yesterday I had the deep pleasure of attending the performance of Flamencoqueer (instagram) from Barcelona at gallery Joey Ramone in Rotterdam for their finissage with visual artist Anna Moreno (instagram). it was a wonderful and very powerful experience, the second performance even partly became an intermedia-event, where the live performance of the dancer & musician on the installation directly interacted with the dance on film/video that kept being projected.
Anna told me later that in the 1970s Barcelona had known an entire scene of Gay and queer flamenco dancers, but that with ever more touristification they eventually vanished for straight(ened out?) "traditional" interpretations.
this morning I realized that this era had indeed seen quite a bit of Gay and Queer "Dionysian" theater and dance worldwide, from the Cockettes in San Francisco, to Dzi Croquettes in Rio de Janeiro to Lindsay Kemp in London (his students David Bowie/Ziggy Startdust and Kate Bush made commercially successful crossovers into pop-music ... ) let alone the Radical Faeries in the US. there was Studio 54 and Disco Music. all gone.
only Butoh in Japan seems to have survived, the Radical Faeries went underground, too many died during the AIDS epidemic but had no followers. the ballroom scene in Harlem and the greater US of A on Turtle Island, largely remained underground until the 1990s.
these days there are remnants and re-vivals, even commercially exploited re-discoveries (e.g. of Julius Eastman, James Baldwin) but times have changed and become if anything more mercilessly commercial, often superficial, making a living has become a lot more cut-throat, even for those of us in the Global North of the European colonizing countries.
Posts
