Feygele: Tobias Herzberg preaches perversion under all circumstances for a second sexual liberation
13. Feb 2019.

by Drew Rowsome -

The Progress Festival is packed with intriguing international performances curated by local arts groups under the umbrella of SummerWorks. The Theatre Centre and Native Earth Performing Arts teamed up to bring Jacob Boehme's explosive Blood on the Dance Floor. Boehme is an Indigenous Australian artist who uses theatre, multi-media and dance to preserve traditional rituals and explore his reality as an artist who is "gay, Blak and poz." Though on tour across North America before arriving in Toronto, Boehme graciously took the time to answer a few questions by email. 

Drew Rowsome: Blood on the Dance Floor is a provocative and evocative title encompassing dancing being in one's blood as well as HIV and one's bloodline. What inspired the piece and how did it evolve?

Jacob Boehme: The piece evolved from a writing workshop that I was doing back in 2012, called The Black Writers Lab. Coming out of that I decided to write the full work in 2013. The title funnily enough came out of a conversation I had with a colleague about the work I was going to make. I was retelling a story about a time soon after I was diagnosed with HIV when I was at dance college and we were doing a workshop and there was a nail sticking out of the floor. I nicked my foot and I got blood on the dance floor. When I told my friend that story, she said, “There’s your title!” 

The real impetus behind the work came from a need to see our stories, by us and about us, on stage and on screen, and not the standard AIDS memorializations. It is a very different landscape now with HIV, with access to better medicines, PrEP, and the "undetectable equals non-transmissible” campaign. There is all this information that the general public is not really aware of - silence, stigma, isolation and shame still abound and I was sick of portrayals of people with HIV as sick and dying. So I thought I would tell my story as someone who is living and thriving and in doing so I had to look at - in examining my blood - my ancestry, my culture and bloodlines, and the dual narratives came out.

How does Blood on the Dance Floor fit into your artistic practice of "cultural maintenance, research and revival?"

Jacob Boehme: My practice is something I have been doing for just over 20 years and I have been fortunate to work with song men and song women who are our lore keepers and in doing so, have found that we (the Australian Indigenous community) have performance methodologies and dramaturgies, albeit undocumented, but that predate Aristotle. I am part of one of the oldest living cultures in the world, our history of performance is long. Blood on the Dance Floor presented the opportunity to take those traditional methodologies and bring them into a western context. The foundations of the work and the choices we made were based in traditional dramaturgies, which comes out in subtle ways in the performance, and my choreographer has married traditional movement into contemporary dance as well.

How is Blood on the Dance Floor being received on tour?

Jacob Boehme: I have had some wonderful feedback from audiences. I have had standing ovations and wonderful conversations in the lobby, I have been sent messages on social media. One thing I really like about this show is that it provides other people the opportunity to tell me their stories. I had a woman last night in Vancouver who came up to me and said that my story reminded her so much of her brother-in-law’s experience, and she was going to tell him to see the show. People seem to really want to hang around after and talk to me and tell me their stories of living and dealing with HIV, dealing with stigma, of disclosure, of friends and relatives dealing with HIV, and about people they’ve lost.

The word "Blak" is new to me. Is it an Australian term? How does it define that part of your identity? 

Jacob Boehme: The word Blak has an interesting history – we in Australia credit the visual artist Destiny Deacon with formalizing that spelling that we have all adopted. The story goes that Destiny said she was "Sick and tired of being called a Blak cunt, so she decided to take the ‘c' out of being Black.” If you are mixed heritage or have fair skin, people wonder what we mean when we are calling ourselves Blak, but at home Blak refers to our blood and our connections.

How do your intersectional identities intertwine and/or conflict?

Jacob Boehme: I think the whole intersectional interest is for people on the outside - when you're in it you just are and you deal with it. There is something about that discussion that is a little voyeuristic and a touch too academic in talking about human experience for me.

Australia finally got same-sex marriage but so did we 13 years ago and it wasn't the sea change in LGBT equality that we had hoped. What is your take on the state of gay in Australia?

Jacob Boehme: From my point of view I am very grateful for all the men women and those that have risen above gender who have fought for more rights and an equitable place at the table. However, the more we seem to gain the less community we seem to have. Our queer communities are nowhere near what I remember walking into in the '80s as a teenager. Where have all the queer spaces gone? Queer pubs have closed down, strips are vanishing, where is the queer community? It is that delicate balance of wanting acceptance and gaining more acceptance and rights but sacrificing our community to get it.

Canadians are also making very slow progress on dealing with the realities of HIV. There are still battles over criminalization and stigma, and gay men as a whole cannot donate blood. Is Australia any more progressive?

Jacob Boehme: No. Which is again why the need to make a show like Blood on the Dance Floor.

What is the next step in your artistic journey?

Jacob Boehme: At the moment I have received a six month research fellowship from Creative Victoria to build a new work called The Blood Library. I have been making great connections here in Canada with Indigenous people with HIV and am working on making a blood library of our stories and hopes and beauty. The impetus behind The Blood Library is to look at shame and stigma around HIV and the self-stigma and shame because of attitudes around HIV in and out of Indigenous communities. So I am working with Indigenous men and women and I ask them, "If you could turn your blood into the most beautiful object you could dream of, what would it be?" Then we work with artists and designers to make the objects and we have a medical partner to draw the blood and we have an artist boiling blood down to a plastic like substance and turning it into sculpture. The library will be full of these beautiful objects that re-frame the idea of HIV.

What other shows at the Progress Festival are you looking forward to experiencing? Are there artists you are looking forward to meeting (many great collaborations have come out of the festival over the years)?

Jacob Boehme: I am very excited to see Lost Together while here as I have heard it is a really moving experience and I love the simplicity of the idea. I was hoping to be able to see Bruno Capinan as so many of our concerns intersect, but I think I will be on a plane when he is performing.

Are Canadian audiences different than Australian audiences? Are you doing specific outreach to gay audiences? Indigenous audiences?

Jacob Boehme: I am finding that Canadians are just as weird and dark as Australians in their humour and also very warm people. HIV is a universal issue though, so I don’t see the audience response as very different. In terms of connecting with people around the show, we have definitely done a lot of outreach such as talks, panels and meet and greets, but we don’t target any one audience necessarily because the message is one that needs to be heard by all people. HIV isn’t going away. That’s why Blood on the Dance Floor exists, to keep the conversation going.