Sasha Velour is making the world a prouder place, one lip-sync at a time

Every day of Pride Month, Mashable will be sharing illuminating conversations with members of the LGBTQ community who are making history right now.

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Sasha Velour is one queen with a lot on her royal to-do list. 

Known for her abstract style and thoughtful approach to performance, the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 9 hasn’t stopped her victory prance since that infamous “So Emotional” lip-sync in 2017. Since then, she’s continued to head up her Brooklyn-based drag review Nightgowns, promoted the work of other queer artists, served up some of the most stunning looks to ever hit Instagram, and otherwise fulfilled her regal obligations every step of the runway.

But in Velour’s latest project — a “one-queen show” titled Smoke & Mirrors that’s a blend of multi-media art, lip-sync performances, personal storytelling, and magic — the savvy entertainer isn’t just juggling a lot of plates. 

Instead, at Smoke & Mirrors‘ West Coast debut at The Theatre at The Ace in Los Angeles, Velour is vanishing, reappearing, sawing herself in half, multiplying, turning into a tree, and more — dazzling her captive audience, made up of fellow queer idols like YouTube personality Hannah Hart and singer Troye Sivan, as well as oceans of dedicated Velour fans.

“It’s pretty complicated to put on a one-queen show,” Velour tells Mashable. “I wanted to have a lot of variety, different types of stories, different narratives, different versions of myself, different gendered versions of myself, even.”

To achieve this illusion — and drive home her show’s overarching theme of queer and trans inclusion and advocacy — Velour makes use of projectors throughout her performance, creating multiple Sashas for big “group” numbers. The result is a spectacular display of chaotic, Celine Dion-fueled fantasy, the kind of vivid dream perfect for the start of LGBTQ Pride Month.

Dates for the show’s pending tour will be announced soon. In the meantime, Mashable spoke with Velour about queer history, political advocacy, rose petals, the perfect lip-sync, and more.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. 

Mashable: From the moment you start a performance to the moment you finish it, what changes?

Sasha Velour: Oh my gosh. There’s so much energy that I have before stepping out on stage, and I feel like I can feel the audience’s anticipation and excitement to see some good drag. Lip-syncing is cathartic. Songs are emotional, and being able to go straight into the emotion with my body and my mouth and the visual picture of the stage without having to produce any sound with my voice is actually a very concentrated version of the emotional and experiential life of people.

The whole audience kind of steps inside me. I get to channel the emotions of the audience through all these emotional ups and downs of the music I’ve selected. At the end of the show, I feel exhausted, and I feel like I’ve gone on a journey, but I also feel like I’ve had therapy with an entire audience of people. And people feel like they’ve faced intensity and come out stronger and more beautiful on the other side.

Mashable: Smoke & Mirrors is laced with incredible references to LGBTQ history and culture, as is all of your work. How do you recommend people get to know the intellectual and historical side of drag better?

SV: I love you so much for asking that question. I didn’t know how to find it for a long time. 

One of the first major histories of drag was written back in the ‘60s by someone named Roger Baker, and it charts the history of drag from very early modern civilizations across the world through today. That scholarship informed a lot of other major accounts, not just of drag, but of trans and non-binary identities, because those have always gone so hand-in-hand.

“So much of what we have to do is reclaim our own queer ancestors.”

So, books like Roger Baker’s history of drag, but especially for me one of the most influential books was Leslie Feinberg’s writing in Transgender Warriors, about positioning modern queer people within this grand history that has not always been recorded — because it didn’t always match the version of reality that historians wanted to document. 

Much of what we have to do is reclaim our own queer ancestors, and reevaluate what we think we know about theater and art and science to make space for the very true and very real existences of LGBTQ people throughout time that were previously erased.

Learning the history of drag means so much more to me than just finding some context for the art form. It’s about finding humanity in history as a queer person. 

And it’s also fascinating! I learned all kinds of things through studying the history of drag that I don’t think people realize. I write a little bit about it in the program for Smoke & Mirrors. I always try to go overboard with the amount of information I give. [Laughter] 

Image: courtesy of sasha velour / jeff eason

Mashable: Educating young queer audiences has been such a shining part of your post-Drag Race career, and your knowledge is such an asset to the queer community. What do you make of your reputation as the franchise’s wise and intellectual queen? 

SV: Are you serious? I don’t think [people think that] at all. [Laughter]  

Sometimes I find that people find it really irritating, because they don’t want to think about the context for things. And I’m like such a … what do you call it when you ruin the party? [Laughter] 

“What do you call it when you ruin the party?”

I’m like, “Oh! I’ve got a nugget of history that should help you here!” I just can’t help it. It’s very much my family’s way. I grew up with a bunch of Jewish people who love to talk about our family history and the history of the Jewish people throughout time, so I’m like, “That’s what I’m gonna do for the queers! I know what my role is, what my calling is.” I love it.

I mean, I was reading about drag performers in the Village in the 1860s in New York, and those artists were seen as the keepers of alternative history as a whole — not just of queer history, but the entire history of night life, of circus, of kink, of sexuality. People would come to [them] for information that wasn’t part of mainstream accounts and mainstream history. So, I feel like it’s our job to know these things.

Mashable: What’s one of your personal favorite moments from Smoke & Mirrors?

SV: One of my favorites is doing “Deceptacon” in the second act, which is, of course, by the queer punk band Le Tigre. I’ve often found that it’s a bit of an anthem in queer spaces, especially in queer spaces that are welcoming to trans people. 

I have very specific meanings behind all of my performances, and I think some people immediately get my exact reference. Other people interpret something that speaks to their own life, and I don’t mind that at all. 

But for that number, in my mind, it’s about the times there have been violence and hatred in the way of success — not just for me, but for the community around me that I see struggling to make it work, just like I did for many years and still do sometimes.

“We all need backup dancers to face hatred.”

That number is about the utopian fantasy that I think drag is so good at, where you create a kind of magnified strength that is impervious to the ugliness of the world around you. I think when people see that on stage it gives them permission to take on that kind of confidence in the everyday world. That spirit of fighting back, that spirit of coming together. 

You know, I have backup dancers in that number. We all need backup dancers to face hatred. When there’s three of you standing there doing the same moves and looking fierce, who is going to question that?

And even though that’s a fantasy, I can channel that just walking down the street. I think that’s something that queer people are able to tap into in themselves, and I hope that number speaks to the necessity and power of that.

Image: courtesy of sasha velour / jeff eason

Mashable: Of course, drag is part of a long-standing tradition of activism. How do you hope your work, and the work of other queer entertainers, can inspire change?

SV: I find the utopian qualities of queer art to be really important, but sometimes it’s important to face those terrifying and ugly realities of everyday head-on. And I think we do need to do more of that.

It has got to be different for each person. One of the things I’m most concerned about is that when queer people are given access to larger audiences, it’s not just about our beauty and our looks, which I know can be such a powerful hooking point for people’s interest. But that it does give us the opportunity to talk about our real lives. 

I love getting opportunities to take part in some of my favorite TV shows [like Broad City and The Bold Type], but at the same time, I want to see more shows where the realities of our lives are told as well. The struggles and the heartaches and the successes of queer people as protagonists — there still is not enough of that. Without that, how can [mainstream] audiences come to learn about those issues? 

Mashable: I’m sure you get asked about this constantly, but can you speak a little bit about what went into your infamous “So Emotional” Drag Race lip-sync, and why you chose to revive it for Smoke & Mirrors?

SV: The way that I lip-sync is to transform a song into a story. I mean, most songs are stories to begin with, but I like to change what that story is about a little in my retelling or my embodiment of it. 

That’s what I’ve always done in drag, and that’s what I did all season long. Thankfully, I was never in the bottom, so I never had to lip-sync for my life. All my performances to those lip-syncs have been lost. [Laughter] Just me and my hotel room, planning my “Greedy” lip-sync that no one saw. 

For the finale, I was honestly really excited. Lip-syncing is my favorite part of drag. I love performing. In that magical, surreal stage moment, I’m able to access a totally different level of fantasy as Sasha Velour. And I was bummed out that I hadn’t been able to show that on Drag Race.

“I want to always remind people that I’m so much more than that.“

So, being given the opportunity to lip-sync at the finale was really, really exciting for me. I wanted to go all out, no matter what song I got, and give a very Velourian performance. At the very least I could walk away from Drag Race knowing I’d shown them what I was all about. 

For “So Emotional,” I wanted to tell a story in two minutes, which is all we had, about emotions really taking over someone in a magical, realist way. I hoped I could captivate a huge audience’s attention with a subtle performance, and I really had no idea it was going to work as well as it did. 

I’m so thankful, and that’s why I wanted it to be part of Smoke & Mirrors. It was just one idea that I had, and the phenomenon that came from me shaking rose petals out of my wig? It’s almost more surreal than drag itself, more surreal than the fact of having rose petals stuffed inside my hair and gloves. Being a meme is such an incredibly specific experience. [Laughter]  

And at the same time, I want to always remind people that I’m so much more than that. I think that’s the role it plays in Smoke & Mirrors, both to celebrate this amazing number that did so much for me and contextualize it within a whole realm of spectacular drag tricks that I keep up my sleeve. And in my wig. [Laughter]  

Image: courtesy of sasha velour / jeff eason

Mashable: How do you cope with the level of pressure that comes with so many in the LGBTQ community looking up to you, and in some ways seeing you so intrinsically linked to their own identities? 

SV: Of course I can’t take on people’s personal or communal struggles. I just try to be very, very mindful of what I put out into the world, and how I run my business to ensure that it’s contributing positively for queer people with every step. 

“Drag for me is about a mission for queer people.”

Trying to make steps into mainstream entertainment while still staying true to queer political spirit is not easy, and I want to do even better going forward. But that’s how I ground myself within the community and within the community’s expectations, as well as within my own sense of what I want to achieve.

It’s not just about personal success. It never has been. Drag for me is about a mission for queer people. And every chance I have to be in the spotlight, I want to multiply as much as possible — so that it’s not just my spotlight and instead it’s something more people get access to, and more can even take advantage of in the few seconds that we get.

Smoke & Mirrors tour dates will be made available soon. Nightgowns, a drag review directed, produced, and hosted by Velour, will appear in New York City as part of WorldPride 2019.

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