I am an extreme extrovert, optimist and a people’s person. For me, a regular day wouldn’t end without having met at least 50 people. The last I stayed without it was around five years ago, when I quarantined from my art to crack the AIEEE, but I couldn’t withstand keeping away. And the next time I arrived, I arrived as a dancer who never wanted to leave the stage.
For a long time, I always ensured that I don’t stay at home, even during the weekends. I ensured that I’m rushing and running, and engaging myself with lots and lots of people around the city. I never wanted to spend a day without art. On some days, it would be dance, on others it’d be drag, or performance art. My body became accustomed to a constant adrenaline rush to create, create and create art.
Soon, the news of coronavirus crept into my device, and initially, I tried to convince myself that the virus won’t come to my country or my city. And as it developed, I assured myself that I can still get a place, I can still get people, and I still share my art with personal effect. However, as time passed, the boundaries around me sucked in, and became tight. Post the lockdown announcement, I was confined within the four walls. The first week was majorly spent on retrospection and telling myself that I cannot stop. Thankfully, I had a camera and a friend who could click pictures. It was then that I decided I would create art with this medium.
I started performing drag in June 2019. Drag is an art form where a man usually performs as a woman, but has now evolved from dressing to resemble a girl, into dressing to resemble a gender. For my drag performances, I shop a lot, pick up clothes I love, and buy items I like. I create particular looks, and then shop and spend a bomb to make that look.
Drag gives me a way of expression. Drag also helps me to create a voice for myself. While I quarantined, I started telling myself that queer people live half of their lives in closets, so it would be a cakewalk for us to be isolated for few days. But, the quarantine actually gives an opportunity to put the heteronormative society within a confined space, and maybe give a peek into closeted experiences. And that is why it is important to be in drag as we quarantine. Every day I picked up a look. The first week when I started, I got the inspiration from the excessively used term of the week: ‘Corona Virus’.
While the pandemic was already threatening the country, it was important to call it ‘ordinary’ to ensure we don’t create panic, and instead create awareness. The culture of the anti-art gave the opportunity to represent even diseases. During the 1960s and 1970s in Japan, Tatsumi Hijikata founded a genre of dance performance art called ‘Butoh’, after the end of the post-war reconstruction of the Second World War.
As the country’s economy flourished, the manufacturing industry started releasing toxic waste into the sea. The released mercury and cadmium caused mutations in human cells, leading to severe diseases. Consuming the toxicity eventually led to Minamata disease. Hijikata continued engaging with bodies weakened due to the disease, and incorporated them into their own dance with deepest resonance in distorted limbs of Minamata disease patients.
While the modernists were enjoying the creation of his beautiful dance, Tatsumi Hijikata alone resonated deeply with the deformed and disabled human life and created a novel beauty that was never seen in human history before. This was the idea to decentralise drag to seek the representation of diseases in human form. When you present something in a human form, there is an awareness, reliability and imagination that makes people understand and empathise. Just as how liberty, nations, elements are represented in multiple art forms, it was also essential to represent a disease to remove the label of fear and make it just a person to fight with.
As days followed, I was running out of ideas for fashion. It was then that I started picking up trash or lump material that I already had and started using it to create an image of what art needs to look like. As I went on, I created a drag art specimen called ‘Hairy Fairy’. When it comes to body hair, society’s standards for beauty for women are certainly stricter than that for men – many people expect them to be cleanly shaved and even the slightest hint of hair is seen as ‘gross’ and ‘unsexy’.
This series of photography was to challenge the idea of beauty and natural hair. Showing it as an extreme viewpoint on so what if a body has so much hair. I used some of my wigs to create this S.A.S (my drag name, which stands for Suffocated Art Specimen) named ‘Hairy Fairy’, through which I wanted to spread the message of being bold and embracing the body and every part of it.
This madness of converting trash started on such a high note that I started looking for things around me. Due to the lockdown a friend of mine couldn’t procure cigarettes, as they aren’t considered ‘essential items’. I took this opportunity to motivate him and leave them. As a result, he gave me all his previous cigarette packets that he had stored in a box. I created a look from 50 empty cigarette boxes procured from him. The look titled ‘Smoking God’ is more than just a look. It’s a performance art, sitting and making it while passing the inhibition to choking oneself with smoke. This calls out for a wave to end the choking game. A campaign to ensure there is no more smoke lighting up.
As the days passed, my madness of creating drag grew more and more, constantly trying to work on placing a certain object in a certain space to create a certain outlook, calling them avant-garde (from French, “advance guard” or “vanguard”, literally “fore guard”) works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to fashion, art, lifestyle or culture.
The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo. I worked on another look with all the waste silk clothes I had been collecting for a while, and called it ‘Rotten Silk‘, in which I wanted to create a bright image with things available to me. The #Tranimalisation of fashion and colour needs to be scrubbed into a deformed structure and that’s how the rotten silk was born.
The blue and the pink denotes the colour of expressions and symbolises the trans flag, blue being masculine and pink being feminine, and out of these emerges a deformed figure with gender delusions. The too-muchness presents the spectrum of gender, and the visual eyes show up a mirror to the society to self-reflect.
Creating these images for myself made me realise how much time and money the experience was draining ffrom me. I still remember the stares with which society looks at you when a boy steps into women’s wear shop or a cosmetic shop, or asks for Kajal. The quarantine has taught me to be free within the walls, loving myself daily. It has taught me how we abuse privilege for art, and how we can get inclusive and bring the essence of art in everything around us.
The quarantine has also helped me develop the ideologies to relook at drag art and create a new version of the art form, something which is a subversion to reveal the absurd, the intermediary between the day-to-day, and the intrinsic ideology that creates it, which then opens up an ideology in response to judgments, mockery, quiescence or anything that satisfies the immediate, visceral shock. Drag serves as a subversion of gender, revealing the ideology of capitalism, though more often and less correctly identified as detached patriarchal structures.
As a famous poet said, “Keep an artist in a dark room for few days, and ask them to draw and that is what becomes a masterpiece.” Similarly, the more days I spend sitting and internalising as a part of my quarantine, it creates a likely madness to create new art that is refreshing as well as inspiring. I may not be fighting directly with the pandemic, but my art gives me a veto power to keep myself motivated and sometimes pass social messages through drag.
Images by Rakesh Assileti