Show Queen

SHOW QUEEN: Does Anyone Still Wear A Hat? | 2023

Show Queen is a multimedia dance piece conceived by Scott Andrew and Jesse Factor centered on the codes and conventions of the Broadway diva. Blending visual elements of dance, costuming, and video projection, this interdisciplinary performance examines the legend of the Broadway diva through the queer eyes of her fans with movement and an original soundscore. The work mourns, critiques, and celebrates the relic of the Broadway diva, modulating her in the process. Factor’s signature stark and sensual physicality and Andrew’s otherworldly video projections collage to present a fantasia in which the many faces of the diva are repeatedly cracked open.

Show Queen stretches boundaries of traditional dance theater forms while articulating a distinctly queer aesthetic. The work critiques the Broadway musical, invoking codes and conventions of the diva and her queer fandom, to locate the queer body as a non-textual site of transfer. We seek to trouble cultural memory, producing a resonance of confusion and transcendence by hijacking and disrupting the stability often assigned to fixed, “official” notions of archival knowledge and institutional history.

In Place for Us, D. A, Miller writes: “In the psyche of the post-stonewall man, the Broadway musical lies like a nervously watched pod that, having been preserved from a past geological epoch, may nonetheless— say, at any temperature above frigidity—split open to reveal a creature that, in comparison with the less primitive forms of life around it, even with those which must have evolved from it, will appear monstrous beyond recognition.”

Show Queen challenges viewers to interrogate the relationship between the diva and her queer fandom in ways that go beyond a punchline. Through formal elements of obscured silhouettes and reflected light, the figure of the diva serves as both a container and blinding projection screen for our own desires and expectations. Multi-channel video mapping enhances concepts of duplication and duplicity: mirrors, portraits, doubles, dialogues. Design elements of costuming mask clear discerning of a singular identity, opening up a sense of mystery. This exchange between the icon and its multifaceted psycho-emotional meaning uncover collective fantasies that force the "nervously watched pod" of the Broadway musical wide open.

Show Queen deepens our obsession with the legend of the diva and the strong emotional attachment that accompanies this attraction. From the performer’s perspective, Jesse Factor writes, ‘As she endlessly haunts me, I bring her to life, I make her “real” through my body. I endeavor to both excavate and complicate the diva figure through inhabiting her.’ From the media designer’s perspective, Scott Andrew writes, ‘Animation / VFX enhance this performance by amplifying and further embodying the mythic nature of the Diva’s ghostly presence. The diva is reconstituted, in part, through interactions of both live and virtual bodies, atmospheric disruptions, and symbols of her existence that extend beyond bodies altogether.’

Show Queen seeks to split open the nervously watched pod and revel in the monstrous birth and glory of the “star mother” identification. Call her Dolly, Mame, Eva, the Spider Woman, Lola, or Norma (“the greatest star of all”), the Broadway diva serves as a projection screen for a distinctly queer desire. We view this dynamic of queer diva identification as a cultural survival tactic, giving permission to perform what the dominant discourse might relegate as ridiculous, and in taking this topic seriously, we seek to understand and demonstrate its complexity as well as strange necessity.