Fording The Fringes

If someone were to come up to you on the street and say the word 'cabaret', you may still be forgiven for immediately thinking of that fine Melbourne institution, Dracula's. For sure, the whole idea of cabaret still has a traditional feel to it; one of sitting down, eating dinner, sinking a few bevs and being entertained by a host of performers on stage. That's how it has been for a while, at least in Australia. That, if you're into something a little more extreme and edgy, is the downside. But, if you are that same person, there is a plus; the Aussie fondness for freaking people out. Our larrikin sense of humour couldn't be held under the cover forever, and luckily the last few years have seen the rapidly progressing fringe festivals of the major capital cities developing into wildly eclectic mixtures of out-there performance. Adelaide and Melbourne have been doing well, and the last couple of years has seen Perth's Fringe World come out if its shell. This year, however, may be a whole different kettle of fish. One example: our own local purveyor of the weird and wonderful, Tomas Ford.

Drum had a chat to Mr Ford – 'cabaret' performer, electronic music artist and personality in general – during the photo shoot that produced the cover you see on this here mag. Glitter seemed to become a motif for the day. “You learn to work with glitter,” Ford remarks while receiving the make-up works, “but there's nothing like getting a shitload of it in your eye. I was playing a show once, and it was so hot I was pouring sweat from my forehead. The glitter ran down my face and into my eyes in ridiculous amounts. I was playing the whole show effectively blind from about ten minutes in. At least, when I get older and my eyes screw up, I know how to perform.”

It's taken a while for Ford to find the character – and, admittedly, the confidence – to step up on stage and provide such an unorthodox approach to theatre as he does. Last year saw him bring his latest show, An Audience With Tomas Ford, to international audiences for the first time – an incredible feat on the basis that it was a brand new show, and he ended up with much critical acclaim at the end of its run. But the roots run much deeper than that. “I started out about nine years ago, just playing around Perth,” Ford explains. “It was just me playing around at the dive bars that were sticking out around here. I was playing more kind of electroclash-based stuff, because that was really what kind of got me started off in music. I wasn't really thinking about what I was doing as any form of cabaret, or any theatrical performance thing for that fact. That was the case for a long time: I was touring around and playing dive bars, pretty much just like any other electronic artist would in Australia. Occasionally I would do a fringe festival, but the act's early stages were a little bit too intense and a little bit too punk for fringe audiences.”

“Back then, my show was mostly based on trying to scare the shit out of people,” he laughs, “and I was happy with that. But last year I took it to Edinburgh fringe for the first time with an act that I'd specifically designed with having a sit-down theatre audience in mind. I knew that I had to have the same level of intensity, but with less output of punk rock bullshit. Kind of through that, I had to put out some advertising, and my friends convinced me to list it as 'cabaret'. Then I got to the UK, did the show, and had the editor of Time Out in London sit me down and convince me I was a cabaret performer (laughs). So I guess I'm cabaret now. That's how it kind of came to be.”

That whole distinction of 'cabaret' is one that Ford ended up embracing, if An Audience... is anything of an example. But, as you might assume, it was difficult for him to find a place when he was used to scaring the shit out of people. Luckily, he has embraced the spectacle of musical theatre, and through his work abroad it has granted a new lease of life to his performances. Not only that, but it has become a great success in the ever-developing world of Australian fringe art. “I guess [the act's] evolved much more into playing with the audience,” Ford tells. “I'm much more interested now in the cabaret side of it, and fucking around with that as a form. There are a lot of people doing interesting stuff in cabaret. Predominately and especially in Australia, musical cabaret is like where it's at. But it's fucking boring,” Ford interjects, with a slight twist in tack that gives a bit of a preview into the aim of his act. “It's the worst shit, and it's why I didn't want to be categorised as cabaret in the first place. But the stuff that's happening in the British cabaret scene is really exciting to me, and totally on my wavelength. It's like I've found my context, in that sense. Adelaide has this big cabaret scene and this big cabaret festival, and over here we have Downstairs At The Maj and that kind of thing, but it's not really what I do. Whereas in the UK, It's much more late-night, anything goes kind of thing. I'm still far out on the edge of what's possible in cabaret, because it's a form where there hasn't really been a lot of experimentation yet.

“Having coming from so far away from cabaret, and having come at it from a completely different angle to everyone else, it's really different,” he continues. “I don't really have that feeling of having to judge myself against other musicians and performers. I've got this show, which incorporates all these varying elements, and I just try to bring all that out and to entertain people. But I have this great freedom in that I can tackle a theme or a story in many ways, and I just have to find the entertaining bits. Like An Audience With Tomas Ford, a lot of that was old acts I was doing, and they've just lent themselves to be done in a completely different way, so I am playing around a lot with the different aspects of performance and theatre.”

Tomas Ford has his work cut out for him for Fringe World this year. As well as bringing his new show, An Audience With Tomas Ford, to punters throughout the festival period, he'll be putting in the hard yards at the Bok Choy Ballroom and Noodle Palace spaces set up for the event, somehow managing the huge list of comedians and performers playing there. It's crazy, just really crazy,” he enthuses. “It's a bit weird, because Edinburgh was such a big deal, but that was in the middle of last year. It was such a huge thing. You go there, not really expecting to make much of the show, but then you just get caught up in everything that's going on there. Like, you walk out onto the street and something's happening. When I started the show, it was pretty shit; I wasn't getting that many people there. Like Edinburgh gets so saturated, that it's just like your mates coming down. Luckily it did pick up. But in any event, you just end up seeing so much, that you don't really care, because you don't get much time to stop and think. It's just like play your show, go out, watch shows, go to bed, get up, do the same thing. But when you get home, you realise everything you've just watched, and you're like, 'Oh god, I have so many ideas!' and that's how I've felt the last few months: just trying to work these ideas out. And that's where I am now, and now I'm doing so much a Fringe World, it's just that same feeling of excitement and frenzy. I can't wait.”

Tomas Ford will be playing the following dates:

Monday 28 January - Big Day Out, Perth WA
Wednesday 13 February - Sunday 24 February - Bok Choy Ballroom, Perth WA