Performance: bodies moving around in front of a group of other bodies watching them. It’s really not much different to the everyday, yet it strives to transcend it.

Often as these bodies climb and reach for transcendence… they don’t… quite… reach it. They fall and witnessing the fall can be horrifying, humiliating even. Knowing these people tried so hard to do something so interesting only for it to be… not terribly interesting.

Enter the choice; our choices as audiences. Do we indulge the urge to cringe at the attempt, or do we celebrate the attempt? Revel in the embarrassment of the flailing/failing/falling.

We are all trying so hard to just carry on with this arbitrary sense of purpose, when really for the most part, we’re just making fools of ourselves.

Performance attempts to catch fleeting moments that elevate us beyond the mundane. Moments more commonly glimpsed in life without reason or conscious effort and in this way it can be awkward and difficult to watch. Just plain silly really. Why try… so hard… to do something we live everyday anyway.

A close friend of mine finds watching theatre deeply embarrassing. For the most part she’s embarrassed for the people onstage.

She finds it “cringe” and it doesn't matter what it is; it could be the most tongue-in-cheek performance, or something more serious and highbrow.

I think what she finds so embarrassing is the act of other people standing in front of an audience pretending to be something everyone knows they are not.

Weirdly, she doesn’t feel this way about watching a film.

I think it's because there's enough physical distance between her and the actors, she can't see the real human beings in front of her.

A film doesn’t suggest what is happening on the screen is happening right in front of you, in your time and space, instead it takes you to a place outside of your immediate reality.

Theatre on the other hand steps into your immediate reality, asking you to suspend your belief there and then, not in some alternate dimension.

This can be confronting, because your reality becomes entangled with the imagined reality.

To take the risk of taking theatre seriously, is to risk the possibility you may appear foolish. As a witness you’re implicated in its often failing attempt to transcend the mundane.

So is being implicated in the foolishness simply a required consequence of being an audience member? You are now irreversibly entwined in the dramaturgy of the work; a la the foolishness of the work.

Cultural cringe in Australia is such a tired old thing, but it seems to hang around like a bad smell on a favourite denim jacket.

Perhaps the problem is with this concept of “cringe.”

“Cringe” is out. “Cringe” has been out for a long time. At least within circles of people who seek joy in life.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you want to or not, cringing physically happens. It’s instinctive. We all cringe and even more so in the theatre.

A reframing I use is “fierce.” I won’t pretend to know the history of how this word began to be used by queer people, especially as any history of queer slang is riddled with whitewashing and conflation. What matters is queer people use it and that it disempowers the act of cringing.

“Fierce” is close to the concept of audacity, however it has unique celebratory and revelatory connotations.

I dropped an egg yesterday and instead of allowing frustration to take hold I uttered:

“Fierce.”

Suddenly there was a certain… fabulousness to the fact that I dropped that egg. Embarrassment, discomfort, is something to be revelled in.

To revel in the embarrassment like you might revel in the initial cold steps into a warm ocean, or the discomfort of a sweaty, yet rejuvenating, hot yoga class.

Truly innovative performance-makers in Australia do this: They don’t care. Or perhaps more accurately, they appear like they don’t care whether you take them seriously or not.

In fact, they may directly challenge you to not take them seriously, then, through reveling in the embarrassment of not being taken seriously, they create a moment of vulnerability that finds itself to be relatable.

Excellent theatre does this intentionally, where the makers themselves are conscious of using embarrassment to build a stage on which they perform. But terrible theatre does this too, consequential to the fact that the performance carries on, ignorant to how much we in the audience may be cringing. In those moments the onus is on us, the audience, to decide whether to revel and enjoy the fierceness, or to paralyse our ability to enjoy the evening.

I took a date to a piece of really bad theatre once. Like really, really bad

The show shall remain nameless, but it was dealing with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, OCD. I’m always interested to see how performance, or any piece of art really, tries to deal with a disorder I am intimately familiar with.

This particular show was horrifying to witness, not unlike OCD, which is why I thought it was sort of appropriate.

Incredibly uncomfortable to watch, kind of like a kid at a primary school talent show gyrating to Timberlake’s sexy back, or watching the person next to you on the plane wet sneeze into their hands and then immediately grab the corded tv remote.

Something was off about it.

Probably had to do with the main character miming the action of chopping his penis off, as fake blood spurted out onto the front row…

We left in silence, breaths held, but each step away from the venue it was harder to contain… until finally, only inches away from the safety of the pub, we broke down in laughter right there on the footpath.

Despite the life-scarring images we were now left with, the conversation was endless. I got to talk about OCD and we kept talking and talking for hours, just about our lives really.

He didn’t run away but leaned into it, which I liked. Someone else who can revel in the embarrassment.

Performance has a way of folding itself into our world, maybe not always as transcendent ecstasy, but beautiful nonetheless.

Last year I fell in love for the first time ever. The moment I realised it was actual, real love was in the theatre. I was watching the Cybec electric reading of Mature Skin by Gabrielle Fallen.

At only nineteen years of age, Fallen writes with an authoritative voice and a natural ability to paint vivid images of place. I witnessed a performed version of Melbourne I’d never seen in any kind of media before, yet it is the one I live and breathe every day. Fallen casts light on seemingly unglamorous realities of post-covid Melbourne and lets the shadows cast reveal the dark beauty of living in this uptight city.

This boy and I loved to talk about culture and urban design and compare our two cities. He's from New Zealand. I wanted so desperately for him to see this show, I was itching in my seat the entire time. I need him to see this, this is Melbourne! This is real theatre! This is me! I can show him me if I show him this show! But I couldn’t show him this show. He lives in fucking New Zealand.

There was a moment I got a bit distracted from what was happening on stage, because I became aware I was thinking more about what he would think about the show than what I thought about it myself. I remember my inner monologue yelling at me:

“Oh shit Zack, you love him!”

After the standing ovation we rushed into Roshelle’s car. If you ask her she’d tell you I couldn’t shut up, you’d have thought I’d taken something, I NEEDED to talk about this boy. We picked up friends from Fringe Hub and rushed to Viv’s 30th.

It was paradise, being in a house full of new people who weren’t allowed to get bored of me droning on about him. I told the same story over and over segueing from “the best new work I’ve seen all year” straight into “I’m dating the most beautiful boy in New Zealand” followed by showing photos of him, which I’d already made my background on my Apple watch.

I reflect on Mature Skin a lot, as it is an excellent play… but when I do, I can’t quite separate it from that night… that night I twirled in a warehouse with a little picture of a boy I thought I loved.

That text exists permanently weaved in the fabric of my life as the night I realised my heart may never be the same. (Yes, we broke up six weeks after that night, whatevah).

The framing of your attitude towards the night, the way you spend it with people you love, or want to love, or can’t love… the way you integrate being a body watching other bodies, into being a body traipsing around town - that is ultimately what decides the value of the experience.

So often, people like us, orangutans as we call them – orangutans can get caught up in the quality of the show, in the meaningfulness of the ‘act of making,’ in the question of was this worth me dragging my ass outside and paying $30 to $80 dollars?

When sharing the idea for this opening essay with a contributor, Max Tassell, he responded with an anecdote. His beautiful girlfriend decided she was in love with Max during what they allege to have been a terrible show at the Phoenix theatre.

She looked to her left and saw Max steaming with rage at how terrible it was and she decided she loved him.

That is the moment ORANGUTAN is about.

Oh how lucky we are to get to run about and play with each other in these silly little cities.