Hot Brown Bitch Burlesque

I’m performing at this with LOCA! Except I’m doing a poem, not burlesque; I’m also not brown; but hot bitch right? Three shows only, don’t miss it. 

Upcoming: 2012

It seems I’ve got quite a few spoken word performances lined up during Midsumma: 

• Love Me, Love Me Not (Thu 19 Jan at Bar Nancy, curated by Lisa-Skye)
• Rapid Fire - 12 Writers, 6 Minutes (Fri 20 Jan at Hares & Hyenas)
• What a Piece of Work: Queer Verse (Mon 30 Jan, also at H&H)

I’m also likely to make an appearance at Word is Out Poetry Slam (Mon 23 Jan at H&H) to defend my title from last year.

It’s a pretty amazing program for spoken word this year, partly I think because H&H have 20 shows on to celebrate their 20th anniversary. My picks are Quippings (a night of “freaktastic delights” hosted by Kath Duncan - Tue 31 Jan) and Australia Day Hangover (programmed by OutBlack convenor Bryan Andy - Fri 27 Jan).

I also have some really exciting stuff coming up as part of the Ladies of Colour Agency - wait and see. 

Exotic Escape

textaqueen:

The Ladies of Colour Agency’s “Exotic Escape”

felt-tips on paper, 127 x 97cm, 2011

 Part of We Don’t Need Another Hero, Texta Queen’s drawing series featuring people of colour as outlaws from their post-apocalypse, drawn as if posters for fictional movies. 

The artist says:

As an artist of colour, my racialised existence has inherently informed my work, but this new series explicitly investigates racial politics. I’ve sought out peers from various sociocultural and racial backgrounds to propose characters, costumes, and fictional surrounds to represent themselves as survivors of their armageddon. The post-apocalyptic genre seems a relevant forum to discuss Indigenous and people of colour immigrant experiences living in settler colonial realities.

Subjects include contemporary Indigenous artist Tony Albert in “Yesterday When The War Began’, Samoan circus and burlesque performer Fez Faanana in “Attack of the Under Water Woman”, Indigenous activist Robbie Thorpe in “Armageddon Out of Here”, Papua New Guinean performance artist Pandie Panther in “Uritai Headhunter: Warrior of Paradise”, Colombian hip hop emcee Ben Beracasa aka Clandestine Voice in “When the South Rises” and Indigenous historian and activist Gary Foley in “Creature from the Black Platoon”.

Gallerysmith will host We Don’t Need Another Hero from 13th October 2011. Opening event on Friday 21st October 6-8pm, to be opened by Gary Foley and featuring performance by the Ladies of Colour Agency and tunes by DJ Pandie Panther.

Typography

> click for audio

Chinese-Australian

i hate the hyphen –
feigning simultaneity       rarely available
a horizontal bar
       denying vertical power
       frontal collision

these words are no clasped hands
no piano keys, sister cities
but lines in the sand
guiding police

chineseAustralian

the camelCaps compound is
       rightly awkward
lumbering, burdened, lopsided
— a strange animal bearing
unequal weight, a more subtle metaphor
for hybridity than the mule,
but no less apt — my ancestors too
walked shoeless, spat on the sand,
and were considered ugly
but useful.

Chinese/Australian

i love the slash /

the slant truth
suggestive of my not-too-tilted eyes
glancing                      sideways
a hooded stare anticipating
the racialising gaze

i love the slash
the very word’s violence
the sign a falling wall
 a guarded border
  a porous skin
   a heaving ambivalence

May 2008