Senith – Italian Queer Drag Performer

Senith

Senith is the art director of the biannual international queer festival GendErotica. She has been a queer drag performer, organiser of workshops and events, as well as a queer activist, for more than a decade. She co-founded ‘Eyes Wild Drag’, an Italian pioneer group in queer performance art. Senith, who experiments with gender roles and erotic imaginaries, embodies the very first critical performing construction of a Faux Queen in Italy, through which she works on the redefinition of a queer collective imaginary of the feminine. Senith’s style is Drag Queer… not King, nor Queen, but in between. In her performance practice she combines style, ages, show genres and gender.

Senith’s main projects are:

Drag Queer Sciò (Drag Queer Show), a female cabaret drag performance; SovverTango (SubversiveTango), a tango performance which combines the subversion of gender codes with role exchange in dance; Queerrida, a playful queer contest open to all forms of art, which revamps the joyful atmosphere of the drag clubs of the 90s in the USA; Il Lato Oscuro del Desiderio (The Dark Side of Desire), an installation performance, which explores eroticism and desire; Victoria Party, a performance party which actively engages the audience with the goal of ‘liberating the Drag Queen trapped in their vagina’; Victor/Victoria Workshop, an introductory workshop concerning basic notions of gender performativity. And alongside the GendErotica 2013 festival, ahe organized the first Italian (and European) Femme Conference – Fem Conference Italiana.

In 2016 Senith took part in the artistic production of La Luna in Folle by Italian-Lebanese artist Adelita Husni-Bey, which was selected for the Premio Maxxi 2016 (Maxxi Prize 2016), in Rome. After the performance, the video part of the art project was screened at the Maxxi Museum in Rome until March 12, 2017. The same year she also produced her first entirely solo performace entitled BAD ASSolo. And she was starring Senith in the award winning documentary Al di là Dello Specchio (On the Other Side of the Mirror) about a drag show, directed by Cecilia Grasso. The shortfilm has been presented at many festivals in Italy and abroad, including countries such as the United States, Spain, Mexico and Argentina.

In September 2017, Senith is going to perform at the Festival Intérnational Feministe de Tunis and she will debut in Rome with a new solo theater performance about the invisible feminine sexuality and squirting: Spruzzami by Sara Del Gaudio.

Related Links

Senith’s website: www.senith.org/
GendErotica – contaminazioni di arte queer – facebook community