Tag: performance

It must have been the summer of 2022 that I learned that the annual Nakba Day demonstration had been officially forbidden in Berlin. The global march commemorates the events of 1948 when Israeli forces drove at least 750,000 Palestinians into exile and killed more than 15,000, seizing control of 78% of historical Palestine. This genocidal war continues not only through physical violence, but also through an insidious manipulation of the very categories of thought in Palestine and around the world: that war is peace, that aggression is self-defence, that there were no people here when we arrived, but if there were then they deserved what they got.

Shocked by how just how blatantly fascistic the Berlin authorities were behaving, I shared the news with a couple of close friends. We shook our heads, muttered our disbelief – and moved on. There were projects to complete, applications for funding that would not write themselves, and, after all, we were burnt out. And afraid. The 2019 anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) law in Berlin had sent a clear message: solidarity with Palestinians could jeopardize any chance of receiving state funding or resources. In corona times, I had my first (and perhaps only) taste of arts funding. I had overblown fears that if I stuck my neck out for Palestine they would snatch this away. To my anxiety-ridden brain, this would mean not having enough income, which would in turn annihilate my dreams of obtaining permanent residence in Germany. I would be condemned to the Sisophysian grind of bi-annual visits to the immigration office to prove that I am a loyal, timid and self-sufficient worker-consumer in the glorious fatherland.

There was also pushback from outside. A friend invited me to contribute a few minutes to a video about the challenges facing freelance artists in Berlin, that would ultimately be shown to representatives of arts funding organs in Berlin. I said I wanted to talk about the anti-BDS law and its chilling effect on the entire ecosystem of free expression.

We sat in a park on the canal, and I remember the gentle sun on our faces as my friend turned to me with resignation and said “no, we tried already, we made so many representations, we’ve told them over and over again, they won’t listen.”

“But this is the only chance I will ever have to talk right to their faces.”

“My love, find something else that’s important. Say that instead.”

I twisted like a leaf. In my mind, these kinds of clashes get reduced to a simple question: “either they are the crazy ones, or I am crazy.” I become a child again faced with the authority vested in a parent of a teacher; seeing something unjust and being told to sit down and shut up unless I really want to find out what injustice means.

So when my friend held a phone up to my face and pressed record, I talked about something else. What it was, now, I have no idea. Because it was not something that needed to be said. Because the words have been buried in shame.

Which brings me to my drag character, Trish.

Trish arrived like a deranged thought in my mind a year and a half ago. Deranged, yet crystal clear: I would become a late 80s/early 90s Australian weatherwoman. The how and the why would come later – the aching necessity of Trish was beyond question.

Over the winter I developed Trish as a lucky member of the König drag scholarship which provided a crucial space to birth new personas through workshops in movement, voice, character development, props and costumes.

When it came time for my debut performance, I decided I would speak about the genocide in Gaza. I got push back from some colleagues, who looked at me aghast. “It won’t work,” they insisted. “What if someone freaks out? Then the whole show is over.”

The acquiescent child in me curled up in a corner.

“Okay, I will do something else.”

I felt sick inside. I felt like my guts were turning rotten. I could not imagine how I could possibly do a performance and not say the words burning in my mouth

I told the story to two dear ones, both of whom up-ended the “who is the crazy one” equation I had grown used to. Their arguments were sophisticated but can be summarized, simply, as “that’s bullshit.”

Later that night, as I washed dishes: a revelation. This was the show. The silencing itself. The silencing we do to ourselves and to others and how it hollows us out from the inside.

For those of you who missed it, the performance begins with Trish grinding through another weather forecast, before realizing that the emergent hole in the Ozone Layer (this being the late ’80s) is a metaphor for a vast absence that she is covering over: “that Australia (wink wink) is carrying out an act of….” Trish approaches the breach again and again but can’t make the leap, can’t say it, and is instead condemned to the brutalizing effects of her self-censorship “an abscess-like absence in the sky that will suck you up and destroy you because you can’t say a word that starts with G and ends with enocide.”

I suppose one useful thing about art, and drag in particular, is that its a kind of alchemy where you take the shit in your life – your failures, the blows you inflict on others, the blows you inflict on yourself – and transform it into something else: in my case, an awakening.

For two nights, in front of 300 people at Delphi Theatre, I made a solemn oath – via the psychic parasite of Trish – to forego silence as Israel’s 70+ years of violence takes an even more accelerated and monstrous form, while the German state punishes anyone seeking to stop this slaughter. And I asked that audience to look at their own silence, their own complicity, and say: No more. Never again. Together we discovered that we have to let go of the one illusion that holds us in place: that if you curl up into a ball, the storm will pass.