| We named our repertory My Barbarian, founded by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and me, a film school dropout with dreams of being Fassbinder, or Jack Smith, or Fred Schneider. In my Silver Lake apartment, we’d act out absurd political debates in three-part harmony, enlisting friends to play along. “Be prolific,” was the advice. In seven years, My Barbarian developed a repertoire: 15 full-length pieces, hundreds of songs, costumes, props, posters, and videos. Jade’s astrologer said, “Persevere, persevere, persevere.” We only needed each other and a platform, or a stage. | 
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We named our repertory My Barbarian, founded by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and me, a film school dropout with dreams of being Fassbinder, or Jack Smith, or Fred Schneider. In my Silver Lake apartment, we’d act out absurd political debates in three-part harmony, enlisting friends to play along. “Be prolific,” was the advice. In seven years, My Barbarian developed a repertoire: 15 full-length pieces, hundreds of songs, costumes, props, posters, and videos. Jade’s astrologer said, “Persevere, persevere, persevere.” We only needed each other and a platform, or a stage. Only together on stage would our promise manifest: like witches, we remade the world, to play the painful joke played on us, in style, wonder, and embarrassing joy. To be a traveling troupe of troubadours, we only needed to travel.
Last week: the Italian Alps. “Grapes! A cottage! A waterfall!” Jade pointed out the bus window. “The countryside is boring,” I said. The hardest part is negotiating personalities and geographies. Malik traveled separately: he had to be back in LA by Monday. Scheduling is the hardest part.
The show was the International Prize for Performance, presented by the Galleria Civica in Trento. I imagined a cross between American Idol and Mortal Kombat, and so it was: a contest among 12 misbegotten artists for €5,000.00. We arrived by night at an old castle-like power station made into a theater, lit up like Suspiria. Our piece, Mountain Peoples, was a funeral for the Rhaetians, inhabitants of the area before Roman conquest; also a gay wedding performed in Pandania, a separatist group’s name for the region. We made a brief opera out of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: Jade as Queen of the Goths, Malik as Aaron the Moor. We opened with a song asking the mostly European judges why they would give Americans €5,000.00. We placed the audience on stage. Our bodies and voices entwined, comfortable together under the lights, at ease with overblown gestures. We threw flowers to the crowd at the finale.
As a theater troupe pretending to be artists pretending to be a theater troupe, My Barbarian’s practice assumes collaboration. This is different for visual artists, whose model supposes singularity. In Italy we got along with everyone: the performers, technicians and organizers. It’s vaudeville.
The weekend before, in our Boyle Heights studio, Jade sewed togas, Malik mixed the soundtrack, as I worked on the script. Jade and Malik thought Poland would win. Poland won.
In Madrid, the week prior, we debuted Non-Western, an epic set in 1840s California. We played pueblo bosses, nuns, Indians, animals, and supernatural beings in an over-stuffed hallucination: history pieced together from beloved, postcolonial scraps, a shared unconscious. The crowd loved my song to the firing squad, in Spanish!
Backstage we sipped whiskey, sandwiched between two other queer collectives: Assume Vivid Astro Focus and Chicks on Speed. It’s good to be in good company, to watch other groups work. AVAF, lead by Christophe Hamaide Pierson, included a retinue of beautiful boys and 2 extremely stylish girls. We hit it off. In that purple dressing room, I saw my sweaty reflection surrounded by chatty Europeans and realized, it’s all collaboration and only show people know this: the lighting guy and the sound girl, the chorus boy in gold underpants, not to mention the curator, Pablo Berastegui, who waltzed through gloriously at last. He had dined with the mayor of Paris. High from a night of highs onstage and off, I was collaborating with the mayor of Paris. I finally fell asleep next to Malik, my closest collaborator for the last 15 years.
My Barbarian makes all the wrong moves at just the right time. Dividing the money and the credit is the hardest part. Keeping it together is the hardest part. But there’s some glory in the rightness of doing wrong.
