The Race and Performance Lab presents, Queer Performance, a two-day festival of workshops, panels, and performances, featuring performance artists Benji Hart and LaWhore Vagistan.
Thursday, January 30th
- Workshop with Dr. LaWhore Vagistan: "Critical Drag"
- 3:30pm
- LGBTQ Center
- Newcomb Hall, 3rd Floor
- Are you ready to lip-sync for your life? I mean this quite literally: what can you know about your life, yourself, and the world around you by lip-syncing? What can drag teach us about gender, bodies, aesthetics, politics, and our place in the world? How does drag give us tools to look differently into the world? As drag becomes ever more visible in mainstream global media, it has on the one hand become sanitized of some of its subversive possibilities, but on the other it has become more accessible to a wider range of people. In LGBT spaces, drag has long been a practice that holds communities together, communicates political ideologies, and serves as a venue for self-exploration. Critical Drag is a performance-based workshop in which we will use drag techniques that emerge from LGBTQ nightlife communities to explore our bodies, artistry, and ideologies. The workshop begins with improvisational exercises that help participants develop drag personas, and concludes in a final lip-sync showcase!
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Performance by Benji Hart: "World After This One"Image
- 7pm
- Helms Theater
- Looking through the lenses of three Black art forms—the queer street style of vogue, the Afro-Boricua dance and drumming tradition of bomba, and gospel music—World After This One uses movement and spoken word to examine how Black people have historically reclaimed the materials of empire to construct portals to impossible futures. Blurring the lines between the secular and sacred, celebration and mourning, the past and the yet-to-pass, World After This One imagines Black liberation not as a metaphor, but a possibility.
Friday, January 31st
- Poetry Writing Workshop with Benji Hart: "Imagining the Impossible at the End of Empire"
- 11am
- LGBTQ Center
- Newcomb Hall, 3rd Floor
- In this workshop, participants will practice flexing their own radical imaginations through revision poems--rewriting harmful laws or policies in ways that break open the possibilities of true liberation for the communities they are meant to contain. Through a series of guided activities, each participant will generate their own short piece based on the poem model, an exercise in envisioning the world we deserve at the exact moment we are being collectively robbed of that vision.
- A Panel Moderated by Dr. Patricia Nguyen: "Race, Politics, and Performance"
- 2pm
- Wilson Hall 142
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Performance by Dr. LaWhore Vagistan: "Lessons in Drag"Image
- 7pm
- Helms Theater
- Dr. Vagistan, your favorite South Asian drag auntie, brings the nightclub to the classroom (and vice versa) to explain how critical social theory matters in queer nightlife. Touching on themes that include globalization, transnational feminisms, and islamophobia, she stages the nightclub as a site of politics and pleasure. Part lecture, part lipsync, part audience participation, the show demonstrates how much drag teaches us, even requires us, to be in relation with the rest of the world.
BENJI HART is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator whose work centers Black radicalism, queer liberation, and prison abolition. Their words have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies from Oxford University Press, Beacon Press, Haymarket Books, Pluto Press, and have been published at Time, Teen Vogue, The Advocate, The Funambulist Magazine, and elsewhere. They have led popular education and arts-based workshops for organizations internationally, including Dissenters, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Arts + Public Life, and Interrupting Criminalization, and facilitated convenings and retreats for groups like Law For Black Lives, Organized Communities Against Deportations, Cicero Independiente, and Project NIA. They have been interviewed in Public Books, Sixty Inches From Center, Lambda Literary, and on Notes from America with Kai Wright, and presented at the American Repertory Theater, the Lab School, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the National Museum of African American History & Culture. Their performances have been featured at the Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago, 2024); the Poetry Foundation (Chicago, 2023); La Goyco (San Juan, 2022); and Den Frie (Copenhagen, 2021). They have received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. They were born and raised in Massachusetts, and live and work in Chicago.
LAWHORE VAGISTAN is your favorite aunty’s favorite aunty—always overdressed, overeducated, and overopinionated. In 2009, she co-founded the queer South Asian party Jai Ho! in Chicago, and in 2023, she launched Dragistan, an annual South Asian drag showcase in New York. Aunty is also a published author--you can buy her very shiny book Decolonize Drag through most bookstores or online platforms, a TedX speaker—look up How to be an Aunty on YouTube, and a mediocre singer—you can find her parody of Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” called “Sari,” online. Follow her on instagram at @lawhorevagistan.
This series of events is organized by Drs. Fiona Ngo, Patricia Nguyen, Katelyn Wood, and JoVia Armstrong with support from the IHGC.