Em Rusciano On Women’s Rage & Harnessing It To Make Change

Em Rusciano’s The Rage And Rainbows tour is, in the writer, comic, singer and broadcaster’s own words, “a way to celebrate and encourage the expression of female rage”.

“I really wanted to encourage women to name what's making them angry, to not eat it, to not drink it, to not shop it, to not do all the self-medicating that we do to be socially acceptable. I wanna make it socially acceptable for women to express their dismay and I think once we do that we let the poison out.”

She developed the show after she managed to get to a really good place, following a year that upended her life – she turned 40, had a baby, and left her job as the co-host of the 2DayFM radio breakfast show, after being widely painted across the media as a “difficult woman”: “I swung between very angry moments and absolute moments of pure joy.” 

The 2DayFM gig, she says, made her feel powerless, gagged by her contract from speaking out publicly about the way she was being portrayed as a “diva”. The media storm picked up when she made comments on Wil Anderson’s Wilosophy podcast about those perceptions and the dynamics between her and newly installed co-hosts Grant Denyer and Ed Kavalee, who replaced Harley Breen in 2018.

Crafting The Rage And Rainbows helped Rusciano to process her emotions about the whole tense saga. “I realised when I left that job, I was pregnant and it took me three months of recovery time, my soul was just completely depleted. And then this show came pouring out, and it's a really joyful show. 

“I've never done anything like it. I do tackle hard shit – last year I did a stand-up show on miscarriage and I've done one on divorce. I like taking big, meaty, hard, heavy topics and shining light and humour into them. This show is a channelling of that rage and then ultimately the acceptance of it and the releasing of it into the universe.” 

Other subjects that anger Rusciano run the gamut of being tasked, as the mum, with the majority of household tasks, to the restrictions placed on her two teenage daughters, Marchella and Odette, in the wake of a spate of male violence against women in Melbourne over the last year. 

“I resent the fact that they can't walk alone at night without arming themselves with a set of keys,” Rusciano says. “That they're being policed on what they have to wear, that they'll walk out into a job already disadvantaged just 'cause of their gender.” 

"I like taking big, meaty, hard, heavy topics and shining light and humour into them."

Rusciano sees anger as an emotion that – unlike sadness, which is passive – can embolden us take action: “It makes you wanna get up and change shit.” 

Still, she warns against getting trapped in seething rage, her show acting like a release of those negative emotions. “You have to see past [anger],” she notes. “And you have to see where you wanna go. You can't just stand screaming into the abyss because then nothing moves forward and nothing changes.”

Rusciano released an EP of songs from the stage show, co-written with Kate Miller-Heidke and her partner Keir Nuttall, in April so audiences could learn the lyrics ahead of time.  

“The singing along is cathartic – you just scream out those words. I wanna see shiny, glittery, happy-slash-angry faces, screaming the words I wrote back at me,” Rusciano says.

The collaboration was “one of the most joyous” Rusciano has ever taken part in: “Luckily for me my weirdness and her genius was a great combo.” 

She notes that Miller-Heidke had likely never worked with a self-taught musician like Rusicano before – “She’s normally working with really credible, amazing musicians” – but took a “real leap of faith” to jump on board the project. 

“When we got into it, she was like, 'Oh my God, are you gonna sing these things out loud?' I said, 'Yes, I fucking am.' She loved it. Kate's a mother. Kate's a woman in her late 30s and she got it all.” 

The Rage And Rainbows tour isn’t all rage – there’s still the rainbows part, which comes through in sequins, bright colour, confetti and four costume changes. 

“I guess I want [the show] to be the big rainbow beacon of light so that everyone doesn't feel quite so overwhelmed all the time, and they remember that there is joy at the end of the rainbow. 

“While I was in the depths of despair when my baby died a year-and-a-half ago, two years ago, I've been able to get to this moment now where I can talk about it and celebrate how I've got to here. You can go from really, really dark to really, really light and it's ok to go back to dark, just know that you can come out again.”