Shiny Penny

Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! REDCAT. 7/14/06.

Penny Arcade, the performance persona of Susana Ventura appeared in Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! this week as a part of Outfest, an event that has been scandalously neglected in this blog.

Penny Arcade developed Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! in response to the NEA censorship and other events of the early '90s. Though I'm sure it has evolved over time, the piece has been performed sporadically since 1990 (although this was the first time it was performed in LA). As a result, the show feels a little bit dated at times, but it has moments of brilliance.

The first thing you see at Bitch!Dyke!... is the dancers. Seven performers opened the show by dancing for the whole time that the audience was being seated and then some. This was a beautiful, fairly diverse group of people who each moved in their own ways, performing something between pole dancing, gogo dancing, and just dancing for themselves for the joy of it. The big suprise was that one of the dancers was the truly stunning Kevin Aviance, only a month after he was severely beaten outside a gay bar. His contribution to this show was incredibly powerful, demonstrating unbelievable strength and generosity. All of these dancers worked hard throughout the show and did an excellent job. I would have liked to see them more integrated into Arcade's main performance.

Other than interludes of the dancers, the show was mostly a solo performance/monologue by Penny Arcade, and some of it was brilliant and some of it was rather redundant, but I think that what she had to say was important and very much worth hearing. She moved backwards through the epithets in the performance's title, starting with "whore" and implying that performance art is sex work. "Faghag" was by far my favorite section of the show, with some incredibly accurate observations about the women who are close to gay men and the ways they relate to each other. This section also alluded to Penny Arcade's history with some VERY FABULOUS gay men. That, of course, is the story I would have liked to hear. Arcade only briefly talked about that moment in the Village with Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Charles Ludlum, and all the rest. There must be some great stories to tell and I would have loved to hear them.

What Arcade did instead was march through gay (male) culture and style from Stonewall to the present day. She condemned current gay people for being so normative, for not accepting drag queens, for being too "straight." The whole thing was a bit of a rant, but in a way she has a point; while this isn't something new, it does bear repeating. She was arguing for acceptance within queer communities rather than policing borders based on identity, which does tend to be a problem. Her most memorable line was "I'm so queer I'm not even gay" which incorporates a lot of meaning into a few words, though it is also problematic. The most affecting section of the performance was her discussion of AIDS and a very moving account of watching her friends get sick and die. She ended this section with the whole audience dancing to "I Will Survive," which was totally fun, but a really odd break in the middle of the show - it was strange to sit down and be an audience again after discoing.

After the break, Arcade performed the "controversial" section on censorship that included video of Jack Smith performing part of Lenny Bruce's piece on censorship, which was a really cool thing to get to see. She played with perception, making the audience sit in the dark and listen to her compared with seeing her naked and listening to her and how each functioned as a method of performance.

The whole show was a bit of a lecture, but it had some truly wonderful moments and I would definately want to see Penny Arcade perform again. She has some of the style and spirit and the memories of a generation of queer performance artists who need to be remembered, discussed, and recreated. Their spirits should be conjured whenever possible, and Penny Arcade clearly learned from the best. She reminds me of Sarah Schulman - didactic and a little angry, but for good reason and with a lot to say.