QC2012: Shortcuts D’Lo: D’FaQTo Life & DawN Crandell: Xenophobadelica

Director: Rachel Brogan

Reviewer: Jo Beggs

The Public Reviews Rating:

Queer Contact aims to celebrate Queer performance in all its guises, giving a platform to a range of theatre makers whose work explores their identity and addresses some of the complex issues surrounding difference. In Shortcuts, two very different performers bring snippets of their lives in a hugely entertaining double-bill.

First up is female to male Transgender Tamil Sri Lankan-American D’Lo. No shortage of material there. D’Lo mines some of the most intimate moments of his life to create theatre which blends seamlessly between stand-up, poetry and drama, all delivered with equal deftness and charm.

DawN Crandell has made a piece for Shortcuts that marks her return to performance after having her first child. Still work in progress, Xenophobobadelica fails to hang together completely, but plays with a number of devices which work well in isolation. Her delivery of two stories, one from the US, one from the UK, which speak of intolerance and homophobia within the black community, is powerful and compelling, and it works especially well when juxtaposed with a chaotic and hilarious attempt to create, with the help of willing members of the audience, Prince’s “23 positions in a one night stand”. DawN has worked with the brilliant Bryony Kimmings whilst devising this piece – and it shows. Kimmings’ talent for taking an idea and testing its boundaries, from the heart-breaking to the hilarious, is successfully re-worked here, infused with DawN’s own, more gentle and poetic, spirit.

It’s always interesting to see double bills of this kind, where, once booked and scheduled, new work can veer off in any direction. Yet somehow there is always synergy, and that synergy almost always comes from the fact that solo performance tends toward an examination of the human condition. In celebrating difference the spotlight tends to fall on the thing that defies that difference. Here it’s about mothers. D’Lo’s recreated before our eyes as he appears in a sari and tells her baffled side of the story. DawN’s is sitting on the front row holding the new baby. When you see difference through their eyes it’s not difference at all. When D’Lo explained to his mother that he’d had double mastectomy surgery she didn’t ask why, she asked “who was with you?”. The same question any mother would ask.

Contact’s Studio is a safe space for work in progress to flourish, and a Q&A after the show, headed up by Contact’s Artistic Director Baba Israel, proved that both performers were interested to hear what the audience thought. The work will be all the stronger for the insightful feedback they received.