Perth’s festival season has come to a close and the final shows of Perth Festival have wrapped up. The inaugural year of Anna Reece’s role as Artistic Director has brought us theatre, light shows, dance, music, and reinvigorated venues across Perth. One of these venues was Perth Town Hall, rebranded as The Embassy and turned into a speakeasy-style music hall where the party continued late into the night. The action was not all DJs and R&B singers, however, as on the third Saturday of the season Perth Festival treated us to a dance party to make us think.
Tristan Meecham is a performer and theatre-maker, based in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, who made the closing address for Perth Festival’s Summit – this year’s panel and discussion event previously known as the Day of Ideas. His show HEAVY CROSS was “part manifesto, part performance lecture, part dance floor beginnings” and in the increasingly conservative world we are entering into served as a reminder of the importance of respecting and supporting each other.
Tristan Meecham. Photography by Apurva Gupta.
The lecture part of Tristan’s performance faced discrimination head on, challenging us to remember that things don’t get better unless we fight for them, and that fighting can come in many guises, including that of dance (insert jazz hands here). As co-Artistic Director of theatre company All the Queens Men, Tristan has created shows celebrating diversity across the country and his work, according to his bio, facilitates creative frameworks that enable social change.
I had the opportunity to ask Tristan about his performance after he returned to Brisbane, including what this buzzword-filled phrase meant to him and how HEAVY CROSS fit into it.
“Over the last decade at All The Queens Men, I have presented and produced LGBTIQ+ Elders Dance Club and The Coming Back Out Ball around Australia for thousands of LGBTIQ+ elders. These projects demonstrate a practical way to build community through art and HEAVY CROSS provided an opportunity to reflect on themes that have inspired this long-term commitment to my community practice. It also provided a chance to reflect on the wild times we are in and try and make some sense of what we can do next…”
Photography by Apurva Gupta.
The role of dance in making connections was not just espoused in Tristan’s show but actually demonstrated in multiple dance breaks. Local dancers from Perth Moves filtered into the audience and onto the stage for a dance party, encouraging audience members to join them. Tristan and long-time collaborator Willoh Weiland have hit on the formula for getting a nervous audience up on their feet quickly. It was much easier to join an existing group of hired dancers as they bopped along unchoreographed, than be the first to step up onto an empty dance floor. In some moments more than half of the audience was out of their beanbags and grooving along for one song and returning to their seats with a renewed sense of community. The inclusion of the dancers and the dance breaks elevated HEAVY CROSS to more than just a lecture, it put theory into practice.
“The lecture was about how we use Dance to move through times of trouble – and it also connected with All The Queens Men’s ongoing social dance events. We wanted people listening to also feel movement of different times – The Coolbaroo Club, The Disco, and our very own LGBTIQ+ elder dance club. It was a way to unite the experiences of people across time and place.”
Photography by Apurva Gupta.
HEAVY CROSS was not all lighthearted fun, however, as Tristan’s speech did not shy away from both the recent rise of conservatism and also the historical discrimination of the very spot we met on.
In the first panel of Summit earlier that afternoon we heard from Barbara Hostalek, a playwright and poet whose grandmother Helena Murphy (nee Clarke) founded the Coolbaroo Club in 1947. In a time when Aboriginal people were limited by harsh restrictions and excluded from the central city of Perth, the Coolbaroo Club, (just outside the exclusion zone) existed as a safe haven for people of all races, black and white, as signified by the coolbaroo, the Yamatji word for magpie. In 1954 the prohibitions were finally lifted and the Coolbaroo Club threw a ball in the Perth Town Hall to celebrate.
Tristan drew on this history to remind us of the importance of supporting each other and celebrating each other’s differences:
“History shows us that minorities have and will continue to be persecuted. The terrifying tipping point in America reveals this isn’t about to change anytime soon – for many it is getting worse. The revelation of different histories showcases histories of exclusion – felt by many. So to combat this overwhelming feeling of dread, it’s helpful to consider our communal collectiveness, rather than our individual identity.”
Photography by Apurva Gupta.
The topic of that first panel was ‘Joy as Resistance,’ and had an array of speakers discussing how historically and personally the despair of living under oppression and repeat discrimination could be alleviated by finding joy, and how finding joy under such conditions amounted to a form of resistance in itself.
“Joy has always been the queer way – dancing through despair, the political often ending in a party and the party always being political etc. Joy is a way to claim autonomy when everything else around you is bunkering down with fascism and conservatism. “
This idea can be traced through this year’s Perth Festival program right through to A Night Out West in this same venue, where we listened to First Nations artists perform poetry, country music, and R&B, celebrating their art and their community on the same land that two generations ago they required permits to enter.
Tristan’s next big work is another collaboration with Willoh, a large-scale theatrical production called CAKE. If it is anything like HEAVY CROSS it will be simultaneously raw, critical, and uplifting, and perhaps an opportunity to dance until the world is a little bit brighter.