Scarface scarface movie poster3/15/2024 ![]() ![]() In an effort to help the illiterate and, well, less intelligent members of the congregation better understand church worship, parts of the mass were dramatized in very simple ways."Īs for the cross-dressing component of these sacred performances, women were omitted from the craft entirely. Roger Baker also pulls a thread back to ancient civilizations, noting that drag "presided over the creation of drama in ancient Greece where masked actors played Hecuba and Clytemnestra." Meanwhile, in England, Baker writes that "formal drama came, literally, from the church. David notes that it rose to popularity in the 17th century, and "is more popular and less ritualistic than Noh." In Kabuki theater, the female impersonators are "carefully made-up, speak in falsetto voices, and move to suggest the essence of femininity."Īnother book that shed quite a bit of light on what we might call the "sacred" drag queen is titled Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. Noh derives from Dengaku, a folk dance associated with rice planting and fertility, and in its ancient, self-enclosed spiritual world, 'female' actors wearing masks follow stylized routines in a complex and rarefied pattern of symbolic gestures." Kabuki, of course, is a form of Japanese theater that many more people are familiar with. "In Japanese theater," David writes, "drag divides the Kabuki and Noh dramas. And every era and every new iteration of the art form has been crucial to the shape and success of drag today. The fact is, drag has been a part of our culture for centuries. And before that, it was an exaggerated and integral part of the theater culture. Before that, drag was submerged deep in underground clubs and back-alley bars. In fact, this sort of public awe - sometimes, it borders on worship - of drag queens has really only cropped up in the past decade or two. And even outside of RuPaul's Drag Race, queens have been able to build incredible followings via social media, live performances, YouTube, and podcasts.ĭrag hasn't always been received this way. ![]() The show's third All Stars season is about to launch, marking a new competition between some of the top drag queens in mainstream media. With its move from Logo to VH1, it racked up almost 1 million viewers for the premiere and held strong with over 800,000 season finale viewers. RuPaul's Drag Race has just had its most successful season yet. In this moment, drag culture is bigger and more popular than it's ever been. They've plunged their hands deep down into their own psyches and pulled out the weirdest, fiercest, and most theatrical parts of themselves, then mashed them together to form something new. Oftentimes, I've heard drag performers describe their personas as though they were another person. When so impeccably dressed and flawlessly painted, the person underneath the queen disappears almost completely. In the 21st century, a drag queen is not just a man who wears women's clothes a drag queen is an entirely separate entity.
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