Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
Déjà vu
Whistle While You Work
Whistle While You Work is based on one of my mother’s stories as a teenager at Auschwitz extermination camp.
She describes the panic of having to strip naked on arrival and, while running, she is forced to grab something to wear from a large pile of random clothes.
In this piece I try to convey the surreal and unimaginable absurdity of such events taking place at Auschwitz.
We dance to Mozart’s ‘March of the Gypsies’. This was a piece the Jewish orchestra was forced to play at Auschwitz while the prisoners marched to their own death.
Whistle While You work