Biladurang

Having recently broken up with his long-term partner, Joel Bray had also just left the country he had called home for nearly a decade – Israel. A frenetic schedule of performances and creative residencies had resulted in Mr Bray finding himself in a different hotel room every week. And so he began to write. What began as scraps of scribbled words penned in hotel rooms, on trains and in cafés began to reveal themselves as ‘a love letter for home’.

He found himself asking, “Who am I? Who am I as a dancer, my body carved with years of dancing other people’s material? Who am I as a Wiradjuri man, so many years away from the beautiful Country of Western NSW that is my ancestral and spiritual home? Who am I as a gay man rapidly approaching middle-age and suddenly single? And since the writings were written in those strange nowhere-but-everywhere spaces that we call hotels, eerily familiar in their sameness, it made sense that the performance would also happen here.”

We are an audience of 14 (which is also the capacity), and after one of us is invited to knock on the door of a hotel room down the hall, we are enthusiastically greeted by a naked Mr Bray. After we give him a polite few minutes to put on some clothes (underwear and a robe), we are invited into his room, given our own robes to put on (over our clothes, relievedly), and a glass of sparkling wine. Little stools have been placed strategically around the room, and there is also the typical hotel room furniture – a couch and a chair.

It is, as Mr Bray writes, very typically everywhere-and-nowhere. And it is, as you might imagine, impossible to know who feels more uncomfortable in what is an incredibly intimate theatre – dominated by a huge bed, television, kitchenette, and an unseen (for now) bathroom.

And a performer who must be close to the peak of his powers.

For the next hour, Mr Bray presents a riveting, rites of passage contemplation through dance, spoken word, multimedia and silence. From the hilarious montage about a teenage boy saving up to purchase his first pornographic magazine, to the profound sharing of his sacred Wiradjuri story of the Biladurang (the platypus), Mr Bray is in complete control of his extraordinary physicalisation, and the tiniest of spaces between us and our increasingly less-reluctant complicity in his intimate confession.

The torque is in the exceptional way Mr Bray uses his increasingly less-exposed dancer’s physique to create almost unwatchable (possibly) self-inflicted violence, angst, pain, resistance, self-consciousness and self-awareness. We are never more than a fingertip away from him, but the power of his physicalisation, and the precise spatial relationship between dancer and space is astonishing. The floor-bound contortions of pain and confusion are interwoven with almost impossible full body extensions in the blink of an eye. Every square metre of our tiny theatre is utilised, and as we watch him take a bath, beamed into the room onto the television screen via a CCTV camera in the bathroom, Biladurang assumes a fraught, voyeuristic intention that is difficult to watch, but impossible to turn away from.

We danced with him, laughed with him, and some members of the audience shared their own origin stories. There is not a single member of the audience who had not fallen in love with our exceptionally honest, damaged, smiling, generous, welcoming and engaging new friend.

And as the now fully-clothed Joel puts on his shoes, picks up his backpack and, with a focussed, disdainful and frightened look back at us – a look that only those of us who have been left will recognise – leaves our little room and shuts the door on our beautiful, raw and important night together, I watched hearts break. I could see it on the faces of my fellow audience members.

I know mine did.

Geoffrey Williams

Photography by Pippa Samaya

Darwin Festival

9–26 August 2018

https://www.darwinfestival.org.au

Geoffrey is covering the 2018 Darwin Festival for Stage Whispers.

His earlier coverage includes a review of Chasing Smoke:
http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/chasing-smoke

An interview with the Artistic Director, Felix Preval:

http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/news/hard-won-success-afar

And a feature about the history of the Darwin Festival:

http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/news/festival-born

Geoffrey also spoke to award-winning Darwin-based writer Sandra Thibodeaux about the sell-out season of her play ‘A Smoke Social’:

http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/news/ghosts-farewell-smoke-social