Five Questions with Cephalopod
Cephalopod
29 October—16 November, Blue Room Theatre
A 26-year-old Filipina and her baby arrive in Australia for the first time. A mermaid (half woman, half octopus) washes up at Fremantle and opens up a fish and chip shop.
Ocean temperatures are on the rise, causing squids to proliferate in numbers. Pauline Hanson’s scared of being swamped by Asians. The ocean isn’t showing any signs of cooling down, the squids are taking over. the baby – now the same age as her mum when she arrived in Australia – makes a theatre show about identity politics.
Cephalopod: A new inky offering from Perth performance fish-punks, Squid Vicious.
How did you meet each other and how did the idea for this project come about?
Jess: Cephalopod actually started off as Andrew Sutherland’s brain baby. He asked me if I wanted to help him develop this idea about Asian-Australians, Little Mermaid and squids, I thought, ‘You seem cool, yes, let’s do it’. Then as it developed, Andy and I both agreed it made more sense for me to take the lead, it gave the work a more personal way in. As for Joe and I, we met ages ago. He put up an ad to start a band that blended punk feels with performance art-stuff, and he was looking for a singer. What he was envisioning seemed very cool, like too cool for the big dork I was at the time (still a huge dork now). So I flaked out. You know when your self-sabotage is so deep that when someone offers you something that you’ve always kinda wanted then your body instantly says ‘nope’? Yeah, that.
While Joe was giving me a lift home from rehearsals I asked him whether he was still keen to do band stuff, he said “Let’s just do the show first”.
Yeah, fair.
Joe: We actually met each other a long, long time ago. Before Jess went to uni and i think i was just starting doing a bunch of theatre?I remember us meeting at the Flying Scotsman, but Jess disagrees. I had an idea for a big ass punk/industrial/cabaret band and i needed someone to sing, but it didn’t pan out. Later on, we were re-acquainted via Andy (the other half of squid vicious) and now we’re here.
Cephalopod has a political element that is expressed self-referentially. The ideological content mixes with the form. What does that say about truth as an idea and how it is conveyed?
Jess: I said at rehearsal the other day that the first half made me feel like a little kid again. What I didn’t say was that the feeling wasn’t particularly jovial or wondrous; it was more navigating through the same feelings that I had back then of strange-ness, loneliness, confusion. There was always this sense having to change myself, of not being enough and it’s still something I’m trying to condition out of me now. Because when you look at it, it’s a bit ridiculous being a part of this dominant culture that says, “Oi you, yeah you! You’re not okay as you are aye”, yet still want to fit into their ideal.
So I guess we’re trying to make Ceph more an experience that hits you in the personal feels, rather than conveying an overarching ideological truth for all migrants (because that’s impossible). Well, hopefully we do that.
Joe: We are perhaps trying to articulate a truth that is more felt than understood. The politics of migration, from the point of view of the migrant, are a miasma of barely spoken feelings, half-ideas and semi-thoughts, all filtered through a lens of self-correction and performing new codes. We could have made something approaching more of a political lecture about humanity and rights and asylum, but we decided with this work to instead attempt to create that alien sense of trying to navigate new waters.
Similarly, in the play, truth intermingles with speculative fiction. How is that dynamic influenced by the conventions of theatre?
Jess: I remember quite clearly sort of coming to a crossroads with the work. Before going into the more intensive part of the process Andy, Joe and I were looking over what we had already compiled. We saw that there was these clear spheres; my own migrant story and everything else surrounding it (inlc. cephalopod lectures describing their physiology/inking behaviour/plans to take over the world (false probs), Filipina-Australian politics, karaoke, Disney-campy-fun-times, Pauline Hanson (there was so much stuff!) ). And I kept thinking that I really didn’t want to lose all of that; I wanted everything that we had collected to be as important as the story I was telling. One part super heartfelt, but clean cut and direct; the other real murky and confusing, but quite fun tangentially. For a bit we play with form, jumping from thing to thing but then we get to a point when we say, “Okay, that’s enough, time to talk about the thing”. So both spheres inform one another, the imagery in one part enriches the story that’s being told and the story provides grounding to the images presented.
Joe: There is a confessional style of theatre that is very popular at the moment, in which audiences expect a certain amount of truth to be given and received. While that is powerful and we certainly participate in that style, we also wanted to muddy the waters a bit and complicate the issue beyond it being merely a migrant story.
Lives are not lived in whole truths. Theatre is a means of lying and performing our way into deeper truths - the form and structure of the work mixes both those ideas alongside a more traditional confessional storytelling form.
Tell me about the creation process with Squid Vicious. How did the production of this show emerge out of that collaboration?
Jess: Cephalopod’s gestation is as old as Squid Vicious itself, maybe even older. Andy and I had just come out of a pretty toxic rehearsal process where we were both performers (that’s how we met- woot!) and I think we both needed a something stirring and nourishing to hold onto. He had this really cool idea of making a platform for interdisciplinary-intercultural-queer performance work and I needed something to get over that awful show, so Squid Vicious came into being. Not to discount it at all, in that short space of time I’ve learned a hell of a lot about celebrating who I am as a creative and as a human being/doing/going in general. Very grateful to be one half of this squid brain. (Cephalopods have three brains though and blue blood, crazy!)
And Joe isn’t a part of Squid Vicious but he runs his own company called Renegade. Productions, he’s also kind of like Squid Vicious’s cool Kuya.
What do you hope this show will achieve for the Perth arts and theatre scene?
Jess: I hope that people like my story, and my mum’s story. If there’s nuanced post-show discussions about race, identity politics and the lengths that migrants go to to fit in to this country that would be cool too. But a lot of the time those expectations lead to heartache, so I just want folks to have a good time aye.
Joe: I hope that people will think that I am cool, and will all want to bang me.
Interview by Kaya Lattimore
Image by Tasha Faye and Michelle Aitken