeze. The subject: “a new work by choreographer and drag artist James Welsby (Valerie Hex) exploring 50 years of queer dance history channelled into a highly interactive and surreal experience of queer bodies in motion. ‘Same-sex ballroom’, ‘waacking’, ‘voguing’, and ‘heels’ are styles that have informed this kaleidoscopic take on history that ultimately inquires into the future of queer dance”.[i] Dancing Qweens is unmistakably a celebration of being who you are, accompanied by a 10-week public program of workshops (Let’s Get Metaphysical), conversations (Let’s Get Critical), and queer dance classes open to all (Let’s Get Physical).
Just as when I look at a photograph of myself as a child, memory makes it hard to distinguish what actually took place, Dancing Qweens “question[s] the weight of history, its relevance today, and the fallibility of memory” by looking at how dance “styles may have evolved”. Patterns alongside sequins; the personal — “being true to yourself in an uncompromising way, connecting with community, …. and making sure [your focus] is about what your practice [as an artist] can give to others”[ii] — alongside “the bigger picture…. of queer cultures as we approach the 50–year anniversary of New York’s Stonewall Riots[iii]”, and a year on from the same-sex marriage postal survey in Australia. It’s all in there. Shimmying, on a Wednesday night, like no-one and everyone is watching — it’s up to you. Past and present, and what might be ahead.
Our first participatory lesson begins with a Tea Dance[iv], and when the bell rings, we all change partners, in reference to a bell which sounded in the event of a raid, signalling that everyone in the venue should switch, as society deemed and the law enforced, to mixed couples. By way of Janis Joplin, costumes changes, and a crying baby mask, we arrive at the Village People and my chance to let my elbows point like rabbit ears atop my head as I make the letter M. Now no longer one to dance in public, if at all, I didn’t tap into the happy five-year-old version of me in the photo, but that’s okay.
My reservation gives me scope to think about what it is I like about being an audience member, and ultimately why I like going to see dance. Dance as an expression of freedom and openness is something I experience in making artwork, in drawing, collaging and writing. I would be lost at sequined-sea without my images and words; when I see dance, I see others perform with a confidence I feel when working in my medium. It is poured into a different vessel, released in a different way, and fascinating to me: authentic communication in another guise.
For Welsby, “dance connects my identity with my moving body and nothing feels more authentic”.[v] And though my ‘waacking’ version of “shampoo and conditioner” lacks rhythm and conviction, I understand the message, and have fun in the classroom: be you.
[i] Dancing Qweens, Dancehouse program notes, 30th January, 2019.
[ii] ‘In the House: James Welsby’, Dancehouse, accessed 31st January, 2019.
[iii] Stonewall Forever, accessed 31st January, 2019.
[iv] ‘The Very Gay and Interesting History of the Almost Lost tradition of the Sunday Tea Dance’, Will Kohler, Back2Stonewall, 17th June, 2018, accessed 31st January, 2019.
[v] ‘Archer Asks: DANCING QWEENS performer James Welsby’, Angelita Sofia Biscotti, Archer Magazine, 15th January, 2019, accessed 31st January, 2019.
Image credit: Valerie Hex (James Welsby) performing in Dancing Qweens by Matto Lucas
We have been collaborating since 1999, making artists’ books, zines, collages, stories, prints, and drawings. Besotted still, it appears, with paper for its adaptable, foldable, cut-able, concealable, revealing nature, using an armoury of play, the poetic and familiar too, with the intention of luring you into our A(rtists’ books) to Z(ines).