Johnny Blazes
With expertise in drag, dance, burlesque, classical voice, and circus arts — plus a cast of alter egos running the gamut of the gender spectrum — Johnny Blazes defies attempts at categorization. Since returning to town in the summer of ’07 from a seven-city tour with OCircus!, the troupe she founded and directed during her years at Oberlin College, Blazes has plunged fauxhawk-first into Boston’s performance scene. Between teaching movement to local tots and theater to area tweens, the 25-year-old JP resident has choreographed for all-sizes dance troupe Big Moves and directed the poispinning, fire-breathing, high-flying folks from Somerville’s Madcap Rumpus Society in Mischief in the Machine, the circus fable that sold out the BU Dance Theater last spring.
But Blazes is best known for her genre-blending, genderbending performances at venues like TraniWreck, The Femme Show, and The Theater Offensive’s Works-In-Progress showings, where she transforms into drag king, femme queen, and sundry colorful characters in between. Some showstopping numbers incorporate burlesque, but even when Blazes strips down to her pasties, drag is often at the heart of her practice. “If I get up onstage and put on a curly blonde wig, ten-inch heels, and huge eyelashes, that’s drag. Even though it’s feminine and I’m female, it’s not my gender — it’s not my daily presentation. It’s a consciously hyper-gendered performance. So if I’m going to get up and do a feminine burlesque piece, that’s drag for me,” says Blazes. “But then I might get up and do a cowboy number, where I’ve got full stubble and I’m packing and binding. That’s drag, too. But if I take my clothes off, is that suddenly burlesque? The line for me is very blurry.”
Right now, she’s busy preparing for her first solo show, the appropriately titled wo(n)man show, set to premiere in Boston next September. (Or rather, we should say, “Ze’s busy preparing for hir first solo show” — the binary-busting Blazes, resisting restrictive gender norms even in their grammatical guises, prefers to be described with neutral pronouns.) Expect a vaudevillian extravaganza as Blazes draws on diverse disciplines — drag, dance, clowning, lip synching, prop manipulation, classical voice, maybe even some puppetry and hula hooping — in an exploration of how we all arrive at the genders that we are. And of course, expect hir to defy your expectations.
