The HEATHER LANG SHOW by ELEANOR BAUER
and VICE VERSA
Get into it
The Heather Lang Show by Eleanor Bauer and Vice Versa is a double one-woman show: double the woman, double the show. Based in the gregarious performative context of a drag show cum talk show cum infomercial cum SNL, two strong entertainers appear not-so-subtly competing for the attention of their beloved audience. Co-opting the language and ethics of "realness" developed in the voguing tradition of New York in the 1980's, Eleanor Bauer and Heather Lang use drag not only as a manipulation or augmentation of gender, but as a springboard for the total emancipation of the performer through a plethora of personalities, entertainers, and iconic figures both cultural/historical and fictional... and never without a twist. Diffuse characters blend together in an amalgam of cultural critique, commerce, and entertainment that hold a fun-house mirror up to society in all it's broken glory.
"The aroma of travesty is pungent, immediately discernable, it can transform a room and provide a unique 'frisson.' ... Drag rarely seems to be equated with the promise of talent, though there have always been exceptional manifestations of the drag queen ... Drag has never been about confusion, gender or otherwise, in my experience. It has always functioned as a sublimely specific vehicle for expression, a beautiful surprise, a red scarf waved in the face of a bullish society unwilling to witness the values between the black and the white. Instead of producing the 'illusion of inner depth,' I have harnessed its unique potential so as to reveal my inner depths to a surprised and unsuspecting public." - John Kelly, In Praise of Drag, (1991)
In line with Kelly's observation that "drag rarely seems to be equated with the promise of talent," Bauer and Lang walk the line between bad art and not art, aiming for that arresting sensation in a viewer when one does not know whether to laugh at or laugh with the performer, whether they are watching a failed attempt at transcendence or an act that transcends its failures. Inspired by such sources as Stairway to Stardom, the 1980's New York public-access channel television broadcast precursor to Starsearch filmed in a basement living room-turned-TV studio, Bauer and Lang model themselves after personalities that contain such an overwhelming desire or necessity to perform, deliver a message, take their field/industry by storm or use it to take the world by storm that they push over normally understood boundaries of can and can't, or should and shouldn't. In a post-pop culture leveling of "good" and "bad" where contemporary aesthetics swim in a sea of sliding signifiers and anything goes, Bauer and Lang take advantage of the flexibility and confusion of today's spectators in order to question and explode the possibilities of the theater and it's hungry performers.