Obsidienne Obsurd’s Otherworldly Drag Touches Down in Oakland for One Night

Imagine a high-fashion circus inside a galactic wormhole and you have a sense of Obsidienne Obsurd’s drag style. The artist is otherworldly, meticulous and unafraid to go all the way, even when it comes to exposing their most tender vulnerabilities or risking making a fool of themself.

On Dec. 5, Obsidienne will bring their most ambitious work yet to the 110-year-old Calvin Simmons Theatre inside Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, The Last 7 Days of Obsidienne Obsurd. Produced by Oaklash, it’s a one-night-only production that combines lip syncing, theater and chamber music, including a newly commissioned piece by Paul Wiancko of Kronos Quartet, which Obsidienne will perform on viola alongside their classical musician parents, Debra Fong and Christopher Constanza.

Elaborate costuming and surrealist stagecraft come together to tell Obsidienne’s story of accepting their trans identity, their struggles with mental illness and family secrets that have been kept in silence for generations.

“It’s a story of meandering, being lost, being found,” Obsidienne tells KQED during a recent interview. “Part of finding the self is reckoning with the ugly parts and turning that into something beautiful. Because you can’t take it away, you just have to accept it.”

Raised in the South Bay by a Chinese American violinist mother and Italian American cellist father, Obsidienne is a classically trained violist who performs with orchestras and ensembles across California. They first tried drag during the pandemic, when the art form went digital. Collectives like Media Meltdown were producing livestreamed shows that challenged performers to become video editors and special effects experts. Obsidienne was hooked after Media Meltdown invited them to perform in a Keanu Reeves-themed show, and soon they were driving to obscure locations with their COVID pod to film elaborate numbers.

“Everyone who was watching me was like, ‘Oh you’re weird. You’re a weirdo. We like it,’” Obsidienne says. “And that was really cool.”

Before long, Obsidienne honed their signature style of warped, black-and-white makeup; hand-sewn costumes that turned their body into horned and tentacled shapes; performance art-y choreo that sometimes includes hyperventilation and intense eye contact; and song selections that go far outside of the pop-diva canon.

It flies in the face of long-held stereotypes about what drag can be. A lot of audiences “think that if you are not a cis boy, you should not be doing drag,” Obsidienne says.

Obsidienne gives themself permission to embrace being different, and invites audiences to do the same. Recently in West Hollywood’s Abbey, the gay bar that inspired Chappell Roan’s smash hit “Pink Pony Club,” instead of picking something by, say, Sabrina Carpenter or Lady Gaga, Obsidienne lip synced a song by 78-year-old avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson.

“I’m going to make you see me, so there’s this sort of delusion that turns into sincerity,” Obsidienne says. “The suspension of disbelief. I try to project a very confident persona that is a projection of all the things in me that scare me about myself, basically.”

Obsidienne has found a supportive home at Oaklash, a drag platform that loudly and proudly champions gender diversity, accessibility and racial justice. Each May, Oaklash produces a festival with multiple stages and over 60 local and touring performers. And even after all that, co-founder Mama Celeste says The Last 7 Days of Obsidienne Obsurd is their most challenging project yet.

“It’s going to be silly and macabre and loud and colorful and bigger than you can even imagine,” she wrote in a recent email blast, inviting Oaklash fans to dress to the nines for the red carpet outside the show.

The Last 7 Days of Obsidienne Obsurd features local drag luminaries like Lisa Frankenstein, co-host of the popular party Princess at Oasis; Sassi Fran, a dancer, choreographer and member of the all-Filipino drag group FiliPINX; and Obsidienne’s drag children Lola Ren and Cult Baby. Music in the show pulls from a huge variety of references, including David Bowie, contemporary composers Chen Yi and Kaija Saariaho and even the 12th-century composer, mystic and proto-feminist Hildegard Von Bingen.

“You can make noise during this performance. You can clap between movements, you don’t have to sit still like a statue,” says Obsidienne. “I think it’s really cool to be able to highlight through this project that classical music is not one thing, it is actually this whole kaleidoscope of things.”

‘The Last 7 Days of Obsidienne Obsurd’ takes place at Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts (10 10th Street, Oakland) on Dec. 5 at 7 p.m.