Go Figure Extra: Dragged Out

Join us for a spectacular celebration of diversity, creativity, and fabulousness! In collaboration with Oslo Drag Festival, we are showing Dragged Out at SALT, and we promise you a thrilling extravaganza like no other.

Varun Narain is an Indian puppeteer who explores the intersection of drag, identity, and puppetry. Varun is a part of Safemuse, an organization that works for artistic freedom and safe working conditions for persecuted artists worldwide. We are showcasing the performance as a kind of vorspiel, or prelude, to this year’s festival, which opens on June 2nd.

“My queer journey out to ocean of Drag began as a child, as I played with dolls and fantasized. In this performance, located at the intersection of puppetry and drag, I return to that world (after about 40 years) to understand what happened, and to see what further happens. The performance is a celebration of Disco life in the closet during the early 1980’s. The world of my dolls has manipulated me, as I have manipulated them, to cross over the boundaries of gender, reality and art. In an ancient text in India, it says that ‘a puppeteer is a soul in search of a body, and a puppet is a body in search of a soul’. I may be a ‘has been’ but my dolls/puppets are still drag queens. The question however is whose dog show is this? Mine or theirs??”
Varun Narain

By and with: Varun Narain
Photo: Private and Karina Rønning