Tell-All Tuesday: Johnny Blazes
February 23rd, 2010 maggieJohnny f’ing Blazes, people! Ze gave me a real trip down memory lane with this one. Makes me feel old just thinking about that first show.
Tell us about your first Femme Show
I performed in the very first Femme Show ever– in the basement of the UCC church in JP. I performed “New Dawn”, a reverse striptease that I had been ready to create for a while and has since served me well, and a dance piece called “Inversation”, which was only performed those two nights. I was fresh out of Oberlin, and still very interested in creating esoteric works that involved “serious dance,” as my mother calls it. The piece was an improvisational dance score that I created with a jazz clarinetist who was very into experimenting with the noises he could get out of his instrument. I think he is the only heterosexual, cisgendered man to have ever performed in The Femme Show. 
We created a recording of my voice saying self-critical phrases about my dancing and my gender. They were fed through a computer program and would happen at certain times during the piece, although I never knew which phrase would come up. I wore a black petticoat (it was The Year of the Petticoat) and a short red satin dress with my fauxhawk. I thought the piece was hilarious, but the audience was mostly silent– except for Maggie, who also found it hilarious. I guess you had to be a dancer to appreciate jokes like “Retrograde!” and “You might want to try inverting that…”
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