🌀 09: Engulfed by a Rising Tide

I’ve been thinking about the end of things. As you do. Something about imminent elections and rising fascism and raging pandemics and cyclones makes it feel like it’s all coming to a close.

I’ve titled this week’s newsletter after a performance work from Cameron Sunde which you can have a read about below—in it the artist stands in a waterway for twelve hours as the tide rises and falls around them. It’s about climate and resilience and our shifting planet and survival.

I recently re-read this article from Claire G Coleman about what it means to live through apocalypse: “[First Nations folk] don't have to imagine a dystopia, [they] live in one — day after day after day.”

I don’t have any particularly put-together thoughts at the moment—but that’s kind of where I’m at: the world sucks and I hope we make it. Hope you enjoy this edition of In the Round.

I really wanted to love The Robot Dog but I just couldn’t.

Went to see this by myself as a little treat last Monday and had fun but ultimately felt the script was a little bit of a let down. The Robot Dog is set in a future with talking smart houses, robot therapy dogs, and an impersonal and uber-corporate welfare system. In it, a Cantonese woman and her First Nations boyfriend have to figure out their connection to culture in a technological dystopia while packing up her mother’s home following her death.

It’s an interesting pitch but the dialogue felt academic and airy which left the characters feeling a little cardboardy.

I did love the design though! Rainbow Chan’s sound design was magnetic (literally obsessed with everything they do), and Brockman’s lighting and Nathan Burmeister’s set were both thoughtfully conceived.

Georgie and I went to see the Three Sisters at Theatre Works but I think I preferred reading Cameron Woodhead’s review.

Slay, also at Theatre Works imagines a political movement called SLAM (Society of Lesbians Against Men) which takes over Australian politics and advocates for a culling of 90% of the cis male population.

This was fun! It's kind of like if Kill Climate Deniers and Valerie Solanas got together and had a test tube baby.

To that end, Slay's SLAM is a riff on Solanas' radical-feminist 1967 SCUM Manifesto which calls for:

civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.

Where Slay fell short for me was a sense that it's imagined politics didn't go far enough.

Solanas imagines a world where laboratories replace bedrooms and test tubes replace uteruses, where eventually even women die off as a staunch rejection of the necessity of men. It's insane (Solanas literally shot Andy Warhol) but invigorating in its totalizing re-think of feminism. In contrast, Slay's version of SCUM imagines a tamer feminist future and yet still refuses to explore how we might get there.

I think those sticky questions of imagining a different world may be the most potent, and Slay avoids answering them—preferring to tell a (lovingly and gorgeously staged) story about how electoral politics may be corrupted by radicalism. Absolutely a prescient story, but I was left confused.

In the final moment of the show, a projected slide bathed in a green wash asked us to 'vote like [our lives] depend on it'—in reference to the upcoming election. It's hard to reconcile an appeal to vote with the exciting imagination of a new feminist world order as explored in the prior 60 minutes. Whether you preference the ALP, or LNP, this nation will remain the racist, patriarchal, classist, and ableist society it's always been. And not even the Greens can save us.

I know it's not my place as an audience member to wish for a show to be different—critics should engage with shows on their own terms—but I can't help but wish that Slay took the possibility of a radical feminist uprising in Australia more seriously, a la Sontag's Notes on 'Camp':

In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

There's really exciting ideas in Slay and its execution is strong, but it doesn't quite stick the landing. But I'm very excited for whatever this team does next.

This is a print-at-home zine/workbook to help you find ways to be an activist by connecting the personal to the political. It's a really thorough and lovely document with reflections on your passions, abilities, and capacities that could help you figure out how to help save the world.

This essay from Howlround Theatre Commons is a beautiful reflection of Sarah Cameron Sunde's 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, a durational performance work about the rising tide.

The simple action of 36.5 distills the turbulent emotions surrounding climate change into a single, uncanny image: a solitary human engulfed by a rising sea. It is a striking image, as well as an enigmatic and multivalent one. It can signify courage as much as stubborn denial, resilience as much as madness, hope as much as suicidal despair.

I was particularly fascinated by the way that Sunde translated the work into local communities when re-performing it. Finding ways to situate the performance in local knowledge systems and use it as an opportunity to strengthen communities against climate change.

The strategic universalism proposed by the collaborative performances of 36.5 is tentative and cautiously hopeful. It offers a space to encounter, however briefly, but without domination or presumption, knowledge systems of the cultures that have been marginalized by modernity.

A beautiful bit of writing about a work I'd love one day to witness.

If you want some more readings about performance art, I’d also suggest this lovely discussion on the medium’s changing role in modern politics which I came across reading Prue Blake’s excellent newsletter.

Last week I was doing a lot of reading about LARPing and immersive storytelling.

First I came across the above set of reviews of immersive performance in New York from Nicholas Fortugno. I was particularly interested by two of those shows: Fight Back and A Eulogy for Roman. Fight Back by David Wise:

cast all the attendees in roles from an actual ACT UP meeting from the 80s. The piece itself was a recreation of the meeting in the true setting it was held in, and the attendees took turns speaking in front of the crowd for their specific historic causes.

This sounds profoundly exciting—I would have loved to have taken part. As much as I’ve read about and watch stories about queers in New York in the 80s I think it’d be something else entirely to re-enact those pivotal moments in our history.

Meanwhile, A Eulogy for Roman by Brendan George seemed to be a work grappling with death in a unique way.

An interesting one-person interactive show, the audience are the guests at a eulogy for the Milo’s friend Roman as Milo tries to give a speech to strangers to share his friend’s life.

From reading some reviews it seems like it didn’t ultimately succeed but it’s format—having the audience help the performer finish the things they wanted to do with the deceased before they passed—seems really exciting.

And one final bit of reading on immersive performance was a bit of a deep dive into Nordic LARPs which is a subculture of LARPing with (from what I’ve gathered) a greater focus on play and storytelling than other LARPing cultures.

One significant example of this genre was Odysseus, a 50 hour long LARP for 100+ people which took place in a school-turned-spaceship exploring the choices we need to make to survive. Only staged six times, it sounds absolutely bonkers as evidenced by this thorough interview with Odysseus’ lead producer about what it took to stage it.

Fascinating stuff with lots to think about for my practice.

• A thorough investigation detailing the extent to which AI is polluting our feeds and what that means for the future of the media landscape.
• A horrifying account of work at an online for-profit university and the psychological and academic hubris of the business model.
• A theory of art which posits that great art is always about one thing “but is really always about something else.”

Here’s the quick bits: Didn’t get another job I was manifesting (sad). My podcast has received its first sponsorship offer (rad). Fingers crossed this one comes to fruition because it’s very exciting.

On Saturday I attended my first death cafe run by the Queer as Death collective. This is part of some ongoing research into death and funeral rites for a show I’m working on—and god it was fascinating.

It was hosted at Black Spark Cultural Centre which is a beautiful and cozy space filled with books and plush furnishings. The session began with a guided meditation imagining our deaths, followed by some solo writing about our ‘ideal deaths.’

I think my ideal death would be alone, in a cozy chair, with the rain outside, surrounded by plants. In discussing it as a group afterwards it seemed there was a split between folks who want to go alone and who want to go surrounded by community. I think I’m almost embarrassed by the idea of passing—I’d much rather it be something I do privately.

After that we had an open discussion where folks shared their experiences and connections to death, grief, and really—life. A lovely experience which was facilitated very well. I think I’ll try to visit another one soon.

Comedy Festival begins this week—as I write this I’ve seen about 6 shows already (and the festival technically hasn’t opened yet) and I’m very much looking forward to the other sixty or so shows I’ve got planned.

Next week’s newsletter will have a roundup of the show’s I’ve loved (as always) but I’ll probably be posting to Instagram sooner than then—if you’re looking for some festival recommendations.

Thank you for reading! I’ll see you next week.