Joel Bray's DADDY Will Come to Edinburgh Fringe in August
Performances will run Thursday 6 to Monday 31 August.
Choreographer and dancer Joel Bray will make his UK debut with his autobiographical sugar-coated confessional, Daddy. Daddy has toured the major Australian Festivals to critical and audience acclaim and now comes to the Main Hall at Summerhall for this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Performances will run Thursday 6 to Monday 31 August.
Daddy is a sweet feast of a show. Bray mixes conversation, performance, audience participation and skilful changes of mood and atmosphere, making for a powerful depiction of identity, trauma and recovery. He mines his own personal experiences as a queer First Nations man brought up in a fiercely working-class environment, someone who is neither white nor black enough, someone who falls between the cracks, someone who has Daddy issues.
Resplendent in satin hotpants and reclining like Michelangelo's David on a pink fluffy cloud, Joel flirtatiously tells his story directly to the audience, moving among them in the promenade staging. Provocative contortions give way to contemporary dance, movements from traditional Wiradjuri dance, and relentless sequences of nightclub dancing exposing the exhausting search for love.
Joel's cravings for father and home leave him always wanting more. The short-lived sugar highs of childhood reminiscence and the excesses of queer adulthood and party hook-ups give way to the inevitable comedowns - before the cycle begins all over again.
Joel is known for creating intimate encounters in unorthodox spaces where audience members are invited in as co-storytellers. From Daddy's opening moments, he strikes up a relationship with his crowd - asking for volunteers and drawing them into the action as prop holders, protagonists, performers and wielders of whipped cream, fairy bread and hundreds and thousands.
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