This November, Melbourne’s Arts House presents a pair of live solo performance works that complement each other through a shared through-line of community, cultural ties and the connection developed through storytelling.
Working Class Clown and The Dark Matter of Usulal are two solo shows firmly anchored in identity and ancestry. While each takes a unique approach, the works are both tender, physical interpretations of how to channel history and grief into moving and innovative live performance.
Arts House is giving audiences the opportunity to experience both works, with a special $45 two-show ticket that gives access to two powerful performances in one.
Two shows, one ticket at Arts House – quick links
Seeking meaning in The Dark Matter of Usulal
Margaret J Harvey is a Torres Strait Islander artist entrusted with a cultural story that she ‘cannot own, master or finish,’ she says. Passed down after the death of her mother, Harvey inherited a Ait Koedal Clan story from senior cultural custodians, with one simple instruction: ‘Go and interpret’.
Having lived with the story for 17 years, Harvey is now taking her interpretation to the stage in The Dark Matter of Usulal by The Jo Ze spArks, opening 12 November.
‘For many years, I thought “interpretation” meant finding the story’s meaning: reading it, turning it over and arriving at an answer. The performance now begins somewhere else,’ says Harvey.
Blending live performance, sound and digital imagery, the work tells the story of WOMXN – a character who falls through the cracks of the world. It’s told in a stirring of hums, magic and black cockatoos, with Harvey also using motion capture of her own body to create opportunities for her live and recorded selves to meet and move together.
Harvey’s interpretation of her clan story draws on her relationships with family and cultural custodians, with those important teachings and voices helping her develop a keener understanding of Saibaian cosmology, the living world and connection to a sinking island.
The transformative power of grief in Working Class Clown
Beginning as an exploration of the highs and lows of public housing, Samoan-Australian artist Tommy Misa’s Working Class Clown evolved into a physical, interpretive look at grief and gentrification in the wake of his father’s passing.
With his loss leaving him unable to see a clear path forward in his work, Misa found that the process of developing this performance, which opens on 19 November, helped him refocus on what mattered most.
‘What pulled me back was joy,’ says Misa. ‘Not joy as an escape from grief, but joy as its most radical companion.’
He adds, ‘My father understood this better than anyone I have ever known. He had this profound ability to find the best laughter even amongst the pain, to walk into a room and make everyone in it feel held.’
In choosing to demonstrate joy, Misa incorporates elements of Samoan clowning and weaving, alongside movement, poetry and song that blend for a tender, physical take on how cities disregard those who fall through the cracks.
It forms a powerful companion to Harvey’s The Dark Matter of Usulal, with the special two-show ticket offer making it even easier for audiences to catch both this November.
