Sonja Pregrad: How Many Cubic Centimetres Can My Body Take Up (2020)

From object to materiality, embodiment, touch, synaesthesia, sensuousness, and receptivity—oscillating between submission and assertion—these elements function as vehicles for performance, transforming the body into a medium that interacts with its surroundings—in a gesture of perhaps paradoxical challenge to the affirmed drag performance strategy of taking up space by the agency of over-performing. Through a double twist, the drag queen reclaims and redefines the act of performing female-to-female drag and the objecthood of femininity. By controlling how femininity is constructed, the performer destabilises the spectator’s perception, challenging traditional views of gender and femininity.

This work is a commission, upon the invitation of the TRAS Studio members to the choreographer Sonja Pregrad, with the interest to work with her specific approach to physicality. The work leans onto her earlier solo performances, that dealt with the objecthood of the (female) body, and takes it’s title question from there. In a gesture of perhaps paradoxical challenge to the affirmed drag performance strategy of taking up space by agency of over-performing, this work is constructed of a sequence of opportunities to witness sensuous surfaces (as used in the queer phenomenology) that make it up – being in touch with the materials such as lipstick, Lycra, another’s skin, concrete floor, gendered gaze, language, light… by this the performance proposes another space of experiencing the embodiment of the performance (of gender). Patriarchy looks at female body as an object, and drag, in it’s overdone voluntary performance, emancipates this. In the double-twist-gesture, that is the performance of female to female drag, objecthood of femininity is re-appropriated by the one (drag queen) that is performing it, that operates it’s construction and destabilizes the way it is percieved by the spectator. At the same time, performance deals with the production or performance of contemporary dance. In it, performers in drag are instructed how to perform drag, and observed in their performance by the figure (of the choreographer?), as well in drag, while all of them being women: ‘Female voice, speaking about female body, performing in a female genre, an objectification of femininity.’ The work aligns thinking with female to female drag performers and artists, such as Victoria Sin, Dynasty Handbag and others.