AD INFINITUM IDENTITIES PSEUDA CAN BE SEEN FROM A STAGE , holding two metal chain ropes attached to the limbs of another body. A doll, a dancer, Kim Ip. It’s Halloween, 2015, at B4bel4b Gallery, and the audience doesn’t yet know that Kim and Pseuda are chained to- gether until they begin to stretch away, the chains syncing a nexus between bodies. IN 2014 NICK BEGAN EXPERIMENTING with creepy horror drag concepts. Blacked out teeth and white- THE WORK OF PSEUDA AND KIM IP BY JUSTIN EBRAHEMI
that contort and pivot her movements. Her improvised dance vocabulary avers free will against the puppeteering dominance of Pseuda, who expertly jostles Kim. Her master. Then the dom- inance inverts and the Doll can be seen controlling Pseuda. She throws them violently to the floor. “I’m Your Doll’’ by FKA Twigs accentuates the sparring as the movement fractures notions of control. The performer’s identities are exported and stretched in situ, surmising agency to that which was assumed to be a chained doll. But what traps the doll’s identity is the same mechanism that may set her free.
out contacts. Dystopian characters and science fiction aesthetics. Blood and glitter. From there his alias, Pseuda, spawned and began performing throughout the city’s queer nightlife – often, alongside Jader and urheinous, as the offbeat drag trio Toxic Waste Face. One performance installation from the trio embodied them as zoned-out adult babies confined to wooden cribs glued to personal television monitors, complete with streams of incoherent media footage bleeding into one another. “We were embodying the crippling infantilization that technology can often wield over the human psyche through themes of technological isolation, control, the sort of phan- tom limb attachment to our devices,” Nick explains. AS AN ARTIST, Pseuda uses avatars to mediate their own identity to investigate the nefarious effects of technology on the human psyche, and our curation of the self. With Drag, Nick could embody any- one or anything he curated. Pseuda emerged as a self- evident slave to the ever-growing techno-voyeurism of
Kim is the marionette. She adorns a black, strappy makeshift harness fashioned of seatbelt material that cages her torso like external ribs. Attached to the back of her are the metal chains controlled by Pseuda. Kim struggles to escape the chained confines
Jader, Pseuda, and urheinous
NICK NAVARRO’S DRAG IDENTITY —Pseuda—was born out of San Francisco’s SOMA nightlife milieu. While he never considered himself a performer, he frequent- ed The Stud and rejoiced in queer mediations of identity. Pre-pandemic, the city’s queer nightlife aesthetics were a haven of experimental drag looks comprising the fabulous, the surreal, the abstract, the morbid – myriad identity transformations partying in unison. As Nick tells me, “Drag is an art form where you can literally do anything you want. The SOMA drag scene showed me there are no rules, and that was a big part of me discover- ing and making my queer identity.”
Pseuda at Gray Area Theater
Pseuda
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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