Sasja joined by Sophie Strykowski & Haz Lugsdin, another artists from the Melbourne Fringe Festival, who shared a discussion of their live performance titled "TWIN FLAME/ DEAD SPIT".
TWIN FLAME/ DEAD SPIT is a live performance work investigating the ways in which we look at another to look at ourselves. With ten years of deep friendship and chosen kinship, performance makers Haz Lugsdin and Sophie Strykowski embark on an intergalactic voyage to understand their interlocking selves.
We all have a gravitational pull. The sun, a chair, and you. I felt that tug. Who put me here? And why are you here too?
Haz Lugsdin (They/He) is a trans performer who relishes in gusto, ego and innuendo.
Sophie Strykowski (She/They) is an actor and performance maker whose work sparkles fearlessly with a joyous curiosity.
Together, they pastiche comedy, performance art, and unbridled joy to glimpse the life practice of world-building together.
About the Artists: Haz Lugsdin / Sophie Strykowski Instagram - @sp0repunk_
Haz Lugsdin (they/he) is a trans performer making on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people. Haz’s experience is in devised and collaborative work, rooted in comedy, pastiched with drag, performance art, movement, wordplay and absolute buggery. Haz is invested in developing non-binary ways of making that refuse rigid performance structures; as explored in their three latest 45 minute works; Rising Damp: A Sporepunk unearthing of a queer utopia at La Mama HQ (2022), The (Sour Glitch) Two-Step Refusal at The Flying Nun by Brand X (2021) and 101101001: Dude Where’s My Gender at The Giant Dwarf (2020). As a writer, Haz has received mentorship with ATYP as part of National Studio (2020) and Fresh Ink (2021). Haz’s work relishes in the illegible and incoherent; centering play and pleasure. He uses performance to make sense of himself and non-sense of the rest. They have a distinct modus operandi of gusto, ego, and innuendo.
Sophie Strykowski (she/they) is a performance maker and actor from Gadigal, currently living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people. Their devised work reflects their positionality as a queer person, with the intention to dismantle and reimagine perceived truths with earnestness and delight. Sophie has worked across a range of independent and professional stages in Gadigal, including Griffin Theatre and ATYP in Intersection: Arrival (2019), Q Theatre in Originate (2020), Kings Cross Theatre [KXT] in Natives (2022) and Rogue Projects in Taz v. The Pleb (2023). Her work plays with form, combining elements of movement, comedy and experimental theater to ask big questions about the self, love, sexuality and connection. Sophie brings these questions to an audience with sparkling fearlessness and joyful curiosity.
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Charaf Tartoussi joined Queering The Air as our third and final guest artist for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. A discussion between Sasja and Charaf about their captivating live performance titled “Aza”
Aza: Stories of Grief in Diaspora TICKET
A vulnerable exploration of migrant and diasporic grief through storytelling.
Aza (Arabic colloq: wake) is a powerful, nuanced portrait of migrant loss. Spoken word theater meets mourning ritual, it takes us on the grieving journeys of four artists as they grapple with what it means to lose a loved one back home.
Meet Charaf, Parminder, Thabani and Farah. They all live in Naarm, all write poetry and all have had to grieve a family member from a homeland someplace else. Together, they embark on an honest voyage through a grief as ancestral as it is foreign. From longing and guilt, to curiosity and pride, they will venture into the breadth of emotion in their migrant and diasporic mourning.
Aza is where they come together to be witnessed in the diversity in their grief. It is where they come together to heal, and to be healed.
In 50 minutes of vulnerable and sincere storytelling, they will move through the motions of their loss and attempt to answer the question: how does grief change when it is experienced in the immigrant diaspora, and how does it stay the same?
Music:
Rehab by Rihanna
Music by Madonna
YAMA LAYALI by David Vendetta feat Haifa Wehbe
(All LGBTQIA+ People Are Welcome)
100 Drummond Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053
Wednesday 11 October
4pm - 7pm
