Essay Sample about Conchita Wurst

Born Thomas Neuwirth, Conchita Wurst is a drag queen and singer who became famous in Austria for winning the massively popular European singing competition, Eurovision, and giving a passionate and powerful victory speech addressing the LGBTQ community. Her aesthetic, performance, and speech sparked both controversy and a career that Neuwirth had never experienced prior. In this paper, I will outline who Thomas Neuwirth and Conchita Wurst are, what their performances typically look like, the audience they perform for, the aesthetics and performance traditions they use, and the utilization of gender in their performance.

Thomas Neuwirth is an Austrian singer most widely known for his drag persona, Conchita Wurst. With the voice of an angel, Conchita Wurst sparked controversy with her groundbreaking performance to win the massively popular European singing competition, Eurovision. Bringing in hundreds of millions of viewers around the world, Eurovision is a highly influential show with a diverse audience spanning 52 countries. Thomas Neuwirth brought home the first Austrian Eurovision win in 48 years with his performance in 2014, and simultaneously became the first drag queen to win the competition (Pilipets). Having grown up in Austria, a country with a notoriously hostile relationship with the LGBTQ community, Neuwirth faced discrimination as a homosexual, and has used Conchita Wurst both as a form of self-expression as well as a platform for spreading messages of positivity and unity to other members of the LGBTQ community (COWI). Since her wildly impactful win in Eurovision 2014, Conchita Wurst has gone on to continue putting on musical performances and concerts, including a performance for the United Nations (Youtube UN). She has also continued to be committed to social justice, having created one of the most media-effective AIDS/HIV charities, and being the ambassador for the United Nations’ Human Rights Free&Equal campaign (conchitawurst.com/about-us).

Conchita Wurst gives a ton of different performances all over Austria and its surrounding countries, and as a singer, her performances stick to the concert format. That is not to say that concerts are the only form of performance that she does. She also has a YouTube channel where she experiments more with the video medium. Apart from her performance off the stage, her onstage performance is where she is most in her element. With high production lighting, emotionally dynamic music, and elaborate costumes, Conchita Wurst serves immaculate femininity in her performances. For her most notable performance of “Rise Like a Phoenix” at Eurovision, Conchita takes the audience on an emotional journey with slow, tension-building verses, transitioning into increasingly grander choruses as the song plays on. Each time the chorus is reached, Conchita is supported by dramatic lighting changes and orchestral crescendos to further advance her message. Much if not all of her music carries some sort of messaging behind it, from the rising of the LGBTQ community and Conchita herself out of the ashes of oppression, to the struggles of body dysmorphia (Neuwirth YouTube). Conchita Wurst has always served as a form of gender performance and expression for Neuwirth, so it makes sense that as Neuwirth himself trudges along the complicated journey of actualization for somebody struggling with their gender identity, his art which expresses said journey would change over time. 

An important note to consider when analyzing the audience of a drag performance, is that most of the time, the performer, while undoubtedly performing to entertain the audience, is performing in drag to satisfy a sense of incompleteness within their own life, and thus is inherently performing for themselves. I, as an actor, of course love to be able to provide performances that other people can relate to and heal from, but at the end of the day, I act because of the way it makes me feel, and the same goes for drag performers. As Wurst said in her interview with Monocle Magazine, “I’m just an artist who takes to the stage to entertain – but I also give my opinion.” According to the official Conchita Wurst website, the ticket prices for one of her performances is on average €75 for the furthest seats, and €300+ for VIP access (conchitawurst.com/events). This pricing makes Wurst’s concerts generally accessible to middle class folk in Austria. Also, with her strong messaging in her music, she also performs for her fellow LGBTQ community members who use her as an inspiration in their own lives. That is not to say that she is universally loved however, as her highly contradictory look brought controversy to many viewers spanning the 52 countries Eurovision broadcasts to. Russian politicians slammed Wurst, and attempted to ban her from performing in Russia as it would be “propagandizing homosexuality (Kozlov).”

Wurst’s performance aesthetic has shifted over the course of his career, with stark differences in branding occurring within the last 5 years. In Conchita’s early career, she stuck to a stoic, Broadway vocal powerhouse aesthetic in her performance. Backed with elaborate and intricate lighting and costuming, Conchita gave performances reminiscent of the high-production spectacle seen in America’s own singing competition, American Idol. In her look, Conchita relies on the world’s opinion of conventionally attractive and talented women to create the foundation of the duality of her look.  By combining the traditional expectations of someone with Conchita’s dress, hair, makeup, and voice, along with the expectations of someone with a full, dark beard, a sort of cognitive dissonance surfaces amongst those with a conservative mindset who are used to traditional gender norms. It is her voice that gave her the opportunity to be on a stage like Eurovision’s, but it is the fascinating duality in her appearance that makes her so compelling and famous. As indicated earlier however, Neuwirth has adjusted and expanded the branding of what he has created with Conchita. Under Neuwirth’s new branding Conchita WURST, Neuwirth created the concept of Conchita being a dual depiction of the traditional Conchita aesthetic, and a more raunchy and masculine alternate aesthetic; hence “Conchita” and “WURST” respectively (conchitawurst.com/about-us). Neuwirth began to develop a sort of second half of Conchita’s identity that showed more masculine features with shorter hair, a male chest, and masculine/androgynous clothes (WURST -- Malibu) This opened his performance potential to include far more masculine and androgenous looks. This adjustment in branding brought an eventual aesthetic shift from presenting both the original Conchita look and WURST,  to presenting them both as one, more androgenous, single identity.

Clearly Neuwirth is doing a lot with gender in his performance, and it is fascinating to see how this new branding shift represents what Conchita has been all along: a glaring and unapologetic contradiction. From the initial concept of Conchita Wurst as the stoic and gorgeous “bearded lady” look, Neuwirth was communicating to the audience in as many ways as possible that he was unequivocally a woman, except for his thick dark beard, which immediately rug pulls the audience by strongly indicating the male body underneath everything she is wearing. Her beard is symbolic because if she really wanted to pass, she could have just as easily (in fact much more easily) shaved the beard to do just that, and not only does Neuwirth choose not to shave, but he leans into the beard by diligently grooming and contouring it, giving it purpose. If there were a visible spectrum of gender performance relative to the microcosm of Neuwirth’s performance looks, the Conchita Wurst look that most people think of, would be far on the feminine end of the spectrum. When Neuwirth introduced the concept of WURST, his gender performance fell far more on the masculine end of the spectrum, flipping between the two identities based on the audience; he achieved this by showing more of his male body, shortening his hair, and wearing more androgenous clothing for his personal projects on his own channel and for his concerts, and stuck to the more widely known Conchita look for larger, media based interviews and performances (Neuwirth YouTube). Most recently under the new branding Conchita WURST, Neuwirth has began taking both concepts and presenting them as one. Under the new branding, Neuwirth places his gender performance more toward the center of the gender spectrum, and achieves this through wearing more abstract clothing with mixed messages in terms of gender, like low, black leather corsets exposing Neuwirth’s masculine chest and high heel boots with short masculine hair and bicep-high leather gloves (conchitawurst). With his new branding, Neuwirth is still representing the same contradiction depicted in Conchita’s initial look, but in a more abstract, ambiguous and refined way that reveals more about Neuwirth himself than Conchita alone ever could (conchitawurst.com/about-us).

Conchita WURST is an Austrian drag queen and singer who, off the back of a groundbreaking win in the popular European singing competition Eurovision, created a career based off stunning vocal quality, and a complex and eloquent relationship with the art of gender expression, as seen through a beautifully non-linear branding timeline, and commitment to entertaining the world, and sending words of unity and power to the LGBTQ community around the world. As she said in her victory speech at Eurovision in 2014, “We are unity, and we are unstoppable.”