DRAG ON

Drag on, artistic project

Drag on is co-produced by Brain Store Project with the support of Life Long Burning (LLB) Creative Crossroads program. CLICK.

Granted residencies:

  • Artistic residency at Zagreb Dance Center (ZPC), Croatia. February 2019. CLICK. 
  • Artistic residency – works in progress at Bazaar Performance and Dance Festival, Prague, Czech Republic. March 2019. CLICK.
  • Artistic residency by Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, Ljubljana. November 2019. 
  • Artistic residency at STUCK, Leuven. April 2020. 

  • Lokomotiva – KinoKultura, Skopje. June 2020, dates to be confirmed.

  • Workshop Foundation, Budapest. Dates to be confirmed for 2020.

Drag on is a choreographic project initiated and developed by Aleksandar Georgiev (MK/BG), Zhana Pencheva (BG) and Darío Bardam (SP).

Drag on is conceptually connected to the already realized projects NEON, (Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva and Irena Tzvetanova), Celebrate it!, (Zhana Pencheva and Aleksandar Georgiev) and Purple Blood, (Zhana Pencheva, Nefeli Ikonomou, Aleksandar Georgiev and Darío Barreto Damas); three of them dealing, in general terms, with queerness as an approach and ideology defined by practice and the relational protest-celebration body.

Drag on is a choreographic work focused on dragging practices that explores the disidentification of bodies and the boundaries around them. 

With Drag on we aim to create a room where queer and non-binary systems/strategies are the norm. We are interested, within a choreographic approach, in the modifications an identity needs to confront in order to survive in a fluid environment, of constant change. A poetic space where hierarchies are no longer phallic, establishing a horizontal power structure that reshape social pre-conceived statuses and functioning.

TRIGGER(S):

  • Dragging practices history, features and updates?
  • Dragging practices as a space for celebration, protest and claim? Dragging as a political body?
  • Cultural appropriation? Cultural exchange? Single identity, several cultures?
  • Queer aesthetics vs queer identity? Expanded notion of dragging?
  • Disidentification practices as queer operative system?
  • Becoming dragging, re-dragging, a mechanism of coexisting with several becoming identities?
  • Drag choreography? Drag dance?
  • The QUEERING OUT of dance. By revisiting and modifying history of dance and choreography, how to queer out dance and choreography? Dragging practices from folklore to pop concert.

Structurally we are interested in drag culture references such as ball gatherings, reading/shading practices and lip-singing. 

These triggers and references  are not necessarily the topic or the “aboutness” of the work but rather the starting point through which the research and creation are approached.

 

“Queerness upgraded 

                                        I call you                                                                     please let me get in…

                                                                                borrow your diamonds, 

                                   your sharpness, 

the trash of your hair…”                                                                      

(Drag on song)

 

“Dancing to the rhythm and holding its border, 

we start to smell the mermaid sex sweat.

Red strawberry screams here,

there 

and far away, 

erotica of red and alight oranges are covering our nails… 

Sweating sweeter the sweat you sweat

before I smell the first sweat drop I like to smell.

Sweating my sweat,

giving you my smell,

bringing your wet to moister place.” 

(Drag on poem) 

 

Drag on at ZPC, Croatia, photos by Nevec Petrović

 

Drag on at Bazaar Festival, Prague, photos by Adéla Vosičková. Special collaboration with Jirí Brnula.