Originally created for a club setting, Every 11 Year Old Girl Dreamed a Dream, is a drag performance that plays with YouTube and celebrity cultures. On the heels of the film adaptation of Les Miserables, I perform in front of a video projection of curated amateur videos of (mostly) young girls singing or lip-syncing to the epic “I Dreamed a Dream.”
For the first two thirds of the performance, my mouth is covered by an iPod that features cropped video images of the young women’s mouths, in sync with the video projection and the track of the song (Ruthie Henshall); toward the end, I remove the iPod and begin my own lip-sync as the videos multiply behind me, filling the screen, and audio from the myriad video fades in to create a cacophonous chorus.
The performance intentionally appropriates the song as a social text, juxtaposing its original context within well-worn tropes of drag as well as these young women’s dreams.
January 2013, June 2013, August 2013
Some Thing, The Stud, SF
Performance Studies International 19, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Trannyshack, Dragonfly, LA
Performance photos (L-R) by M. Toosarvandani and Dusti Cunningham
