Bronx Cunt Tour
Created, directed, produced, and starring: NIC Kay
Bronx Cunt Tour gives one of the few, if not the only, documentary series about a Black gender nonconforming artist traveling the world.
NIC Kay filmed themselves for months as they toured their show lil BLK, an hourlong performance piece combining movement with a mix of Black music as an ode to their childhood self.
“I made lil BLK to talk to my younger self aka NICKY. I wanted her (she likes feminine pronouns) to know that I loved her and that she was finally gonna get the audience and applause she worked so hard for. The little black girl who felt too small to be as great as her wildest dreams,” NIC said.
This explains the “cunt” in the title, which refers to the style of hyperfeminine performance as developed by the ballroom scene. Through cunt performance cunt, NIC destabilizes gendered expectations and establishes their uniqueness as an artist and person: “Cunt is my black queer gender non-conforming femininity oozing from my pores. It is me staking claim to my independence. I also practice a type of vogue femme which is called soft + cunt. A slower sensual style that is powerfully seductive + playful.”
In the five-episode series, NIC shifts between performer and spectator. After explaining their practice, which they cultivated watching YouTube and making short videos of their movement, they travel to New York to start the tour. In the third episode, NIC Kay goes to Atlanta for AfroPunk, which was canceled, but they instead organize an impromptu shared bill with Rashayla Marie Brown (of Reality Is Not Good Enough on OTV). NIC then goes global and gets experimental in Berlin at the Queer Institute, before ending the Bronx Cunt Tour on a reflective note in Toronto. Sharing a collage of performance documentation and a unique archive of movement research, personal narrative, and space to contemplate what this artistic journey has been about. Concluding with a dark, beautiful recitation of Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival” with NIC ascending into blackness, the series also culminates in footage of their show in Chicago at Links Hall.
“I wanted to bring the audience into my journey. Embracing my femininity, exploring my femininity. And also being told by society and people around me to perform specific types of femininity, and my rejection of those things. So that’s really what the show is about.”
Traveling allowed NIC to meditate on how Black shifts across borders. “Coming to the US it’s like you kind of are forced in many ways to just adopt this sort of like, homogenous black culture, or presentation.” Growing up in the Bronx, NIC’s family are Jamaican food and listened to reggae music. “There are some like, cultural references that I don’t know from childhood because I was like, in a different world with my family then maybe some of my friends who are like, families are Black American.”
Whether in the ballroom community or mostly white Berlin, this shifting between borders reflects NIC processing feelings of (not) belonging: “I’ve never really felt welcomed in most spaces. I often say I feel like I snuck in through the backdoor in most spaces that I’m in.”
Though the series may not have the high production value of corporate reality TV, it is a true labor of love that was a lot of work for NIC to take on. The $2,000 OTV paid to license the series was not enough to cover all NIC’s costs or hire crew (their partner helped film and they edited it in iMovie), pay for adequate storage of the files or high quality cameras (they shot it on their phone). “It was absolutely horrific and I would never do it again. But I would never have to do it again because I know what I need to do. I think for me the type of learner that I am, I’m not able to tell someone to do something if I don’t understand the job.” In this way, NIC shows how the microbudget contexts in which OTV artists worked are sometimes necessary for emerging artists to gain experience so they can charge more in the future.
The Chicago premiere of NIC’s series at Woman Made Gallery, which we titled “One in Theirself” as a foil to the gallery’s “One in Herself” exhibition at the same time, was one of the most special of OTV’s early years. Featuring a maker lab hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Kamilah Rashied, guests arrived and were prompted to make collages inspired by queer artists in the museum’s collection (Robert Raushcenberg’s Combines).
Before screening Bronx Cunt Tour we hosted a panel with “One in Herself” curator Audra Jacot and OTV artist Marshall Green (of Triggers), about gender and representation in art. NIC skyped in from abroad to discuss the piece after its screening, and the audience asked questions.
NIC ultimately views their art as a practice to liberate themselves and others: “I believe that there is no liberation without art.”