For this community engagement requirement, I will be reporting my attendance and take away from the drag show performance at Virginia’s Pride festival in Richmond, VA. Richmond, VA celebrates Pride from June through September with the annual Endless Summer of Pride event. The Endless Summer of Pride event is hosted by the Virginia Pride board of directors, based out of Richmond, where most events take place in this city. The event ends with a large one-day festival full of vendors, performances, and community enrichment.
At the VA Pride festival, the headliners were Rose, from RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Big Freedia, a well known Bounce artist in the LGBT community. The day of the festival started roughly around 10am and lasted until 9pm. Performers and guests on the stage also ranged from salsa dancers, Richmond’s mayor, local drag performers, and actors performing small skits. I actually had the honor of performing on stage myself, alongside my drag family: The Haus of Envy, the drag branch of Haus of Envy & Co (a queer art collective group in Richmond). My drag family and I completed a medley of Beyonce songs that ended in a short portion of Lose My Breath from Destiny’s Child. My drag sister portrayed Michelle Williams, my (at the time) drag daughter portrayed Kelly Rowland, and I portrayed Beyonce. It was an amazing moment, and an even more amazing time to experience pride on stage and also as an audience (as we were able to mingle as normal before and after our performances). In addition to this main stage performer, I also performed on the Youth Stage (during a very quick costume change) where I performed in the Disney princess line-up; because of my Polynesian heritage, I performed as Moana. Overall, this event was very fun and a great learning opportunity on many levels.
As it relates to my degree, I reflect a lot on communication in the digital age for this event. There was a tremendous amount of online marketing for this event, including Instagram ads, radio ads, TV commercials, and posters all over the city. The effort in communicating this event/festival to the city was heavy and well done. The branding was consistent and it was easy to acknowledge the credibility in VA Pride’s efforts (which also leverages in material from Persuasion COMM333). On the same theme of communication in the digital age, there was also a lot of this present amongst drag performers. During the festival, there were many photographers and videographers recording the event, in which all performers received videos and photos of themselves. Because of this, local drag performers had more material available to them to post on their social media pages and connect with their audience (fans and colleagues). This ties into the modules discussed and mastered in Communication in the Digital Age as it showcased the way drag performers went about communicating online (primarily Instagram and Facebook). It brought many different ways that the performers posted their videos and images and shared with everyone: some did so in a manner to reflect the experience, some did so to showcase their skills and talent, some did so to present their “status,” and some did so simply because others did.
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