I see the all the different kinds of work that I do as being entangled rather than separated. It's always in movement and in conversation with everything else. The work I did as boychild is still present in the work I make as Tosh. My performance practice is really rooted in improvisational movement, in the non-fixity of things. It is testament to living and life as ungraspable, uncapturable. I really loved going into places where people might not… Like in niche spaces underground, queer nightlife in San Francisco, or LA, or New York. As a young person I sought out the freaks like me, the kinds of people I didn't see growing up. These spaces became vital for my survival and my happiness and knowing that I was allowed to exist, and I'm so grateful for that. But I also became very exhausted. I performed hundreds of performances in the first five years of my career in nightlife in cities around the world. I did it to the fullest, and then I started to really value performing for people that might not be in a nightclub, people that might not know what art is or might not know what drag is.
Now, several years later I am in a different place. I am in residency at a state theater in Zurich which is a dance context very different from the art and fashion worlds, even though we’re in an age where these things are intermingling more than ever. Somehow, where I come from, a very disconjointed family, that intermingling has kind of always been true in a very suburban and mundane way. Having experienced many different cultures from a very young age (also with the families of my Mexican stepdad and Vietnamese stepmom) I understood the disparity or difference that can exist in one person or in a family. I think to become Tosh Basco was really to return to a vulnerable, fleeting, moving self that is porous.
boychild allowed me to explore things that were outside of being “human.” A lot of people used to tell me I was “So alien, so Leigh Bowery.” And for me, that was always a funny sentiment, because it is something as simple as makeup that allows for that other worldly transformation. For me, then, anyone could be an alien, we all have access to this slippery transformative place. The word “human" too, has a lot of complicated implications about the body, about sovereignty, about who is allowed to be. I like to traverse the places that are open or shifting but sometimes missed.
When thinking about the body I can’t help but think of its permeability, its softness, its many borders and how these edges are constantly in flux. There are a lot of people whose work I’ve been thinking through that past years in this regard. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Karen Barad, Fred Moten or Fernando Zalamea (who I was fortunate to perform with a few years ago), their work has helped me to think about these seemingly fixed categories (race, gender, body), through physics, philosophy, poetry and math.
And so Tosh Basco—being me—the intention was to allow myself to share the parts of my thinking and my artistic practice that people don't know, because I think people really affiliated boychild with a certain kind of movement-based performance that always had makeup, staging, and music. It was the thing that actually taught me how to break the boundaries of the fixity, until it started to enclose it.