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. In the uniquely gregarious context of a drag show cum spiritual talk show cum QVC infomercial, two outrageous and entertaining performers appropriate and reinvent the language and performance ethics of "realness" that originated in the 1980's New York voguing scene. Combining genres of performance, remixing character prototypes and archetypes, challenging the economy of stuff with the immeasurable value of experience, these unlikely partners in crime fashion a homemade and uncanny amalgam of critiques on cultural identity, capitalism, creative expression and entertainment that holds a broken compact mirror up to the real(ness) world in all its twisted glory.
Eleanor Bauer and Heather Lang refer to drag not only as a manipulation or augmentation of gender, but as a springboard for the total emancipation of the performer through personalities both cultural/historical and fictional... and never without a twist.
"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)
