We sat down for a quick chat with Jasmine Thien, a quadruple threat of actor, writer, poet and comedian. Jasmine often grapples with the messy, joyous, absurd parts of being disabled, pansexual, female, Southeast Asian Chinese, neurodivergent – in other words, human.
I Dream in Colour draws deeply from your lived experience as a blind, neurodivergent Southeast Asian artist. What moment first convinced you that your personal story could become a universal one worth putting on stage?
I don’t think it was one moment per see, but more a realisation of how much I identify with stories I see on stage when I do not personally have had those experiences myself. I went to see this fabulous show about endometriosis recently, and even though I’ve luckily never experienced endometriosis, the experience of being dismissed by medical professionals and the frustration with one’s body as a woman still resonated strongly with me. The wonderful thing about theatre is that as artists we have the power to draw audiences in and to evoke responses such as compassion and empathy, and that is how we make changes as a culture and a society. So for me in making this show it was about finding the parts of being blind, neurodivergent and Southeast Asian Chinese that people outside of these specific communities can also identify with.
The show sits at the intersection of disability, race, and gender — themes that are often treated separately in mainstream theatre. How did you weave these threads together so that they speak to one another rather than compete for attention?
The best analogy of intersectionality I’ve ever heard is that it is like taking a bite of cake. You can taste the vanilla extract, the lemon zest, the sugar, etc, but you can’t separate those individual ingredients because of how combined they are. My focus was on telling my story as authentically as possible: the intricacies and nuances of living such an intersectional life I think naturally comes through. My interactions with my Southeast Asian Chinese parents are, for example, inevitably informed by our culture, religious beliefs, views on disability, gender and so on. I can’t separate them, and I think that is the beauty of telling a story like this.
Sophie’s dilemma — between surgery and identity — feels both medical and metaphorical. What did you most want audiences to feel as they navigate her decision alongside her?
You are absolutely spot-on that it is both medical and metaphorical. I think for her it is less about the surgery, but more about whether she should allow others – her fiancé, family, doctors – to decide what to do with her body. Again. I think what I want audiences to feel most is the sheer messiness and deeply human, emotional response to the dilemma. I want them to be swept along with her as she spirals, as she questions everything, as she piques and as she falls, because that is what we as humans do. When something massive happens to us, we often don’t just focus on that one thing, we associate it with a whole bunch of other things from our past, our present, and our imagined future. It’s part of being human, and it is this very human experience I want the audience to share with Sophie.
You move between storytelling, comedy, and spoken word. How did you find the right balance between humour and heartbreak when tackling something as raw as ableism and bodily autonomy?
I am a huge believer that we need to laugh through the pain, to find joy in the little absurdities in life even as they infuriate us. There was this one time my partner and I visited this water park. They made me sign a waver stating that they would not be held responsible if I got injured. It was deeply insulting but I dealt with it because I really wanted to go down the slides. First slide: I came out fine; my partner came out upside down. We just laughed. For me it’s about finding the things to poke fun at and laugh about, and I trust that audiences will read between the lines to recognise just how messed up it is to have to deal with this kind of thing every day.
The production integrates creative access through audio description and relaxed performances. How do you see accessibility not just as inclusion, but as an artistic language in its own right?
It’s still something I’m grappling with myself as someone who is very new at integrating creative access. I think what is exciting is that creative access presents new limitations but equally new opportunities. Right, we want to create this sense of being in an MRI machine but we can’t use loud noises like loud bangs. How can we create that sense of claustrophobia anyway? What if we had pre-recorded voices coming at Sophie from different directions? It’s fun to work out how to create the atmosphere and feelings you want within the boundaries of still keeping it accessible and inclusive.
You’ve said your work asks how we exist in a world that reminds us daily that we “should not even exist.” What gives you hope — or fire — to keep creating in that world?
Because I love doing it, I love theatre, and I know there is always something I can do in my own small way to move hearts and change minds while being entertaining at the same time and giving people a fun night out. That is what theatre is: it is powerful, it is inherently political, and it is there to make us laugh, cry, rage, celebrate, and come out with feelings that stay in our bodies long after the bows.