Fauxnique wields a provocative, wry framework of drag, dance, and philosophy to confront identity, femininity, and self-image.
How Do I Look? is the latest work from Monique Jenkinson/Fauxnique, the multifaceted artist, choreographer, writer, and performer best known as the first cisgender woman anywhere, ever to be crowned as a pageant-winning drag queen. With her rigorous ballet training buried in the bottom of her artistic toolbox, Jenkinson emerged out of a feminist, postmodern, improvisational dance lineage and into the nightclub scene. There, she fashioned Fauxnique in a laboratory of liberatory radical queer performance, reclaiming ballet and learning to use drag and theory as modes of inquiry and entertainment. Jenkinson brings this fluency to this latest work.
Now she dons her drag queen guise and wields her unique combination of precise physicality, irreverent humor, and gutsy vulnerability to ask the most vain, mundane, and loaded question: How Do I Look? With it, she digs past glossy platitudes and flattering exaggerations into the hot mess of perception, subjectivity, identity, and taste. How Do I Look? throws itself into the space—sometimes a chasm—between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. As always, Jenkinson’s work resists dogmatic answers and leans into philosophical modes of questioning, considering the methodology of looking: by what means do we see the world and each other? By what means other than looking might we perceive each other, art (especially works of art like this one), and the world?
Part roast, part dance, part drag, part stand-up, part performance art, this piece delves into an extreme close-up of the self. How Do I Look? poses a question that generates more questions—can I train myself to look without flinching, without cringing? Can self-knowledge help me to know others? If I roast myself, will you like me more? Is it even possible to roast myself? Do I really want to know?
Photo Credit: Robbie Sweeny
About the Artist
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Fauxnique | Performance
Monique Jenkinson | Conception, Creation, Choreography, Writing, Direction
Jesse Hewit | Dramaturgy, Co-direction
Del Medoff | Lighting Design
Marc Kate | Sound Design