Love has an illustrious circus background, which includes earning her stripes at Melbourne’s National Institute of Circus Arts, becoming a core part of the Circus Oz family, and touring the world with Le Soirée alomgside Finucane and Smith. Love has mad skills and she can do everything from tap dancing and jumping rope at the same time to gender-queer sideshow. She’s also devastatingly funny and not averse to getting her kit off – check out her gender and clothes swapping routine with her ex-wife Ursula Martinez on YouTube.
Love’s show – a mix of performance art, circus and theatre – was born from her own misbehaviour and finding out that she wasn’t the family’s only wild child. It turns out that Love’s great-great-great-great grandma Jess Mullins was convicted of theft (she nicked a john’s wallet) in the UK and was transported to Australia. Upon arrival, Mullins settled in Tasmania and amped up her infamy, being arrested 23 times for being drunk and disorderly.
Love found out about her notorious nan in what she describes as an “interesting accident”. Love’s uncle, a librarian and genealogist, had mapped out the family tree, and a week after Love hit the skids herself, he sent her an email with nothing other than the intriguing title “find yourself here” and a PDF of the family tree attached. While Love was half hoping for a metaphysical epiphany when she opened the attachment (that didn’t happen), the family tree did spark a process of self-discovery.
In the four subsequent years Love cleaned up her act, as well as digging up as much info about Mullins as she could find – interviewing historians, meeting up with authors who had written about convicts and connecting with extended family, including down in Tasmania. “It was a really freaky time,” Love says. “No one in my family is an alcoholic, they’re all heterosexual Christians, very clichéd middle class, perfect members of society. So, I grew up in this very straight environment. My parents don’t drink. They’ll have a glass of wine sometimes, but it’s so rare, and none of my sisters are alcoholics. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who was. So when I started finding out this information about [Mullins] at the same time I was discovering my own problems, it was difficult not to make a correlation between the two of us.”
BY MEG CRAWFORD
Venue: Emerald City – The Gingerbread House, Meat Market
Dates: September 15 – October 2 (except Mondays)
Times: 7pm, 8pm, 8.45pm, 9.45pm
Tickets: $20 – $25
