Welcome to Inside Cambridge.
This is a new series of films
in which we will be taking you to see different people
and places from across the University.
In today's episode we will be meeting two students
who are at the forefront of Dragtime,
which is the University's only drag show
performing at the ADC Theatre.
Then we are going to be meeting
Sarah-Louise Decrausaz, who is a PhD researcher
in Biological Anthropology.
She is looking at pelvis size in current day populations.
So to find out more, please sit back and enjoy!
I'm here at the St Catharine's College bar
with Amber and Ben
who are in the ADC Theatre's only dragshow,
called Dragtime.
Would you like to tell us
how and when Dragtime started?
Well Dragtime first started
as a musical theatre cabaret night
at the Corpus Playroom
in early 2016 I believe.
It was started by one of my friends, Jossie Evans,
and at the time it was just conceptualized
as just a nice fun way
of doing some songs from musical theatre.
But then one of the people who was in it,
Ethan, decided to actually carry that on
and then early this year (January)
he put on another drag show at the ADC
under the Dragtime name.
Since then, we were asked to do a lot of May balls
so we started touring all of the May balls in Cambridge.
Then, this year, me and Ben have taken over
and we have done our second show at the ADC now.
Can you tell me,
when did you guys get involved with drag?
And why did you decide
to do this particular kind of performance?
I ended up getting into it
while I was away on my year abroad last year.
And I happened to come back in March,
when auditions were going out
after Dragtime had done the ADC show last year -
auditions for May balls.
The thing with Cambridge is that there's not
really a platform to do it here.
There's very few opportunities to do drag,
and I think when you start doing it, you get addicted
and you have to keep doing it again, again and again.
So I was, 'I absolutely have to do this.'
I came back and did the May balls and it was fantastic.
Then they asked Amber and I to take over it
So, here we are leading it.
But you were involved in the first ADC show.
Yeah, I was involved in the Corpus show as well.
I'd originally gotten into drag through...
So, outside of drag I like to sing opera
and, because I have a low alto voice,
a lot of the roles for altos are trouser roles.
One of my favourite opera performances ever
is the character in Die Fledermaus, Prince Orlofsky,
that is a trouser role.
He's basically a drunken prince who tells everyone
that they have to drink with him at his pace or he will throw them out of his house.
That is a sentiment I feel I can definitely relate to.
It is literally our shows.
Then from there, after my dream of performing that,
I then moved to thinking about drag more generally
and started constructing a kind of character for myself
from those foundings of this idea of old world, princely -
and then, now here I am today!
But the way you do it, is so cute,
because it's the drag king thing but it's done
in very adorable pastel-cutesy Lolita style.
So I've started making it a bit more
Gender- as it were ,
because I realised that binding isn't for me.
So I decided to go to the other extreme
and so I do my nice face with mustache and then wear a push-up bra.
You were wonderful last night.
You were asking if you should wear boots or heels
and heels were the only option because it makes even less sense!
How many people are now involved with Dragtime?
It's growing and growing.
So it's getting it's momentum.
It was quite sad at the end of last year because obviously people graduating,
but now that we've done this one show,
we're getting more people involved.
One of the nicest things is
that we've got people from ARU getting involved
This is the thing I really want to do,
is really build a community out of it
because it's the kind of thing where,
even if you are not performing it,
if you are coming to the shows - you're involved in it.
It's such an interactive experience,
even if you're not getting dragged on stage -
which does happen a lot
(Does.)
- but when it doesn't, it's still a thing.
Drag very much relies on
engagement with the audience.
Even last night,
one of the main things that was worrying us,
was whether the audience wouldn't be into it
and taken with us immediately,
but as soon as we started hearing that cheering,
we realised that it was going to be a fantastic night
for everyone involved.
That's the thing.
We were worried that, because there's not a scene here,
people wouldn't necessarily get what's going on,
or want to see it, or know that much about it.
And the thing is, people don't know much about it,
but it is the thing -
literally as soon as the curtain goes up -
people go crazy for it.
It's just the nicest atmosphere there,
people just want to have fun and are ready to accept
whatever you put up on that stage.
Where do you see Dragtime going in the future?
So we've got a show at the ADC next term in Week 4.
Then also we've been considering doing
...maybe a Fringe show.
Saving up our pocket money for that.
Yeah,
saving all the pocket money
we'll make from doing all the May balls -
please book us!
It is exciting though -
It's fantastic.
- this year's started and
it's been a bit weird obviously,
because so many new people coming in,
and the show we did last night is the first
that people will have seen us.
The first with this
new generation of the collective as well.
But now, so we're doing the Selwyn Snowball on Friday,
and we're going to get ready to do auditions for the other balls
We did quite a few of them last year
and we were received really, really well.
So it's going to be really exciting
to do more of them this year.
We're opening auditions
for the next show next term as well
to get even more students involved,
if they want to be involved.
From feedback from last night,
it seems that a lot more people
would like to be involved with us.
Definitely, because I think before people were
'Oh I think I might be interested but I'm not sure'
and now they've seen the show.
After seeing it, I feel that,
even just being a part of that atmosphere
as an audience member
makes you want to engage with it further.
It's addictive for the audience as well as for us!
Definitely, definitely.
So, if you were to give a pitch to our viewers
about why they should get involved with drag,
or why they should go along and see a drag show,
what would you say to them?
Being involved in drag, whether it's watching it,
or performing it,
can be both incredibly validating and liberating.
I know that all of our performers have come and said
that doing drag has
had a real positive effect on their self esteem,
but that's also true of audience members as well,
because drag allows for such a space of honesty
that I don't think you necessarily find
in other styles of performance.
Yeah, definitely. There's a really weird interplay
between the illusion of the makeup ,
of the wig and the costume that you're putting on,
but it allows for people to access
a kind of vulnerability that they never normally get to.
Being able to put it on the stage
with such a loving audience
it's amazing because you get validation
for things you'd never be able to express normally.
It's amazing.
Exactly
Thank you very much
and good luck with the show in the future.
Thank you very much.
I'm here with Sarah-Louise Decrausaz
and she is a PhD researcher in biological anthropology.
Would you be able to tell us a little bit more about
what biological anthropology is
and what your research is about?
Certainly.
Biological Anthropology, broadly speaking,
is the study of human variation.
Now, humans vary in lots of different ways.
We vary with respect the things we do in life,
such as our culture,
which is where the anthropology part
of biological anthropology comes from.
But in biological anthropology
we look at how humans vary
from a biological perspective.
So we look at how their bodies have changed
over evolutionary time,
we look at, on the inside of our bodies,
how things like genes affect the way we look,
and things like our ability to fight disease.
And again how these things have changed
over evolutionary time.
Now we don't just look at humans,
we also look at our nearest cousins,
which are our primate cousins,
so that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans.
And we look at the similarities and differences
that we see between these species.
My particular research
is focusing on the human skeleton
and, more uniquely,
the human pelvis.
In terms of its adaptation to obstetrics,
or the ability to give birth to babies.
Now anybody who has had a baby
will tell you that that's not easy.
Certainly it's not easy
in terms of the realities of being a human today,
even with the advent of medicine,
and actually it's not easy at all
when we compare humans
to our living primate cousins,
like chimpanzees and gorillas.
Now a lot of research originally suggested
that we had a such a difficult time giving birth to babies
because we walk on two legs.
That our pelvis had to be very narrow
when it comes to the outlet,
or the big hole that babies pass through,
because we have to be
energetically efficient on two legs.
More recent research has suggested
that there's actually no reason we couldn't have
a bigger hole for babies to pass through.
So that really means that there's other things
affecting the way our pelvis is designed
around childbirth.
My PhD research
is looking at what other factors
contribute to growing the pelvis in women living today.
If we can understand how the pelvis develops
throughout childhood into early adulthood,
we might be able to answer some of the key questions
about why childbirth is so difficult for humans.
So, in regard to your research,
do you have any idea
of what some of those factors are?
Do you have any ideas yet
about what could be impacting this?
I am still working on my PhD,
I'm not quite finished, however,
generally speaking what we have found is that
components like your body size in general
and particularly things like
your fat tissue have an impact.
So if things like soft tissues
-so fat tissue and muscle tissue -
have an impact on how we develop throughout puberty,
the pelvis (or at least parts of the pelvis)
seem to be responding to different,
I guess, growth triggers, throughout puberty.
On average things like the age of menarche
(so when girls start their period)
seems to have a relationship
with how big their pelvis becomes
by the time they get to early adulthood.
And where did you get the idea for this research?
How did you decide
that this was what you were going to be researching
for your PhD?
So when I did my Masters research,
I was actually also looking at the pelvis
with respect to the possibility of
identifying whether a woman had had children or not
from a forensic perspective,
to see if a particular phenomenon
known as childbirth scarring
actually is a good way of identifying it.
Plot twist! It turns out it really isn't.
Things like pelvic scars
actually we've found them on males as well.
We know that men definitely don't give birth to babies.
I really thought there's a lot more
to understand about the pelvis
with respect to childbirth
from the skeletal perspective
than a lot of more recent work has looked at.
I also really wanted to do a set of research
that integrated looking at living people
with trying to understand the skeleton
the way that we look at skeletons in the past
Now, once you've finished your PhD,
what do you think are some of the things
that you might do next in your career?
Well, I am hoping to
expand a little bit more on this research
by looking at the skeletons of pregnant women.
This of course brings up a couple of very new
and very important ethical considerations
because, quite understandably,
there's a lot of medical technology
that people have to be carefully considered
in terms of participating in studies
that are using medical imaging technologies
when you're pregnant
just in terms of radiation levels.
But, there's a really fantastic project
that, fingers crossed, funding dependent,
I'm hoping to be starting
that is going to be integrating how the pelvis changes
in pregnant women
in living women.
Thank you very much.
Really nice to meet you
and to hear more about your research
and good luck for the future.
Thank you.
Thank you for watching
our first episode of Inside Cambridge
We hope you enjoyed it.
If you have suggestions for further episodes
about what you would like to see,
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