Fictional Realness: Towards a colloquial performance practice

Abstract

This article develops the concept of a colloquial performance practice with the use of three examples: vernacular drag performance in Jennie Livingston's seminal documentary film on New York City ball culture Paris is Burning (1999), the “documentary fictions” of South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord, and the theoretical concept of a minor literature developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book on Kafka (1975).

By investigating the colloquial term "realness", which meant to “pass” as a specific gender or social class other than ones own, and which was incorporated into drag ball performance in the 80s and 90s, this article explores how realness functions as a repetitious device that deterritorialises (Deleuze and Guattari) the major language (“the real”) and subverts it from within, calling forth a new language (“realness”), and a new scene (the ballroom).

It argues that colloquial performances such as drag realness are a fictional inhabitation – an expansive force – rather than a reductive repetition that might be coopted into capitalism and thus need reterritorialising again. By pointing to the fictions already at play in the so called “real”, it proposes that colloquial performances such as realness produce difference in place of the subordinate repetitions of imitation and parody, which would keep realness subservient to “the real”. It then offers the term "fictional realness" as an extended framework to read (and question the ethics of reading) “exaggerated experience” in the irreverent and boorish performances of Die Antwoord.

Notes

1 To ‘read’, in the ballroom sense of the word, is a colloquial form of critique that highlights and exaggerates someone's flaws. My own ‘reading’ of the failure of the major language to critique (within the major language of sanctioned academic writing) addresses the subversive potentials of more colloquial forms of performance and criticism.

2 Artist and theorist Simon O Sullivan's concept of a minor art practice following the Deleuzeo-Guattarian framework of a minor literature has also informed my thinking here (O'Sullivan2005).

3 I am in agreement with Jennifer Doyle, who writes: ‘There is a lot of language out there celebrating the silence of John Cage, the sparseness of Donald Judd’ (Doyle 2012: xvii).

4 I invoke the term ‘penification’ here as a minor literature following artist Vaginal Crème Davis’ use of the term in her lyrical performances of word-twisting, tongue-in-cheek self-exploitation and rude provocations of racial and gender confusion.

5 There was debate surrounding the originality of Gaga's concept Meat Dress. Many in the art and fashion press remarked on its similarity to Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, a meat dress made by Canadian sculptor Jana Sterbak in 1987 exhibited to considerable controversy at the National Gallery of Canada in 1991.

6 The setting of District 9 is inspired by historical events during the Apartheid era, particularly alluding to District Six, an inner-city residential area in Cape Town, declared a ‘whites only’ area by the government in 1966.

7 Whilst drawing on ‘gangsta rap’ their fictioning as a group also offers something different to the languages of popular hip hop groups and rappers like Jay Z, Drake or Dizzee Rascal.