Queer PowerPoint is one of the featured presentations of the Festival of Live Art (F.O.L.A), running the second week of June 2025, at Auckland’s Basement theatre.
The artists and performers describe themselves as gay/queer and BIPOC. Black, indigenous and people of colour.
I can’t think who that would exclude. The English/Europeans who were colonisers here are indigenous somewhere. Albinos have suffered their own forms of persecution over the millennia of human history, either gods or demons.
Queer PowerPoint started in Australia and the show is presented for the first time in New Zealand. This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Xanthe Dobbie, Harriet Gillies and Thom Smyth form the creative team. They make the important distinction at the beginning.
Rather than gay content, we are gay, and we have content.
PowerPoint presentations we are all familiar with.
The funniest was from Jazmine Mary, an avant-garde Folk singer from Victoria. Australia who has been making waves and quickly gaining popularity around this country.
Seems to be everywhere these days. First saw her with an iconic blue Gretsch guitar at the Wine Cellar.
The venue since departed and morphed to the bigger bunker-like Double Whammy, where she performed as Pony Baby, a two-hander with soul-singing Folkie Arahi.
Most recently she performed at the Atomic 2.0 Tribute to Women in Rock on the big Auckland Town Hall stage. Always an arresting performer.
A gay guest presenter tonight. She tells us this was revealed to her by an ex-boyfriend who informed her on break-up, that she was a fucking lesbian.
What follows is a discourse on the sexuality of different animals.
Talks about the male puffer fish. Which constructs an elaborate mandala on the sandy sea floor to attract a female mate. Only it takes days for the little guy to complete it.
Not interested in fucking. Just making mandalas and getting kisses. One of many wonderful David Attenborough documentaries, I recall
Very good as a stand-up comedian with uncanny comic timing.
Somehow manages to equate queerness with rock-climbing and the audience crack up.
The opening PowerPoint is from Xanthe Dobbie and an extended deconstruction and takedown of Amanda Fucking Brynes.
Don’t know much about her apart from the fact she was a child actor.
She had a central role in the great musical comedy movie Hairspray (2007), the original one directed by John Waters.
She has spent the last ten years at least battling addiction issues.
Emma McManus then takes us to Northern Queensland and the home of the brush turkey.
She anthropomorphosizes the bird as a typical Aussie bloke. Became invasive in suburban backyards. A bit stroppy and belligerent.
A bush turkey is slang for drinking rapidly. As in sculling a schooner.
Kaan Hiini is award-winning Design director and strategist working with creative agency Curative. Brings a deep knowledge of Māori culture to applications of his artistic approach.
This evening is deep dive into fonts and typeface, and he is on the search for the most cunty.
Quite technical, and his patter is rapid-fire but oddly fascinating as the talk progresses. The sexuality of letters and symbols.
The most surprising and compelling was from Harriett Gillies, an award-winning performance artist from Australia.
Starts with a discussion on the physiology of sleep.
When the debacle of covid took full flight a year in from the first lockdowns, there was a lot of talk on the importance of the natural and innate immune systems.
One of the key pillars of a very complex immune arsenal was good quality sleep. The healing regenerative one which is REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.
Brought up an important point which was new to me. Sleep may be a mechanism to shift some memory modules out of your mainframe brain.
The discussion of the beneficial nature of relegating memory led straight into Buddhism and the nature of impermanence.
The crossover point. Buddhist masters teach that what inhabits your mind and consciousness is illusion. The important practices are meditation on impermanence and understanding the nature of death.
That he not busy being born is busy dying. (Bob Dylan It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding)
I took this as profound teaching and not what I was expecting at all at a show called Queer PowerPoint.
Which begs the question. There are no boundaries like gender or sexuality. They are constructs and everyone can head down a path their own self-discovery.
Rev. Orange Peel
Banner photo by Harry Matheson
