What’s the central premise of your show? Everyone is different – right down to how our brain fires – but what we hold in common is our humanity. I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s with “superpowers” like the supermarket meltdown, queer sensibilities and being gender unimpaired. Ultimately, Labelled challenges the backwards thinking of a generation waking up from practices like institutionalising young people just for being different.
What do you want the audience to take away from your show? As an audience member once said, “there is important stuff in this show about neuro-diversity and how not to be a dick in a nice way.” The world and our understanding of it are changing and we need to run with it, not fear it.
How does your show play with convention? It’s a mix of storytelling techniques, audio-visual, a ventriloquist sound-effect guru as a narrator and bad interpretative dance. I don’t do traditional “boom boom tish” punchlines but comedic storytelling and word-play aimed at smashing stereotypes about young people in irreverent ways. It aims to “punch-up not punch-down”, critiquing worldviews that hold binaries as more important than people’s experience.
Who/what are your biggest influences? The faces of Lucille Ball. I have spent my whole life trying to work out facial expressions that I could not process. My faces on stage are entirely the fault of watching too much I Love Lucy. The other one is the rambling critique style observation of Billy Connelly.
