The Ritual Joy of Queer Performance Refuses to Give Up
Reigning diva Amygdala brings Brooklyn drag to Manhattan in “Pleasure Dome: Continuum,” a fête of therapeutic sound, vaudeville tributes, and queer politics.
Mamdani’s New York is anything but a drag, as even the performance queens are taking their work to the next level in the commie corridor-inflected, sensorial extravaganza called Pleasure Dome: Continuum at SoMad. Brooklyn drag has always been known for its conceptual girth, but now Amygdala, the reigning diva of the L train, has hatched a Manhattan variety show at the Madison Square Park-adjacent multimedia art space, one that takes advantage of the strange, narrow room by distributing performances around it so there are no bad seats.
Yesterday, October 7, the first iteration of the performance featured projections on curtains, diva anthem sets, body piercing, and elegant ensembles that would make RuPaul envious. The gathering became a fête of therapeutic sound, queer political rally, vaudeville tribute, and a vibe manifesto for a city that is constantly shattering the old to make way for the new.
RuAfza served the theoretical meat of the aesthetic banquet, bringing Brechtian stylings to her surgical strikes at billionaires, right-wing hysteria, and exhaustion, capped by a Luigi Mangione-inspired enactment that left us with a hole-y Elon Musk. At one point, she refused to perform as we watched projections of her dancing and large white words scream “RUAFZA DOESN’T WANT TO WORK ANYMORE” behind her. Selena Surreal injected Modern Primitivism into the evening with her sensual piercings, which left gorgeous streaks of blood once she removed them in a moving set to Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).” final girl ‘98 was the feast’s jester with a high-energy charge, and at various points she sprawled on the stage, inserted herself into the crowd, and ran to corners that obscured what we saw while continuing to be infectious nonetheless. In one number, the words “Art World Grifters” were projected on a curtain as she hung off the stage, head first, and Cowboy Hunters’s “Punched in the Head” blared in a brash send-up of our expectations of what was to come.
Yet I can’t emphasize enough how Julie J’s diva moments gripped the crowd with commanding elegance. In one of the highlights of the evening — while outfitted in an orange lamé cloudscape — she transported the audience to Sunset Boulevard as she performed to Nicole Scherzinger’s version of “As If We Never Said Goodbye” in a rousing rendition that saw her emote straight to our hearts and whip the audience into a frenzy. I found myself breathless while being confronted with so much fucking beauty.
Amygdala was the program’s guide, ushering us through this queer Xanadu in song and readings, including what she jotted down in her notes app while stuck on a Brooklyn subway. Her words ruminated on ancestors and their identities, “their own fears and motivations, their own drive to exist and survive and reproduce, to share knowledge, internalize it, to seek pleasure, to seek understanding, and make each other our parallel selves that exist somewhere out there too. We won’t ever truly know them, but I know they exist because I exist.” She ended with a question: “What can we imagine if we imagine other futures?”
What was glorious about this pageant of L train burlesque was not the references, surprises, or even the moments of rare but crystal-clear intimacy between performer and audience — it was that it didn’t come from a place of entertainment, it emanated from a place of necessity. This is art that had to be made. Queer art is in danger in this age of right-wing resurgence, so Pleasure Dome Continuum and other rituals of making space for possibility are essential. And what was Mamdani’s election if not proof that politics, like art, is about what we aspire to be? If a truly queer church existed, this could be its mass.
A moment of beauty on stage
A back stage area helped distribute performances to all theatergoers.
The first part of Amygdala’s Pleasure Dome: Continuum continues on October 8 at SoMad (34 East 23rd Street, 4th Floor, Flatiron, Manhattan), while the second part happens on November 18 and 19. The list of performers will change during each iteration.
