culture
A sex worker and a queer carnie meet at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Jess Love’s new solo work Notorious Strumpet & Dangerous Girl, appearing at Fringe World this year. Love uses her incredible circus skills previously featured in the Fringe World favourite La Soiree to tell the story of discovering her convict ancestry and a transformative connection to her great-great-great-greatgrandmother. Love caught up with OUTinPerth to have a chat about the show. Notorious Strumpet & Dangerous Girl seems to explore some very intimate content - does this draw from personal experience? Yes, very much so. The show is completely autobiographical. I tell the most intimate experiences of my life, some very funny, some very dark and some sad. The show delves deep into my soul, my obsessions and my past.
Trevor Jones is one of the busiest men in show business, juggling many different commitments. He’s bringing his cabaret show Kollision to Perth for the Fringe Festival. OUTinPerth caught up with the musical mischief maker while he was in town working as the Music Director on the musical Avenue Q . The last time Jones was performing downstairs at The Maj was five years ago, when he presented a comical show which saw him having live Grindr chats on stage. This will be your first trip to Fringe World. It’ll be my first time at Fringe but my fourth time performing downstairs at The Maj. It’s amazing how people in Perth have gotten behind Fringe World, it’s just enormous. It’s a huge thing now – people in Perth go and see Fringe shows. Your show has been described as ‘Miley meets Mozart’, how did the show come about? I came up with the idea for Kollison when I found myself in one day going from an opera rehearsal, to a cabaret
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OUTinPerth
January 2017
You’ve performed in some high intensity shows in the past, like La Soiree. How do you incorporate your circus training to a performance like this? That is harder to explain! I am a theatre maker and a performance artist but I am also an acrobat. It is who I am and how I identify, just like being queer or bi-sexual is. So it is actually almost impossible for me to make work without using the circus skills I have. For an explanation of how they are woven throughout the show well, you’ll just have to come and see for yourself. There are over 100+ shows that we found in the Fringe guide that feature openly LGBTIQ+ artists - do you think there is an affinity between our community and these festivals? Of course there is! You can’t turn a corner in a theatre festival without bumping into one of us… we’re everywhere, like a rainbow plague. As the brilliant Gerry Connolly explains while addressing an audience as The Queen; “Queens have always patronised the arts and the arts have always relied on the support of queens.”
performance, to a rock ‘n roll piano bar. I was looking at my life and thinking ‘This is insane! Most people stick to one musical genre. I thought to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if I turned up to of those events and got it wrong’. What would happen if I turned up to the opera rehearsal with my rock n’ roll hat on? That’s where the idea for the show came from. The idea of all these musical world’s colliding. I was writing the show around the time that Miley Cyrus was having a big hit with Wrecking Ball and the image of coming in on a wrecking ball and mashing up all these musical genres was really appealing. We had a lot of fun doing the photo shoot. I do love it when you find those odd obscure tracks when you find artists recording outside of their usual genre, like when Madonna covers alt.country artist Vic Chesnutt. There’s a great Michael Bolton one where he sings Nessun Dorma, he realsed a whole album of tenor arias, its quite something. I’m not sure what it is, but it is something.
You explore your family history in the show, how have new discoveries shaped the work? Everything shapes my work and I started writing this show in 2011 so that was quite a journey of discovery. Not only for the show but for me personally. I married my girlfriend, I divorced my wife, I was diagnosed with a mental illness, I went into remission from the illness, I moved to the other side of the world, I lost family, I gained friends, I took way too many drugs and I ended up sober. I found my convict ancestry and I finally felt like I belonged. What Perth Fringe Festival shows are you looking forward to? December has left me a little exhausted and I haven’t really had a chance to explore the program but I am definitely looking forward to The Little Death Club, because I’m in it and I get to take my clothes off onstage and I love doing that so…. Notorious Strumpet & Dangerous Girl will be at the Black Flamingo in Fringe World’s Pleasure Garden from January 31st to February 4th. Tickets available from fringeworld.com.au
Are you doing a second show while you’re in town? ‘Show’ is probably too strong a word, we’re doing a rock n roll piano bar, like the piano bars in New York. Where people can make requests, and we’ll have lots of guest artists passing through. It’s all about sitting back and relaxing on a Saturday night, singing along and throwing out some requests. Trevor Jones’ Kollision is Downstairs at The Maj from January 21st. Tickets are available at www.fringeworld.com Graeme Watson