Gender-bending Performance Art for the Cape Town Fringe with ADAM:VICHISTRAVRYA at the Galloway Theatre

The second major work in his "Adam" cycle, Tazmé Pillay brings gender bending performance art to Cape Town Fringe 2015 with ADAM:VICHISTRAVRYA - I WISH I WERE CAITLIN JENNER.

Conceptualized and performed by Pillay, ADAM:VICHISTRAVRYA - I WISH I WERE CAITLIN JENNER puts the social and pop culture shift towards embracing alternative masculinity under the spotlight. In a society scaffolded by the bones of heteronormativity, a Vichistravrya is being defined by E! Entertainment and Facebook Pride photos. The queer body becomes queer commodity. Witness the deity of sexual freedom and genderless power Adam invade Earth in song to carry the arms of these Vichistravrya, these strange masculinities whose voices are not being heard, but transposed through the mouth of Nick Jonas.

Pillay describes his ongoing "Adam" cycle as 'a series of performances where I attempt to dissect and eradicate the man-made boundaries of gender and sexuality and reconnect with our primitive, more distinctly human energies where we are not shaped or confined by the conventions of gender or heteronormative behavior.' He continues:

I have created this character, Adam, a gender neutral collage of Hindu mythology, queer aesthetics and pop culture. Adam is a deity, the deity of pure human energy and genderless power channeled through the queer site of my own body. In this work I explore the recent socio-cultural shift toward embracing the queer body and critically interrogate this shift with regards to the pop culture phenomenon of "gaybaiting" and the worrying "trend" that queerness has become, one which transforms the queer body into the queer commodity. Through the metaphor of the pop star and using mass culture sounds and aesthetics, I will perform a piece which presents four vignettes sewn together like a pop concert, each visceral and performative and each appealing to a commentary on the queer body as socio-cultural commodity.

Pillay says that one of his great inspirations for ADAM:VICHISTRAVRYA - I WISH I WERE CAITLIN JENNER was Richard Wagner's idea of "gesamtkunstwerk", or total artwork:

The ideas I deal with in these performances are totalitarian; gender conventions and conservative views on the human expression of sexual self-identity have infiltrated every aspect of the way we live our lives in both the social and cultural spheres. I want to appeal to these issues on a level beyond the visual; I wanted to explore the aural. Working with upcoming drum and bass and future bass DJ Tyler Brooks, I have transposed my manifestos into sound. With this show, I perform those manifestos with all the spectacle of a pop star; it's this post-modern cabaret where these really controversial ideas are being pushed through a mainstream aesthetes. It's queering mass culture in a way that mass culture has failed to do; their idea of queer identity is superficial and surface but here I turn the tables so that its queer identity running mass culture, not the other way around.

ADAM:VICHISTRAVRYA - I WISH I WERE CAITLIN JENNER will be performed as a part of the Cape Town Fringe at The Galloway Theatre, situated on the premises of the Waterfront Theatre School just outside the V&A Waterfront. Performances take place on 26 September at 13:00 and 18:30 and on 27 September at 13:00 and 20:30. Tickets, costing R50, can be booked online at the Cape Town Fringe website.

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