A gentle voice fills the courtroom: “If you stop thinking of yourself as a stable identity, it changes the whole game.” Two figures in suits face the cavernous space of the Borough Hall courtroom, transformed into a destination for Brooklyn’s book lovers on September 17th for the annual Brooklyn Book Festival. Olivier Py and Peggy Shaw, artists whose work centers their own ever-dynamic identities, take the mics for “Performing Gender,” a talk highlighting themes of Olivier Py Sings Les Premiers Adieux de Miss Knife, part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival.
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| Olivier Py as Miss Knife at BAM Photo: Rebecca Greenfield |
This glamorous, dark performance in the Next Wave features Py—in a way. It features, rather, Miss Knife, an old-style cabaret singer modeled after Py’s grandmother. “It was very difficult to sing without drag,” Olivier Py explains. As himself, he was unable “to do the thing I loved.” When he began performing as Miss Knife, Py was young, self-professedly “very sexy,” and excluded from a community of political leftists in France. To them, he explains, gender was not a political matter. But for Py, who observed a growing momentum around the gay rights movement that often excluded gender-nonconforming and gender-fluid individuals, it was both political and necessary to his art. To sing, he needed to become Miss Knife. “I had no idea 30 years later, Miss Knife would still be singing,” Py chuckles.
