A pop up gig at a local queer bar. I performed one of my staple numbers, "Free the Animal" by Sia.

A Pride nightlife performance stripping Ethereal back to one of drag’s simplest pleasures: look good, move, entertain and let people get their fucking life. KISS at Purgatory during Pride 2026 represents the nightlife side of the practice: sensuality, movement, fashion, lip sync, audience energy and the immediate relationship between performer and room.
That simplicity matters.

Ethereal Sacrilege’s performance practice has never existed exclusively inside nightlife. CUNY Lavender Graduation brought the work into an institutional queer-community setting centered around celebrating LGBTQ+ students and their accomplishments.

The appearance reflects another through-line of Ethereal’s career: drag as both entertainment and community practice. From Pride and queer youth programming to university events and activism, performing outside the nightclub has remained as important as performing inside it.

During a period when live performance and queer gathering abruptly disappeared, Bad Kidz Club became both a performance outlet and a community-building project.

As co-founder, producer, host and performer, Iggy helped coordinate participating artists across six counties and produce digital drag programming during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project raised more than $2,000 in support of mutual aid, Black Lives Matter organizations, LGBTQ+ centers and queer/displaced artists.

Bad Kidz Club also produced a virtual drag interpretation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show attended by more than 200 people.

The project became an early foundation for Ethereal’s work beyond performing: producing, organizing artists, hosting, directing concepts, coordinating events and using drag as a tool for community rather than simply individual visibility.

Masculinity, Queerness & the Three-Headed Serpent is an evolving autobiographical performance and research project examining masculinity as something assigned, resisted, curated, performed and continuously renegotiated.

The “three-headed serpent” frames a tension between queerness as political refusal, queerness as an expanding umbrella identity, and the ways queer communities can turn structural conflict inward. From there, the work moves through masculinity, desirability, gaze, assimilation, nightlife, drag and the hierarchies reproduced within spaces created as alternatives to the mainstream.

Drag becomes particularly important within the project because it exposes masculinity as something that can itself be constructed and performed. The project’s position is not an argument for abolishing masculinity, but for destabilizing and expanding it beyond its dependence on distancing itself from femininity, transness, race, disability and softness.

Long before horror became increasingly integrated into Ethereal Sacrilege’s interdisciplinary work, it was already living inside the drag. For Ellipsis Queen’s HOHOHO: Edit 2: O’Da Horror at Magnet Theater, Ethereal created a horror-comedy drag number balancing grotesque imagery with sexuality, glamour and humor. Performed in a red dress made for the number, the piece demonstrates an earlier version of a philosophy that still defines the work today: frightening does not have to mean humorless, and beauty does not have to be safe.

Reasonable Reality (Nonsense) is a darkly theatrical drag work created for FRIGID Nightcap: FUTURE TENSE, combining horror, camp, political satire, experimental sound, movement, lip sync and queer performance.

Built around the question “Who gets to decide what’s normal?”, the piece turns anxiety, identity and social critique into something deliberately surreal, funny and cathartic. Rather than separating nightlife entertainment from conceptual performance, Reasonable Reality uses both at once, allowing absurdity and spectacle to carry the argument.

The work reflects a central part of Ethereal Sacrilege’s practice: using horror to examine systems that define certain bodies and identities as strange, threatening or unacceptable, then reclaiming that strangeness through drag, humor and performance.

Radioactive Waltz marks one of the clearest expansions of Ethereal Sacrilege from drag performance into puppetry, fabrication and physical theatre. Built around Nikolai, an original puppet character, the project explores the relationship between performer and constructed body through horror, movement, transformation and theatrical illusion.

Developed through puppetry and performance work at Hunter College and presented within the Hunter Puppet Slam, the piece combines handmade fabrication, character performance, physical storytelling and practical theatrical effects. Rather than treating puppetry as separate from drag, the project asks what happens when the puppet becomes another scene partner, body and character inside Ethereal’s world.