🌀 08: Hopelessness, Helplessness, and the Ibises

This week's newsletter is a big one—lot's of shows, lots of reading, and a whole lot of thoughts about some new projects I'm working on. Have a read, and let's talk about how we're saving the Ibises when you get to the end.

God, I am so f*cking excited for Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Georgie and I have finished up our schedule and (at this stage) it‘s full of 69 shows—exactly one more show than I saw in last year’s festival, and an infinitely funnier number.

On Wednesday I went to a comedy lineup in Collingwood which was a lovely little appetiser for MICF and featured some of my fave local comics. I did end up riding a scooter in the rain from Richmond Station to the venue so I was the soggiest audience member there, but nevertheless, had a heap of fun.

The night afterwards I caught up with Paris to see Djuna which is a trans thriller exploring “power, kink and gender politics” while the world collapses. I definitely enjoyed it, the performances were solid and the design was pretty slick, although the characters felt very slippery to me—with motivations fading in and out as the show went on.

If you see it, you should sit in the middle of the seating bank. I was chatting to a friend about the show and they mentioned being terrified during it which confused me because I definitely wasn’t sh*tting bricks. Turns out that from where I was sitting in the audience I missed some key action which would have contextualized the show a whole lot more. C'est la vie. You'll probably get more out of it than me.

My Friday night show was Boys on the Verge of Tears which I saw with Georgie (who did the lighting design) and my housemate Chelsea—I really loved this one. Set in a male bathroom, the show is a series of vignettes exploring the life cycles of men and all the f*cked up and beautiful sh*t they're capable of. The design was stunning, acting phenomenal (Damon Baudin and Justin Hosking ate!!!), and it all just came together so well: beautiful, terrifying, heartbreaking—all the lovely adjectives you give to good drama.

You should absolutely go—if only for the final scene which was a masterpiece of writing, acting, and direction. In it, an elderly man changes his colonoscopy bag while telling his step-son about how much he loves the kid's mom, how sex with her helped him feel in his body, how all men need to remember they have a body. It's a touching end to a devastating snapshot of the worst of masculinity, how so much of manliness is running away and hiding and pretending. 'You have a body.'

And to cap my theatre-going week off Georgie and I drove to St Albans on Saturday to catch closing night of The Hyena: Act 1. This was my first time seeing a show from Western Edge and f*ck it was well done. Ras-Samuel tells a story based on real events about leaving Ethiopia and growing up in Melbourne's west. His performance was captivating, transitioning effortlessly between dozens of characters and voices, and using a sparse selection of props to physicalise the story. Real good stuff.

Working in corporate communications a couple years back was exhausting and it’s for exactly the reasons outlined in this article from The Walrus—an approach to language designed to say nothing and distract from everything.

Sorry Not Sorry: The Art of Saying Nothing in Apology Statements | The Walrus

From corporate scandals to celebrity missteps, public contrition has lost all meaning

The WalrusMichelle Cyca

I loved this bit of writing, emphasis my own.

As journalists and readers, we should be critical of a world where we are prevented from engaging with our representatives and leaders; where harms are direct but apologies are only offered at a remove; where we are told that the most authentic version of a person is the one drafted and approved by somebody else. 

It’s a dreary world filled with this sort of language when:

Everyone wants to say the right thing, particularly if it excuses them from having to do anything at all.

In a similar vein as this article about the futility of posting in the face of fascism which I shared a couple weeks back is this essay about the inutility of knowing (read: scrolling endlessly) as the world sinks deeper into fascism.

How Much Do I Really Need to Know?

investing in humanity, divesting from socials

words from elizaeliza mclamb

McLamb reflects on how an endless barrage of knowledge of tragedy and trauma leads us to freeze.

I have recognized an impulse in myself to keep intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors. And, as much as I would like to think that it does, I don’t think that this impulse comes from duty. I think it comes from guilt. If I couldn’t directly help, the least I could do was witness. The least I could do was watch, feeling increasingly helpless, feeling increasingly numb.

Alya Mooro’s essay against helplessness draws a similar conclusion, that:

The anger, the grief, the unbearable frustration - we must use them. We must turn them into something that sustains, that builds, that insists on another future.

And what might that building look like? Maybe training endangered European Ibises to follow their traditional migratory routes by following a mad scientist in a tiny airplane? That’s exactly what this lyrical bit of journalism from The New Yorker delves into.

The Long Flight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate

Our devastation of nature is so extreme that reversing even a small part of it requires painstaking, quixotic efforts.

The New YorkerNick Paumgarten

That mad scientist’s name is Johannes Fritz, who flies an annual pilgrimage with the Ibises down south to warmer climates. There’s a prophetic bird named Ingrid, mishaps on the journey to Spain, and prescient reflections from Fritz:

“Being pessimistic is often just an excuse for doing nothing,” he said. “But the other side of the coin is that after twenty years of work for this one species it still is in danger—increasingly in danger—because of climate change. If you only communicate that there is reason for hope and everyone is happy, I think this is a naïve vision. It’s not the full truth.”

The writing is just so lovely in this one. Devastating, tragic, but so so lovely.

Our devastation of nature is so deep and vast that to reverse its effects, on any front, often entails efforts that are so painstaking and quixotic as to border on the ridiculous ... Fritz’s microlight brings to mind Noah’s ark, except that it has room for only one niche victim of our age of extinction.

Let’s f*cking save the Ibises y’all!

• This article about how old Super Nintendos are starting to run faster than they were designed to. Tl;dr a material which limited computing speeds is breaking down, making the devices speed up—interesting to think about how our digital devices might be more organic than we thought.
• An essay about 'theatre bros' and 'theatre for boys' which is interesting to read right now with both Boys on the Verge of Tears and The Removalists being staged in Narrm.
• This remarkable video essay from one of my favourite board game designers, Amabel Holland, exploring how game mechanisms contribute to meaning. One case study she explores is the video game Signs of the Sojourner, a gorgeous card game about communication and community which I've spent the last week playing to much satisfaction.

Didn’t get a job I really wanted (please pour a drink for me).

Had an interview for another job I really want (please manifest for me).

Read this artist diary from Nina Goodheart and resonated far too much with this sentiment:

i’m feeling both under- and over-qualified, both over- and under-eager. i’m incredibly aware of my artist self as a brand, an object, a consumable, and i savor the moments where it feels like i’ve actually had an original idea. i swing back and forth between giddy excitement and anvil-heavy exhaustion. i think about how none of the many professionals i admire have ever claimed to have it all figured out. i close my eyes. i take deep breaths. i wait for the disorientation to settle.

That made me reflect on my fear that refusing to limit my practice to one easily communicable category (producing, theatre making, marketing) might hinder me. Arts careers, like queer lives, are so scary because there’s no blueprints. How the h*ll do I build a life which fulfils all of me? Anyone? Let me know x

After opening night of Boys on the Verge of Tears I went to drinks with some of the team (as Georgie’s deso) and ended up planning a show with Georgie, as you do when one of you has downed four G&Ts at Cabinet.

Here’s the pitch: Georgie is turning thirty next year and has a whole bucket list of items to finish before then.

So let’s make a show about that. And turning thirty. And taking your time with life… or feeling like you’re going too slow. And maybe we’ll raise the funds to finish off some of the tasks in time (Georgie & Ryan do Christmas in Paris? I know I’m manifesting).

I emailed one venue about the show minutes after we came up with it so that’s one thing I’ll be working through this week.

Then came the weekend development Georgie and I have been planning for a little bit.

I’ve been working (very slowly) on a script about my relationship to the Gold Coast (my home) and the role that romance may or may not play in my life. It’s called Sea Glint which was a name considered for what became the suburb of Surfers Paradise. I imagined the show would a one-man performance, a bit like Sirens by Ben Nichols. Ultimately, I never got around to finishing that script.

Separately, I’ve been very interested in Manychat which is a marketing software for Instagram and other messaging platforms. It’s kind of like an email marketing software but it’s hooked up to your DMs and it let’s you set up messaging automations. If you’ve ever seen a post on IG imploring you to ‘comment to receive a DM with more info’ or something similar, Manychat was likely running that automation.

There’s a lot of utility in this software for marketing, but I’m more interested in what it’s chat automations could do for storytelling purposes. It can let you build out entire conversations which users can have with your account, with automated buttons leading to different responses, and the ability to respond to what users type. It’s kind of like how conversations with NPCs work in most video games... except on Instagram.

I've been pretty interested in queering this dystopian marketing platform and turning it into a site of creative expression. And then I was like... what if I combined Sea Glint with Manychat?

Could I make a show about returning to the Gold Coast out of chat bots? As an audience member, you could ‘step into’ the main character’s phone and experience these DMs with family, friends, and lovers like they’re happening to you.

One of the most interesting thing for me was that if this ‘show’ is removed from the constraints of a venue and placed into an audience member’s DMs then there’s no need for the show to be an hour or two. There’s no reason every scene needs to follow immediately after each other. I could make a real-time narrative which unfolds over the course of a week, with scenes occurring at the time of day they’re meant to.

So with all of that in mind Georgie and I spent Sunday playing around with some automations in Manychat and discussing what sort of story we might want to tell.

Georgie moved to Narrm from Murchison (population: 925) for uni like me so there’s a lot of strands we're able to weave together—about the ways we don’t fit where we came from anymore, about why some people stay and some people leave, and the things people will do to themselves to feel loved.

It’s really fun making art that isn’t necessarily theatre but is still some type of performance. Theatre is such a slog to make so I appreciate that this project can be something we can work on at our own pace, plus there’s a whole lot of other experiments we can try if it works well. For example, what would a story look like if we told it to you in a series of five letters delivered to you over six months?

I’m excited to get to work writing these scenes and programming them into Instagram, and hopefully soon we’ll have some sort of chat bot you can talk to over the course of a week.

I will say though, it’s pretty scary to tell you about this given it’s very much not finished.

I have a penchant for dreaming big and not following through, but I’m hopeful that because the project’s been reshaped to be much more interesting and smaller scale I’ll be able to drag myself to the finish line. Especially because now you know about it (and it would be so embarrassing if I didn’t finish what I started).

That's all for this week, I'm proud of us for getting through it. Before you go, I've got two final little bits and bobs to share with you.

I've seen some other artists have webpages with all the tools and software they use. They're so fun exploring (and great to discover new apps). So, if you want to stalk all the software and tools I use on the regular, I've put together this page to help you do just that.

Plus, you're invited to watch MONSTER IN THE CYBORG BODY with me—it's a free durational dance work at Arts Centre in May. I'm thinking we can see the show and have a cute picnic after. I'd love to have you along x

I'll see you next week, friend!