Piercings, Projections and Diva Anthems: Inside Pleasure Dome: Continuum

Amygdala, the Brooklyn drag performer the critic Hrag Vartanian calls "the reigning diva of the L train," launched her Manhattan variety show Pleasure Dome: Continuum at SoMad on October 7, staging projections, diva anthem sets and body piercing in a multimedia space near Madison Square Park.

The venue sits at 34 East 23rd Street, fourth floor, Flatiron. Vartanian, reviewing for Hyperallergic, notes the show exploits the room's strange, narrow layout by distributing performances around it, "so there are no bad seats." Brooklyn drag, he writes, "has always been known for its conceptual girth"; this production moves the borough's ambitions across the river.

Vartanian describes the first iteration as a mix of "therapeutic sound, queer political rally, vaudeville tribute, and a vibe manifesto for a city that is constantly shattering the old to make way for the new." He frames it against the political moment: "Mamdani's New York is anything but a drag."

What did the performers actually do?

RuAfza delivered the "theoretical meat of the aesthetic banquet," in Vartanian's phrase — Brechtian attacks on billionaires, right-wing hysteria and exhaustion, capped by a Luigi Mangione-inspired enactment "that left us with a hole-y Elon Musk." At one point she refused to perform at all while projections of her dancing played and large white words declared "RUAFZA DOESN'T WANT TO WORK ANYMORE."

Selena Surreal performed sensual piercings set to Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)," leaving what Vartanian calls "gorgeous streaks of blood" once she removed them. Final girl '98 played the jester, sprawling on stage, inserting herself into the crowd and hanging head-first off the stage while "Art World Grifters" was projected on a curtain and Cowboy Hunters's "Punched in the Head" blared.

Julie J supplied the evening's diva centerpiece: in an orange lamé cloudscape, she performed Nicole Scherzinger's version of "As If We Never Said Goodbye," a rendition Vartanian says "whip[ped] the audience into a frenzy" and left him "breathless while being confronted with so much fucking beauty."

Amygdala guided the program in song and readings, including text jotted into her notes app while stuck on a Brooklyn subway. Her words ruminated on ancestors and their identities: "their own fears and motivations, their own drive to exist and survive and reproduce, to share knowledge, internalize it, to seek pleasure, to seek understanding, and make each other our parallel selves that exist somewhere out there too. We won't ever truly know them, but I know they exist because I exist." She closed with a question: "What can we imagine if we imagine other futures?"

What does this change for queer performance in New York?

Vartanian's verdict is that the show's force came not from entertainment but necessity. "This is art that had to be made," he writes, arguing that queer art is in danger "in this age of right-wing resurgence" and that Pleasure Dome: Continuum and similar rituals of making space are essential. He goes further: "If a truly queer church existed, this could be its mass."

The claim is strong; the evidence is one evening. The test comes with repetition.

The first part of Pleasure Dome: Continuum continues October 8 at SoMad, with a second part on November 18 and 19. The performer lineup changes with each iteration.

By Tom Whitfield