Even though the term ‘performance art’ has become a catch-all phrase, it still feels too narrow to convey the onstage antics of Dynasty Handbag, the performance persona of writer, visual artist and actor Jibz Cameron. When Titanic Depression debuted in New York in 2023, its sensibility was described by the New York Times as “queer vaudevillian.” That’s a more intriguing, and perhaps more accurate label. In November 2024, MOCA hosted three nights of Titanic Depression, Cameron’s multi-media live show, starring her alter ego Ms. Handbag. This show, lightly updated since its premiere, is a blockbuster solo performance: a zany, affecting dreamscape, hybridizing theatre, animation, cabaret, video, political critique and clowning.
Cameron’s work as Dynasty Handbag is sui generis with a vengeance. This is true of her stand-up comedy performances like The Bored Identity (now available on vinyl!) and of Dynasty’s turns as the trash-clad, gyrating curator/MC of her long-running underground variety show “Weirdo Night.” Cameron, a long time Angeleno, is a Guggenheim fellow, and her visual work was included in the Hammer Museum’s Biennial exhibition “Made in LA” in 2023.
In Titanic Depression Dynasty Handbag embarks on a classic heroine’s journey. She confronts climate disaster, battles family repression, and has a sexual dalliance with an octopus, complete with an exhaustive, hand-penned, pre-coital consent form. She stumbles into a roomful of male cigar-puffing, planet-wrecking billionaire capitalist bastards from various eras, which provides a quick history lesson for the audience. And she suffers a searing bout of existential panic which she tries, for the most part unsuccessfully, to escape with the aid of meditation apps. The iceberg threatening to destroy her luxury cruise ship melts (thank you, global warming) but is replaced by an aggressive island of ocean trash, which may pose a greater threat. One of the loose through-lines in this wacky tale is the narrative’s ingestion and subsequent subversion of a few plot points from James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic. (About the shared Cameron surname: The fact-checkers at Artillery are pretty sure Jibz and James aren’t related, but anyone with information otherwise is welcome to contact us… )
Dynasty Handbag, “Titanic Depression.” Performance documentation from The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Image by Elon Schoenholz courtesy of MOCA. Performer: Jibz Cameron.
Cameron is a natural actor, mistress of a smorgasbord of cartoon voices that would make Mel Blanc proud. She’s got the manic, rubbery physical comedy thing down cold. She’s a skilled enough dancer that when she chooses to flail and dance ‘badly,’ you remain mesmerized. Her signature makeup for the Dynasty character brings to mind a demented mime, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp and/or Faye Dunaway’s Mommy Dearest visage mid-facial. Thus constructed, Dynasty’s face harkens back slightly to silent films. Topped by a spiky black wig, that face is as elastic as bread dough and gymnastically expressive. Her costumes feature garbage bags and thrift store regalia. Her pantyhose, webbed with runs, often serve as stand-alone ragged pants (ooh la la!) worn beneath a short jacket. At one point she sports a flesh-colored unitard with cartoon breasts and squiggly pubic hair felt-penned over the appropriate zones. The overall effect of her costumes, which tend to slip or fall off, is a mix of little kid dress-up, madwoman, and lesbian burlesque. She has a way of sending up tropes of conventional sexiness and exploding them.
In terms of props, repurposed trash litters the stage by the end of the performance. Items from what might be a recycling bin or treasure chest, jumbled up with junk from grandma’s attic get pulled out on cue when Dynasty is frantically searching for something to push the narrative forward or to get out of a jam. An overripe banana, her only live co-star, doubles as cellphone and as microphone for a crooned musical number or two. There’s a moment when Cameron sings a song she wrote to the tune of “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Her take-off on that song, “When a Man has an Idea,” is a comic lament about mansplaining and its dominating damage, inescapably wreaked on, well, everyone.
The backdrop for Titanic Depression is Dynasty’s most important co-star. The video by collaborator Mariah Garnett plays on a screen that spans the stage’s entire back wall. Animated video runs before the show even begins and continues throughout the performance. The video provides various settings, some aboard ship, some underwater, plus doctored clips from an array of films about the Titanic, as well as other archival material. Wonderfully misspelled text exchanges between Dynasty and her never-seen therapist appear, typed out in real-time, courtesy of the video. Additional characters, fully animated or topped by Cameron’s actual videoed head gabbing away on caricatured bodies appear onscreen and interact with the live Dynasty. This means, for example, that while Cameron plays Dynasty onstage, on the video backdrop she’s playing Dynasty’s screechy, smothering mother, leading to a series of altercations with herself. The video backdrop is funny, eye-popping, and an essential, unifying contribution to Titanic Depression’s pace and look.
Dynasty Handbag, “Titanic Depression.” Performance documentation from The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Image by Elon Schoenholz courtesy of MOCA. Performer: Jibz Cameron.
How is it that although this performance brandishes its seams, that only makes the work more intimate and effective? By “brandishes its seams,” I mean that Cameron regularly breaks character and addresses the audience using what one could call her “normal voice” and persona. There are glitches in the performance (usually trouble changing a costume, or a forgotten line) that seem intentionally inserted or at least expected, and embraced when they occur. These scattered moments provide Cameron a chance to stand outside the piece and make observations that a character conventionally enmeshed in the action could not. Rather than this feeling like a mistake, it worked for this viewer as a form of layering and another kind of through-line. We get both Cameron’s and Dynasty’s perspectives overlaid intermittently, situated inside and outside the plot, via this device. Sometimes we’re even privy to tidbits about the construction and genesis of the piece. In other words, this is not a work of art intent on maintaining airtight illusions or preserving the so-called theatrical “third wall.” Instead, Cameron seems determined to periodically puncture the fiction she’s been constructing, so she can rebuild it again and again.
Cameron is great at creating a sense of the eternal now. Watching her work, one has the feeling that what she’s doing and saying on stage is being born in that instant, exploding from her mind as you’re seeing it, fresh and current, though it’s simultaneously clear that Titanic Depression is NOT mostly extemporized, but developed and rehearsed, complete with its audio, lighting, elaborate video interface, etc. When Titanic Depression makes a point to lean into its DIY improv aesthetic, appearing to embrace the spontaneous rather than having been rehearsed into rigidity, a creative, playful relationship to chaos emerges. We’re sucked into the vortex of Cameron’s rampant, humane imagination and indignation. We get the message that if we’re going to survive the coming decades, we had better be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice. We had better get incredibly flexible and learn to be light on our feet. We’d better stay nimble and open.
I don’t know who Cameron considers her artistic influences to be, but it’s fun to speculate. There are bits of Lily Tomlin in what she does as monologist and repository of a panoply of characters. I wondered if Edward Albee’s sense of absurdity might have tinted her vibe. The barbed
comedy of Richard Pryor came to mind as I watched Titanic Depression, as well as Jonathan Winters’ prodigious wizardry with simple props. (For example, there’s a moment late in the show when Dynasty picks up the drinking straw from a Starbucks cup and uses it as a flute).
Given the scary political drift of late, the Statue of Liberty might need a friend right about now. Perhaps Lady Liberty could use a second “…mighty woman with a torch…” to stand by her side for moral support, reinforcing her battered message. If anyone’s taking nominations, I’ll cast my vote for a 22-story, harbor-presiding likeness of Dynasty Handbag. Her blazing torch of gonzo comedy and razor-sharp satire casts a galvanizing light.
