Image credit: Photo of John-Paul Zaccarini, by Susan Schwartzberg.

When Cirque du Soleil offered John-Paul Zaccarini a job, he turned them down. A political performance artist, a ‘dragademic’, and a clown, Zaccarini wanted to carve his own path away from the corporate machine he felt Cirque du Soleil to be. Instead, he created Angels of Disorder, a political performance company. Alongside his richly varied career making art, he is also a Professor in Performing Arts at Stockholm University of the Arts. 

Now, as part of Certain Black’s Heroes Festival, Zaccarini is performing The Mix Race Mix Tapes at RichMix. Ahead of this performance exploring identity and inequity, he shares his experience of creating the show, navigating intersectionality in art, and experiencing performance as transformation.

Kate Wyver: As an actor, a drag artist, a clown and a circus performer, what’s your greatest party trick?

John-Paul Zaccarini: Serving political shade that makes folk laugh without them realizing that they’re the brunt of the joke. People have said that my style is slap and tickle, i.e. I deliver shade like a slap in the face and then make you laugh.

Kate: Why did you want to make The Mix Race Mix Tapes? Is it a piece you’ve been thinking about for a long time?

John-Paul: I work in 99.5% white, mostly hetero spaces. That comes with a certain smugness and unconscious privilege. I wanted to show those spaces that there are other bodies and perspectives that are either excluded, or else invited to the table but denied a voice. One way to do this was to do one queer thing, one black thing and one feminist thing every day. Every day. To put invisible privilege in the spotlight.

Image credit: Photo of John-Paul Zaccarini, photo by Andrea Davis Kronlund.

Kate: What have you learnt from the experience of making it?

John-Paul: That combining structural critique with personal stories of vulnerability, overcoming oppression, one’s own privilege, and a spoonful of self-deprecating comedy helps the medicine go down. Also because of the maybe provocative nature of the poetry that came from my own experience, I backed myself up with intense study, just in case white fragility, shame or tears flared up to take the attention. I decided I needed an academic clapback for every line that I wrote.

Kate: What do you hope audiences take away from the show?

John-Paul: I would like them to consider how easy it is for some of them to move through the world without interruption, while some others have a hard time just getting from A to B without being questioned, asked to justify themselves or without having their dignity taken away from them. I would like it if those that think that “identity politics” is either over, or never was a serious claim, took a look at how they may not, in that case, have an identity, or a community, because their universality and access to everything has always been an unspoken assumption. 

When do we ever speak of a “white” community in any positive sort of sense? Yes, white people do have a white identity, and maybe that’s why some continually disparage identity politics. After all, we don’t have white visual artists, male pop stars or fully-abled architects, but do we have female athletes, black filmmakers and queer poets.

Image credit: Photo of John-Paul Zaccarini, by Isak Stockås.

Kate: The show tackles racism, homophobia and classism. What might a world that truly embraces and celebrates intersectionality look or feel like to you?

John-Paul: A world with less inequity, more communal resources and a world that has finally reckoned with its colonial past and its neo-colonial present. It’s hard to imagine that, so when asked I always respond with: what seems more likely/realistic – reparations or the Mothership? The afro-futurist in me says the Mothership is way more likely than actual reparations.

Kate: You are a trained performer and a highly qualified Professor. How do the practical and the academic inform each other in your work?

John-Paul: The academic is an exclusive, elitist language that can often be abstracted from practical, situated experience. Black Studies helps me find the groove, the vibe, the beat of being brown in a deeply racist structure. The academic helps me take a wide lens perspective on the structural and systemic inequities that harass some bodies. The practical are the day-to-day actions, activisms and strategies that try to embody or enact philosophical rebellions. I philosophize with and through my body in real-time, in real spaces, against real oppressions.

Kate: Which artists inspired you when you were starting out, and have you had any transformative mentors along the way?

John-Paul: Starting out I was inspired by Motown, The Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the queer semiotic terrorists from Manchester Homocult, Meshell Ndegeocello, DV8 Physical Theatre, with whom I performed and the films of Peter Greenaway. 

Representation was scarce when I was growing up. I wished there had been a black Jesus, a black superman, a black 007. Most recently the South African performance artist and sangoma (traditional African healer) Albert “Ibokwe” Khosa. I was transformed in the sense that my African roots reminded me that performance itself is a transformational space.

Kate: You grew up in Elephant and Castle. What does the place mean to you now?

John-Paul: It remains in my bones as a beautiful bonanza of cockney working-class graft and pride, and Caribbean vitality, love and community. Now, the splitting up and displacement of those neighborhoods via Compulsory Purchase Orders by the Blair government, the loneliness of old folk ripped from their communities and dying alone, just makes me furious and sad. No amount of Pret A Mangers can cover the fact of that class-based violence.

See John Paul Zaccarini perform The Mix-Race Mix-Tapes as part of Heroes Festival at Rich Mix, London, on Friday 3 February. 8pm, tickets £10. More info here, richmix.org.uk