‘Signature Act’
The queer performing body as living archive
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21687393 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maude Davey (La Trobe University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 13-20 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Performance Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1352-8165 • E-ISSN: 1469-9990 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13528165.2024.2408108 |
| OpenAlex | W4405579599 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
This article reflects on the notion of repertoire in reference to the field of queer short form variety performance in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on my own repertoire of queer, short form variety acts and my experiences of performing with and watching leading Australian and international variety artists over the last three decades, I worry at questions including: How does an act become a ‘signature act’? How do those ‘signature acts’ transform over time as both performer and audience change? In what ways do they persist after they are gone from circulation and not being performed anymore? What are their legacies? Where can their residues be found? I look at an act from my own repertoire alongside the signature acts of artists including London-based neo-burlesque artist Ursula Martinez and Australia’s late, great, strip-tease artist Elizabeth Burton.Halberstam identified the ‘need to theorize the concept of the archive and consider new models of queer memory and queer history capable of recording and tracing subterranean scenes, fly-by-night clubs, and fleeting trends’ (2005: 280) to more fully consider queer and sub-cultural subjectivities, identities and communities. As well, over the last decade the performing body has begun to be conceived as ‘living archive’. The records such an archive keeps, however, are unstable, continually transforming as they are re-constituted over time. For queer variety performance, the meanings that cohere around an act transform in relation to the audience that is co-participant in the making of the act in each iteration.In this article I work in fragments, weaving together diary entry, autoethnographic observation, recalled conversations and snippets from the Internet to offer a stuttering record of thirty years of queer performance
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |