Phantacamp: Queer Temporal Ruptures in the Performance of Restaged Camp
Rezes, Jo.
2020
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Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2020.
Submitted to the Dept. of Drama.
Advisor: Lilian Mengesha.
Committee: Noe Montez, and Kareem Khubchandani.
Keywords: Theater, Aesthetics, and LGBTQ studies.
This project explores the ways in which Camp aesthetics rupture time within and around performers' bodies. This thesis develops a mode of reading violent time ... read moreslips in camp performance through autoethnography, archival digs of cult-classic communities, and the lens of queer phenomenology. Phantacamp indexes the ways in which camp is haunted by the ahistoricism of shifting performance contexts. As a nonbinary researcher and artist, I move through my time in New England playing Frank N. Furter in an eleven-performance tour of The Rocky Horror Show, assistant directing Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine for a mid-size professional theatre, and devising a queer adaptation of the Grimms' Fairy Tales for the premier production of a fringe theatre company. I contend with white supremacy's grasp and/or possession on camp, not just by examining the statistical and anecdotal evidence of tropes, objects, and performance in the camp canon, but also by closely examining how bodies interact with a set of reiterative aesthetics: B-movie ephemera, gender and race play, science fiction fascinations, and, most importantly, filth. I examine how queer bodies interact with camp within economies of filth, including sex and disidentification, domesticity and home creation, and identity bending. Camp-induced time ruptures —whether created by current camp, the historical canon of camp, or the clash between the two— create and foster queer communities and also can place those same communities at risk, all within a time-based matrix of economies of filth. It is through my absorption of temporal rupture that I chronicle moments of refusal in outdated camp performance spaces. This queer friction —bodies bending, colliding, and transforming in their orientation away from (or towards) the ever-changing camp sensibility— heats up and makes malleable the fungibility of queerness on and off the stage. Camp's act of citation is stifled by shifts in political and social movements, rifts in bodily autonomy, and through a process of repetition, reifying outdated concepts of sex, gender, and race when whiteness is presumed as not only neutral, but nonperformative in the realm of restaged camp performances.read less - ID:
- cr56nf41f
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