Day Glo is En Vogue

Day Glo is back, honey!

Once upon a time, New York was full of downtown-style “avant-garde” performance art. It was usually at clubs or divey East Village spots. The idea was that you didn’t know exactly what you were seeing, or why, but it provoked some kind of emotion in you. While the best kind of performance doesn’t require it, being on mind-altering drugs probably helped.

But enSubtitles, a performance group consisting of club kids (and drag artists) One-hAlf NeLson, Erickatoure Aviance and Clifton Brown (sometimes known as the beautiful Nanya Bidness) fills a gap in visual performance left by the death of New York’s clubland of yesteryear (and yes, I admit to all, these guys are my friends. It’s Thanksgiving, a break please!).

Conceived after a huge response after an avant garde drag performance at a Grace Jones drag tribute at the Cock last November—Erickatoure and Nelson inhabited one voluminous costume with a bald-capped head—the aesthetic of enSubtitles (think, En Vogue, but not) is pretty much lots of Day-glo and scary-looking.

Okay, you need more brainy words? More thought out? Not gonna happen. Words cannot do these visual justice. The overall effect is supposed to freak you out, forcing you to pose questions like “what the hell is he wearing? Is that a he? What is going on here?” And yet, you love it.

In a word, they’re trying to gag you, honey. Fill you up with emotion so that you can’t speak. Give you naches. Get into it.

The most recent performance (last Thursday) to a small but adoring crowd was at “Oops, she fell!”—a party at LES bar-with-a-basement, Uncle Charlie’s. Performing Freakazoid, these often-dressed-like-ladies wore suits and robot heads for the first part, and then evolved into a scarily life-like cartoon face (sort of like a 1980s Wizard of Oz), who sang the rest of the song.

What’s fun and different about enSubtitles is that they sort of call upon a very Leigh Bowery-esque idea: not in their actual style (a look that Lady Gaga tries to cop, but fails), but in the effort to create a sort of beautiful monster—the kind of visuals that are freakishly weird or upsetting, but also quite whimsical.

In the past, at Spank! parties, the group has performed as three homicidal cupcakes to Marylyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” and performed “Mesopotamia” by the B-52s with (curiously) Egyptian-themed Day-glo backdrops. Thank goodness there is video evidence of that groundbreaking performance, because trying to describe in words what they looked like (day-glo blackface? Neon Egyptian priestess?) is near-impossible.

These mavens of visual culture are the kind of people you want to pay attention to. Not because I like them, or because I told you so. Inspired young people into design are a dime a dozen in New York, but these kids are especially talented. If you haven’t seen Erickatoure’s new music video, My Pumps, all three of these characters appear in the video. But beyond that they are part of a greater group of friends who built the looks and aesthetic of that video from the ground up. It’s very inspired, and detail oriented

You would want to see more! And you just may…

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