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A Queer Punk Vaudevillian’s Surreal Take on ‘Titanic’

In some ways, turning the movie Titanic into a farce about climate change makes a lot of sense narratively. Instead of an iceberg (although it melts, of course), the ship hits a pile of underwater garbage and sinks.

In another sense, “Titanic Depression,” a new multimedia performance, could have come solely from the madcap brains of Dynasty Handbags, queer vaudvillians with punk origins and questionable tastes in unitard.

The 1997 movie was certainly a hit, but the Dynasty handbag’s vision may be even grander than James Cameron’s. Wearing mostly frilly underwear and speed-texting with a nonchalant therapist, she is a vulgar version of Rose (the character played by Kate Winslet in the film). Octopus, who plays Leonardo DiCaprio’s lover Jack, sneaks onto the ship disguised as her fancy hat. Billy Zane’s diabolical snob has been replaced with a dildo in black loafers. A camel and a microscopic tardigrade make cameo appearances. There’s also Mark Zuckerberg. All this is a metaphor for the seeming futility of the fight against industrial capitalism and impending environmental destruction, but it’s also a hilarious ruckus. Sex capad with consent form! Pause yourself for meditation, about death! And artist Gibbs Cameron’s alter ego, Dynasty, has his handbags everywhere.

Cameron, 48, has performed on various stages in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. dynasty handbag For over 20 years, we have built a fan base at both August cultural institutions. Brooklyn Academy of Music And at the underground Freak Spectacles.

“Gibbs is able to deal with all sorts of issues, whether it’s body dysmorphic disorder, childhood trauma, or climate change, in the most hysterical, absurd, and unexpected ways.” said Audience Engagement Director Ed Patuto. wide In Los Angeles, we created the program, asked her for a job. “She’s a great performer. She looks completely spontaneous in that we don’t see her rehearsing at all.”

On her popular monthly Los Angeles variety show Weird Night, she sums it up as “a raw ‘Muppet Show’ meets a lunatic queer ‘Star Search’.” It has become a mecca for the surreal. “The ‘Weird Night’ community is the eccentric church, and Dynasty Handbag is the eccentric priest,” said Saturday Night Live star Sarah Sherman, who rose to prominence there. (this series is 2021 Sundance documentary to critical acclaim. )

“Titanic Depression” was commissioned by the cultural institution Pioneer Works in Brooklyn in 2017. premiered there on Saturday and Sundayis Prime Minister Cameron’s most ambitious and multidisciplinary project to date. It includes animations, videos, soundscapes, songs, history and dance.it follows her Guggenheim Fellowshipwhich is tough for an artist who calls his crew “dirtbag queers.”

As her vision for “Titanic” grew, “the money and the attention just kept coming,” Cameron said with avant-garde surprises. “And I kept feeling like I had to make it bigger.”

“What feels fresh to me is knowing that I can do something if I want to,” she said during a rehearsal break near her home in Los Angeles last week. she added. Incorporate punk aerobics. “I’m sure it’s what you want.”

Her instincts are recognized here and there. She will be exhibiting her visual arts at the Hammer Museum Biennale Made in LA this fall. She will also release a comedy album on artist Seth Bogart’s Wacky Wacko label.

But among performance artists, though not strictly conformist tropes, Cameron’s alchemy of comedy, art, music, theater, and fashion stands out for its practical madness.

“Gibbs is a force of nature,” said actor and musician Jack Black, adding that he and wife Tanya Haden were “totally blown away” when they first saw the Dynasty handbag. “We couldn’t stop laughing,” he wrote in an email. “I had a psychedelic experience.”

With a sharp jawline, a slanted wig, and a complexion that contorts like a bouquet of contempt, Cameron plays Dynasty as an otherworldly star, whose aesthetic is synonymous with “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and ’80s minor Aaron Spelling. “Heart to Heart” was her favorite of late), “but it was clingy and lesbian,” she said.

One of those inspirations, Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman himself) was impressed with her character work. “In some ways, she feels indefinable,” he says. “It has to be seen. You can’t explain it very well. And in itself it seems incredible to realize on your own.”

This show was independently developed with artists and technologists Sue Cpresented as part of the new york live arts festival planet justice, run with a video background. Our heroine is live on stage, and everyone else is animated mostly from Cameron’s own drawings, sometimes from her face.

Cameron and her team of collaborators, including her co-writer, at a recent rehearsal in Brooklyn. Amanda Verwayand visual director, Mariah Garnett, Cameron’s romantic partner — worked throughout the scene. A La Rose, Jack, and Dynasty follow an octopus through a gilded saloon, partly generated by the image AI Dar Yi, just like Dynasty himself. , Cameron explained, because they were visibly out of shape, too. In the depths of the ship, they found a lively dance party. (cue techno beats, Not a fiddle.) Cameron choreographed a writhing duet with Cephalopod Lover.

Many hour-long shows end up on loops. David Everitt Howe, the Pioneer Works curator who commissioned the project called it a “crazy death sequence.” A literal meditation, it highlights how consumerist greed caused the tragedy of the time and the immense hardships we find ourselves in today.

“It was such a tonal shift,” he said. “It’s dark. I remember laughing uncomfortably, but I think that’s powerful too. It makes the stupidity stronger.”

Known as Jibbs from an early age, Jibrilah Cameron grew up in a poor and rough environment in Northern California with glimpses of creative freedom.a performing arts summer camp Run by hippie clown Wavy Gravy, a friend of her parents, the shop “completely saved my life as a kid,” she said.

However, her home life was rocky and she left home around the age of 15 to roam the Bay Area. Although she did not graduate from high school, she was accepted into the San Francisco Museum of Art thanks to her Edward Gorey-esque cartoons. There she encountered her art performing, began making her videos, and joined her band. “I was kind of freaked out on stage and was just playing keyboards,” she said. (One of hers in the group was an all-female post-punk her act called Dynasty. After the breakup, she kept the name with the addition of a handbag. I always thought the word handbag was really funny. ”)

After that, he wanted to become an actor and studied at the Theater Conservatory. She already embodied her Dynasty handbag that debuted at San Francisco’s Lady Fest in 2002, but her look has remained remarkably unchanged. Misconceptions about femininity, the failure of the studied aesthetics. “She’s wearing tights, but it’s under her bathing suit,” Everitt Howe noted. “Every layer is wrong.”

Her strange clarity inspired a younger generation of artists like Sherman. “Gibbs gave me the best advice ever. After seeing me perform with all the props and costumes and tools and equipment, she said, ‘You have to work that hard. No, you’re funny!’ You’ve had enough!” Sherman wrote. “I really took it to heart.”

Cameron is not related to ‘Titanic’ director James Cameron, but says he appears on the show alongside businessmen like Benjamin Guggenheim, who ‘made his money in the mining and smelting business’. Dynasty Handbag said, interrupting a monologue about Prime Minister Cameron with a fart. the sound of bombs. Guggenheim’s disembodied voice, who actually died on the Titanic, answers: “Oh my God, I gifted you a Guggenheim in his 2022 and you wouldn’t have made this ridiculous show without me!”

Cameron was still working on the ending to “Titanic Depression” last week, conjuring moments from discarded plastic straws, Lou Reed songs, and gowns made from garbage.

“I feel like what I want to evoke with this piece is creating something out of nothing, this little hope, this viability,” she told the crew. “People make music wherever they are, regardless of socioeconomic class. And then it gets weird.”

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