THEATRE
DADDY ★★★★
Midsumma / Arts Centre Melbourne, until Feb 8
Does performance art get more powerful and intimate than Joel Bray's Daddy? It's a show where the artist invites the audience to lick icing sugar from his body – which might feel like a gimmick if this soul-baring erotic odyssey weren't matched by a deeply personal, and intensely political, exploration of gay and Aboriginal identities.
Combining dance, theatre and audience participation, Daddy begins with Bray reclining atop a plinth ringed by pink fairy floss.
Joel Bray in Daddy.Credit:Bryony Jackson
Slowly the sculpture comes to life; object transforms into subject. A series of tableaux vivants are created with audience volunteers. No one constructs identity alone, Bray seems to be saying, and nor do these fantasy scenes spring from a vacuum.
This artist embodies a confluence of Oxford St and Aboriginality, of mainstream gay culture and the oldest living culture on earth. Through puppet-like dance and revealing monologue, Bray offers a playful critique of the gay scene's obsession with youth, beauty, casual hook-ups and untrammelled pleasure – a quest for freedom that perhaps carries its own confining sense of tribalism.
But the "daddy issues" behind the show arrive most poignantly on the issue of Aboriginal identity.
The blond, pale-skinned Bray admits to looking "Swedish", though he is a Wiradjuri man on his father's side. His mob's language, dance, traditions and cultural knowledge weren't transmitted to him as a child, and a sense of loss drives Bray's adult attempts to reconnect.
Being light-skinned and identifying as Aboriginal puts Bray on the front line of an ugly culture war. That's tackled head-on in (of all things) a porn audition, where he doesn't get the part because he doesn't look Indigenous enough.
Bray's response – that the inheritors of a genocidal colonial project have no business defining Aboriginal identity – stills the room with its anguished and ferocious eloquence, before the artist reveals a fleeting memory of cultural connection with his father .
It's a quiet, moving moment before camp excess reasserts itself. Bray, as Queen of the Dessert, is showered with hundreds and thousands, whipped cream, marshmallows and a cherry on top.
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