Perfomance Art and Freedom at ADIRA Drag Festival

Hassandra is an experimental drag artist and co-founder of the ADIRA Party, whose work throughout their career and in the upcoming ADIRA Drag Festival uses humour, beauty, and stagecraft to interrogate the intersecting experiences of queerness and Arab diaspora. A multi-disciplinary artist— DJ, makeup artist, and drag performer— Hassandra studied theatre and acting in Beirut, focussing on classical drama and the female character acts in ancient Greek mythology. They moved to Berlin in 2017 and subsequently began a solo practice as an experimental drag artist, later becoming a founding member of ADIRA and Critical Queer Solidarity. Hassandra’s instagram is crammed with posters for artist exhibitions and queer-solidarity workshops, headlines from their contributing work for podcasts and newspapers, and dozens of drag looks. Their makeup ranges from traditional drag— sculpted, exaggerated features, pouty lips, and silky, shimmering wigs— to more experimental styles: full body paint, moulded horns and elfin ears, and abstract animal print designs.

When we met on Zoom, Hassandra was makeup-free and dressed simply. They spoke excitedly about the ADIRA Drag Festival, but their tone kept a resonant seriousness. The morning of our interview, Berlin Instagram was awash with stories reposting a video from the night before of a police officer shoving and punching a teenage boy on Sonnenalle, a busy thoroughfare that’s known as Berlin’s “Arab Street”. In the last few months, Berlin’s Arabic-speaking residents have been subject to increased violence, racial profiling, and threats of arrest or even deportation. The upcoming ADIRA Drag Festival was imagined by Hassandra and their co-founder xanax_attax as a space where queer Arabic-speaking people could vent their frustrations, teach each other how to resist their identity being co-opted for political clout, and organise for solidarity and collective resistance. Through a range of thematically connected workshops and performances, the festival will explore the interdisciplinary nature of drag as a medium for freedom of expression and protest, bringing together around 25 artists for a day-long program of music, dancing, and discussion. 

SLEEK: You’ve already hosted a number of ADIRA parties with drag events, what makes ADIRA Drag Festival special? Is it just done on a bigger scale, or structured differently? 

HASSANDRA: Before, the party, the music, the DJ sets lasted for just a night, 6 or 7 hours, until about six in the morning. The drag festival is done on a much bigger scale. We have international artists coming from Lebanon and other European cities to join the festival. And we’re starting much earlier. We’ve had drag shows and performances in the past, but with this festival the drag performances and their showcases are the main event. There are many more performers and the show will last for around three hours. 

S: If you and xanax_attax are performing at the festival, what should we expect? Do you think that your drag persona has evolved over the years? 

H: We are performing, yes. I will be hosting the night and performing as well, which is really exciting. And xanax_attax will be playing as well later at night as a DJ. Plus we have 12 other performers joining and two other DJs. I think we have about 25 talents in total, with the panel talk beforehand and the workshop facilitators. 

And my drag persona has for sure evolved. I started as Cupcake, and then over the pandemic, I moved to Queen of Virginity, which is still my Instagram handle. Eventually it changed again, I think with the birth of ADIRA, to Hassandra. My legal name is Hassan, and I’ve always been so inspired by ancient theatre characters and Greek characters like Cassandra. So I put that twist on it.  But it’s also very Arab sounding. So I think that became the truest name to my identity. I don’t really go with Cupcake or Queen of Virginity anymore. I go with Hassandra even when I’m out of drag. 

When I first started, I was more of a drag clown. I was inspired a lot by clown makeup and more grotesque things. Now I’ve moved into different aesthetics. It really depends on where I perform, because I think of myself as an experimental drag artist as well. I tend to adjust to the gigs that I perform at and the audience that I perform to.

S: How do you scout for your performers, and what do you look for in their acts? 

H: It really is a mix of everything. We had an open call that motivated a lot of people to apply. The rest was just a lot of research. Browsing Instagram and TikTok and finding all these different Arab drag artists in different cities in and outside Europe. I also wanted to showcase different drag art forms, to have as much variety as possible. There are people in the festival who are more on the conceptual side, or who are more performance artists. And there are more traditional drag artists or musicians who are performing. 

I used to be much more on the conceptual side and on the multimedia side of drag that did not quite fit in club spaces. That’s one of the reasons why I founded this festival, because I wanted to give space to different art forms to be showcased and appreciated. 

S: About the workshops— there is this one “How To Avoid Getting Thrown Off Roofs” that addresses the issue of pinkwashing. How have you designed ADIRA to resist the risk of being co-opted by agendas you don’t agree with? 

H: I tried to connect the festival thematically from beginning to the end: from workshops and panellists during the day to the drag performances and the DJ sets at night. I wanted to offer a variety of workshops that range from fun stuff to heavy stuff to talk about, but also that reflect the reality of queer Arabs as well. 

All of the workshop facilitators are Arab or Arabic speaking, we’re going to be running two workshops in parallel at the same time. We start with drag makeup, which a lot of people are interested in, whether they are interested in pursuing drag professionally or not. It provides this space for fun and for skills to be taught and shared. 

At the same time there’s a workshop on reclaiming codes, where we revisit the symbolic codes and references from our culture, and how to reclaim them back. So when I speak about “queering up” our pop culture, this is the exact space for it. And then we move on to the performance class. Performance class is a continuation of the makeup workshop. A lot of people will end up in full drag by the end of the workshop, and there will be a lot of energy that needs to be let out.

The other workshop, “How To Avoid Getting Thrown Off  Roofs”, has been receiving the biggest feedback. As queer Arabs, I think that our identity has been either tokenized, or overlooked, or misused in ways that we don’t even get a say in. This workshop is first of all about raising awareness on pinkwashing and how it’s being used to justify such horrific acts with the genocide.

I think, at the end of the day, queer Arabs are the people who get the biggest backlash from everything, always. At the World Cup in Qatar, people were always saying “But homosexuality is not legal there”. But in the end, us queer Arabs ended up having no say in that at all because it was taken over by other discourses. 

This workshop is held in Arabic, with a lot of texts in English to read, because we primarily want this space for queer Arabs and queer Arabic-speaking people to have this togetherness. To have this space of relief, of finding refuge, and to just let a sigh out. It isn’t a 101 for people who know nothing about pink washing. There are a lot of other spaces where people can learn about the concept. This is a space to reflect, and that we can utilise to be productive, and to release a bit of the frustration we are experiencing in the world right now, especially in Germany.  

S: You’re also showing this installation, “You Will Never Know How It Feels”, a performance piece that is confronting the repression of free speech in Germany and calling for Arab and queer allyship with those who are living under siege in Gaza. In what ways do you think that the medium of performance art can effectively serve as protest? 

The video art is a reminder that politics and art intersect. There is no art without politics and no politics without art. I am not censoring any performers on stage and I did not dictate what any of the performers do. I think especially with Arab artists, what we are really missing at the moment is the autonomy that we have on stage to say what we really want to say and to let out this frustration. 

It is a protest performance, in a way. We do what we can. I mean, we cannot ignore what’s happening at the moment. It feels really absurd to perform without acknowledging what’s happening. One of the performances that I will do is this sort of Miss Lebanon emigrant persona, who is kind of like a saviour in Germany. 

We’re going to do a street interview style where Miss Lebanon comes back to Germany on a mission to try and save German culture, because native German culture is under threat. So she’s going to go on the street interviewing people, asking them very problematic questions. At the end of the day, it is taking the piss, putting people on the spot, asking them embarrassing questions. I think a sense of humour is just one way that I have always used to show how ignorant certain people are, and to just kind of laugh at the misery that we’re in. Especially with the rise of Islamophobia and racism in Germany. I think one way we can proceed with this is just laughing at how ridiculous and ugly it is. And this is what Miss Lebanon is going to do. We’ll see if she’ll succeed or not. 

S: In your experience doing drag and working with other drag artists, how does the combination of dance, costume, makeup and performance lend itself to queer expression? 

H: This is why I am so happy that this festival is happening and that we made sure to call it ADIRA drag festival, not just the ADIRA festival. Drag artists are systematically and institutionally always overlooked because we don’t go through the same sort of institutional paths that other artists go through. I myself am a theatre student, I have a degree in stage acting and performance. And I have been so inspired by the different art forms that drag combines altogether. You’re talking dance, you’re talking acting, you’re talking writing, video art, all these things. That is what is really beautiful about drag. It’s a clay that you can really mould and shape the way that you want. It is such a freeing tool that you can use to speak about whatever you want.

I have used drag since the beginning to reiterate different stories of mine from the past. I was able to share a lot of painful things with the audience. That was really freeing and healing in a lot of ways. Drag is political and has always been— maybe because it’s not been dependent on public funding, it made it a lot easier to be political.

It says a lot that people are afraid of drag performers. We say what a lot of other institutional artists are afraid to. I think that drag is the mother of all arts at the end of the day. And as people will see in this festival, every drag artist is taking a completely different direction.