Preview: The Best of Johnny Woo at Glasgay 2011!

ONE of the first drag acts Jonny Woo saw was a queen called Mollie Mocks. It was 1996, Miss Mocks wore enormous wigs, huge 1950s style frocks and did a stand up routine.

“It was old school drag,” Woo says, sounding a bit croaky (that’s what singing Jim Morrison songs to celebrate your birthday will do for you). “She was very funny.”

In the early 1990s, he’d seem some “tacky drag” in gay club Nightingales in Birmingham. But it was all about “base humour and it was very misogynistic. It never interested me.” That’s not what Mr Woo is about. He is the doyenne of London’s alternative drag queen scene, who over the past decade, bedecked in creations by designers including Giles Deacon (“a kaftan covered in dinosaurs”) and Louise Gray (“a huge rag thing that makes me look like a rag monster”) has established himself as a performance artist and tranny superstar. Woo is all about the anarchic punk spirit of the alt-drag he discovered in New York when he moved there in 2000.

“It was a performance art-led scene,” he says. “It was about dressing up and being self-expressive and being surrounded by people who loved it. It was about fashion looks too – there was the whole coquette and radical fairy vibes, having a beard and heels and all that stuff. I started doing it as my own little protest against the established gay scene. The body fascist scene, the lifestyle scene which was about looking and being a certain way to fit in. I wanted to protest against that.”

Three years later he was ready to come back to East London and bring the sequin-studded spirit to Shoreditch. It started with parties and then moved on to tranny lip-synching and tranny talent competitions. That’s where artists including Ryan Styles and Dickie Beau honed the performance personas they’d already started to create. “It was an open mic scenario and if you were enthusiastic you could come down and do stuff,” Woo says. “There really weren’t many places like that in London. There still aren’t.”

The Best Of show that Woo is bringing to Glasgay! will be his first appearance at the city’s annual celebration of queer culture. The show will tap into Woo’s work from the time he spent in New York to material he wrote in the “flurry of activity” after he’d been in hospital (in 2007 he suffered major organ failure) to new ideas he’s putting together now.

“The stuff I wrote after being in hospital is always about death,” he says. “Someone always dies in the stories. But I’ve got ideas for brand new stuff too. Whether I’m going to give it a linear narrative or just bounce around, I’m not sure yet.”

Woo has built his work around nights such as Gay Bingo, which runs at the Soho Theatre, and performance pieces including his Dallas parody, Stark Dallas Naked and Night Of A Thousand Jay Astons. Recently, “since no one has given me my own TV show”, he’s created a night of emerging bands, cabaret and a reenactment of a famous Top Of The Pops moment. “It’s called The Jonny Woo Show. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time and soon I’m going to get it streamed live. The gay cabaret scene is where some of the most abstract, interesting work is being done. On the straight scene the cabaret is often skills based, or burlesque or there’s a stand-up element to it. On the alternative drag scene it’s become more conceptual.”

For one thing, as far as Woo is concerned, it remains political. “I might not bang on about political issues,” he says, “but anarchic, punky drag has its own politics.”

Which fits neatly with the Glasgay! theme this year which is representation – chewing on the notion of how queer identities, lifestyles and relationships are understood. As well as Mr Woo, alt-cabaret act Bourgeois and Maurice and Glasgow’s own Fish and Game will add their cabaret contributions, while other strands of the festival, offering its usual eclectic mix of, as they put it, “kitsch and class” skip gaily through performance, comedy and film. Most eagerly anticipated is Scotland’s National Poet, Liz Lochhead’s celebration of the life and work of the late Edwin Morgan in her theatrical collaboration with the Tron theatre, Edwin Morgan’s Dreams – And Other Nightmares as well as comedic offerings from Margaret Cho and Craig Hill.

“I’m so excited about coming to Glasgow,” says Woo. “I’ve been in a bit of flux recently. There was a while last year when I wasn’t really enjoying it. I think I was trying to make myself a bit mainstream.” He sounds utterly horrified. Thankfully that moment passed. v

CLAIRE BLACK

The Best Of Jonny Woo is at The Arches on 22 October. Glasgay! 2011 runs from 15 October until 12 November at venues across Glasgow, www.glasgay.com