Camp and Triptych open at Sydney WorldPride festival
The theatre program at WorldPride shows there are different ways of thinking about queer identity and expression.
The party finally has landed in Sydney. In case you’ve managed to avoid the media saturation and corporate messages, WorldPride is a floating international festival of LGBTQ culture and ideas, hosted by a different city every two years. This year is Sydney’s turn and there is a full program of exhibitions, performances, fair days and parties, as well as a three-day conference about the ongoing fight for equality and to end persecution of queer people in different parts of the world.
Elias Jamieson Brown’s play Camp, at the Seymour Centre, tells the story of gay and lesbian activism in Australia in the early 1970s when homosexuality was a criminal offence. Camp was one of the first public advocacy groups for law reform and a vital meeting place for often isolated people. Early in the play, a copy of The Australian is waved around: a story in this newspaper in 1970 about the establishment of Camp rallied many to the cause. The story focuses on the women in the group, and while the characters have been fictionalised their stories are based on lived experience.
There’s a gay mother desperate to see her children. A woman dishonourably discharged from the air force. And a young woman traumatised by years of so-called conversion therapy at Sydney’s notorious Chelmsford Private Hospital, including electroconvulsive shocks and deep sleep therapy. (The reminder of such barbarism is timely: Sydney independent MP Alex Greenwich last week won bipartisan support for legislation to ban gay conversion practices in NSW.)
Director Kate Gaul deftly moves the action through time so that we see these characters in their prime as young activists, and later in life as they reflect on the past. Some are brave and politically fierce when young; others reveal their courage and quiet resilience with the passing of years.
Simply and effectively staged, Camp recalls the passion and struggle that made events like WorldPride possible. When the names of the 78-ers – those who marched in the first Mardi Gras in 1978 – are read aloud, you want to stand and cheer.
British painter Francis Bacon evidently has a hold on the theatrical imagination. The Sydney Festival in 2005 presented Three Furies by Stephen Sewell, a darkly poetic cabaret about Bacon and his lover George Dyer.
In Triptych, experimental dance-maker Phillip Adams draws on motifs from Bacon’s life and paintings: the wrestling male figures, the trapezoid structures, the circles of carpet, the cross-dressing, and the erotically charged atmosphere with a presentiment or memory of violence.
The performance is already under way when the audience enters the exquisite small venue, Phoenix Central Park. Two sets of male couples lie on the floor, clinging to each other and shuddering, more out of desperation than sexual pleasure.
Later they dress themselves in gold outfits, dresses and high heels (the costumes are by Toni Maticevski) and strike poses as they deliver lines of dialogue as if in a camp movie. A filmed, sexually explicit sequence gives a new meaning to the term splatter painting. Then a woman arrives in the uniform of a parcel courier, settles herself into a sling, and reads aloud from a book of cultural criticism, Queer Theatre by Stefan Brecht.
The audience is seated around the performance area, so it’s possible to watch one’s fellow patrons as they observe the goings-on.
The sensations crush together: arousal, alienation, disgust, ennui. Sexuality is here presented as performance, a scene with its own codes of dress and behaviour, indifferent to the outside world.
Camp, by Elias Jamieson Brown. Siren Theatre Co. Seymour Centre, Sydney, February 19. Tickets: $39-$49. Bookings: online. Duration: 90min, no interval. Until March 4.
Triptych, by Phillip Adams. BalletLab. Phoenix Central Park, Sydney, February 16. Tickets by ballot (allocation exhausted). Duration: 60min, no interval. Until February 25; then at FRAME Biennial of Dance, tickets $10-$35, Temperance Hall, South Melbourne, March 15-18. .