Exploring New Perspectives And Real Discussion About Racial Identity

In January of this year Kim Bowers was selected as an Artist In Residence at La Boite in 2016, offering the opportunity to work alongside fellow residents like Michelle Law, Suzie Miller, and Ngoc Phan, and with Artistic Director Todd MacDonald and Creative Producer Glyn Roberts.

Having heard about the "moving and shaking" Young Jean Lee's Straight White Men was doing in the States, and hearing whispers of a local production soon after her appointment, Bowers wasted no time in expressing her interest in the project. "I have quite an affiliation with Young Jean Lee and the work that she does, and most of her plays she has done all herself with her own theatre company, so I put my hand up straight away. The whole idea for her theatre company, the mission statement, I suppose, is Destroy The Audience, which is a really exciting idea for me. It's really exciting to be working on a play by a woman of colour, especially about straight white men, you never see that perspective, it's a totally different gaze."

"It's really exciting to be working on a play by a woman of colour, especially about straight white men, you never see that perspective, it's a totally different gaze."

Once arriving from South Africa, Bowers got her foot in Australian music's door with her high school band Spdfgh. Later, alongside her sister Candy, Bowers founded Black Honey Company, a 'production house and cultural consultancy team that collaborate on and create fearless sticky performance.' The company's CV features hip hop inflected shows such as MC Platypus & Queen Koala's Hip Hop Jamboree and Hot Brown Honey, a burlesque show currently in the midst of a world tour.

Noting the parallels between her own and Lee's artistic practices Bowers gushes: "It was a perfect match!"

"It's really interesting in this day and age that there's still no discussion, or the discussions about the identity of whiteness are so false, because people don't really like talking about that and what that means culturally as well as politically."

Imagine if the coffee table book Stuff White People Like had been written by one of the most daring playwrights working today, an Asian American woman named Young Jean Lee, as opposed to a bespectacled Canadian hipster. This is comedy that isn't scared to question cultural privilege, not just chuckle at it.

"As a woman of colour, every day is like an assault. You hear and see so much of these huge amounts of stereotyping and huge amounts of questioning of black women in society, and it's almost like a default for white men to have to have that same assault, but it's starting to happen, there's talk about what whiteness is and how it effects everything we do."

Lee's play is part of that conversation. The co-production between State Theatre Company of Adelaide and La Boite will be directed by Nescha Jelk, whose feminist politics Bowers highlights, alongside the contributions of Alexis West, a Birri Gubba woman who plays a stagehand that delivers the curtain speech in the play.

"To have an Indigenous woman, both of us in the room to actually talk through the play, to have us in the room, and Nescha being a female and a feminist as the director of a play that, in a very interesting way has been set in a very conservative canon, is necessary. Necessary on all shows!" Bowers clarifies with a hearty laugh. "But it's great to be on something so specific."