John Jarboe Explores Gender Queerness Through The Metaphor Of Cannibalism
Jarboe's musically-driven "Rose: You Are Who You Eat" plays for two nights at CulturalDC's Source Theatre.
Whatever their personal journey, LGBTQ folks of all persuasions often contend with the fact that even accepting family and friends will experience their queerness as some sort of mystery to be solved.
So it was that a few years ago, John Jarboe, founding artistic director of the Philadelphia-based Bearded Ladies Cabaret, learned from her aunt the somewhat shocking news that Jarboe had had a twin in the womb.
“You ate her,” the aunt told Jarboe, who had only recently come out to her family as genderqueer. “That’s why you are the way you are.” Mystery solved.
The exchange served merely to spark further introspection by the acclaimed director, singer, writer, and producer, who has spun this seed of family history into an inventive live performance. Named for the unborn twin, Rose: You Are Who You Eat imagines a life she might have led, while also allowing Jarboe to take back this myth of how she came to be.
“It’s fascinating to me that someone who is very well-intentioned, like my aunt, would use that as a means of justifying the reality that I’m a queer person, that I’m genderqueer, that I use she/her pronouns,” Jarboe reflects. “It’s like people are just searching for some kind of myth to explain who I am.”
A “shrine of music, images, objects, and text,” Rose was commissioned as a live performance by the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series, where it had its world premiere in New York last Saturday, March 26.
Jarboe brings the production to D.C. for a two-night engagement at CulturalDC’s Source Theatre on Friday, April 1.
Directed by Philly-based theater artist Mary Tuomanen, and featuring floral couture designed by Bearded Ladies member Rebecca Kanach, the show explores Jarboe’s fascinations through songs by a range of queer composers and musicians, including Emily Bate, Daniel de Jesús, Pax Ressler, and Be Steadwell.
“[They all] brought their own musical sensibility and style to the story,” says Jarboe. “All the lyrics are mine, but the songs range from art song, to punk rock, to like a Joni Mitchell folk tune, to an ’80s pop tune. Every style is very different, and it’s designed that way. There are many voices so that my story gets prismed out through other composers. It’s really important to me that queer folx and mothers of queer folx can feel like they can see some part of themselves in the story, even if they don’t see themselves in every detail of the story, because it’s a really particular story.”
The specificity is part of the point, says Jarboe.
“It’s a very specific story that ideally is a prompt for other people to feel permission to dig deeper into the really specific things that make them themselves. And in doing so, ideally, to find healing or catharsis or release of some kind.”
Rose: You Are Who You Eat is Friday, April 1 and Saturday, April 2 at 7 p.m., at the Source Theatre, 1835 14th St. NW. Tickets are $25-$100, with pay-what-you-can options available at each performance. Visit www.culturaldc.org or www.beardedladiescabaret.com.
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