🌀 07: Roll the Dice

Last week I saw two shows (one of which was legitimately the most boring show I’ve ever seen), played one board game (about queerness in 18th century London), learnt about white supremacist radicalisation tactics, revelled in queer horny art, and rested in between job interviews. How have you been?

You’ll notice in this week’s newsletter that board games have been on my mind—I think using systems and mechanisms to interrogate our world is really f*cking exciting. There’s something about letting an audience play with, break, and re-make a story that could sow the seeds for a better world—I think.

My theatre week began with Berlin by Joanna Murray-Smith. I missed the original production at MTC in 2021 so was pretty keen to see this indie iteration.

I have to confess I’ve not been the biggest fan of Murray-Smith’s writing. Julia felt like an overly polished re-telling of Gillard’s life in service of deifying that iconic speech. Seeing Switzerland as a teen didn’t really resonate with me either, but I’m willing to look past that because I was probably too young to get the most out of it.

So with that context, I rocked up to Meat Market about a minute before the show opened and had the best time I’ve had at any Murray-Smith show. Berlin is grappling with the messy inter-personal aftershocks of the Holocaust, seventy years on. It’s a really meaty and fun text and staged well enough. Georgia Latchford’s performance in particular as a German grappling with her inheritance from the genocide was deeply engaging. I had fun!

The next big piece of art I engaged with in the week was not a show, but a board game: Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle. Wehrle is best known for his games which investigate historical power struggles. When describing his work in this Slate article he said:

They’re theater exercises where the players are writing and performing for each other. That’s so intimate. And when you’re in those really intimate spaces, you can capture a little bit of sympathy for the past.

I mean… I’m obsessed.

Molly House puts players in the shoes of 18th century queers throwing parties at molly houses, cruising in nearby parks, and avoiding arrest for sodomy. It’s full of period accurate illustrations, characters, places, and quotes—plus the rule book features essays on reading queerness in history. I’ve played it now three times, culminating in a lovely night with five friends gathered around my table.

I was particularly taken by the win conditions in the game: If the community experiences enough Joy then the winner is whoever individually had the most Joy—otherwise the winner is the player who best colluded with the police to close a molly house.

Sadly I’ve not played a round of the game where we’ve won via community Joy. It’s a lot easier to sell out your community for some quick points. But so it goes.

I’m eager to get some more play out of this one.

The last show I managed to see last week was Fire Drill Scenario—wild theatre. During the show choreographer Geumhyung Jeong takes us through the fire evacuation procedure for the venue in (in this case, the Arts House Warehouse) in excruciating detail for over an hour. At the end, right when I truly was about to fall asleep we got to see ‘the show’ (two robots controlled by Jeong dancing together) before—surprise—having to evacuate the theatre because of a fire.

This was the most boring piece of theatre I’ve ever seen—painfully so. Jeong showed us how to walk from each seating bank to each emergency exit, had us watch videos demonstrating each route to the evacuation point, and painstakingly explained the operation of various evacuation equipment. Her complete deadpan delivery bordered on the hysterical at times and almost put me to sleep—I loved it.

I was left reflecting on our penchant to bureaucratise danger in an effort to stamp it out. Being told twenty times what to do when I heard an alarm didn’t make me any quicker to evacuate. So how then do we actually empower each other to practice and embed safety in what we do? How do we get folks to engage with systems designed to protect them when the threat doesn’t seem possible? How do we make safety not boring?

To continue the thread of board games I want to share with you this gorgeously written appeal to queer game designers to make ‘f*ggot’ games “loudly, and into the future.”

Making queer, horny art alone will not save everyone, but it might help one person be more comfortable, free, relaxed. It's worth doing, I believe. It's one of the few things I'm sure of.

It’s a wonderfully brash piece of writing with lessons for all art forms on why we need unforgivingly queer art right now.

Back in 2017 I first saw Javaad Alipoor’s terrific The Believers are but Brothers. It was a fascinating piece of multimedia theatre which put audiences directly into a group chat, letting them experience first hand extremist radicalisation techniques.

In 2017 the extremism Alipoor’s work was concerned with was ISIL, but as this rigorous piece of investigation from ProPublica indicates, the major threat now is white supremacy and neo-Nazism.

ProPublica’s reporting explores the radicalisation of teens and young people through fascist group chats, looking at a case study in Slovakia which led to a teenager attacking a queer bar:

Before the attack, Samotný’s major concern was that some homophobe would smash the bar’s windows. After the murders, he said, “the biggest change is the realization that we are not anymore safe here. … I was never thinking that we can be killed because of our identity.”

Samotný has closed the bar.

Utterly terrifying and prescient reporting.

Here in Australia, the most recent ASIO Threat Assessment delivered in February detailed several examples of threats that have been neutralised such as “a left-wing environmentalist aligned with Adolf Hitler.” In addition, ASIO chief Mike Burgess said:

We expect nationalist and racist violent extremists to continue their efforts to ‘mainstream’ and expand their movement. They will undertake provocative, offensive and increasingly high-profile acts to generate publicity and recruit. While these activities will test legal boundaries, the greatest threat of violence comes from individuals on the periphery of these organised groups.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that a nation as implicitly racist as Australia is acknowledging the danger of this permutation of white supremacy—but it’s deeply concerning.

Two suburbs over from me there’s been white supremacists spotted in Elwood, plus myriad examples of fascists gathering across the continent. I’m taking some relief that anti-fascist organisations like The White Rose Society are out there but frankly, it’s a scary time to be alive.

I’ve been enjoying Alexander Leon’s blog which is full of beautiful queer auto-ethnography. I really loved this essay on men and fatness in which Leon reflects on how his weight loss upended the world’s perceptions of him:

The privilege is totally intoxicating and intensely upsetting. I am more human to the world around me in this body.

This week I read his latest essay which explores his relationship with home as a queer settler on stolen land:

I think most of all of the wisdom of a new friend, who, upon hearing me list all the stories I'd told myself about this city, about my lack of home within it, said simply: more than anything you belong to this land, not to the people who stole it and made a nation state out of it. Return to it. Find your home in that.

Beautiful writing to cap your week off with.

• This is a great tool for communicating about content in role playing games which could probably be applied to devising practices in rehearsal rooms.
• I loved this analysis on the gendered politics in Anora which very much makes me want to delve into Sean Baker’s oeuvre.
• One last link about games for this week: an analysis of video games and current trends which centre addictive design practices.

Again a very quiet bit of life for me but that’s about to change this coming weekend. I’m going into development with Georgie to work on a digital work that I briefly mentioned a couple newsletters ago. I can’t wait to get in a room again and show you what comes out of it.

The 2025 program for Yirramboi came out the other week and it’s looking really good. I’m excited for (amongst many other shows) MONSTER IN THE CYBORG BODY which is a durational dance work which you can step in and out of throughout the twelve hour run time.

I’m organising a group to visit the show for an hour or so and have a picnic/debrief afterwards which I’d love to have you along to. You can check out all the details and RSVP here.

That’s all for this edition. I’ll see you next week.