It’s a small event on French television: for the first time, a channel devotes prime time to the art of drag to celebrate it. This Thursday, at 9:10 p.m., NRJ12 is broadcasting Perfect Queensa show recorded at the Nouvelle Eve in Paris and which sees a succession of twenty artists.
“We had carte blanche, it was a platform to show what we knew how to do”, explains to 20 minutes Coco Ricard, who stands out in the field of humor. “We are not 400 to do stand up. Me, I was super happy to do my character thoroughly. We can spend four hours doing makeup, we can have fun! “, she continues.
“In Drag Race everything is calibrated, there, it’s their own art”
Among the drag shows, some have already been “seen on TV”, such as Icee Drag On, finalist of France has an unbelievable talentor Soa of Muse and Kam Hugh, candidates for season 1 of Drag Race France which was a phenomenon last summer. It is precisely because of this success that, before the filming, voices were raised in the LGBT community to cry out for the opportunist project. “It’s TV, so of course one of the goals is to get ratings. But the producers, who are themselves gay, left space for everyone to impose themselves, ”tempers Tonya Loren, revealed in the 1990s in the group Sister Queens.
Aaliyah Express also salutes the production which would have been “incredibly attentive”. She was invited to appear on the show along with several other members of her Rice Queens cast. “We were able to show that we all knew how to do different things, that as Asian drags, we were not a monolith, that we each have a point of view, a way of expressing our art”, she points out.
“Having a militant discourse is cathartic”
Aaliyah Express thus offers a performance in the form of a snub to those who brandish the word “woke” like a scarecrow. “Having a militant discourse stems from my experiences, from my life, I need it, it’s cathartic. It is important to me to defend anti-racist and anti-LGBTphobia values,” says the artist. Passages on stage are interspersed with images from behind the scenes where we see the drags getting ready in the dressing rooms, but also interviews facing the camera where the protagonists of the show and other figures of the Parisian nights of yesteryear intervene, at the Like Galia and Jenny Bel’Air, without whom the current French drag scene wouldn’t be what it is. “It is essential to show that there is a rich history in France and not just 20-year-olds who copy drag race “, insists Aaliyah Express.
The specificity of Parisian cabarets (Chez Michou, Madame Arthur, etc.) is therefore recalled, just as artists from transformism or the ballroom scene are not left out. “There is contextualization, the girls tell their stories. Me, I make a bit of a link between the old and the young, ”smiles Tonya Loren. Of course Perfect Queens does not claim to be exhaustive and has not invited any drag kings for this premiere. But it is rumored that if this trial run is successful, they will be there for the next issue.