SAN FRANCISCO—Performance artist, activist and academic Diane Torr is making a rare trip to San Francisco to present lectures and her Man for a Day workshop at the Center for Sex & Culture. Torr has a book out, Sex, Drag and Male Roles; Investigating Gender as Performance, and a documentary film about her, Man for a Day (by Berlin filmmaker Katarina Peters), recently premiered in Berlin.
In the 1970s Torr studied and explored new dance and the work of Susan Sontag, Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage, among others. Political analysis and action entwined with her artmaking: Working for feminist newspaper Majority Report, she met leading feminist/activists such as Kate Millet, Shere Hite, Susan Brownmiller and Valerie Solanas. Torr joined the all-girl art band DISBAND.
Torr began performance in drag in the early 1980s with a dance commission from Dansspace, New York, working together with visual artist Bradley Wester on a piece called Arousing Reconstructions (1982), in which each cross-dressed. Within the performance, they showed the results of research in developing an androgynous movement vocabulary in the form of a dance tableau which contained the archetypal male and female gestures, such as Rodin's The Thinker image, Marilyn Monroe's hand-over-mouth sexy gasp, and so on, aided conceptually by the writings of Deleuze, Guattari and Michel Foucault.
Torr began teaching Drag King Workshops in New York in 1990 with make-up artist and FTM transsexual Johnny Science. These workshops became very popular and were documented by BBC TV, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, London Independent, der Spiegel and other publications. Her performance Drag Kings and Subjects became her signature piece. Another popular work dealing with cross-dressing is an installation, Ideal Homo (1999), has been shown in galleries all over the world. In October 2010, her book Sex, Drag and Male Roles; Investigating Gender as Performance, co-authored by Stephen Bottoms and published by University of Michigan Press, was released. The feature film Man for a Day, based on Torr’s workshop and performance work, premiered at the 62nd Berlinale Film Festival on February 10.
The following events are taking place at the Center for Sex & Culture, located at 1349 Mission St. in San Francisco:
Diane Torr—25 Years of Sex and Drag
Sunday, May 13, 5 p.m.
At the Center for Sex & Culture
$5-25 sliding scale
Diane Torr—Man for a Day weekend workshop
Saturday and Sunday, May 19 and 20, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
$300 (RSVP to [email protected])
For more information, go to SexAndCulture.org or DianeTorr.com.
Image of a Torr workshop from the SexAndCulture.org website.
