Miss Manhattan Hangs Out with Rachel Rampleman
"My whole life is a passion project."
Rachel Rampleman is already in process when I arrive to meet her at the art space SoMad, where she is an artist in residence. Lights and tripods and laptops line a swath of white seamless paper that’s draped onto the floor from on high, a couch here, a chair there.
Rachel is the artist behind “Life is Drag,” which is currently the largest archive of recorded drag performances in the United States. The project came from a desire to make sure the performances didn’t disappear. Rachel travels to different parts of the country recording drag artists’ performances, and has amassed in her seven years doing the project a video archive of over 200 performers. Rachel jokes that her whole life is a passion project, but people are paying attention. Her work matters to drag artists, to drag as a whole. It’s a chronicle of what performance looks like now and what it means to its performers, captured in moving images.
Rachel’s work has been covered by The New York Times, Paper and Hyperallergic, among others (I also wrote about her for CNN and Autostraddle). We met many moons ago, on a day of drag history at La MaMa, where Rachel was displaying her work. Drag nerds that we are, we ran into each other constantly at shows.
When we meet, she is recording from one of the SoMad studio spaces the performer Daphne Always in two numbers and an interview. Assisting Rachel is Esther, another drag artist known for her video work.
Lenses are focused, lighting is prepped, framing is calibrated. Rachel is excited to be shooting with a new camera today, which she adjusts with bright blue nails. Daphne will perform two numbers, one a burlesque number, one a lipsynched reimagining of Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
We break in between for lunch. Rachel and I sip mandarin-flavored seltzer and she tells me about what’s next for her, the interview as artform, the desire to engage with the world and meet interesting people. We have similar desires as creative people and we manifest them in different ways.
Coming back from lunch, it’s time for a new lighting setup, one that changes from yellow to pink and back again. Esther is on the lighting controls and Rachel is behind the camera. Daphne performs her piece a few times, and then it’s time for her interview.
Later, Rachel and I sit in Madison Square Park nearby. Blissfully, it’s something like 6pm and it’s light outside, just after Daylight Savings. We sit at one of the green metal tables outside Shake Shack with other New Yorkers leaving their coffins and stealing every second of sunlight after the long, dark winter. We talk about art and how to make a living doing it. The ideas, the goals, what comes next. How to keep showing up for art and for ourselves. Soon Rachel will head back inside to pack up, another day, another “Life is Drag” recording on the books.
