I was so excited when I saw Bridge Markland would be performing with Buba Sababa!
Bridge, who’ve I have drawn many times, is an incredible icon of Queer Berlin, a Drag Queen/King and genderfuckery artist who has created decades of transgressive works. During the early quarantine days Bridge shared archived show ephemera like press, flyers and posters on Instagram. You can really see what a pioneering role she played in international gender performance theater.
Plus, she has created some of the strangest and most unnerving puppet shows you will ever see! And danced and written and taught and modeled for artists and so much more. Bridge celebrates 35 years on stage this year!
This show, queens + kings special with Bridge Markland + Buba Sababa, included multiple acts and reveals and so many sheddings of skin!
And Bridge shares the stage with generosity and grace, welcoming Berlin’s new generation of gender-play performers.
Seeing Venus Boy Buba Sababa onstage with Bridge Markland was fantastic.
Buba Sababa is a radical talent, a fearless performer who really gets into it with the audience. In the drawing above you see Buba eating sweets and dancing to “Sugar Sugar” in macho persona, which was layered and intense. There was also a video collage piece spotlighting toxic masculinity which was hard to watch and yet heart-wrenching, and Buba dancing in femme mode in veils, and much more. Buba is part of the amazing Venus Boys, “a collective of Berlin based Drag performers who paint from the palette of performative masculinity”. I have drawn Buba before as well, and hope to draw Buba many times in the future.
In the chat people were saying things like “I feel like I should have paid 125 euros ticket for this and I don’t have any money” and “DED FOREVER DED”. It was a Tuesday night twitch show but it felt like we were in some prestigious theater watching an experimental show funded by Udo Kier. Seeing these two generations of Berlin gender-performance work and dance together was stunning.
queens + kings special with Bridge Markland + Buba Sababa was part of Camillo Queer Cinema Week, which is online this year. You can see the programm here. There are more events to come!