Happy Hour

Camping

Sacred music greets the audience. The light is dim, tinged red – part church, part nightclub. One First one angel appears, then a second, then a third – on pointe shoes, balancing, teetering between appearance and disappearance. What unfolds looks less like ballet than like an incantation. Is that a Latin mass I hear, or merely an echo of sacred chants – or a parody of the sacred itself?
Suspended between sublimity and (self-)parody – utterly sincere and yet far too much. It is within this very tension that Happy Hour by Tomi Paasonen unfolds: somewhat between ritual and trash, between holiness and camp. „It’s too much.” Or perhaps: „Yes, exactly like this.” – Susan Sontag might have written. Too much pathos in the music, too much red in the light, too many angels wobbling on pointe shoes that seem too tight. Yet it is precisely this excess that defines the scene. In her Notes on Camp (1964), Sontag writes: „The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” And here, at the very beginning of Happy Hour, that logic comes alive: we are not entering a sacred space, but a camp universe, where angels and zombies, priestesses and heavy metal all coexist on one stage.
With the entrance of the priestess, storytelling begins: childhood memories, the boy/girl gender divide, the feeling of drifting like a ghost through one’s own life. The drag-stage becomes the site where these experiences can be channeled.
After the intermission, the atmosphere shifts. The „angels” return, but the mood is erratic. Pointe shoes vanish, replaced by high heels; tulle veils shimmer, glamour spills across the stage – a game of veiling and unveiling. The Queen of Heaven reappears, now as a zombie figure, while heavy metal collides with operatic aria. Extreme shifts, dissonant overlays – deliberately causing uncanny, unsettling sensations: partly trash, partly exaltation, partly ironically fractured. The overflowing codes invoked here remain fragmentary, directionless, indeterminate: ballet, baroque, gothic, trash TV, yoga session, golf course.
As in earlier works, Tomi Paasonen plays with the collision of drag and ballet: the performers move as radiant ballerina, as corps de ballet, yet simultaneously as figures that subvert all normative frames. Yoga poses, golf swings, extended arms – all exaggerated, absurdly stylized, yet choreographically precise. Drag, the serious play with gender identities, becomes a bodily syntax that summons narrative, emotional, and aesthetic codes all at once. It feels like a call to mindfulness – and at the same time like its parody: „Surrender to the present moment.” The performers drool, chew on their mouthpieces: grotesque, visceral, repellent.
Beneath it all runs a layer of tragedy. The Queen is slowly stripped off her costume until only fragility remains. The dance with death fuses with Gregory Porter’s „Smile“. Tragicomedy, deep melancholy – and the reminder that sometimes a smile is the last defender against disappearance.
In her Notes on Camp (1964), Susan Sontag described an aesthetic of exaggeration, artifice, and ion the „good taste of bad taste”, one that dissolves the boundary between high and popular culture: a playful, hedonistic, anti-serious way of enjoying the world as an aesthetic phenomenon – trivialities included. Camp, she writes, is the „love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” It is not merely a stylistic device, not mere decoration – it is a sensibility, a way of seeing, an attitude toward the world that embraces excess and irony while holding on to seriousness. Camp takes the ridiculous seriously and ironizes the sublime. For, as Sontag notes, „[t]he ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful.” Or, as Charles Kennedy puts it in Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening (1954) – referred to by Sontag herself:

„You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it, you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love …”

On Paasonen’s stage, this logic becomes evident: angels on pointe shoes appear at once beautiful and absurd, sacred and banal. And far too much. „Camp is the triumph of the epicene style,” Sontag writes, adding in parentheses: „(The convertibility of „man“ and „woman“, „person“ and „thing“.)” In other words: camp is the triumph of queerness. Camp makes it possible not only to endure contradictions but to enjoy them, and to perceive the exaggerated and the excessive as an expression of sensuality and emotionality. It celebrates excess and transforms it into form—into the form of a narrative, an attitude, a performance—because the stage itself becomes a metaphor for life, a space where we enact our roles.
Accordingly, drag and ballet interlace here into a choreographic language that is at once ironic, tragic, banal, and sublime. In a logic of excess, c codes are accumulated, mixed, deconstructed, and, just as insistently, celebrated. Every pose, every step, every exaggerated gesture is both quotation and its transgression: baroque elegance meets grotesque distortion, classicism meets pop, spirituality meets irony, trash meets transcendence.
Drag thus emerges as a „queer art of manifestation” – as we hear in the piece – not to imitate reality but to expand it, to make visible what would otherwise remain unseen. Paasonen transforms the stage into a site where personal memories, cultural codes, and aesthetic extremes converge in a bizarre poetic logic.
In this sense, Happy Hour is not a „happy hour” at all, but a queer liturgy, an invocation of epiphany, a celebration of the irreconcilable – speculating on meaning in excess, and on secret longings in the uncanny. A theatrical space where trash transcends itself, where laughter and tears blur into one another – and where drag finally becomes an „art of manifestation“.

Jette Büchsenschütz, Berlin