[Wren Tiffany]

[The Green Room: A Multimedia Drag Extravaganza!]

The Green Room: A Multimedia Drag Extravaganza! was a culminating event during the VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition that brought together my roles as showrunner, performer, and community member. Co-hosted by Zukini Lèsagna, the show was an improvisational, satirical jukebox musical. It featured performers that I had worked with previously in The King Collective, including Royalty Resignz, Mac Frost, Lichen Von Stag, Mad Maxii, and Viktor Lickter. The support and artistry of these performers shaped the success of this May 2nd thesis finale performance showcase at its core. This closing event utilized camp and comedy to create a safe space within the institutional gallery to celebrate my communities, trans and drag artists alike. The creative partnership I had with co-host Zukini allowed me to become the symbolic rubber chicken, so to speak [ + the satirical focus of the performance]. The Richmond drag community was also the primary audience for this event, which made it so powerful! I really enjoyed sharing this creative space that I had been exploring in preparation for that evening with my biggest supporters, the exchange felt like a radical [trans]mission of resistence. This power-dynamic [showrunner + perfomer] was able to thrive in this institutional setting only by my engagment with my community directly as collaborators in the space and not as subjects or objects within a show. This was a mix of traditional drag and experimental performance art, it lived somewhere in between rehersal and primetime. For The Green Room event, I subverted expectations and returned control to the artists by providing them a structure of improv and image manipulation that gave them agency in an American culture with increasily hostile anti-trans narratives.