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Naarm-based Joel Bray is a proud Wiradjuri dancer and performance-maker who performed with European companies and choreographers and with CHUNKY MOVE. Joel’s intimate dance-theatre encounters in unorthodox spaces spring from his Wiradjuri heritage, and use humour to engage audiences in rituals about sex, history, trauma and healing.
Joel’s works - Biladurang, Dharawungara, Daddy, Considerable Sexual License and I Liked It, BUT - have toured to the Brisbane, Sydney, Darwin, Midsumma, Auckland, LiveWorks and Dance Massive Festivals and Arts Centre Melbourne. Joel was the 2019 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow, a New Breed choreographer with Sydney Dance Company and is Chunky Move’s inaugural Choreographer-in-Residence.
Considerable Sexual License — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Considerable Sexual License — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Considerable Sexual License — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Considerable Sexual License — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Daddy — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Daddy — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Daddy — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Daddy — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
Daddy — Photo credit Bryony Jackson
To me, Camp is a particular style or way of making work. And that could be anything. It could be theatre, it could be fashion, it could be the way you decorate a room, it could be dance, it could be visual art.
But it’s an approach that is particularly attached to the queer community and queer history, I guess. And like any style that’s handed down from one generation to generation, it kind of has its own rules and its own logic. And as queer artists and as artists w ho work with camp, I think we work with it almost, like, subconsciously. I would be hard - pressed to tell you exactly what it is that I’m doing that’s camp but when I step back and look at what I’m doing, it’s like, ‘oh yeah, that’s camp’.
Camp’s full of innuendo, right? It comes from that time when just being ourselves was very dangerous. And not only was it illegal, and there were times punished in really quite horrible ways if you were found out to be queer. So, this whole culture developed which coded everything, and everything was with innuendo and code.
And even though, thankfully, most of us, we’re not in that situation – though, that’s not entirely true. There’s still a lot of people who are in danger, especially in regional and remote areas of Australia. But we still love to play with that coding and re - using words to suggest at things. Rupaul’s Drag Race is just that. From beginning to end it’s just puns.
So, I think, in a way, we continue that, because it’s our culture. But it’s also a way of remembering and honouring that history and those people who came before us.
In my own work, I work a lot with, like, what are called homoerotic tropes. So these images that in the gay community are considered these kind of like archetypes of beauty or of attraction. So, when people walk in on the first scene of my show called Daddy, I am kind of dressed like Cupid. And I’m floating on a cloud of fairy floss, or what looks like fairy floss, and it’s this allusion to other artists. People like Pierre Et Gilles, who are this amazing couple - couple in art as well as life partners, they’re French - and one of them takes these beautiful photos of these idealised youths. And the other paints on the photos and makes these beautiful borders around them. So that’s one image, and then later I dress up as a sailor boy - same thing, referencing Pierre Et Gilles photography.
And even when I have to make practical decisions when I’m making my work, I’ll often reach for camp as a toolkit. So, for instance, in Daddy I think one of the saddest scenes is where I sit down with my phone in front of the audience and I try and teach myself my Wiradjuri language from this app that is like... you know, you can get apps where you can learn French or German. So there’s also one where you can learn Wiradjuri. And it’s sad because I shouldn’t have to be doing that, right? I should’ve been able to learn it from my father or my father’s father but our language was beaten out of us.
But even the choices of the phrases I used were phrases like, ‘do you come here often?’ or ‘can I go home with you?’ or ‘I miss you?’. So even the choices of phrases are these kind of delicate nods to gay pickup culture, or things we might say in the bar or things we might say to a lover.
So yeah, it’s constantly threaded through.
I stumbled on this mode of performance almost by chance. I was making my first work, Biladurang, for the fringe festival back in like 2017... and I wanted the work to be set in a hotel room. And then someone said to me ‘why don’t you do it in a hotel room?’. And I was like, ‘genius’.
And for a whole bunch of very basic reasons around budget and stuff, that made sense at the time. But then, once I was in the hotel room quite intimately with the audience it felt weird, or felt very artificial to then pretend that I was on a stage and to not interact with them when they were literally in arms reach.
And I discovered that I actually really relish that level of interaction with the audience and the ability to have conversation and for them to start to have some agency over what happens. So for them to be able to step in and almost co-storytell or co-decide what’s going to happen.
And that got me interested in the idea of ritual and ceremony. So traditional Aboriginal dance, which was how I came to dance was through doing Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander dancing, that dance was always a part of ceremony or a part of corroboree. In ceremony, or in a ritual, there is no such thing as a passive audience. Even witnessing is a form of participation. And why that’s beautiful is because it means everyone in the space is required. Everyone’s presence is required for this thing to happen.
And if you look at the roots of Western performance that’s the same. Ancient Greek theatre was ritual. But over time what happened in Europe, this divide came and the performer started having to do all of the work and having all of the glory and the audience became mere passive consumers of the work. And, actually, that’s the aberration.
When you look at performance and ritual all across the world, the work that I make is the more common, it’s actually the more truthful work in many ways.
And then there’s this crossover with queer culture, because the queer community congregate in dance floors and in clubs which are hyper-interactive performances. You think of drag, you think of burlesque, or you think of cabaret, or you think of all of the artforms that we specialised in as queer community... they’re highly interactive. In fact, they even invite the audience to kind of screw with you. And to challenge you and to throw you curve balls, and how you deal with that, with humour or grace, is a part of your skill as a performer.
So, I feel like my work is a continuation of and an intersection of those two great traditions of Wiradjuri ceremony and queer dance floor culture.
Yes, I think that’s something that I do in my work. And I do it with my audience as well, I give them a hard time. And I give them the opportunity to give me a hard time, as well. Which is kind of fun.
Audiences don’t necessarily want to participate. I often see them creep into my works, and you can see them gingerly kind of thinking ‘please don’t come to me, please don’t come to me’ and playing with that awkwardness and playing with that fear.
And then continuing to be kind to the audience and continuing to care for them and show them that I have their safety as my first priority allows them to go on this little journey with me from fear to actually like being a kid again and being able to be playful. You know, Daddy finishes with the scene of everyone turning me into a big dessert. I get covered in hundreds and thousands and marshmallows and raspberries and whipped cream and chocolate syrup... and the journey that takes over an hour where they crept into the space to them gleefully elbowing each other out of the way to cover me in lollies... that’s beautiful, that’s really gorgeous.
Yes, I want my works to be spaces in which we can have some tough conversations around tough issues: around colonisation, around child sexual assault - I’ve made work that talks about the loss of culture, the desecration of country... but, actually, the first clause in my contract with my audience is to entertain. Is to delight. Now that isn’t always to please. A horror film is entertaining, right?
But my first clause is that you’ve come here for a good time. I actually think that’s pretty queer, that’s pretty camp. So I keep that always in the front of my mind, that this needs to be engaging and entertaining and it needs to be, like, virtuosic, and it needs to be a good time... whatever that means in that particular moment.
And once I’ve satisfied that condition, once I’ve fulfilled that obligation to my audience then I can talk with them about these tough issues. So yes, my work is constantly caring for my audience and challenging them at the same time.
Camp is the celebration of all those things that you get bullied at school for. At school, I was given such a hard time for the way I talked, and for the way my wrist was limp, and for the way I walked and for my interest in art and music and culture.
And then I left school and I joined my community and found a whole bunch of people that walked, talked and sounded like me. And then we all got to celebrate all of those things together and now I get to make art out of it.
And that’s awesome, I reckon. So, I reckon camp is also a symbol of hope for someone living in a world where you’re not being accepted.
Chiara (she/her) is a queer artist working on Wurundjeri and Kaurna land.
She works as a performer, writer, and poet. Chiara is currently a co-producer of Melbourne’s Slamalamadingdong and producing her own online series #thatswhatshesaidsunday. As an actor she has worked with Windmill Theatre Company, State Theatre Company South Australia, Freerange Theatrix, Foul play and Act Now. She has been selected as the Adelaide City Library Poet in Residence and has performed at the Australian National Poetry Slam. She has recently been published in the anthology Spitting Teeth.
She performs in drag as Bruno Salsicce.
Hiccup - Chiara Gabrielli — photo credit Thomas McCammon
Hiccup - Chiara Gabrielli, Quokka — photo credit Thomas McCammon
Hiccup - Chiara Gabrielli, Lachy Micklethwait — photo credit Thomas McCammon
Stephen is a Melbourne based theatre maker, director and co-founder of queer theatre company, Little Ones Theatre. Upcoming: Looking for Alibrandi (Malthouse Theatre, Belvoir). Recent Credits include: Loaded (Malthouse Theatre), Considerable Sexual License (Joel Bray Dance), Merciless Gods (Arts Centre Melbourne, Griffin Theatre Company), and Abigail’s Party (Melbourne Theatre Company).
Stephen has also directed Ash Flanders’ End Of. (Griffin Theatre Company, Darebin Arts Speakeasy), Judith Lucy and Denise Scott’s Still Here (Token Entertainment), The Happy Prince (Griffin Theatre Company, La Mama), The Moors (Red Stitch Actors Theatre), and Daddy (Joel Bray Dance, Arts House, Arts Centre Melbourne, Brisbane Festival, Perth Festival, Darwin Festival, Liveworks). He is a Green Room Award winner for Best Director (The Happy Prince), his productions have received 12 Green Room Award wins and a Sydney Theatre Award. Stephen was also the recipient of the Besen Family Artist Program role in 2009 and was a member of the 2019 Lincoln Centre Theatre’s Directors Lab.
Photo credit Robert Catto
Photo credit Byony Jackson
Happy Prince — photo credit Pia Johnson
Meme Girls — photo credit Pia Johnson
Oh my god this is a big question.
I think for me camp is the early cinema of Pedro Almodovar. So extreme depictions of characters who are unstable and almost a caricature but also have a lot of heart. Opera I would consider camp, but it’s unintentional because it’s all about heightened extreme emotion. Anything that goes to the brink of an idea... So, for example, John Waters having Divine being this grotesque monster eating their own poo is an example of camp.
I think camp is things that are stretched to... things that are pushed to the most ridiculous version of themselves, but still have heart. It’s all about extremity. It’s the most extreme version of something so that we can understand the political, or the internal, or the social anxieties or inhibitions that the character is experiencing.
From my point of view it’s all about pushing boundaries, creating something that’s larger than life in order to actually see the soul, as it says in this book, The Lie that Tells the Truth. This extreme thing will always have an underlying reality to it.
I find it quite an emotional sensibility because it’ s not about presenting things that are realistic. It’s about taking cultural references throughout history, particularly the baroque, to the Victorian, to the Rococo, to Art Nouveau. And then in the 1970s this sort of extreme Giallo Horror. Like, all of these things for me, are camp because none of it is subtle. But every single bit of it is talking about something that’s dangerous or transgressive.
So you throw the glitter onto the image or you saturate the colours or you move into the most obscene version of yourself to show the things we’re not supposed to talk about.
Charles Ludlam, who started the Ridiculous Theatre. He said that pathos is something that is so comical it’s tragic and bathos is something that’s so tragic it’s comical. And I thought that was a really good way of defining the ridiculous, but also ways that you approach camp.
It’s something that’s malleable. It’s playing with something, like Play-Doh. Misshaping it so you can be imaginative and explore and not be confined by the realms of the mundane. Nothing about camp is mundane or boring. It is always magical and fantastical and rich with... like every single moment of a camp work is rich with meaning. It also is supposed to make you laugh, and also cry, and also scream.
There’s something about it... like... you don’t have to be reverent about anything. You can be playful and deconstruct and actually make something entertaining out of something that you may not think are particularly interesting. Or they’re kind of trashy. There’s always a phrase with camp which is like, ‘turning trash into treasure’. So it’s like going to a trash and treasure market and finding a crappy old Madonna vinyl and then like getting really excited by that and playing it on repeat. You know? I guess that’s what I think.
Well, see, this is where I always get into trouble because I actually find the artificiality of the aesthetics of camp emotional. So, the very thing that is not supposed to be... that the irony is brittle, dry, or sort of... as you say, poking fun, it is emotional because it’s historical.
It’s started with a verb. To camp. To pose! And that’s inherently linked to theatre. You’re posing. You’re not genuinely that person, you are posing as that person onstage. And what camp allows you to do is say ‘I’m not really that person, but I’m going to show you a version of them that is beyond this world’.
And that’s the freedom of camp, is that as performers, or on stage or when you’re making works in this style or sensibility... whatever you want to call it there is utter freedom to carve your own space. And that’s because of creating artificial worlds.
I can only use examples from my own work but when we did Dangerous Liaisons By Christopher Hampton, we wanted to expose the political issues. The sexual... the battle of the sexes by presenting something that was ornate, baroque and over the top. So it was like a gold set like a Ferrero Rocher. The women were powdered white to the point where you couldn’t see flesh. Every costume was fuchsia pink. And all of these extreme things with a story like Dangerous Liaisons make it camp, I suppose.
And I guess when we go back to this idea of taking something and being playful with it, you can take a serious script that people laud as this fantastic play that’s played by Hugo Weaving and Pamela Rabe and we just turned it into a bloody comedy. And why the hell not?
And I think that’s what’s exciting about camp aesthetics because, yeah, it’s active. You’re actively doing something.
It’s like when we did Psycho Beach Party by Charles Busch, I remember saying to Ash Flanders when we’re in rehearsals, ‘we’re going to treat this like an Ibsen play. It’s kind of the inverse. We’re going to treat this ridiculous comedy about psycho beach killer surfer girls and we’re going to take it really seriously’.
And that, if I can give you another thing to think about, it’s taking frivolousness seriously. Like, to me, that’s what camp is. Why can’t we celebrate and give power and reverence to things that are obscene? Why can’t we treat the kind of ‘put a bit of glitter on it’ as something that is serious? And is an artform? But some people just don’t get it because maybe they’re not connected to the history of those tropes.
It’s a value thing. Like, I don’t value Wagner. I don’t value Shakespeare. I don’t feel comfortable in those spaces. But what I do love is pop music, and Pet Shop boys and Pierre et Gilles. And things that some people might consider trashy and not artful. And I think what I mean by taking frivolousness seriously is that you can, I’ll use an example from my work, create a piece that is satirising the Brontë Sisters and put the song Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush in it. There’s nothing wrong with taking the frivolous things that you adore and inserting them into work and taking them seriously as pieces of art.
I think there’s this notion that camp always has to be this destabilising political force when, in fact, it can also be an appreciation of that artform. Like Suddenly Last Summer by Tenessee Williams is a camp piece of work and he knows it because he calls it a horror. He wrote in response to Alfred Hitchcock who, again, is another example of this accidental camp. It’s all speaking to each other and it has a history that is so rich. And if you really gave a shit about cinema or, you know, theatrical history, you would see it. But it’s the stuff that’s relegated to late night movies. It’s appreciating things that aren’t considered high art. And giving it space.
I think that camp and parody often get thought of as the same thing, and they’re not. A parody is like Scary Movie, which is something that’s taking the mickey out of something. As opposed to trying to create something new out of trash or ideas that are dangerous. Parody is like cheap gags, which is fine – and it’s also really enjoyable.
But camp is like... there’s a history to it that’s about a queer experience. It celebrates feminine and masculine and gender history and... there’s something, I guess less cynical. Parody is cynical and camp is not. It can be, and some people would say that about my work, that it’s cynical.
I just think it’s become a really rich playing field for artmaking.
When we did Abigail’s Party we took a Mike Leigh play that, you know, is a very naturalistic story about a group of lower middle class Brits getting drunk and dealing with class. And it’s a comedy, but what I did with it was... I became obsessed that Beverly, the lead character, has become a camp icon by being accidentally camp.
And I wanted to explore was, well, this is a play in the 1970’s where camp aesthetics were at their peak with disco... and the argument between high and low art was really happening, particularly in Britain. So I wanted to make that extreme and turn the whole thing into the fantasy vision of the 1970s. Everything was the same colour. There was no detail. Like every cup was orange, the floor was orange shagpile, the bookshelf was orange... everything was extreme. There were no physical walls. There were curtains instead of walls, like people were in this theatrical, fake, very purposefully fake and artificial world so that we could understand a new story and what lay beneath it. That’s an example.
One thing that I adored was... obviously I’ve done a lot of Oscar Wilde pieces and we did a version of Salome and while researching camp history I found a bunch of research about the first ever drag artists in Harlem doing Salome’s dance of the seven veils from Oscar Wilde’s play. So African American men would dance like Salome.
And I also found out that in the army in the first world war, if you were homosexual you would call each other Salome. And finding these little titbits made me really excited and then we created a version of Salome that used drag ball culture as a stimulus. So, people were dressed as sailors, Salome was a young matador boy, John the Baptist was a Madonna-style popstar wearing cowboy boots and diamonte style panties... and the dance of the seven veils was done to Samantha Fox’s Touch Me.
And this is about taking frivolousness seriously, this is a dance where this girl wants to get the head of a saint and have it chopped off so she can possess it and we did it as a very serious balletic flamenco dance number to an 80’s pop song. And it was really erotic and really beautiful and his movement was like a gazelle, but it was ridiculous.
And that was one of my favourite moments because there was a hen’s night at the party... sorry, at the play. This is was camp does, we had hen’s nights coming to see an independent show in Malthouse. Like, and they were screaming. And I think that’s the other thing, it brings a lot of joy.
Under Rose’s leadership as Artistic Director, Windmill creates and presents work inspired by the vibrancy, sophistication and inventiveness of young people and the exhilarating challenges they pose to creating theatre of relevance in this modern time.
Rose is a multi-Helpmann Award nominated director, her productions regularly visit leading stages and festivals around Australia and the world, including the Sydney Opera House, Hong Kong’s Arts and Leisure Centre and New York’s New Victory Theatre. Her directing credits for Windmill include Rumpelstiltskin, Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz, Fugitive, School Dance, Big Bad Wolf and Girl Asleep.
Prior to Windmill, Rosemary was the Artistic Director of Arena Theatre Company and Artistic Director of Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s Out of the Box Festival in 2010. In 2015, she directed her first feature film Girl Asleep with Windmill Theatre Co, and in 2017 she was awarded the prestigious Australia Council Theatre Award.
Fugitive, A Windmill Theatre Company Production. L-R Peter Houghton, Carmel Johnson, Patrick Graham, Matthew Whittet. Photo Tony Lewis
Windmill Theatre's School Dance, Amber McMahon. Photo Tony Lewis
Photo by Brett Boardman
Girl Asleep - Ellen Steele and Sheridan Harbridge - Credit Sia Duff
Rumpelstiltskin — Paul Capsis — Photo credit The Other Richard
Rumpelstiltskin — L-R Elena Carapetis, Paul Capsis, Alirio Zavarce — Photo credit The Other Richard
Windmill Theatre's Wizard of Oz. Jude Henshall. Photo Tony Lewis
Jonathon Oxlade, Fleur ELise Noble — Credit Thomas McCammon
Spanning an extensive career, Paul is best known as a theater, concert and cabaret performer. His theater highlights include Angela’s Kitchen (his co-written solo piece), Little Bird (one-man musical theater piece written especially for Paul by State Theatre Company of South Australia), The Threepenny Opera, Boulevard Delirium, Three Furies, The Rocky Horror Show, All About My Mother, Thyestes and Volpone with various state and independent theater companies throughout Australia. Paul has also worked extensively internationally including in New York, London, Vienna, Shanghai and Hong Kong. He appeared in a leading role in the Australian feature film The Boy Castaways.
Paul has also appeared in several short films including Let Me Die Again (1997) and Oscar’s First Kiss (2009), as well as the telemovie Carlotta (2013) and the online series I Luv U But (2014). His vocals are featured on the soundtrack of the hit television series Underbelly: Badness (2012) and the award winning short film Franswa Sharl (2009). He has also recorded four albums and is a popular guest for various television programs in Australia. His award highlights include five Helpmann Awards (including 2012 Best Actor in a Play for Angela’s Kitchen ), a Green Room Award, a Film Critics Circle Award and the 2010 Sidney Myer Individual Performing Arts Award.
Calpurnia Descending — photo credit Brett Boardman
Calpurnia Descending — photo credit Brett Boardman
Calpurnia Descending — photo credit Brett Boardman
Rumpelstiltskin — A Windmill Theatre Co and State Theatre Company SA production — photo credit The Other Richard
Rumpelstiltskin — Paul Capsis — photo credit The Other Richard
Rumpelstiltskin — Paul Capsis — photo credit The Other Richard
Christine Johnston is an Australian performing artist/writer/singer who became known on the Brisbane arts and live music scenes from the late 1980s for her dramatic visual performances combining music, voice and her signature style of humour.
She continues to create a diversity of performance and musical works for events, festivals, art galleries, theatre, comedy, short film, and cabaret, touring Australia, UK, Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, USA and Canada. From 1994, Brisbane’s Women in Voice cabaret series became a spring-board for some of Christine’s iconic vocal performance concepts and characters including her touring co-creation Fluff: A Story of Lost Toys - and her surreal bird-calling character Madame Lark. In 2000, Christine and friend Annie Lee birthed the multi-award winning and internationally beloved comedic trio The Kransky Sisters, all continuing to tour. Christine’s award winning creative collaboration with Windmill, Rosemary Myers and Scottish artist Shona Reppe - Baba Yaga - continues to be a highlight, touring with co-performer Elizabeth Hay.
Baba Yaga — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — L-R Christine Johnston, Elizabeth Hay — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — L-R Christine Johnston, Elizabeth Hay — photo credit Sia Duff
Baba Yaga — L-R Elizabeth Hay, Christine Johnston — photo credit Sia Duff
Madame Lark
Madame Lark
Madame Lark
Jonathon is a multi-award-winning Australian film and theatre Designer. He studied Illustration and Sculpture at the Queensland College of Art.
Jonathon is the co-creator, production designer and character designer of television series BEEP & MORT for Windmill Pictures and the ABC which will be released in 2022. He designed the film Girl Asleep for which he won an ACCTA Award for Best Costume Design.
He has designed sets, costumes and spaces for Queensland Theatre, Guesswork TV, LaBoite Theatre, Is This Yours?, Aphids, Arena Theatre Company, The Real TV Project, Polytoxic, Men of Steel, Lemony S Puppet Theatre, Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Vitalstatistix, Barking Gecko, Bell Shakespeare, Red Moon Theatre Co, The Border Project, The Last Great Hunt, Stan TV, State Theatre of South Australia, Sydney Theatre Company, The Escapists, Sandpit, Sydney Opera House, Asia TOPA, Adelaide Festival, The Brisbane Festival, The Malthouse, Performance Space, Queensland Art Gallery, Melbourne Theatre Company, Belvoir Street and Windmill Theatre Company, where he is currently Resident Designer.
Girl Asleep - Antoine Jelk and Ellen Steele — photo credit Sia Duff
Girl Asleep - Amber McMahon, Ellen Steele and Antoine Jelk — photo credit Sia Duff
Girl Asleep - Ellen Steele, Amber McMahon, Sheridan Harbridge — photo credit Sia Duff
Big Bad Wolf
Hiccup — Nathan O'Keefe - photo credit Thomas McCammon
Pinocchio - Alirio Zavarce and Nathan O'Keefe - photo credit Tony Lewis
Glace Chase is a multiple award winning multi-disciplinary “trans-queen” / performer / playwright / comedienne / screenwriter / tour guide / bon vivant. Described as “delightfully satanic” by Time Out NY, Glace’s work defies easy categorisation. Glace created the world’s first Drag Queen Tour Guide business – Dream Queen Tours – named “Best Alternative Tour” by the International Travel & Hospitality Awards.
As a playwright Glace has won two Griffin Awards and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and has been shortlisted for almost every playwriting award in Australia.
Camp, to my mind... is a state of mind. It’s not even a state of mind, it’s a state of being. It’s a place that you transcend ordinary reality and you become something special. There’s another reference that I’m not sure if you guys are using. But of course, you should. It’s probably the most definitive reference on camp. And that is Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp.
And if you ever want to read a dry analysis of camp, that is it! And, in fact, Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp almost is camp in the sense that it’s so dry and academic... it kind of elevates itself above itself.
For me camp is this never-ending feedback loop. It’s about luxuriating in your emotions, whatever they are. And the bigger, the badder, the more extreme and powerful, the better. Even the more upsetting the better, quite frankly.
You know, and one of the great things Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp says, and I’ll never forget this. This is actually probably the only thing I really remember out of it. It’s that you’re not being the thing, but you’re enjoying ‘being’ the ‘thing’.
That's camp.
Camp icons, well... Liza Minelli. Liza Minelli. Liza Minelli. Marlene Dietrich. Me!
One of the other great things that Susan Sontag said is that you can either know you’re being the thing, or you can not know. And the most fun one of that, is the not knowing. That’s the campest.
That’s why gay men don’t tend to be considered camp because they know too much. Whereas Liza Minelli – I mean, Liza Minelli knew she was camp – but, you know, she’s so caught up in her emotions and it’s just SO SINCERE! It’s just sort of explodes out of her. And that’s actually where ... you know, I’ve lived in my body a while now and it took me a long time to discover that that’s actually how I am. Like, I live like this. I have very extreme emotional reactions to things. And it’s authentic. It’s not me even pretending, it’s just who I am.
So, drag queens can indeed be camp but they don’t tend to necessarily embody the pinnacle of camp. If we’re to look at camp... Princess Diana was very camp because she was, of course, very suffering and so glamorous. Lady Gaga’s pretty camp these days, I think. Oh god, who else?
I think trans is very camp right now. Like, trans is really occupying this whole new space in this modern day time that... you know it’s almost like a supermodel. You’re just sort of the site of all this luxurious femininity. And you can kind of get to indulge in your overt femininity and everyone has to support you. It’s wonderful and I love it. It’s why I became trans.
But it’s also very very camp.
Accidental camp... I mean, it’s like Beyoncé falling down the staircase or getting her hair stuck in the fan. Oh my god that was just so... it made me so happy. Like, just transcendentally happy. That was complete accidental camp. Why? Because she’s taking herself very seriously and then life just happens. She’s just fallen down a staircase or got her hair stuck in a fan while trying to pull it out and she’s still singing, you know? That was incredible camp.
Susan Sarandon once said about Rocky Horror Picture Show that maybe it’s a little bit like love - about the success of Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I think, maybe in a way, this is my approach to camp is maybe it’s a little bit like love. Maybe you shouldn’t overthink it too much.
You either know what camp is or you don’t. It’s a sensibility. And I think people can be taught it. But I... you either know it, or you don’t. And if you know it, you know it.
Yes... I love that. Well camp luxuriates in the biggest form of emotion. It’s biggest form of itself. It’s never pulled back, it just goes there. I think that epic bigness is very fun, it’s very funny as well.
But it does bring people together and it allows them to be okay to live their best versions of themselves. And I think in my own performing career it’s something that I’ve learnt along the way... is how to let an audience in and how to let them enjoy it. Enjoy the bigness of you and the crazy of you. Yeah.
You know, because, in my life I’ve wanted to achieve many, many things and... haven’t actually. I’ve also, you know, in my life, it’s been a hard life. I’ve had more than your average amount of setbacks with parental deaths and illnesses. I’ve come from a very difficult circumstance.
So that means I’m a leading contender for camp. Great suffering, low achievement, big emotions. That’s like win, win, win, win. So with me you’re always going to see an earnest heart on the sleeve quality. And always giving and wanting and probably failing. And then stoically getting back up.
That’s funny but it’s also camp.
What I will say is go out. Experience life to it’s fullest. And maybe, too, you will be unsuccessful. Unemployed and unhappy. Just like me. And then you can truly discover the pleasures of camp.
Everywhere Windmill wanders we walk softly, we speak respectfully, we hold integrity, we collaborate and create while honouring the truth of reconciliation and the true history of this country. We know that the land on which we create our work is sacred. We know there were many tribal family clans here before us and we now sit beside them. We acknowledge the tribal family clans who are known today as the Kaurna Meyunna, the first peoples of this place. We respect all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across this sacred land which is known today as Australia.
Written by Karl Winda Telfer, Burka - Senior Cultural and Spiritual Custodian
Mullawirra Meyunna - the Dry Forest People, Southern Country
Writer: Anthony Nocera
Designer: Josh Brigante (Sandpit)
Development: Stuart Mackinnon (Sandpit)
Camp Guides: Thomas Fonua and Fez Faanana
Videography: Run Wild Productions
Camp Windmill was produced by Windmill Theatre Company in association with Sandpit with support from the Government of South Australia through the Department for Education and the Lang Foundation.
Camp Windmill was a big undertaking and wouldn't have been possible without the time, care and generosity of a bunch of awesome people.
Rosemary Myers, Kaye Weeks, Ross McHenry, Sasha Zahra, Alex Hayley, Jana Drummond, Madison Thomas, Anthony Nocera, Gemma Winter Harris, Emma Biglands, Genevieve Fischer
Sam Haren, Jude Henshall, Dearna Newchurch, Rachel Perks, Chris Edser
Farrin Foster, Luc Hansen, Scott Basket, Jared Nicholson
Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, Piere et Gilles, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Pedro Almodòvar, Rhonda Burchmore, Janet Jackson, The Kransky Sisters, Tina Turner, Faye Dunaway, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Bob Fosse, Elizabeth Taylor, Rupaul, Kween Kong, Diana Ross and, of course, Liza Minelli
When I was 12, or maybe 13, I had to go to a one-month-mass for a recently passed relative. A distant one. I remember walking into the chapel and, in and amongst greeting all of my family who I probably don’t see enough, noticed a woman who I’d never met before sitting at the back of the room loudly wailing then stopping, looking around at the family to see who was watching her, and then wailing all over again.
“Who is that?” I asked my cousin.
“No idea. She seems sad though.”
Every person I asked didn’t know who she was. Not even the wife of the deceased. Maybe, the wife said, ‘she’s just here to show off’.
It’s one of those things, a one-month-mass, that I’ve never quite understood. To come back, 30 days after a funeral, to remember the dead all over again. Surely it would be easier to just... not do that? After a month, when the loss maybe just begins to start to feel manageable, it seems counter-productive to just go back to the start?
Even at 12, or 13... whatever, I didn’t take the whole thing very seriously, which is why, when my cousin handed me a wheel of pink Hubba Bubba bubblegum tape and said, ‘take some’, I opened the little Pacman packet and bit into the wheel, taking half of it into my mouth as we sat in the church pews. As I sat there and chewed and chewed and chewed one of my uncles ran up to me and said, ‘Anthony, there’s no one to do the reading so I said that you would do it. You’ve always got your head in a book. Thought you’d enjoy it!’ before handing me a piece of paper with a passage from Peter or John or Leviticus or something.
I looked at my cousin, panicked and went to say, ‘what am I going to do with all of this gum?’ but my mouth was too full. So, I text her, ‘what am I going to do with the gum?’ and she looked at me and said, ‘don’t you have a tissue?’ and I shook my head. It turns out she didn’t either.
We looked around and spotted a handbag belonging to someone random that came to pay her respects. My cousin slid to the end of the pew, pulled out a used tissue and handed it to me. I looked at her, disgusted. “It’s not my fault,” she spat, “who doesn’t bring a tissue to a funeral?”
Right as the mass was about to start and as the priest said, ‘we now have a reading from Anthony’ I unfurled the tissue and out slid a slimy pink orb, the size of a golf ball.
When I think about camp, I think about that day. About the theatre of going to church and the performance of grief, particularly public grief. I think about rifling through an Italian woman’s purse and the treasures you’ll find there, but, most of all, I think about that saliva covered wad of gum. Glistening neon pink on a church pew somewhere down Grange Road in Adelaide’s Western suburbs.
Camp is often out of place and inherently artificial. It’s slippery, near impossible to capture or grasp and is, at its core, frivolous. It is an exercise in being comically too much and is a celebration of being out of place. But camp is also picking up that grossly pink orb and stretching it into a thin inky pink film and using it as a lens through which to make the world more fabulous, more femme, more ridiculous, more pink, more sugary. It’s a way of seeing. Of being. It’s also, like copious amounts of chewing gum, remarkably messy.
Camp Windmill sees us grapple with the pink, celebrate it, and introduce you to camp in just some of its many different styles. With the help of our drag queen camp guides, Tom and Fez, we’ve assembled some of Australia’s finest purveyors of camp to tell you everything they know about the art of the pose and how it influences their art, design, performance - style, music, dance and the entirety of their being. It’s a way of life for a lot of people. For me, maybe. For the crying stranger in the chapel, definitely.
Camp isn’t something you can define neatly, nor is it something that’s easy to get. It’s something to chew on.
I really hope you enjoy navigating Camp Windmill, meeting these wonderful artists and chewing on everything they have to say. But really, I hope it confounds you a bit, excites you and opens a fabulous new world of artifice for you to inhabit.
Yours in pink,Anthony Nocera
If Camp Windmill has taught you anything, and it may well have taught you nothing (which is very camp, to be honest), it’s that to really understand camp you need to have some references. A lens through which to view the world that helps you spot camp when it pops up in a play, film, song or weird part of the internet. This is in no way exhaustive. In fact, it’s barely adequate. But have a read or a scroll through. It might be useful.
Camp: Notes on FashionThe 2019 Met Gala was themed Camp. It caused a storm. As celebrities walked the pink carpet, people from all over the globe began to argue that everyone had collectively missed the point and a whole new generation began to try and understand what camp meant to them. Whether the exhibition was good or bad or missed the point entirely, it’s a useful starting point in attempting to grapple with the thorny issue of camp.
Hillbilly Elegy is an Accidental Camp MasterpieceThroughout Camp Windmill there is constant tension between the notion of camp as a conscious choice that artists are making and an accidental thing that just somehow happens when a piece of art is made. In this review of the film Hillbilly Elegy, writer Patrick Sandberg provides some really clear definitions of camp and tells us why Glenn Close is an icon.
Notes on CampA seminal work that was one of the first pieces of scholarship to attempt to define camp. It might be all wrong about camp, but it might also be 100% right. Camp is hard. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s pretty difficult to understand. Make sure you set aside at least an hour to read this one.
Notes on Dyke CampCamp isn’t one thing to one group of people. Anything, and anyone, can be camp in their own way. For example, the most seemingly vanilla or traditional office or classroom environment can be a camp office or classroom environment, provided it is extremely vanilla or traditional. Culturally, camp has often been a space inhabited by the hedonistic excess of gay men. In this razor-sharp essay, Mikaella Clements makes a case that lesbians are just as, if not more, camp than the gays.
An Interview With Pierre Et GilesPierre Et Giles is referenced by Joel Bray and Stephen Nicolazzo as a seminal camp reference for their unique aesthetics and the collision of high and low culture in their work. In this interview they give you an insight into their work.
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