One of the most electric figures in Australian dance Joel Bray makes his Edinburgh debut with Daddy which sees him mixing performance, conversation and audience participation to explore identity, trauma and recovery.
Daddy is in the Main Hall, Summerhall from 6 to 31 August at 22.40. Tickets: https://festival.summerhallarts.co.uk/events/daddy/
Daddy feels deliberately seductive before it becomes emotionally exposing. Are you interested in how performance can lure an audience in before confronting them with something far more uncomfortable?
A show is a kind of relationship; a relationship between an artist and the audience. And all relationships start with a first date. A good first date involves getting to know each other, and charm and even, yes, some seduction. And this is especially true in participatory work. Once we have built trust, then we can dive into the more challenging conversations, the audience feeling that the artist isn’t just lecturing at them but rather cares about them and their experience. Also, artistically and aesthetically, I like that the work begins with a literal exposure, presaging a future metaphoric exposure.
You speak about falling between racial, cultural and queer identities. Do you think audiences genuinely embrace complexity now, or do they still want people to be easily legible?
Ah, what a perfect question! There are two opposing forces at work. Generally out there in the world, people are becoming more familiar with intersectionality and more able to see complexity in others. But, simultaneously, shrinking arts funding means institutions are curating less risky works that sell more tickets — shows that present more legible characters, storylines and themes. Over time, this has a cumulative effect. Audiences engage with less complex work, lose their ability to read it, and that leads to a preference for simpler work, and risk averse institutions respond accordingly. A vicious cycle. The net effect is that, in my shows, I feel audiences leaning in and engaging with complexity, but a pressure from ‘the market’ to simplify my work.
The show blends cabaret, club dancing, contemporary movement and Wiradjuri dance vocabulary. Was refusing a single performance language important to the work’s politics?
I once worked with an incredible couple, Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor. They taught me this approach of collaging different performance languages and told me something that’s informed me ever since: ‘you can use anything so long as it is the right thing’. Whilst you can use literally anything, you have to choose judiciously. It’s both a freedom and a challenge. In Daddy I mix and match different forms to do very specific things. Words convey story and meaning, but the choreography picks up and ‘says’ what I can’t put into words — the visceral ‘body emotion’. And the ‘workshop’ mode — for instance, teaching a ‘dance-class’ in how to pick up a guy on the dancefloor — is about getting audiences to experience something in their own body.
There is a fascinating tension in Daddy between craving intimacy and performing intimacy. Did making the show ever force you to question where the boundary between the two actually is?
My father left me at a young age. I internalised that abandonment as there being something wrong with me. I reckon that’s a familiar experience for many. In my case, I’ve sought to fill that cavity with affection and intimacy from men. That pursuit is a performance. Flirting, peacocking and seducing are a performance we learn, rehearse and enact. The applause we seek is the affirmation of someone wanting to fuck you. (By we I especially mean Gay Men, but I think this is true for many across the sexuality and gender spectrums). In Daddy, the audience become both the objects of and the conspirators in that pursuit. So there is a ‘meta-ness’ here, a kind of Russian Dolls scenario of performances happening within performances.
Audience participation can create connection, but also vulnerability and loss of control. What does inviting strangers directly into the performance unlock that traditional staging cannot?
I never set out to make participatory shows. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, yeah? I made my first work in a Fringe context in a hotel because I couldn’t afford a theatre, and a solo because I couldn’t afford another performer or crew. So when I needed the light turned on, I had to ask an audience member; when I wanted dialogue, it had to be one of them too. But I fell in love with the form. It creates space for play and, as adults, we have so few of those. It allows for conversation, where we can navigate disagreement and difference. As a performer, I love that it keeps me on my toes. An unexpected response means I need to improvise. And I love that.
Beneath the humour and glitter, the show seems haunted by exhaustion, the exhaustion of constantly searching to be seen, desired or recognised. Was that emotional fatigue the real starting point of the piece?
In a way, yes. One of my starting points was the Ancient Greek myth of Tantalus, condemned to an eternity of having satisfaction in front of him but always just out of reach. This is why the work drips with sugar, candy, sex and bodies served up for consumption, but satisfaction or resolution can never be found. There is a deep exhaustion in that. Colonial capitalism, manifested through marketing, social media algorithms and dating apps, runs on this never-ending search for an unavailable fulfilment. And trying to find belonging and safety in a never-ending search for love is a profoundly fatiguing exercise. At the post-coital end of the show, dripping in sweat and chocolate syrup, I am exhausted. Ready to do it all again the next night.