Sebastian Marmite Drag King

Sebastian Marmite, the bedsit aesthete, is a young working class man bored in a mac job is a sleepy small town, but nevertheless committed to living by the ethos of Oscar Wilde and the Decadents in his dreary mundane reality, which leads to surreal, absurd consequences. A kind of Don Quixote for gender outlaws and bohemian idlers!

Absurd dark comedy about contemporary queer life re-purposes out-of-context quotes from historical queer wits, and old fashioned cabaret musical numbers!

My drag mixes popular alt-drag cabaret with live-art aesthetics to question gender identities and restrictive social norms. I perform in the ‘dark cabaret’ genre, inspired by contemporary performers such as Dusty Limits and Sven Ratzke, but also drawing from older traditions of Weimar and European cabaret, and live artists like Dickie Beau and David Hoyle, mixing the political with the melodramatic and grotesque. I am also inspired by David Lynch characters as I like to portray tragi-comic characters in conflict with themselves as well as with external social norms.

What makes me stand out in drag are my singing technique, meaningful and unusual song selection and stylish, timeless look. I seriously study the techniques of singers with dramatic delivery focusing on character interpretation, especially Marc Almond, Scott Walker, Tom Waits and Johnny Cash, and adapt it to portray different masculine archetypes, such as the camp aesthete, the petty criminal and rent boy, the broken man. I carefully curate songs with meaningful lyrics exploring these different facets of masculinity, drawing from Camp classics such as La Cage aux Folles and Boy Georges as well as edgier styles such as Brecht’s the Threepenny Opera, Blues and French chansons popularised by Marc Almond. Sebastian’s elegant look is mainly influenced by the Weimar cabaret performers and of course the musical/film paying homage to it, but also borrows elements from decadent aesthetes and Oscar Wilde, gangsters from David Lynch movies and glam rock.