Blood Is Thicker Than Stigma In Jacob Boehme's Exploration Of Aboriginality And HIV

As a fair-skinned Aboriginal man of Narangga and Kaurna heritage who is also gay and has lived with HIV for 18 years, multi-disciplinary theatre-maker and Yirramboi First Nations Arts Festival's Creative Director Jacob Boehme has copped prejudice from all directions, but he does not want your pity. "It took until about four years ago for that flame to be lit, the burning desire to get on and just write my story," Boehme says. "But what I'm not really interested in [is] doing one of those solo shows from the '80s where someone gets up on the stage, bares their soul and, by the end of it, an audience thinks, 'Here, mate, I'll give you money - go see a shrink.'"

The heartfelt and humorous Blood On The Dance Floor, presented in conjunction with Ilbijerri Theatre Company as part of this year's Sydney Festival, is a heady fusion of dance, film and intensely autobiographical storytelling, drawing on thousands of years of traditional ceremony. Charged with an indomitable, generous spirit and witty tongue, it reveals the spectrum of stigmas Boehme has had to overcome, both homophobic and from within the queer community, racial too. His diagnosis came two years after his best friend committed suicide because of his positive status.

"I've come through the hellfire personally, so I can look back objectively and I do believe that, as theatre-makers, as artists, your job is to be generous with audiences," Boehme adds. "You can't make them pay good money to sit there and have shit thrown at them" — good advice given to Boehme by Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett, a mentor at the Victorian College of the Arts. Blood On The Dance Floor punters are greeted flirtatiously by Boehme as the camp, silk kimono-wearing, smoking Percy.

"You can't make them pay good money to sit there and have shit thrown at them."  

"They've read the blurb, they know to expect some issues," Boehme says, with added sibilance, "but we're going to have a little fun. It's not going to be too heavy and, if it is, there's always going to be a joke to bring you out." Percy was born of a young Boehme hanging out at the bar of Oxford Street's The Beauchamp Hotel with older drag queens. "I always sit with my elders because they have great stories," Boehme says. "They were talking about the onset of the AIDS crisis and everyone was being very depressed, then this one queen leaned into my ear, 'Oh, darling, it was sick, you should have seen the drag queens. People were popping off left, right and centre and the funerals were hilarious. Each one had to be better than the other.'"

Boehme's monologue jumps from this blackly comic elder to his personal experiences of abusive language, worries over divulging status to a new date, then back to his childhood and the voice of his father. It's laced together by Mariaa Randall's pared-back choreography and smart direction by Isaac Drandic, drawing on the non-linear nature of ceremony. "The thing in the back of our heads that always crept into the room was Western dramaturgy - 'Does this make sense?' — which we had to fight. Who cares if it makes sense or not? This is not the mode of storytelling we're using."

And yet, the logic is carried in the DNA of the piece. Amplified by James Henry's staggering sound design, stunning, cinematic backdrops by videographer Keith Deverell sweep up Boehme's expressive movements in a swirling torrent of red blood cells; his words escape like sweat from microscopically amplified pores. "I'd always approached blood as ceremony, where you usually paint it symbolically on your body," Boehme says. "Keith very quickly understood that the visual aspect had a very important storytelling role."

Bringing the show to Carriageworks during Sydney Festival means a great deal to Boehme, 18 years after his diagnosis. "I keep saying I'm returning to the scene of the crime," he laughs. The performance space was derelict when he first discovered it and was also the scene of several suicides. "I was having a yarn with Nardi Simpson from the Stiff Gins and I was telling her I'm bloody nervous about coming back here and singing them spirits up again, but she said, 'Think of all the healing you could bring,' and I reckon that's a better way of thinking about it."

Ilbijerri Theatre Company presents Jacob Boehme's Blood on the Dance Floor, 21 — 15 Jan, at Carriageworks, part of the Sydney Festival