5 Questions with Jonathan Homsey
Jonathan Homsey is an artist fascinated with the intersection of street dance, visual art, and social engagement. Born in Hong Kong and raised in the United States of America, he immigrated to Australia in 2010 where his award-winning choreographic practice has evolved from a theatrical context to interdisciplinary installations across Australasia and Japan.
He is also a passionate curator who has worked with institutions from Melbourne Museum to Footscray Community Arts Centre. Jonathan’s choreographic and curatorial practice uses intuitive movement to inform works that explore utopian worlds and emotional connection.
Maggie Zhu and Maggie Chen from I Am Maggie (Photo credit: Wild Hardt)
No.1
How did I Am Maggie come about?
The most important element of I Am Maggie is my two dear friends: Maggie Chen (Madfox) and Maggie Zhu (Maggz). We met in 2015 when we were learning waacking, a queer street dance founded by LGBT+ Black and Latinx men in the clubs of Los Angeles in the 1970s. After having spent many years dancing within street dance genres, waacking came to me like a saving grace. The weekly jams started by Burn City Waack was a place where we could express ourselves freely through improvisation and to amazing tracks usually filled with female divas doing melodramatic runs over disco or funk beats. Both Madfox and Maggz always caught my eye—we would take turns watching each other and I was always so mesmerised by them and their movement choices.
Secondly, I’d say I Am Maggie owes its thanks to my YouTube algorithm during COVID-19. In attempts to comfort my intermittent bouts of anxiety about the uncertainty of our world, I would watch Mad Libs Theatre from the Jimmy Fallon Show and Audio Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos. In Mad Libs Theatre, celebrities would select random words which were then placed on cue cards for the host and celebrity guest to act out. With ASMR, particularly the first ones I saw shared in Vanity Fair, celebrities would whisper sweet nothings and do banal things like shucking corn. I stirred all these ideas into a pot in my mind and I Am Maggie was born.
No.2
Tell us a bit more about how you conceptualised the work, the Mad Libs and ASMR components especially. Was this intended as a livestream or did you have to adapt it for the pandemic?
My brain is always juggling things, for which I blame my Gemini Moon for ;)… I love to play this game where I’ll put on different music while watching a ballet on mute (Coolio’s ‘Gangster Paradise’ to a Swan Lake is a must).
Anyway, I was watching a dance video one day and decided to put it on mute, then opened a new tab and played an ASMR video of Penelope Cruz eating tostadas. The crunch of the toasted corn oddly made the dynamic percussion of waacking’s arm gestures so nuanced.
From there, I wanted to add in the Mad Libs-style word games, but based on stories from the Maggies’ lives. I only lived in Hong Kong until I was 7, but we started discussing stories we all remember from when were little, stuff like going to markets and rituals our grandparents would do. These anecdotes truly contributed to the evolution of the work.
I had no intention of live streaming I Am Maggie—streaming tends to cause a lag which would severely damage the work, especially as dancers are responding to each other in real time. But we have worked on some DIY tech solutions and have included extra cameras to evoke the intimacy we want people to feel when the work debuts in November.
No.3
There seems to be a recurring theme of duality in your work, which comes across most strongly in Shujin and Thrice For The Third Culture Kid!, as well as in I Am Maggie. Can you speak more to this?
I am half Cantonese and half Syrian; however I am also aware that I am white-passing and have a thick North American accent. My existence in this lifetime and how I have grown up across both the East and West has shaped how I see the world. I have been told my whole life that I am “too white”, “too Asian” or “too gay”; I was always too much of something based on obsolete systems. So I try and take these moments and transmute them through movement. I always see both sides of every coin, but never at the same time—I feel I am constantly flipping to either side very quickly and work within the unknowns of my cultural intersections.
That said however, it is rare for me to take that concept of duality and apply it through an artistic process to bodies that are not my own, even more so with two different collaborators. Both Maggie Chen and Maggie Zhu—who grew up in mainland China and left at different times as teenagers—provided a beautiful duality in our conversations around the East and West. Through our shared anecdotes, we discovered how fleeting events and stories have shaped our perceptions of cultures outside of our own. This project is equally teaching us about ourselves, as well as hoping to teach empowerment through this performance.
No.4
In the event synopsis, it’s said that “Everyone can be Maggie.” I imagine that the participatory aspect of the performance will result in one “Maggie” that’s somewhat determined collectively—by you, the performers and the audience. How do you think this open-ended format will further inform the work?
I love improvising! I am a sucker for [the idea of] destiny and am always curious to create ecologies for a dance experiment to shine. And I feel that in waacking this serendipity happens all the time, especially to the Maggies. They have a deep connection: they know how to quickly read a room, and what is needed to best express the emotion of any given moment. Which made me wonder how everyone could also feel this magic they both feel when they improvise, so this is where the audience gets to join in.
The Mad Lib biographies that the audience helps fill into (through an online form) will be read out by the audience in I Am Maggie. I believe having the viewer in the driver’s seat can dissolve the barriers between audience and performer. It is from this dissolving that I think viewers will feel that they have the permission to embody the energy that the Maggies are performing with, and thus change the atmosphere of the space.
No.5
What do you hope to express through I Am Maggie?
The Maggies love being themselves and are proud of who they are. I hope it is a reminder to every viewer that you can be yourself too, which is pretty damn cool.
Find out more
I Am Maggie will be shown at Take Over! via Arts Centre Melbourne in November 2020, as part of the Melbourne Fringe.
Register here for a sneak peak, livestreamed on Aug 29.
Fill out this form to play a role in creating I Am Maggie.