Drag star becomes real drama queen

By LINDA HERRICK

Mid-afternoon in Auckland's grandma of gay clubs, The Staircase, and a figure familiar to hardcore clubbers looks strangely normal as he prowls around the dance floor. Usually when DeeZaStar makes an appearance at The Staircase - or any other venue, including the Hero events - the drag star is bigger, taller, louder, weirder than anyone else in the room.

And Dee keeps vampire hours, dropping in at 4 or 5am. But he (or is it she?) is moving on. Here, in broad daylight - well, as broad as it gets in The Staircase's twilight zone - DeeZaStar has literally become a drama queen, rehearsing for his first play, Fierce, Child, which opens at the Maidment Studio on Tuesday.

Although Dee's creator, Kneel Halt (the artist formerly known as Neil Holt), is entirely without makeup or costume in rehearsal, the costumes will be wild. With the device of audio-visuals, puppets and masks, the one-hour show takes a slice of DeeZaStar's multi-hued life, a look at what goes on when she's not on stage. And when she's not on stage, her creator - as we'll see - is a man called Zachary.

Fierce, Child - the title is from a piece of house music - is a collaboration between Halt, fellow Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School graduate Amanda Rees, who is directing, film-maker Mark Summerville and lighting designer Jo Kilgour, who worked on Woman Far Walking for the 2000 International Festival and most recently, Jacob Rajan's The Pickle King.

"We were at drama school together in 1989-90," says Rees, who wrote and starred in her own memorable one-hander, Stark, about the life of dancer Freda Stark. "When we went through it, it was very focused on creating your own stuff."

Says Halt: "Last year we started chatting and I was intrigued Amanda had taken a project she'd done at drama school on Freda Stark and developed it into her own show. I hadn't done anything like that and I wanted to create a product I could travel with."

The pair set up a series of workshops earlier this year and picked through the themes they wanted to explore through the eyes of DeeZaStar and Zachary.

"I sat down and storylined the play, then we workshopped it and videoed it, and honed it down and honed it down," says Rees. "It's very much a duo scriptwriting effort. We have tried to find the character who might be the person who created Dee. It is fictional: it's not an autobiographical piece about Kneel behind Dee."

Halt, who jokes that his name is "full of commands", moved from theatre to the drag scene about eight years ago, drawn not by a desire to look like a woman but by the playfulness of drag.

"I discovered with some friends I was quite good at the drag-monster side of things - not the beautiful drag look but more the adult clown."

It helped that he was good at sewing as well, having studied costume design at Wellington's Bowerman School of Design. "At drama school we were all allocated roles [other than acting] to play: I was always good at wardrobe, Amanda did set and lighting."

After graduating, Halt performed in touring educational shows including the improv work Hide and Seek, which was a hit at the Adelaide Fringe, but he grew bored with the constraints of theatre.

"In theatre there are too many comfort rules, like people sitting in rows facing the front, usually not having to think too much about what they were seeing. But I really love the chaos of clubs, where there's a whole raft of problems and situations that arise at 4 or 5am when you're doing a show. It keeps you on your toes and keeps the audience guessing.

"Drag in a club is more of a visual art so people are entertained from a distance. I see what I do as lifting the spirit of a room - you make a high-impact arrival and the room goes up a notch in energy. Visually I've got to be up there and that's the monster I've created."

It's hard work going back to theatre, says Halt. "I've developed a lot of bad habits from not being in the theatre for a long time. I knew I had to sharpen my tools. I really want to travel with DeeZaStar and the only way I could see that happening was by collaborating with other performers and directors to create a glue to hold the show together.

"Within that show there are pieces I could put into nightclubs independently, but," sighs the 35-year-old, "I'm not doing as many club things these days. I'm getting older - and I'm expensive."

* Fierce, Child, Maidment Studio, Tuesday-Sunday at 7pm; guest DJs will perform 30-minute sets in the foyer before and after each show; some of the city's best-known drag queens will play hostess