Daddy

“Daddy is a sweet feast with a deadly aftertaste.”

Photo of Joel Bray, by James Henry

(Trigger warning: contains reference to sexual abuse of children)

Last night I went to see Joel Bray’s performance piece, Daddy, with a good friend, Paola. As we walked to a bar after the show, she commented, apparently without irony, that there was something very sweet about the performer. She was in a position to say so, having licked icing sugar from his body at one point in the show. But she wasn’t talking about the taste of his white sugar-coated Wiradjuri skin, rather about the spirit that animated his performance – playful, humorous, generous, inviting the audience into a shared intimacy that was palpable by the end of the piece.

Despite the feather light touch he brought to them, the topics Bray addressed were not frothy. Early in the show, in fairy-story style, he told the tale of his Wiradjuri father’s life – a childhood shaped by repeated sexual abuse by a white stepfather, leading to an adult life marked by compulsive flight from one relationship to the next. This meant that Joel missed out on learning his indigenous culture (among other things) from his father and was left with a sense of emptiness that cannot be filled with any amount of sex with other men, any amount of excessive consumption, however sweet. His personal story opened onto discussion of the colonial legacy of abuse and discrimination toward indigenous people that continues to define Australian culture. Remarkably, this still left room for a joyful sense of celebration of the unique, dancing dessert that is Joel Bray, lavishly covered by willing audience volunteers in the very last part of the show with butter, hundreds and thousands, whipped cream, marshmallows, raspberry lollies, chocolate sauce and, naturally, a cherry on top – not a glacé one, but a fresh black cherry.

Central to the piece was a night-club style seduction scene. Joel prepared this with a confessional chat about his endless search for the man who will make him complete, the highs and lows of Grindr dating, the sweat and spit of daily weight-lifting sessions with his personal trainer to keep him looking good for “the one” (a regime that definitely seems to be working). Then he announced that this was the part of the show when he set his sights on someone; he shot a magnetic gaze and an outstretched arm through the crowd to pick out a tall, handsome Asian man on the other side of the room. The audience parted like the Red Sea to give Joel access to his target. He then proceeded to dance his way into this man’s arms, performing like a colour-blind bowerbird (there was a lot of pink in this show) on MDMA. 

Mature male bowerbird making sexual overtures to a juvenile male

The object of his attentions stood a bit stiffly, smiling self-consciously as Joel pressed his sweaty torso against him and gyrated in front of him. After an extended dance routine that took Joel down the diagonal length of the room, while the audience clapped along and cheered him on from either side, he paused. The pumping music and clapping died away. The man at the other end of the room continued to clap a little longer than everyone else, seeming slightly dissociated from his surroundings. Then Joel came close, and the other man followed his lead as Joel guided his arms and hands into embraces and caresses. These postures were sweetly affectionate, not sexual, and the other man appeared willing to go along with them, but his movements were awkward: he cooperated as a mannequin or a puppet cooperates… or as a child cooperates, when an adult who is in charge makes him do something that doesn’t come naturally. I started to feel queasy. The story of a child sexually abused by his stepfather was still hanging in the sugary, testosterone-laden air.

And then we were off into the next segment, which saw Joel struggling to pronounce phrases in Wiradjuri, learning them from an app on his phone, that supplied translations of sentences like, “Mate, I’m going to go home now,” and “Is it broken?” And the next, in which he failed an audition for a porn film because he didn’t look indigenous enough, despite having competently mastered the holding-spear-while-balancing-on-one-leg-pose.

In her eloquent review of Daddy, Allison Croggon describes Joel Bray as an artist of trauma: “I’m not sure that I’ve seen anybody explore trauma and dislocation with quite the same mixture of delicacy and brutal honesty.” She persuasively compares him to Rimbaud. But let’s face it, Rimbaud’s flowers of evil have never been known for making people laugh. Bray’s talent is to offer his audience the sugary treats of Australian trauma and leave us feeling, if somewhat sick to the stomach, also warmly connected and a little more clear-sighted, perhaps even a little more capable of moving beyond abusive patterns of the past. 

Photo: Bryony Jackson