Too Much is Never Enough: A Love Letter to Bad Girls and Melodrama Suits Her
Too much is never enough: choreographer and drag queen Olympia Bukkakis writes for tanzraumberlin about camp and its political and often neglected potential for dance and performance art. Focusing on the productions Bad Girls by Oozing Gloop and Anali Goldberg and Melodrama Suits Her by Tümay Kılınçel, Olympia Bukkakis examines the work with emotionality, exaggeration and marginalized identities, and demonstrates how camp and melodrama can serve as emancipatory and forward looking strategies. A declaration of love to the exuberant, the hyper-emotional and to all the “too much” on the stages of dance and performance.
Olympia Bukkakis
Choreographer, Drag Queen
Excess tends to make the middle class uncomfortable. While the ultra-rich and the working poor are no strangers to extravagant expressions of emotion, those in the middle often define themselves by their abstinence from excessive pleasures. This plays out in our field as well. While transitioning from performing in basements in Neukölln to contemporary dance stages I learned to say things were ‘interesting’ rather than ‘amazing’ and identify the slightly pained look of Fremdscham that meant that I had expressed an idea or emotion that was naive, overly sentimental or just ‘too much’.
Of course, like all sweeping, broad and fun statements this doesn’t always apply. Recently I saw two pieces that, in the spirit of excess, I can only describe as the BEST shows I have seen in my ENTIRE LIFE. Bad Girls by Oozing Gloop and Anali Goldberg Something Jewish and Sexual which premiered on 16.06.24 at Sophiensæle and Melodrama Suits Her by Tümay Kılınçel which premiered on 16.05.24 at HAU. Watching both shows I felt something I rarely feel in the theatre: an urgent, expansive excitement and joy. I had the feeling that both of these pieces were made for me in particular and I became curious about where exactly this feeling was coming from.
Is this for me?
Seminal queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick writes that the ‘sentimental’, this overflow of emotion, used to be a ‘’term of high ethical and aesthetic praise’’ in the 17th and 18th centuries but has in the 20th century come to ‘’connote, beyond pathetic weakness, an actual principle of evil’’ (1990: 150). Safe to say that strong surges of emotion have gone out of fashion. Sedgwick argues that the two chief manifestations of sentimentality in 20th century cultural consumption and production are the ‘kitsch’ and the ‘camp’.
Kitsch is a classification that reinforces the category of ’sentimental’ by acting as a shield against contagion (1990: 155). If I say that a certain object is kitsch I am saying that it is sentimental and unsophisticated and that I am able to make this judgement because I am not sentimental and am, as it happens, rather sophisticated. This judgement implies the existence of someone else who is easily manipulated by the kitsch object and consumes it naively. This kitsch consumer would never use the word ‘kitsch’ and is, I would add, definitely working class-coded, or at best nouveau riche (which is probably worse for the kitsch-critic).
Camp offers a less snobbish perspective. Sedgwick writes: ‘’the typifying gesture of camp is really something amazingly simple: The moment at which a consumer of culture makes the wild surmise, ‘’What if whoever made this was gay too?’’ Unlike kitsch-attribution, then, camp recognition doesn’t ask, ‘’What kind of debased creature could possibly be the right person for this spectacle?’’ Instead, it says what if: What if the right audience for this were exactly me?’’ (p.156). If the person denouncing an object as kitsch is unconsciously identifying a sense of taste based on class delineation (in which they very much hope to come out on top), the camp view asserts that there is another, usually more marginalised, way of reading the cultural artefact, apart from the more obvious surface way of seeing.
In order to get a proper hold on what camp actually is you really have to read Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964). By synthesising them into a paragraph I’d be betraying the form of the original text so here are some key points, edited for brevity:
-The essence of camp is the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.
-Many examples of Camp are things which, from a ‘’serious’’ point of view, are either bad art or kitsch’.
-Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘’lamp’’; not a woman, but a ‘’woman.’’ To perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.
-The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful… Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions.
When I’m good I’m very very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better - Mae West
Bad Girls takes the form of a conversation between two bad girls who are on holiday: Agnes (Oozing Gloop) and Lydia (Anali Goldberg). There are a few brilliant lip syncs performed in double speed to camp classics (Total Eclipse of the Heart & Mein Herr) and many drawn out transitions in which they smoke a cigarette or eat a sandwich containing a used condom. While there is narrative progression (they go to Hades, obviously) I was reminded of Sontag’s Note 33: ‘’What Camp responds to is ‘’instant character’’...Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing… Wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced.’’ While dramaturgical lip service is paid to the development through time of these two characters, the real joy of watching Bad Girls is in watching the two performers be one overflowing, joyous, incandescent thing. The prioritisation of instant character here also facilitates a type of neurodivergent dramaturgy, which Gloop defines as the use of interesting visual and auditory sensations, rather than relying on plot and text. Gloop and Goldberg employ a kind of abject camp (reminiscent of John Waters) in which the deliberate and precise application of dramatic failure opens up a very specific way of moving through the piece with them. Anali was inspired by her fashion designer father who loved bright colours and, touchingly, her great grandmother Zimbül Zizi Arie, a jewish woman born in what is now Turkey in 1900 who she remembers always laughing, never wearing a bra, and frequently making physical gags, such as cleaning her glasses with her shirt to expose her breasts. What Anali gleaned from these influences was a sense of the clownery that comes from being ‘’the most vulnerable body in the room’’ (as a member of the jewish diaspora, or a queer body onstage), that allows her to perform in a way that invites laughter but also a tender sense of outsider solidarity.
Sontag famously claims that camp ‘’is disengaged, depoliticised – or at least apolitical’’. This has been refuted often, perhaps most famously through Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity which uses drag as an example (see Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter). There’s a lot of discourse about whether drag reinforces or destabilises gender norms and it’s all boring. Most of it assumes that drag involves dressing as a lady or a gentleman and that’s it. In fact, we’re artists who have a variety of aesthetics, practices and political positions, which is why the politics of the camp we’re talking about is so vital. Bad Girls is too complex and interesting to limit itself to deconstructing gender roles. Instead the abject camp of Gloop and Anali offers a unique sensory experience and displays the tender joy of revelling in outsider status as well as a generous desire to share the fruits of this experience.
Melodrama Suits Her is similar and also extremely different to Bad Girls. They were produced with vastly different budgets, and the authors come from different backgrounds and have different sexual and gender identities. While Bad Girls opens with a hilariously camp DIY holiday setting with a tropical version of the Star Wars theme playing in the background, Melodrama Suits Her begins with the three performers (Tümay Kilincel, Ixchel Mendoza & Qadira Oechsle-Ali) sitting resplendent on a couch gazing at the audience. Leila Moon wears a gorgeous dress so impractically long at the front that she needs to carry it in her hands to move. In a choreography referencing telenovela slaps the performers fall, draping their hair artfully against a dance floor which is a perfect shade of red that in a lipstick would be branded ‘joyful widow’.
Tümay explained to me that the title of this work was inspired by a book she found in 2008 titled Kadına Melodram Yakışır - Türk Melodram Sinemasında Kadın Imgeleri (Melodrama Suits Women - Images of Women in Turkish Melodrama Cinema). She was inspired by the ambiguity of these figures, who communicated the dangers of stepping outside traditional women’s roles, but also offered the possibility to express strong emotions: “When someone is so desperate and cries there is a reason, and it must come out.’’ Tümay also wanted to use the opportunity to break free of a eurocentric prioritisation of movement over music and to place two elements on an even level. Melodrama Suits Her is promoted as a work ‘against the male gaze’ that seeks to break the feminine stereotypes that we see in cinema. This is clearly present in the work but it doesn’t explain the breathtaking set, the exquisite costumes, the velvet richness of Leila Moon’s voice accompanied by a live viola (played by Fatmanur Şahin). The re-presentation of these over-the-top feminine cinema tropes is, like in Bad Girls, both richer and more nuanced than a simple deconstruction of misogynist cultural fragments.
Feminist Camp
Much writing about camp highlights the relationship between gay men and this particular sensibility, but it remains true that most of the best performances of camp are by women. Unsurprisingly, the feminine labour that goes into camp production is often underappreciated. In her history of ‘’feminist camp’’ Pamela Robertson points out that ‘’We tend to take for granted that many female stars are camp and that most of the stars in the gay camp pantheon are women: consider Garland, Streisand, Callas, Dietrich, Garbo, Crawford, just to name a few… This suggests that women are camp but do not knowingly produce themselves as camp and, furthermore, do not even have access to a camp sensibility (1996:5).
Tümay expressed to me that she felt that in some quarters Melodrama Suits Her was read as reproducing these dramatic figures without offering a strong enough critique. I couldn’t understand how someone could miss the very obvious critical feminist camp in the piece, but more importantly, I thought it would be a serious mistake to dismiss these personae as just figures of the sexist imagination. Firstly, because viewing the kaleidoscopic wonders of human gender expression through the lens of political virtue is an unnecessary impoverishment and a distraction from more pressing matters. If we spend too much time attaching political significance to the gendered practices and styles we enact in day to day life we forget to think about what sort of material formations we would need in order to create a more free and equal society, such as state sponsored childcare, universal education about consensual, caring relationships, and free and safe access to abortion and gender affirming healthcare. It’s less important who wears 6-inch heels and Ruby Woo lipstick to the Kita, endocrinologist or abortion clinic. But secondly, I think there is a further emancipatory potential here, it just can’t be found within the liberal or reformist outlook.
Utopian Camp (or the necessity of demanding more)
Much seminal writing on camp ignores the existence of the trans perspective, and it’s perhaps for this reason that the productive utopian possibilities of camp are sometimes overlooked. Bini Adamczak argues that “The historical genders, including the relationships that create them and the modes of existence that they create, would have to be understood as a repository of affective, habitual, intellectual, practical riches from which a society can choose in the process of its liberation” (2018:174). Lydia and Agnes, as well as the various personae of Melodrama Suits Her articulate a kind of femininity that in various ways ‘fails’ but that playfully demands to be taken seriously. It’s a joke for sure, but it’s a joke that asks us to appreciate the potential in various forms of gendered expression, even those that make us uncomfortable. Of course, it’s bad if our cultural production is telling us that all women are hyperemotional hurricanes of affect. But it’s also bad if none of us are hyperemotional hurricanes of affect. These figures who want more, who demand that the world expand to contain their overflowing sensibilities, who fail, who sag, who insist on their mortal physicality, belong in our future. As we look forward it makes no sense to cultivate a gender politics of austerity. Bad Girls & Melodrama Suits Her ask for, and deliver, more. I’m deeply grateful to their makers for that.
Bibliography
● Bini Adamczak: Beziehungsweise Revolution: 1917, 1968 und kommende. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018.
● Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick: Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
● Pamela Robertson: Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna.Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1996.
● Susan Sontag: Notes on Camp, in: Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.