A long-durational one-on-one performance (3h 30min), combining transformation, text and spatial installation

The performance takes place in a small, intimate space. The performer is sitting at a table with a mirror, the back facing to the door, transforming herself for the entire duration of the performance into a fish creature - a „fishy queen“.  

Outside of the box, a hairy Jessica Rabbit is welcoming the visitors, letting them peek into the room through a small hole in the door.

One by one, the visitors can enter the room, sit down next to the performer, watch the transformation through the mirror, while listening to a series of intimate personal stories about the performer's experience with femininity, its artificiality and drag, about snakes and apples and blue nail polish.

In the drag jargon, a „fishy queen“ refers to a drag queen that looks like a biologically female human being. In other terms, it refers to a „drag“, that is minimal and supposedly „natural“, without the typical caricaturesque aspect of drag that highlights the artificiality of femininity. The „fishy“ refers to the supposed smell of a woman's vagina, which is colloquially and misogynistically likened to the smell of fish.

“We’re born naked, everything else is drag”, said RuPaul and then argued, why no cis- nor trans women should be allowed on Drag Race, because “drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it”. When fem bodies perform femininity, who is to say who is paying tribute to whom, who has the right to subverting what and ultimately: who is really (re-)appropriating femininity from whom?

Through this performance, the artist highlights the labour and artificiality that are embedded in the concept of femininity in our society and explores how fem bodies are policed and how misogynist stereotypes are being reproduced even in queer spaces.

concept, performance, text, costume, make-up, set design: Valerie Reding
assistance and performance: Nico Dubosson as Jessica Rabbit
music: Tyler Holmes
dramaturgical advisor: Marc Streit
technical support: David Baumgartner
venue: Last Tango (Zurich) within the zürich moves! festival curated by Marc Streit
pictures: Rocco Schira