Kaj-anne Pepper: A Spectacle, A Spell
Kaj-anne Pepper is a multidisciplinary maker, choreographer, and performance artist. I interviewed them before an Interfaith Muse Artists in Conversation event in 2016. Pepper had just produced “Diva Practice,” a research project about drag and contemporary performance. What follows is an edited version of the Eavesdrop podcast episode, plus some extra conversation that never made it to air. We started the interview, at their urging, with two deep breaths.
Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo: When you started working professionally, was it always kind of a mix of things? Or were you doing mostly theater or mostly dance, and then got into drag?
Kaj-anne Pepper: My very first drag show, I was probably 15 or 16. I played the role of Blanche the Morning-After Pill and she was a chain-smoking insult comic. I had this ugly Dee Snider wig on and I was just making fun of everyone and making fun of myself. And I realized at that point that I wasn't trying to be sexy and beautiful, I was always kind of a clown. I think has a theatrical tradition. That has evolved, obviously, because I have always run parallel between my dance career and my drag career. When they intersect is when I create big shows. I noticed that after I became a little bit more professional, started touring––professional means I ask for money now––the drag really became a vehicle to look at and express those things that I couldn't or didn't know I could with dance. And then they informed each other. They allow me to do both in both fields.
EHF: One thing that I did notice in your show [Diva Practice] was that kind of interweaving of those two things. The dance and the drag were two big methods by which to get it the same thing, sometimes overlapping and sometimes separate.
KP: I don’t think there’s a difference. I believe dance is drag, drag is dance––you are just employing different tools. I happen to be really into the spectacle of the face, and of makeup, and of the pageantry of the costume, and the different ways in which those can represent character and identity. And also how the body, just on its own, can also carry those things without wearing anything. In my theater practice, as a maker, I want to consider the totality of audience: where they sit, how their bodies sit in the space, and my body in the space and then the space around us. So in that relationship, the magic spell isn’t just casting a circle around the entertainers, it’s cast in the entire space so that everyone is in that world between: that special thing where anything could happen. Therefore we're all collaborating together. Whether or not I walk up and say, “by the way, we’re all collaborators now,” that's not the point. The point is that you're implicated and therefore you're at risk. And I think that danger is important.
That comes from my training in witchcraft. When I was young, I spent a lot of time with witches in Sonoma County, California, and so a lot of that ritualistic, dynamic, energy-raising community practice, embodiment practice––a lot of that [attention to the collaboration] is informed by my spiritual relationship to those communities.
EHF: How did you end up with witches in Sonoma County?
KP: I grew up in Central California and then my two lesbian moms and I moved up to Northern California when my biological mother found her biological family. So in that journey we have two queer moms with a very queer and very flamboyant young child, and we end up in Sonoma County. You may not know this, but Sonoma County, especially West County of Sonoma County, is like, witchcraft capital of the United States. There's a long tradition of West Coast Reclaiming: socially-engaged, activist, Wicca witchcraft-inspired paganism and neo-pagan and sustainability movements and a whole host of Earth-Firsty kind of awesome things. Living and growing up near Sebastopol, where eight times a year in the community center, [they have] witch gatherings––one of the few places in the world that that happens regularly, without abashed anything. I fell into that kind of practice by proximity but also because I was that kid who would search out every book, every library book about anything witchy, anything dark, anything goth, anything fantasy. Any kind of other-worldly thing is super important to me. When I discovered that it comes from a tradition, that was huge. When I was an adult and I realized what Reclaiming Tradition stands for, and who I know who does it, it just makes sense that it would connect me to other things like the Radical Faeries or Buddhist meditation practice or Tai Chi or how I deal with it, which is dance.
EHF: Can you say a little more about Reclaiming Tradition?
KP: Reclaiming Tradition is the name of a tradition of witchcraft. Starhawk is the famous name––queen––of it, but Reclaiming is the social activist branch of this witchcraft practice. They hold circles, they hold classes. They are exceptionally feminist and exceptionally queer-welcoming, which is another reason why I ended up there. They have branches all over the world. How I ended up in there is that the pollination of that goddess magic ended up in California and so did I.
EHF: It sounds like your moms were already involved in it? Or did you end up in it on your own?
KP: The fact that my moms were queer women in California [means that] I’m sure that they had known many a witch, self-identified or not. My moms in their particular brand of feminism exposed me to a lot of music and a lot of freedom when I was younger. I felt like I had permission to feed [my] quest for things. I would literally ditch school go to Barnes and Noble and I would steal books about witchcraft and read them voraciously. And a lot of them were terrible, but some of them were very, very powerful. In my work, I’m researching the relationship between feminism, the earth, and the body as dance. And as a gay, queer, male-presenting person, the game of identity is one of glamour.
Glamour is one of the oldest words from magic. It’s one of the oldest ways to say, a spell being cast. And in that, I think drag fits in this old concept of what magic is. We say: Oh, what a magical night at the theater. Oh, how fabulous is that! I think of fabulousness as that sparkle that happens when you turn tragic into magic or when you turn trauma into drama. That alchemical process of: I’ve been dealt a load of bullshit from a society that is rigid. How can I turn it into something usable and enjoyable which is going to be powerful?
EHF: There’s an implicit idea of transformation, right? Even those of us for whom our only conception of witches is through European fairy tales, we have this sense of a spell being about transformation, taking one thing and making it another thing.
KP: I also want to point out that the American concepts of witchcraft, and Puritanical violence, the witch hunts in Europe which were replayed again hundreds of years later in America, come from what Silvia Federici (who is an Italian anarchist, mostly likely a witch) talks about. How the transition from feudalism into capitalism was that period in which the war on the working class and the war on women’s bodies for the control of reproduction, the control of land, the control of ideas, moved us into the fucked up mess we’re in. I think that glamour has an important thing on the large scale for society as well as a personal scale. I cast a personal glamour to make sure I get the response I want from an audience. But there’s a glamour cast on all of us by capitalism, an ensorcellement even, that says this is who you have to be this world, this is who you are, this is the way the world works. That’s just not a truth I want to live in.
EHF: That goes back to the idea of reclaiming. The capitalist creation of the safe identity, this identity you’re allowed as a consumer, as a particular commodified person. This is the body you’re in so you are allowed to want these things. Reclaiming the things that you are not allowed to want or be inside of the capitalist framework.
KP: The secrets and agency that this witchcraft revival really offered teenagers, especially when I was growing up in the ‘90s and 2000s, [was] that kind of agency and self-acceptance and self-empowerment was super important to hear, [that] I have the ability to do something fantastic. And whether or not little gay boys seeing RuPaul’s Drag Race know that, they are learning how to do glamour. They are learning to cast spells saying, this is who I am. And the first person who has to fall for that glamour is the person who casts it.
LHF: I know you've done some training in butoh dance. How does that affect your ideas about spirituality in the body?
KP: As a white person who comes into a tradition coming from Japan, it's really important for me to pay attention to what it is that I'm engaging with here. I don't call myself a butoh dancer but I trained in it because I think it's very powerful. Butoh made people riot out of the theater the first time [they saw it] because it was the exploration of darkness and taboo. It's always been an exploration of the mystery and of the body in a dance form. As a white person on the West coast, what butoh has to offer me is a physical, embodied practice that allows me to understand the unknowable inside me. It's a practice of the grotesque, of the small, of the large, of the painful, of the beautiful, of the ecstatic... It is in itself a tradition that really embraces queerness. Whether or not the practitioners do, it is in itself is a queer dance because it's not virtuosic. Although you can be a virtuosic dancer.
EHF: My experience as an audience member, just being exposed to it a little bit was like, this scares the crap out of me! I really like what you said, about [the dance] being queer in that is undermining that idea of virtuosity. Of course to do it requires an incredible virtuosity––
KP: Or not. I don’t think it requires virtuosity. I think it requires a willingness to be honest and ask yourself what the fuck you're made of.
EHF: As an artist, do you feel accountable to any community?
KP: This is hard because I feel so unequipped to tackle the world's problems! But as a queen, as a drag queen, you're expected to do certain things. And that's changing now with the industry of queen-mainstreaming ‘cause of RuPaul's Drag Race but in the past––and currently––not only are you expected to be this flawless artist, but this artist who represents the gay community. You're expected to be a fierce performer, you have to know pop culture and lip sync, you need to be a seamstress, and a costume designer, and a makeup designer. The point is that you are showing that I'm good at all these things. Not only that, but you have to be a fundraiser and attend charities, work for the community, and you have to support yourself somehow doing all this. And it’s a lifestyle. When you dress up in women's clothes you are giving up something of your masculinity and that sacrifice is powerful and that sacrifice teaches, I think, a lot of men what it’s like to be a girl. Just like I say in “Diva Practice:” When I get dressed up, I'm treated like a first-class object because you think women are second-class citizens and drag is third-rate entertainment with first-world problems.
EHF: I loved that and I was really glad to hear you talk about misogyny and drag.
KP: I feel accountable and challenged for and because of the strong women in my family, and the queers and non-binary gendered beings in my life. My women friends and my men friends--I feel accountable to them, because I have, as a white person who presents as male even though I may not identify as that, I have an accountability to at the very least, being sensitive. At the very least…. I’m just trying to be full-time fabulous.
Kaj-anne Pepper AKA Pepper Pepper is a multidisciplinary artist who works in performance, video, drag, installation, theatre and dance.
“So Spice They Named Her Twice” Kaj-anne’s drag persona “Pepper Pepper” is a humorous yet thoughtful gender bending MC and entertainer. Her mix of camp and charm live in the unique strata between Fine Arts and Vulgar Marxism. Pepper has premiered hybridized dance/theatre work at RISK/REWARD, DANCE+ The Headwater’s Theatre, PICA’s T:BA festival, Performance Works Northwest, and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest. When S/he is home in Portland OR you can see her at “Drag Queen Tag Team” an all ages FREE durational improv lipsynch-a-thon every 2nd Tuesday at The Alberta Street Pub. Often you can catch her regularly prancing at Carla Rossi’s “Queer Horror” film screenings and pulling stunts at gigs across the nation.
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