🌀 05: All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

This week’s newsletter is named for a play I saw in 2017 at the Edinburgh Fringe. It was the first piece of gig theatre I had ever seen and it absolutely blew my little 19-year-old mind: ‘You mean theatre can be musical without being a musical?’ From what I remember it was story about austerity, class inequality, and dreaming while the world is ending.

I keep up with a couple blogs about theatre in the UK, including The Crush Bar by Fergus Morgan. In a post this week Fergus wrote:

Unless it is a juggernaut musical, which I would struggle to have an enthusiastic chat about anyway, a show runs for a bit, then it is gone forever. Either you saw it, or you didn’t. So, when you find out that someone else has seen and loved a show that you saw and loved, it evokes an extraordinary sense of shared wonder. It is like you both know the same secret. It is like you have both witnessed a miracle being performed.

When I scrolled down to read about the shows which had permanently seared themselves into his memory I saw All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. It felt like a small wonder of the world to read:

Middle Child Theatre’s gig-theatre show about unfulfilled potential and the end of the world was all I talked about in 2017. At the end, an asteroid smashes into the planet, leaving the stage in darkness. The last line of the show, screamed at the audience by the magnificent Marc Graham, was: “Live your life! I f*cking dare you!”

I remember that ending so vividly, and spent all of that year thinking about it as well. Thank god I brought a script back home with me so I can re-live some part of that magic.

Two shows, one comedy fundraiser, and one TV show this week.

Last Tuesday I went along to opening night for Our Monster’s Name is Jerry which was a horror about family curses, lineage, and offspring. This was staged so excellently, particularly thanks to the stunning set from Sav Wegman which was stuffed full of genuinely scary practical effects (walking through walls!!). I had so much fun with this one, and even though it went for about two hours it only felt like sixty minutes—I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.

Later in the week Georgie and I descended deep into the belly of Arts Centre Melbourne to see Tiny, Fluffy, Sweet which was a devised work exploring our desire for cuteness and how it can serve to placate feelings of isolation. While the ideas were really interesting, the work didn’t feel developed enough for me, which Georgie and I spoke about in our response to the show.

🐼 If You Can, Have Everything Be Soft

A dialogic response to ‘Tiny, Fluffy, Sweet’ by Ran Chen, presented by Arts Centre Melbourne as part of Asia TOPA

Ryan HamiltonRyan Hamilton

I’ve been feeling a little burnt out by the prospect of writing reviews. I think I have this ill-placed sense that I need to write with a ’neutral’ or ‘impartial’ voice—which just sucks the joy out of talking about theatre. So the above response, which is an edited conversation between Georgie and I, is a little experiment in another way to respond to theatre. Let me know if you enjoyed it. I know I found it a lot more fun to write and edit.

The last bit of performance I saw this week was a standup comedy fundraiser for Palestine which had one of my absolute closest friends on the lineup: journalist, comedian, influencer, podcaster, and poet, Simran Pasricha. I’m so proud to say she absolutely killed it (I‘m completely unbiased I swear).

And just last night I finished watching the Stan original series Invisible Boys. I‘m going to have to eat my words from last week’s newsletter because the final two episodes really pulled the show together. While the middle of the season dipped, the resolutions it served it’s quartet of queer teens were unexpected and heartbreaking. It’s no Please Like Me but it’s also not a ‘facile Aussie Heartstopper’ as I said last week—instead something wholly original and itself.

One thing to come from Creative Australia’s decision to drop Khaled Sabsabi from representing Australia at the Venice Biennale came this incisive piece of writing from Matt Chun. When examining the way that outrage around Sabsabi’s censorship has been framed, Chun writes:

The continued erasure of Palestine from this discourse is, in itself, an act of capitulation and censorship — the very things that the Australian arts industry is suddenly purporting to oppose.

It’s a passionate and thorough critique of the double standards in Australia’s cultural institutions and their failure to advocate against Zionism.

And suddenly they’re outraged?

On the ‘Australian’ art industry and the Venice Biennale

Matt Chun's NewsletterMatt Chun’s Newsletter

This interview with philosopher and artist Sunaura Taylor on disabled ecologies and ways of thinking of about climate collapse as disability was great. Taylor speaks about about Injury Environmentalism or:

The idea that our environments are disabled by the same forces that disable us, and that a praxis of non-abandonment (of people, of animals, of earth) is at the heart of what justice for all beings must look like

It’s full of really fascinating case studies on community organising and healing. I felt galvanised by the thought that the world outside us may be failing in the same way as the world inside us; and how healing either could heal both. There was also this fascinating contextualisation of Darwin’s writing:

Darwin's On the Origin of Species is often associated with “survival of the fittest,” but that's actually not what Darwin was saying. Of course Darwin had his problems, but he was also interested in variation and atypicality. He saw that transformation and accidental mutations were responsible for creating this wondrous, infinite, world. So there's a way to read Darwin as actually profoundly centered in and resonant with disability values in politics.

It’s worth noting that the interviewer, Emily Dupree, has a blog with a wealth of excellent writing on how to live in this moment of collapse, with a particular focus on the pandemic. I highly recommend you have a read of this article and then explore the rest of her writing.

Against Abandonment

An interview with Sunaura Taylor

Notes from the VoidEmily Dupree

Judith Butler has come up a lot this week.

First there was a couple of Philosophy Tube videos which invariably cite them. Then there was this article written by Butler which explored the im/possibilities of imagining futures and the need for the humanities to help do so.

Later I came across an interview with Butler for the Spanish newspaper El País. I enjoyed the more freewheeling discussion in this piece; Butler chats about transphobia, genocide, misunderstandings from their previous writing, the effectiveness of protest, the American election, and identity politics:

Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties.

Lovely digestible thoughts from literally one of the smartest people out there.

Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’

A leading figure in feminism and gender studies, the thinker welcomes EL PAÍS in California after being voted one of the most influential minds in the world

Ediciones EL PAÍS S.L.Iker Seisdedos

I also just wanted to quickly link to another two articles which I almost included in my top three of the week.

• A gutting investigation into the way that the IDF exploits queer Palestinians through blackmail, using them to spy on their communities.
• An interesting essay from Celeste Liddle about Pine Gap (an American surveillance outpost on Arrernte country), and the way that its presence shaped Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and fuels Australia‘s role in global systems of oppression.

A quiet week for making. Georgie and I have some developments booked in during March which I’m slowly preparing for.

In saying that, I did spend a lovely day last week with close friends Seb and Dannie recording some narration for an EP that Seb’s working on. Very fun, very camp, very much can’t wait for it to come out so that it can top my Apple Music Wrapped.

I’ve also made it halfway through Building a Sustainable Theatre which is a book about building sustainable theatre businesses (not, as the title suggests, ecologically sustainable theatre-making).

I’ve found it very invigorating to read as it’s directly linking almost everything I learnt in my marketing degree to theatre—which is so great. If only I had read it five years ago instead of suffering through the mindless capitalist propaganda of business school. But anywho.

It’s terribly fun in the way it addresses business concerns of emerging makers, very much from an American context but there’s a lot to transfer here. And I just feel very seen by it. The writer calls for theatremakers to pursue a fierce independence and consider deeply the needs and wants of their audience which is so so exciting to see written down in a language that’s familiar to me. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to build a theatre business.

I want to leave you with another gorgeous piece of reflection from the ever-brilliant Flick which has been on my mind as we get further into the year.

Pressure has been my engine for more than a decade. Pressure against a clock, pressure to not let down a team, pressure to fill the CV, pressure to make quotas, pressure to impress, pressure to prove I deserve what I have, pressure to outrun the feeling I’m a fraud. A decade-long dance and something as simple as time away helped me re-work the steps. … By practicing no and refusing to measure my self-worth against my ability to perform labour ‘better’ than others, I have to believe that the needle is moved a little in the right direction. Even if just a little.