your body is a wasteland, here there and everywhere
CW: chronic pain, suicide ideation, suicidality, death, deep and meaningful ramblings about craft and process
There’s an article I’ve had sitting in my Twitter bookmarks for a few years now. It’s by Anna Borges, and it’s called “I am not always very attached to being alive”. You should read it, if you can; I’ve had it bookmarked for so long cause I feel like it settles something inside me, appeals to some sense of placement and order that calms my thoughts.
The article, if you’ve not read it, talks about passive suicide ideation. It describes the concept as sitting in an ocean. Some days the sea is calm, and you’re fine. Other days, it’s tumultuous, and you’re being dragged under, but wherever you go, you’re still in that ocean, and you’re still dealing with it.
I feel that often. The constant rolling of oblivion, a weight in the pit of my chest. It never truly goes away.
I’m bringing this up, in an article about a show I created, to give you some context. Existence is hard when your life is tinged with pain, and all too often that sea is so stormy. L’appel du vide. The endless, existential what if?
Back in 2021 I was having a shit time. Well, frankly, I’ve been having a shit time since I was about eleven, when my body decided one day that it would start breaking down, but I was having an especially shit time then. I’d broken my leg, I was having a lot of teeth issues, everything was bad. Several other health things decided to rear their ugly heads at the same time and things were… not good.
It’s funny, the life of a performer. At 2am one night you’re about half an hour away from taking your own life due to pain, and then seven hours later you’ve got yourself on antibiotics and the good drugs, and you’re on Cuba St performing detective improv to a crowd.
What would have happened had I tried — I don’t know — but it’s still there in the back of my mind. It is so very hard to articulate the experience of living with this kind of pain, in this kind of body, day in and day out, to those who haven’t experienced it.
I got my teeth fixed. I’m on new meds. The sea swells sometimes, but is very rarely that deep. Life goes on.
Your Body is a Wasteland took root on one of those dark days. I might have spent the entire day trying to keep food down, or maybe my chronic back pain had been playing up. Maybe I’d popped an ovarian cyst and was half out of my mind on codeine. Regardless, the idea came to me. How do you articulate the experience of living in a body this unpredictable and an experience this lonely?
You create the end of the world.
What happens when your world ends (you develop a condition or disorder that sets you apart from others) and you just have to… keep going?
It might be an isolating or solo journey (your condition might be such that it’s hard to talk about & hard to live with) and the apocalypse could throw up anything in your path (unpredictable medical scares).
But still, you walk. You press on. No matter how tough it gets.
With those ideas in mind, I started creating this work.
I started this show off as epistolary. I’d recently finished working on ROUGH NIGHT/Thank You To All My Voyeurs, which were both as-live digital pieces of theatre told through social media, about a bad night at a birthday party. I wanted to continue the digital theatre vein, and wanted to give audiences the chance to wander through their own wasteland, a digital landscape that grew across the span of three weeks, where they could return to continue their walk at their leisure.
The show consisted of pictures, videos, audio and letters. Within it, I explored medical misogyny, chronic pain, capitalist medicine, food intolerance, lack of control over one’s own body, and loneliness — the deep-seated discomfort I had with my own existence, despite being surrounded by people who loved me; and my seeming inability to discuss how I felt.
Pulling on references from things such as Fallout, The Road, Station Eleven, My Chemical Romance’s album Danger Days, and other apocalypse media, I distilled the show down to one specific thread: YBIAW would be a story about surviving.
Surviving through support from others, but also about pushing through and making it on your own volition, despite all the odds being against you. The main character, The Wanderer, would not die at the end, despite my own occasional glances in that direction. She would make it through.
(There was… a lot… of My Chemical Romance-inspired imagery in this show. Sue me. They were the first album I ever bought.)
And so, I wrote the show for digital. I created the media. I would play the Wanderer — as it was, in itself, my story, and I brought on the lovely Hamish Boyle (as Tom) and Bethany Miller (as Nina). Tom and Nina provided a lighter foil to The Wanderer’s constant cynicism, and gave the audience breathing space. They also, most importantly, showed the audience that there was a path out of the darkness — a way out for the Wanderer.
It went well! I ran the show at Brighton, Edinburgh, Melbourne & NZ Fringe, as well as DAFT (now DAT Fest). Though turnout wasn’t huge, the people that partook in the show really felt it spoke to them, and it got excellent reviews.
And so began the drive to put it on stage.
Live performance has always been my heart. I adore digital theatre and the ability it has to build worlds, but there’s no better feeling than live performance. YBIAW would work on stage, but it would need some… shaping.
After the abrupt realisation that I would have to have a show to put on at BATS within two and a half months, we sat down and did some casting. Finn McCauley would be our Wanderer, Hamish would return as Tom, and the rest of the roles would be populated by actors from our auditions who had vocal strength and skill.
It was fine. It would be fine.
Oh gods, what an absolute insane undertaking.
The thing about making a digital show live is that I wanted to keep the aesthetic of the digital work within it. Thus, that meant building interstitials, music, video and design elements that would be projected/played during the show. It took — let me be clear — nearly a full month. In these situations, most people would just hire an editor.
However, this is professional theatre, baby. If we’re not all in an insane degree of burnout constantly then we’re not living. (Plus, I don’t cost money.)
Early June, I’d cast the show, and we were moving into pre-production. We’d started rehearsals, and it was all go.
And then Mon died.
It’s funny — well, it’s not funny, really. It’s absolute grim fucking irony to be struggling a bit yourself and doing a show about the depths of illness & depression, about dragging yourself through and surviving no matter what it takes-
When someone you love hasn’t.
I lay under my duvet for a week and played Civ V. I don’t think I cried much. There’s no right way to grieve but I certainly didn’t think I was doing it right. When people are crying around you and you can’t, it does feel like you’re failing.
I don’t know. I just know that there’s a silence these days, and sometimes it’s unbearable. Every moment of creating this show since had that tinge.
The rain came and so it continued.
We press on.
We shot photography, filmed on location (thanks Troy J Malcolm for the filming!), recorded in a studio at Matrix Digital, ADR’d in my “home studio” (my bedroom, talking into a shotgun mic in a box), built show files and designed imagery. I underscored our major scenes using music I composed, and spent way too long rendering out video files. In total, it probably took about 60+ hours of editing (not to mentioned recording/shooting) to build the entire show.
Rehearsals were a dream. Working one-on-one with an actor is an experience I’d recommend to anyone, and Finn was just the best to work with due to her skill and competency. We needed far fewer rehearsals than I had plotted in the end, which was also great. Hamish arrived from Auckland, and we slotted him into the show, which went well as well.
Pack-in was a technical hell, and we had 10000 pitfalls with tech during the season, but it happened. We made it. My exercise in technical lunacy hit the theatre, ran five excellent shows, and then it was over.
I have several chronic health conditions. I will be sick and I will be in pain every day for the rest of my life. Those two clauses are non-negotiable, and unchanging.
Sometimes the sea is so, so stormy.
But it continues. There’s not much I can do about that, even though I’ve explored and talked about it in this work, which I suppose is cathartic.
What this show has given me really is community.
YBIAW has a lot of tendrils, a lot of things I was trying to get across, but the main one was that there are those out there who understand. Despite how dark it feels and how alone you are, there’s people out there who will get it, and who will hold your hand in the night.
I noticed that during the season. For every person who said nice things about the tech or the writing, there were even more who came up to me and talked to me about how they felt listened to or understood.
Having something that sets you outside the norm of life experience can be so, so isolating; whether that’s a mental illness, a disability, a chronic health condition, gender dysphoria — those things and more.
I guess during this season I just recognised how many people I know live with that experience. I’ve felt so alone, so often. Now I feel less.
Is that the appropriate summation of two years of artistic process and burnout? I don’t know. I just know that it’s nice that I said some things and people listened, that they found some hope within my words, and that they felt I understood enough to share it with me.
Where does this show go now? I don’t know. We might tour it. I might write increasingly ludicrous fanfiction about the world behind it (I do that for most of the shows I write). It might just go into my Google Drive archive, along with 50gb of video footage. I don’t know.
But there’s time for all these things.
To Finn, who gave so much to The Wanderer, who was a constant source of wit, cleverness and talent, and gave my words life.
To Hamish, who is so often my anchor in stormy seas.
We’ve made it. We’re here. We’ve survived.
We press on.
