To create The Queer Woodchop, a wood-splintering subverted agricultural showcase merging smooth lumber, alternate show bags and the odd pink flaccid axe, experimental performance duo Pony Express sought out the experts.
But, on meeting Tasmanian husband-and-wife woodchoppers Dale and Amanda Beams, world champions in the heritage sport, the theatre group’s preconceptions were toppled.
The Queer Woodchop team of Solomon Frank, EJ Son and Ian Sinclair.Credit: Jessica Hromas
“A bunch of us had a lesson, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’m actually secretly surprisingly strong and I’m sure I’ll be good at this’,” says Ian Sinclair, one half of Pony Express. “Then I turned out to be terrible because, in the initial parts [of chopping], it’s less about sheer force and strength and more about being soft and relaxing your body and letting the blade do the work.
“I was really surprised at the choreography and zen-ness of woodchopping.”
The Queer Woodchop, one of 11 acts in Performance Space’s six-day Liveworks Festival at Carriageworks, is a tongue-in-cheek take on the decades-old competitive sport that has long pulled crowds at the Sydney Royal Easter Show and beyond.
Partly exploring ideas of competition and pageantry, Pony Express’s best-in-show tournament blends rural tradition with radical queer performance practice. Cast members wield axes and saws and wear special singlet and sash insignia, commentators explain the action, and respect for the sport’s practitioners, traditions and spectacle is instilled.
Photographer Jamie James. Credit: Jessica Hromas
“When you watch a wood chop, it has its own language and rules and props,” Sinclair says. “Some of them make sense to you and some don’t. Sometimes there’s a mirroring of that in experimental performance or live art and the way audiences experience those works.
“The Queer Woodchop definitely starts off as a competition as we know it and then begins to transform into something more collaborative and more sculptural.”
Elsewhere in the program, which stretches from dance to digital, theatre, talks and photographic works, photographer Jamie James is drawing from their immense personal archive chronicling Sydney’s queer and kink performance culture in the 1990s and 2000s. Collaborating with performer and dramaturge Victoria Spence, the work Breathing Space plumbs thousands of analog photos to create a no-holds-barred visual retrospective.
“It’s a hybrid performance piece of the photographic pulse of my 20s in approximately 700 images,” James says. “It all started when I was 21, and I started consciously making images in the queer, kink and fetish scenes in Sydney.
“That led me to social documentation more and more, of queer performance, underground culture and extreme body embodiment, and of a time around HIV and AIDS, around my own youth and around my passion for photography.”
Bringing together elements of film, narration, collaborative storytelling and audio clips of people and artists sharing stories of the time, Breathing Space is a journey into personal and shared history.
“There are other amazing queer photographers that have documented events and people,” James say. “William Yang and C. Moore Hardy and Mazz Image, but mainstream gay or Mardi Gras gay or drag, that was a bit more their area.
“Mine was much more underground fetish, early Hellfire Club days. There was a blend in performance around how you used your body and what we could get away with.
“Nothing seems really very extreme to me now, although I’m highly aware that most of what you’ll see in Breathing Space wouldn’t really be allowed. Risk assessments wouldn’t pass it. Body fluids, blood, hanging from ceilings, machinery, all that kind of stuff.
“I think it’s time now to honour that period in my own life and also to honour a lot of people who were there and part of it and many people who aren’t here now.”
Tommy Misa will be performing his show Working Class Clown at Liverworks. Credit: Jessica Hromas
Samoan/Australian writer, performer and artist Tommy Misa is also looking to the past with their work, Working Class Clown. Taking inspiration from Samoan clowning, weaving and architecture, the one-man show explores grief, the Samoan political satire tradition of Fale Aitu and the humour and wisdom of Tommy’s late father, Mefiposeta Misa.
“The show itself features a fictional clown called Pepe Toa, which means baby warrior, who is navigating a crumbling city, Sydney or any sort of global post-industrial city, whilst also navigating personal grief,” Misa says.
“Throughout the show, he’s observing and being present amongst these moments of downfall of empire.
“I lost my father a few years ago, and I was very angry and upset, and I was trying to place this anger somewhere. Blame, essentially. I was trying to figure out who to blame. With this show, I didn’t want to look at specific people, I wanted to look at power structures and, in a physical sense, how space can create these rules about how we grieve.
Misa’s show celebrates the Samoan political satire tradition of Fale Aitu and his father’s humour. Credit: Jessica Hromas
“My father was a clown, a real clown, as in he was a clown in the everyday sense. So, amongst it all, this show is a story of joy and grief and how they hold each other at simultaneous times. How you need one to have the other.”
Next year, Liveworks moves from annual to biennial, with the next live festival staged in 2027. Artistic director Kate Britton says funding plays a role in this decision, along with a drive to support artists in developing work and connecting them with opportunities at Australian and international venues and festivals.
“It seems like a great blindness in our sector at the moment, and quite often in policy as well, that people want the incredible, internationally touring-ready work for the main stages and the festivals, but they seem to forget where they actually come from in reality,” she says. “Even for artists that do end up working in a more, shall we say, commercial space, or discipline-oriented space, the playgrounds of experimental spaces are still a really big part of their formative years.
“They are often how they develop the skills to finally become the artists they are when the public gets to know them better.
“As an organisation, we are really trying to lean into this idea of what does happen to these works after Liveworks.”
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