By Luke Nickel
I meet Berlin’s drag legend Olympia Bukkakis in a chic flat in Berlin-Neukölln. She’s catsitting for her “platonic life partners,” a term I’ve not heard before, but it instantly makes sense to me. Over the course of our talk, it will not be her first brilliant turn of phrase. Talking to her is like witnessing dark magic.
Olympia Bukkakis is an Australian-born drag performer, choreographer, event creator, and writer who has lived and worked in Berlin since 2012. She completed a Master’s Degree in Solo Dance Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin in 2019 and has long organized and hosted recurring queer performances in the city, including Get Fucked (in various locations), Fancy, Apocalypse Tonight, and Queens Against Borders, a performance event in solidarity with trans and queer refugees.
Sophiensæle, a performance space in Berlin-Mitte, is her primary stage home and where, most recently, she co-created the performance Unsex Me Here with her frequent collaborator, the dancer and choreographer Maria F. Scaroni, which ran from 9-12 April at Sophiensæle. Olympia Bukkakis is scheduled to co-lead a research project with Maria at ImPulsTanz, Vienna’s international dance and performance festival, this July.
Put simply: she’s busy. I’m grateful she makes time to sit down with me and talk.
Let’s start with your drag name. Where does it come from?
“I was called Mummy Complex for the first three years, 2009 to 2012,” Olympia says, “but maternal kinship structures in drag are loaded, and you can’t be claiming mother status as a twinkellectual.” (I instantly have to jot down “twinkellectual”.)
She changed her name when she moved to Berlin in 2012. “A friend and I were playing with drag names, and when I said Olympia Bukkakis, we both laughed a lot. I like it because Olympia Dukakis is both a high-status actor and a motherly figure”.
Let’s talk identity.
I fumble a bit for the language to refer to Olympia. Some drag queens prefer she/her pronouns while in drag, but not when out of it.
Olympia helps me. “Olympia is the condom through which I interact with the world,” she says. (My god, she’s amazing at the art of the phrase.) She has another name and pronoun, but she doesn’t disclose it, as it’s her private, non-work life.
Olympia’s biography reads as follows: “Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering.” So I have to ask next:
Where does all this darkness come from?
“Queen of Heavens and the Earth” refers to Inanna, a Sumerian goddess, she tells me.
“The goddesses in old myths are fucking bitches. They just did whatever they wanted. They’re kind of like drag queens.”
The rest: “Empress of Despair is just a thing I started saying when I was wasted at Cocktail D’amore,” the legendary queer party in Berlin that happened at the now-defunct club Griessmuehle. And “Architect of Your Eternal Suffering”, she says, “is not something I thought much about.” But:
“I think it can be empowering to align yourself with the darker and difficult parts of your existence. And maybe that’s what drag is.”
Which apocalypse scenario do you think is most likely to happen?
Olympia doesn’t hesitate in her reply: “Capitalist barbarism, nuclear apocalypse.”
“Things look very bleak, and the boot on the face of the huddled masses of the world is pressing down harder and harder. But those faces have never stopped pushing back against the boot. So it’s still anyone’s game.”
Let’s talk about your most recent show, Queer and Present Dangers.
Queer and Present Dangers is an experimental talk show series at Sophiensæle; the latest one, titled “FAMILY,” examined “the ties that bind us, the places we call home, and ways in which we can love each other.”
Olympia tells me she intended it to highlight aspects of being queer “that the conservative construct of the family finds dangerous.”
But this was the second edition of the show. The first, she says, focused on sex, and in particular, on the idea that queers are somehow trying to cancel sex and gender.
“The idea was to take that accusation really seriously and see how we can make it even more dangerous.”
The second edition of the show referenced a range of thorny topics, from the struggles of non-white and working-class families to queer ballroom culture. I tell her that it all sounds like thorny topics—bold subjects to take on. She agrees:
“I think there’s a soft left impulse to run from things that are difficult in case they make us too easy a target. But I’m a leftist drag queen, so I feel like I’m well placed to tackle the hard questions.”
Let’s talk money. Getting funding for artistic projects is hard!
Olympia says she owes much of her success to successful funding applications and support from venues like Sophiensæle.
“I like writing applications,” she says. “I don’t like it when I don’t get the funding, which happens too often.”
As an experimental music artist, I can relate; a major part of my career is writing funding applications and facing the rejection that comes with it. How does she keep it going when rejections come so often? I admit to her that I sometimes feel bogged down and that it can be hard to keep up hope.
Olympia Bukkakis is kind and empathetic: “When I get an application, I think, yes, there is order in the universe. When I don’t, I think the entire system is wrong.”
Still, she loves the process and says:
“We have to remember that hope is an ethical commitment.”
Let’s talk about your recent show, Unsex Me Here.
The title comes from Macbeth, from the famous monologue by Lady Macbeth, who calls on the spirits to remove her femininity so she’ll have the resolve to kill the king. Why was Olympia drawn to such a powerful (and, ultimately, tragic) figure?
She tells me that she and her collaborator on the show, Maria F. Scaroni, each embodied different aspects of Lady Macbeth: Olympia as the queen, a “transfeminine outside regent,” and Maria as the witch, a “menopausal wise woman.”
Olympia tells me she is particularly interested in rediscovering and re-imagining women from the canon of great literature as if they were goddesses, or, as she says, “like these bitches…and I like to insist on the possibility of them being fine in the end. What would it be like if they went all the way? What if they survived or were victorious? What if they fucking did it?”
Speaking of endings, I want to go back to the beginning.
I need a “first time in drag” picture.
She smiles. “There was an Annie Lennox music video with some ambiguous gender stuff going on,” and the character Mercutio from Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo and Juliet inspired feelings of desire and admiration. But her first real encounter with a drag queen was at a Melbourne gay bar when she was 18.
“I never would have dreamed that I’d someday be the kind of person who could be mighty and beautiful and incredible enough to do drag.”
I ask how she started. In Australia at that time, she says, it was common for people to have huge house parties with themes, and everyone would dress up. She always did a drag take on the theme until one day a friend booked her to do a show at a gay rock music night. She did it with a friend.
“And then we just kept getting asked to do that.”
Compared to “mainstream” drag representation, like on RuPaul’s Drag Race, how does Olympia Bukkakis compare?
“I’m quite a bit more minimalist,” Olympia says. “I don’t wear wigs. I use the existing features of my face; I don’t transform it so much with makeup.”
She first called it “trash drag” until she realized this might spur people to pay her less. Now, she says it’s “experimental drag.”
Much of drag culture gets dismissed and reduced, especially by naysayers, to “feminine impersonation,” but it’s true that, for many drag artists, creating and playing with femininity is important. But I wonder if it’s important to Olympia Bukkakis.
“I think femininity is a vehicle,” Olympia says. “It’s important to me to be in heels, which change how I move.” Even though she might look androgynous, Olympia Bukkakis says she’s not into non-binary drag as a performer.
“I’m just a lady on a stage,” she says. “I think there’s something feminist in that as well.”
“Unrestrained femininity can also mean no breasts and big, hairy pits.”
What brought you to Berlin?
“Getting wasted,” Olympia Bukkakis says with a laugh. “I just wanted to go to the clubs.”
Like many of us, she quieted over the years; now, she rarely takes drugs and goes clubbing less. How did that change?
“Rising costs have made clubs less diverse, but they’re also not places that work well for me anymore. The amount of restraint needed to have a healthy life but still work in clubs is just too high.”
Now she hangs out with queer and interesting people through work. “Now, I’m playful like a child, but with the brain and skills of an adult.”
Does Berlin feel like home?
“Unfortunately, yes,” Olympia Bukkakis says. When we speak of Australia, where she’s from, she says she still feels a bit homesick.
I’m from Canada, and I tell her that, when I think on it, it feels like a frictionless existence—a normal life.
Olympia Bukkais feels the same about Australia: “Yeah, my therapist very pointedly asked me, Do you think you could be happy with a normal life? And I was just like: Dude, shut up.”
Then, I ask my toughest question:
In 2020, you were attacked on the street while walking. Can we talk about it?
In particular, I want to know if she feels attitudes in Berlin have changed for the better since then.
In a word: No.
“Rising inequality increases dangers for queers. And Berlin has become a more unequal city.”
She tells me how the cops that came to her aid assumed her attacker was Turkish or Arabic, even though there was no evidence of this. She constantly thinks about how, if she were Turkish or Arabic, the cops would not have helped her.
“When the cost of living goes up, you have more angry young men on the streets. This is what the statistics tell us. These men are the ones who are most likely to commit this violence in public.”
Can we talk about your ongoing drag project, Get Fucked?
Its current iteration is called Get Fucked in Hasenheide, which takes place at the Freiluftkino open-air cinema in Berlin’s Hasenheide park, a historic gay cruising spot.
Running for over a decade now, Get Fucked has grown into a performance platform that bridges more traditional forms of queer nightlife performance like drag with performers and artists from other disciplines (dance, installation, sound). It has partnered with other queer institutions in Berlin, like Whole Festival, HZT Berlin, and Yo Sissy Festival.
It started in 2013 at a friend’s bar in Berlin-Neukölln. Olympia Bukkakis had the idea to tell the crowd that every time she got 10 euros in tips, she would do a performance number. After making 120 euros the first night, she realized it was better money than bartending.
At some point, she started inviting guests. The event evolved through multiple venues and formats. Now, she says, “It’s a drag show that’s over by eight. I can be in bed by ten. I love it.”
Get Fucked “has always been a home for weird drag and non-drag”. She’s most interested now in artists from other disciplines and challenging them to fit into their work, even awkwardly, into a drag frame—the mixmash is sometimes really cool.
The upcoming edition on 6 June features Melanie Jame Wolf and Oozing Gloop, who are “some of the smartest and funniest people I know, who really enjoy getting the audience a little uncomfortable, challenging them, then making them feel good.”
What does success mean to you?
“Success means being able to afford my life, not having to look at the prices of different ingredients at the supermarket, and the freedom to keep making work that interests me.”
I tell her I’m interested in the difference between people who look for freedom versus those who look for stability. On a recent podcast, Esther Perel, the famous Belgian psychotherapist and author of the 2006 bestseller Mating in Captivity, said she preferred freedom because she had her own things she wanted to do. Olympia is similar.
This is a music magazine, so I have to ask: Any albums on repeat?
“At the moment, I’m listening to Lili Boulanger, who is this great French composer,” Olympia Bukkakis tells me. In particular, she’s been enjoying Lili Boulanger’s powerful and devastating Psaume 130.
Here, my own musical education slips out: Nadia Boulanger taught many of Europe’s famous composers at the turn of the 20th century, but her sister, Lili, was the first woman to win the Grand Prix de Rome. She was sickly for most of her life and died at just 24 years old.
Excitedly, Olympia Bukkakis and I talk about this like two music nerds.
Olympia says: “It’s wild to think of this very ill young woman lying in bed, looking God in the face, scribbling the notes down, bringing her eyes down from her mortality, and putting it on the page.”
Other than Get Fucked in Hasenheide on June 6th, what’s next for you?
In June, Olympia will present the second edition of Queer and Present Dangers at Sophiensæle, and the third edition, which is “all about God,” will happen in December.
As our interview closes, I realize with surprise that it’s only been an hour, but I feel like we’ve traveled through worlds together—I feel like I’ve been on a week-long learning course. I tell her my final impression: She offers a real feeling of hope in a hopeless time, which is ironic, given her tagline as the Empress of Despair.
She likes this and tells me, “I think I’m happiest when I’m learning. And we learn, unfortunately, through struggle and suffering. As long as it’s productive discomfort, it’s worth it, and that’s what makes me feel alive.”
Olympia Bukkakis can be found at her website and on Instagram.
Dr. Luke Nickel is an award-winning Canadian multidisciplinary artist, writer, and composer living in Berlin. His interests include experimental music, speculative fiction, roller coasters, and contemporary performance. He’s eager to write about people and practices on the margins of the mainstream.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Words: Luke Nickel
Edits: Alexander Cheves
Images: Mara Menzel, with additional photos provided by the artist
