By Maya Johnson
Lovers of queer art and expression gathered to watch Theatre and Dance students perform in the recent Amplify Drag Festival, the first undergraduate drag show UC Santa Barbara has seen in half a decade.
Two male bouncers dressed only in slacks and blue neckties–a tongue in cheek homage to the infamous Pit Crew in the TV series Rupaul’s Drag Race–welcomed audience members to a night of cherry-red lip-syncing, burlesque dancing, and over-the-top satire that sought to define how queer expression exists on the UCSB campus.
“Drag to me is an art that allows queer expression,” said third-year Theatre and Dance major Jake Marshall, who first pitched the event to the UCSB Amplify initiative and co-hosted the evening.
The cast and Pit Crew welcomes the audience to the first Amplify Drag Festival produced and performed by UC Santa Barbara theater students.
Amplify is part of the Theater department’s LAUNCH PAD program in which theater professionals work with UCSB students to write and produce new plays. The initiative’s mission: to create safe spaces that support underrepresented artists and promote equity and inclusion on campus.
To Marshall, the work done through events such as the drag show is as much about entertainment as it is about representation. “It’s something we do for fun but it is also something that is a political statement,” he said.
The show’s co-host was Marshall’s fellow BFA in Acting student Aivarey Sala. Together, they made their first appearances as their drag personas Cherry Vohn Illa and Miss Mimi Eepy. In total, the night featured seven drag debuts.
From offering life-saving advice on how to boil water (give the water one good withering look and it will naturally get flustered and hot), to reading bad opening lines in Tinder messages, the two hosts showed off their comedy skills in between performers.
Miss Mimi Eepy (Aivarey Sala) dog-walks the Pit Crew in her performance to When I Grow Up by the Pussycat Dolls.
“How’s your relationship with your parents?” one Tinder suitor asked, via a message Miss Eepy read to the audience as she was lifted off stage by the Pit Crew. In response, Sala said that their mother was their largest inspiration. Being raised by a nightclub performer gave Sala the motivation to put on the show and open a space for students to explore performance in an unconventional way.
“She always wanted me to be body positive,” Sala said of their mother. “She was touring the world and hosting burlesque shows my whole childhood, and so tonight was for Heather.”
Sala performed later in the show as Miss Mimi Eepy in a burlesque-inspired number to When I Grow Up by the Pussycat Dolls. They were followed by the only drag king performer of the night, Brianna Mungo.
“I’ve played men before. I just feel like I’ve been tapping into some masculine energy recently,” said third-year acting student Mungo of her alias Axel Fractal.
UC Santa Barbara theater student Brianna Mungo performs as Axel Fractal to the song Mama by My Chemical Romance
UCSB Theater student Aivarey Sala, as Miss Mimi Eepy, and the Pit Crew clean spilled water from the stage at the recent Amplify Drag Festival.
Mungo was heavily inspired by the social media platform Myspace and the early 2000s scene subculture. Her performance of masculine energy included stomping and battle dancing to the song Mama by My Chemical Romance. For Mungo, playing Axel meant incorporating her identity as a queer, bisexual person into who she is as a performer.
“I’ve really come into my identity and my sexuality and brought it into my performance,” said Mungo.
After Axel closed out the show by emptying his cup onto the stage, Miss Mimi Eepy and the Pit Crew came back on with rags and paper towels to answer the most anticipated question of the night: How many topless drag performers does it take to clean up spilled water?
Promising another show to come in the near future, Sala and Marshall “let the music play,” and the sound of Rupaul’s U Wear it Well ushered the crowd out of a theatrical fantasy full of big wigs, dramatic makeup, and radical self-expression and back into the conventional, everyday world.
Maya Johnson is a fourth-year Writing and Literature major at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.