It’s no secret that artistic research takes place at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, but what does it actually entail? In this interview, the twentieth in a series, we take a peek behind the scenes, in conversation with Taka Taka, a.k.a. Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos, who is a make-up artist, performer, drag activist and Professional Doctorate (PD) candidate at the Lectorate of the ATD.
The repetition in your name is interesting.
Panagiotakopoulos is a very common name in Greece, and Panagiotis is the masculine version of Madonna – pan means ‘everything’, and agios means ‘holy’.
That’s beautiful.
Yes it is really beautiful.
And it’s doubled, too, like your drag name.
Yes I like that duplication. I chose the name Taka Taka because I do non-binary drag and I wanted my name to avoid the whole gender question – plus ‘Taka Taka’ rolls off the tongue nicely. It means ‘fast’ in Greek, and I’m really fast. It’s an onomatopoeia, like ‘vroom vroom’. ‘Let’s do it taka taka’ [clicks his fingers] is like ‘Lets do it vroom vroom. In Swahili taka taka means ‘garbage’; in Japanese it’s ‘high’, and in Filipino it’s ‘sparkling’. Someone in Riga once told me that there a taka taka is an animal trail in the woods. I like that one, especially considering my work in the underground and everything I do parallel to it in the city.’
I understand that you’re the artistic director of your drag family the House of Hopelezz.
That’s right. I joined the House of Hopelezz in 2013 after finishing at the Rietveld Academy. My drag mother Jennifer Hopelezz founded it in 2003 – it was the first drag house in Amsterdam. Part of my work as artistic director is to organise BLUE, a weekly underground night party at Club Church. In 2019, I also set up the Drag King Academy and the House of Løstbois for drag kings. I’m the drag mother of that house.
The Drag King Academy is based on the ideas of the American trans activist and drag queen Sylvia Rivera, who helped young drag queens and sex workers in 1960s New York. She invited these young people to a hotel room in the city to teach them about life on the street. While drag queens are well embedded now in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the world, I noticed it wasn’t the case for drag kings. So now at Club Church there’s a ‘school’ from 6pm to 9pm every Thursday for them. It’s a place to be together and exchange ideas; a free space to play with make-up and costumes.
Am I right that you also give drag workshops at several art academies and that your PD is connected with this subject.
Yes, that’s right. I learned from my drag mother Jennifer how you can use drag as a social impulse. Jennifer fights against queer discrimination, breaks the stigma around HIV, and pushes sex positivity. It’s through her that I became part of a lineage of drag activists – we call it ‘dragtivism’. It stretches back to Hellun Zelluf and political activist Fabiola, and all the way to the Stonewall Uprising in New York in 1969. My way of doing it is by combining drag and art education.
So what form does it take?
For me it’s about a certain attitude I encountered on the drag scene.
Visual arts education uses competition and awards to make young artists highly individualistic. I was once a young student too. In the drag scene I was struck by how artists help teach other before going on stage; how they carefully fix each other’s corset and wig. I think the attentiveness they show towards each other is really lovely. Outsiders look at our scene as if we’re incredible bitches to each other, but I’ve never felt as much support before as I do here. My drag mother Jennifer accepts everybody into her drag house. The only precondition is that you stay a bit nice to each other. Some newcomers can be really bitchy, though, and I once asked Jennifer: ‘How can you be so nice to her!?’ To which she replied: ‘Who’s to say she won’t get nicer if, over the next year, I give her the love she never had.’
It’s also interesting to look at the HIV community from this perspective. They haven’t been really well treated over the last 30 years, so they’ve developed their own methods for taking care of each other in all sorts of ways: medical, practical, and spiritual too. They’ve done it as a community. I think there’s a lot to learn from that.
For my PD, over the next four years I’m going to document the House of Hopelezz with a podcast and zines. There’s 20 years of experience and history in that place. I’m also going to study drag mothering as an educational method, to explore whether it can be used to bring about more empathetic, creative and social forms of interaction. When I give a workshop at an art academy, or a theatre or fashion academy, I always watch the way people enter the classroom and wonder what social roles they’ve created for themselves. Which ones are leaders? Who are the shy ones? And I think about how we might use drag mothering to switch those roles, and who will be prepared to step out of their role. What might that make possible?
Tell me a little about what one of your workshops entails.
I bring materials with me to make masks, as well as make-up and costumes. The students use them in improvisations. We always get started right away, and the first step is to get to the point where your iPhone doesn’t recognise you. I’ve got a series of exercises. I like to create a setting where people feel warm and safe. I believe drag gets people into their comfort zone, not out of it. I think we’re all really uncomfortable in our Western clothes. Drag is about playing with gender, not about conforming to new rules, and when you really start playing with gender you never know where you’re going to end up.
And then there’s ‘The Closet’.
During Covid several drag artists stopped performing and donated their clothes to Club Church. I’m now using those clothes to create a place for teens called The Closet, at Erwin Olaf’s studios. It’s for people aged 14 to 18. That was a period in my life, in the village where I grew up, that wasn’t particularly easy for me. It’s an important phase when all sorts of creative and sensitive things emerge. If you embrace them and get to celebrate them with other people it can be life changing. The young people come along every Monday – it’s a group of six at the moment, so there’s still space for more. There are dozens of football clubs all over Amsterdam where teens can play their favourite sport, and now there’s also one place where they can come and queerly express themselves.
Text and interview:
Hester van Hasselt
The complete series of interviews Artistic research: New pathways to new knowledge? you can read here