Many of us take stock of our lives as our thirtieth birthday’s approach. Twenty-nine-year-old writer Ingrid Taylor-Moss is no different, but, unlike most of us, she’s turned her musings on ‘thirtyhood’ into art.
Daze to Thirty, a theatre piece that is neither quite a play nor a monologue, will debut at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival.
“It’s true of 30 and 35 and 40,” says Taylor-Moss. “Even 25 is a little post in your life where you ask, ‘What am I doing? What is going on? Who are these people around me? What is this occupation I’ve found myself in?’ It’s a moment when we reflect on that.”
Taylor-Moss grew up in small-town Victoria and studied international relations before detouring toward Melbourne’s National Theatre Drama School. She currently splits her time between managing a wine bar, drawing up blueprints for a novel, tentatively titled Catatumbo, and rehearsing Daze to Thirty. It’s not a lifestyle that leaves her with much idle time.
“I was like, ‘Okay, by the time I’m 30, what would I like to achieve with my life?’” says Taylor-Moss. “‘What don’t I like about it and what do I like about it?’ Time and time again, it kept coming back to issues of communication. I wasn’t being strong enough with how I wanted to represent myself, so I was getting frustrated with how people were seeing me.”
Working with wine isn’t just a way of paying the bills for Taylor-Moss – it’s a way of bringing people together. Taylor-Moss has toured wine-producing regions in Europe and North and South America, and her connoisseurship works its way into Daze to Thirty, where a bottle of Joshua Cooper Chardonnay features as a prop.
“I love it, because I just tell stories about wine all day,” says Taylor-Moss of her job. I like the massive contrast: wine is farming, and you meet a lot of winemakers who are chilled out, down-to-earth dudes. Then you go into a restaurant and the people who are talking about the wines are the most anal-retentive, strung-out dudes.
Daze to Thirty has evolved during writing, and so has Taylor-Moss’s perspective on her approaching birthday. Cutting Daze to Thirty down from a broad semi-autobiography to a sleek 50-minute piece posed a challenge. Fifty minutes, Taylor-Moss calculates, is about as long as an audience can pay attention to a single person on a stage, absent any significant gimmickry.
This is also one of Taylor-Moss’s first major non-collaborative works. “I wouldn’t call [Daze to Thirty] a drama or a comedy or anything like that,” says Taylor-Moss. “Imagine a documentary crossed with a music video, maybe, with some speech thrown in. I don’t think you’ll have seen a lot of things quite like it.”
Communication and miscommunication are recurring themes in Taylor-Moss’s work. Working in hospitality has given her ample opportunity to observe people half-listening to others around them. She’s also concerned about the online echo chambers created by curated news feeds. She goes out of her way to pursue a somewhat omnivorous news diet. “The other day, I was watching all this Fox News stuff,” says Taylor-Moss. “They were hideous – they were disgusting, they were misogynistic and racist, and I was very offended. But I still need to see those things, because that’s what they’re seeing. We can’t have an argument if we’re not seeing the same things.”
Taylor-Moss hopes that Daze to Thirty will prompt Melburnians to regard their lives with fresh eyes, and ask if they’re really happy with where they are. After that, she plans to take the show on the road to Perth and across Australia, all the while turning 30 in April, 2019.
