🌀 06: A Repository of History

I’m sending this newsletter a little late—I have been stuck in the stress of applying for and interviewing for jobs so I hope you enjoy this edition of In the Round as a little weekend treat instead. I’ll be back to regular Tuesday posting next week!

The title of this week’s newsletter comes from a gorgeous essay I read about the importance of citizen archivists. Like the rest of this weeks readings, it’s linked down below with heaps of chewy quotes for you to digest.

Last week was a big theatre week. I saw two shows which could easily be described as my favourites of the year and two shows which (diplomatically) I would say didn’t rise to the occasion.

Goldfish

First there was Goldfish which I saw last Wednesday at Arts House. Goldfish is a collaboration between Aichi Prefectural Art Theater in Japan and the Tasmanian company Terrapin which was presented as part of Asia TOPA.

It is easily one of the strongest shows I’ve seen this year.

It began as a one person shadow puppetry show, telling us a story about three children on an island facing rising flood waters. But then, in a gorgeous twist, two disaster relief personnel barge into the theatre announcing there’s a flood outside and the theatre is being turned into an evacuation centre. Of course, the puppeteer isn’t going to stop telling us their story, and so they use the personnel and their equipment and supplies to keep on telling the story.

In doing so, Goldfish turns the aesthetics of disaster relief into play and offers a reimagining of how some/all of us might find ways to survive climate crises. It’s a work which tells one story nestled inside another, showing us a way to re-read disaster as an opportunity to re-make the world a little bit better.

There were shades of Fleur Kilpatrick’s Whale in the way the fourth wall was blurred (which I loved—I think about Whale about once a month and it was so lovely to feel something like it again). As Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred bears down on my home it’s poignant to reflect on the necessity and efficacy of work which navigates the emotional turmoil of climate change as well as Whale and Goldfish do.

Ugh. So GOOD!

Truth

The next day I saw Truth at Malthouse Theatre which is Patricia Cornelius’ retelling of Julian Assange’s life. A lot of other reviews about the work have praised its strong design, prescient messaging, and interesting narrative (which is all accurate). My favourite part was a ten minute scene featuring footage from a drone strike sourced by Wikileaks featuring narration by the five actors. It was electrifying to sit in a theatre and face the deadly effects of American neo-colonialism first hand, but apart from that one scene I found the rest of the work little for me.

It could have been my overfamiliarity with the subject matter which made it feel more like a lecture than a drama. Maybe it’s because it was produced by an organisation which for years accepted funding from the deeply zionist Besen Family Foundation? We’ll never know—but I left with a sour taste in my mouth.

I walked away wondering why the truth is only told when it’s about agreed-upon histories. What does telling the truth about injustice today look like? How do you tell the truth when you’re drowning in propaganda and disinformation? These are all more interesting questions than what I felt Truth delved into. Ah well.

The Boys in the Band

On Friday night I saw The Boys in the Band at Chapel off Chapel. The Boys is a hugely significant piece of gay theatre history and this production attempts to reanimate it. Unfortunately, I think The Boys so of-its-time that it doesn’t offer much when transmuted to the present day. It was definitely interesting as a piece of pre-Stonewall queer history, but (for me) it didn’t offer any new ways of looking at gay male relationships or identities in 2025.

U>N>I>T>E>D

The last show I saw in the week was U>N>I>T>E>D by Chunky Move, also part of Asia TOPA and easily my favourite thing I’ve seen this year. Maybe my favourite dance work ever?

Here’s the quick summary: presented on the stage of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, six dancers use prosthetic spider appendages to examine natural/technological divisions and mythology in our digital era. This was my very first show by Chunky Move and I‘m kicking myself that I waited so long. I mean look at it, it’s stunning:

I do not claim to be a good writer about dance so please forgive me for my crudeness: U>N>I>T>E>D was terrifying. It was beautiful. Mesmeric. It was jaw-dropping. I was completely agog awestruck—the design was phenomenal, the soundtrack from Indonesian techno duo Gabber Modus Operandi was hypnotic, the choreography was electrifying and at the very end when some of the dancers shed their clothes and prosthetics and danced together emulating their cyborg forms was…. something beyond… transcendent.

A week on from having seen U>N>I>T>E>D I’m thinking about Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and her conclusion on how to live in the 21st century:

Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

I loved this. I loved it so much. If you didn’t, I wish you could have seen it too.

Queer Archives

I loved this newsletter edition interviewing Isaac Fellman, an archivist with the GLBT Historical Society based in San Francisco. During a conversation about prominent citizen archivists Fellman said:

The thing that figures like this have in common is a recognition of their own importance, and of the importance of their things. When people ask me for advice about queer archiving, I usually say that the most important thing is to recognize your importance. You need to see yourself as a as a repository of history — as a repository of memories, both internal and external, and in the things you care about. Our archives are reflections of our interests, our obsessions, our private concerns. No two people collect alike, and the shape of your brain is memorialized in many ways by the things that you collect. 

Beautiful words for a beautiful call to action. I’ve long regretted that (despite advice from my mom) when I was working to save my degree from closure we didn’t archive more of the work we did. I’ve tried my best at the linked page but much of that protest was digital and ephemeral and that year (2020) was so traumatic that we didn’t take proper records. On that note Fellman said:

Often these are really significant achievements, but because there's so much pain around them, it's hard to give yourself credit for the person that you've been.

There’s some gorgeous other threads that Fellman references like the now-archived Transgender Forum from the 90s which is both a snapshot into trans life two decades ago, but also of a moment when the internet was imbued with more optimism than it is today. It’s a beautiful read:

A gorgeous companion piece to this interview is this lyrical essay about link rot, AI slop, and how we choose to remember on the internet.

Sex Neutrality

I’m quite familiar with the concept of body neutrality—it was vital for me to find a neutral middle ground to move from self-hate through to self-love. I hadn’t heard of sex neutrality though, until a friend shared this essay on their story. It’s an illuminating piece about how ‘sex exceptionalism’ harms us, defined as

the cultural notion that sex is particularly fraught with meaning, both more suffused with evil and loaded with sacred potential than any other human activity on earth.

I enjoy the potential in reframing sex as a mundane activity, and the way it might help us see more clearly.

Part of the reason we exceptionalize sex is because it protects us from having to think about the many many ways that power, coercion, isolation, and pressure are used against us every single day… Sex neutrality allows us to clear the fog of stigma, obligation, and moral panic surrounding sex that makes it almost impossible to speak about.

A great read, but please be warned that the article describes instances of assault and has mentions of child sexual abuse.

Excavating Whiteness

So, I came across this essay in HowlRound which featured a discussion with several theatre practitioners about grief and how it manifests in their work. Liza Bielby of The Hinterlands spoke about a work she had made called Will You Miss Me? It featured “traditional songs specific to our lineages—songs from specific peoples and places in the British Isles,” which were used during a theatrical funeral for whiteness.

[The songs] offer a way to kind of deal with whiteness and this cut-off from ancestry that I think is a real problem, not just personally, but culturally and globally, that keeps manifesting. When you have a bunch of people who cut themselves off from their lineage and cut other people off from their lineage, it's always going to result in violence, I think, until you find something else.

I’m obsessed with this idea. I’ve long struggled with whiteness because it‘s such a meaningless identity. Who am I beyond this vague notion that I might have Irish blood, a convict ancestor, and a heritage of genocide? None of that is stories, music, food, clothes, or performance. None of whiteness is culture.

So I had a bit of a further read into this company and this show and came across a beautiful bit of show documentation. They included a long form interview with the creators which gets into the aftershocks of whiteness, a show recording, and more. The interview is beautiful and I highly encourage you to read it in full. I’ll leave you with this reflection on the ending of the show:

It felt important to land on some sense of possibility, because I don’t know how you deal with this horrible historical inheritance. Who, as a human being, would want to participate in this sh*t?  I guess there are plenty of people right now who might want to, but I don’t. So we tried to think, what else can we do? How else can we be? What framing allows you to see something differently? And as part of the natural world, does that allow for other possibilities?

There’s so much here for me to think about and the way that I want to excavate and investigate my whiteness in the art I make. God I am so f*cking excited.

Extra Reading

• This history on the KKK’s popularity in America, providing examples of the way that right-wing movements decay. Pair it with this YouTube video about an evocative protest against lynching from the NAACP.
• An anarchist manifesto about queer revolt: “In short, this world has never been enough for us. We say to it, “we want everything, motherf*cker, try to stop us!””

I’m still in the midst of a job search so haven’t been making much. This moment feels like a big breath in and I’m revelling in it. Learning and reading and researching what I can now before the year sweeps me off my feet.

The one tiny thing I have been doing is snooping at the annual financial reports for all the non-profit theatre companies around Narrm. Just out of curiosity. It’s interesting seeing who’s making money and who’s not, how people are sourcing funding and how much people are paying artists. It’s terribly mundane but sometimes there’s very interesting glints hidden in the numbers.

If you want to have a look for yourself just search each company (they have to be a registered not-for-profit) on the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission website. I’d love to hear what you discover.

That’s all for this week! If you’re currently dealing with old mate Alfred I wish you the best of luck weathering the storm.