Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Saturday 11 May
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Hailing from Portland, Oregon, acclaimed American drag clown Carla Rossi (aka Anthony Hudson) brings you a conversational lecture-style workshop exploring the history and future of drag and gender. What are drag’s many varieties, flavours and houses, and how do they correspond to the unchartable spectrum of genders and sexualities? And as an increasingly popular artform, how does drag serve to highlight the ways in which we all perform identities in our everyday lives?
This workshop pays homage to a broad medley of drag’s legendary elders, artists and ancestors. Learn about the Two-Spirit gender shamans of pre-settler North America and the late-1970s activist group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and trace the influence of David Bowie, Judith Butler and Disney villainry. Calling on icons such as Marsha P. Johnson, Leigh Bowery, Elvira and Christeene, Rossi will lead an inclusive, participatory session exploring the confluence of drag and gender – and how we build performance and meaning.
Presented in partnership with YIRRAMBOI.
Featuring
Anthony Hudson / Carla Rossi
Anthony Hudson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and filmmaker perhaps best known as Portland, Oregon’s premier drag clown Carla Rossi, an immortal trickster whose attempts at realness almost always result in fantastic failure. Anthony and Carla host and program Queer Horror – the only exclusively LGBTQI+ horror screening series in America – bimonthly at the historic Hollywood Theatre, where Anthony also serves as the Community Programmer.
In 2018, Anthony was named a National Artist Fellow in Artistic Innovation by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and among the inaugural cohort of the Western Arts Alliance's Native Launchpad program to advance Indigenous performance. Anthony’s new play Still Looking for Tiger Lily is in development through Artists Repertory Theatre’s On the Workbench program with a production on the horizon thanks to the generous support of a 2018 Creative Heights award from the Oregon Community Foundation; in the meantime, Anthony's first evening-length show as Carla Rossi since 2014, Clown Down: Failed to Mount, will premiere at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Spring 2019 and is funded in part by Anthony's third Artist Focus Project Grant from the Regional Arts &andCulture Council.