Slanty Eyed Mama performance at the UW-Madison
Streams of consciousness

By Jonathan Gramling

Part 1 of 2

     It was hard to fathom what I walked into April 5 in the Humanities Building on the UW-Madison campus. As the conclusion to their annual Asian
American Voices seminar, the Association of Asian American Graduate Students and other organizations sponsored a performance of ‘Slanty-Eyed
Mama’ by Kate Rigg on vocals and Lyris Hung on electric violin.
    For the next hour or so, Rigg and Hung sent a steady stream of electrifying hip-hopish consciousness toward the audience. Rigg’s Lenny Bruce like
lyrics and half sung-half spoken presentation blended with Hung’s sometimes frantic violin melodies to throw thought after challenging thought —
sometimes random, sometimes connected — in rapid fire at everyone so fast that they cut directly to the visceral being in all of us, which would laugh
and cry and get angry without waiting for the conscious self to take hold.
    Slanty-Eyed Mama boldly touched on a broad range of issues dealing with war and racial identity and everything in between. These choice nuggets
came so swiftly that it was pointless to try and grab hold of them. The best way to enjoy the show was to just sit back and enjoy the rollercoaster ride of
emotion and thought.
    Rigg and Hung are two high powered Asian American performers who trained at Julliard School in New York. Rigg is bi-racial. Hung didn’t go there.
And Rigg has this volcano of creativity and energy inside her that she attributes to her biracial background. “I think it comes from being biracial and
growing up with two families, neither of whom you could fit in with,” Riggs aids in an interview after their performance. “That means you had to be
independent the whole time. You’re the Asian kid in your White family and you’re the White kid for your Asian family very specifically, so no one has
your back. You already have a very disintegrated vision of what cultural identity is since neither one particularly applies to you. But these are your
parents and your ancestors, so you have to define yourself somewhere in between. And then, starting from that point, it gives you a sense of identity or
identifying with people who are culturally alienated for whatever reasons.”
    It was this dual identity that led Rigg to study drag queens when she attended college in Australia. “I was interested in drag queens specifically —
not transgender and not transvestite — who were expressing a kind of political anger and a vision through taking on a persona of what they perceive to
be their inner feminine body,” Rigg said. “I wanted to do drag queens and it was speaking a gay agenda, but it was speaking a very specific gay agenda.
This was Australia, which is different than America. It was very specific. So they were speaking an agenda through kind of a ‘F____ You. You think I’m a
man. I am, but I also have this female part of me and I’m going to express it freely.’ Australia is way more homophobic and sexist than America. It’s hard
to believe, but it is true. There was a kind of necessity for the drag queens I interviewed — I did an oral history project — to speak their own emotional
truth. And their emotional truth wasn’t male or female. It was drag queen. So they had this kind of in between identity and I was very interested in that
because being biracial, I’m not Asian and I’m not White. I’m this new blended thing. And so all of the information I get about the world is filtered
through information from one side of my family and information from another side of the family and then having to look as an individual how I relate to
those questions. That’s why I really do take on — if I have to wave any flag — the flag of mixed-race identity.”
    And it is Rigg’s biracial heritage that has led her to take on a more esoteric identity that transcends the boundaries of race. “To me, identity is how
you look at the world and how you feel your relationship to the world,” Rigg said. “I feel comfortable with people who understand what a hybrid identity
is. I would say that I am polymorphous-perverse, if I actually had to pick something to say. I am comfortable with people who are experiencing the world
with at least two core identities or core cultural truths and sometimes possibly more. That’s where I feel comfortable.”
Kate Rigg (Top) and Lyris Hung (right) perform
‘Slanty Eyed Mama