STATE OF PLAY

State of Play @ The Flying Nun, Brand X - Feb 7 & 8 2025

Article on Christopher Bryant & State of Play, this is translate

“Anything can disable us at any time, sugar. Don’t make it weird.” - Blanche DuBois, alcoholic, sad girl, neurodivergent icon.

2017. Christopher Bryant creates the “daring experiment in audience unease” Intoxication (2018, Glam Adelaide). This show uses Bryant’s anxiety disorder to discuss the reality of growing up queer in a homophobic society, & his resulting problems with alcohol that led to the car crash which nearly claimed his life. Intoxication wins awards & tours the country..

2020. Bryant presents the “brilliantly engrossing” New Balance (Suzy Wrong, 2023), a show that shares the stories of the queer-disabled community, mapping the connective tissue of our lived experience. In 2023, New Balance successfully returns for seasons at The Old Fitz, Sydney, & Merrigong Theatre, Wollongong.

2024. Their third collaboration begins an extended creative gestation: a state of play interrogating queer-disabled joy. The joy we feel in the everyday, the joy we express despite the state of the world, and the joy we feel in challenging society’s beliefs: that queer joy is something deviant, that disabled people aren't allowed to be happy and secure with our disabled identity. This state of play is called, appropriately: State of Play.

Using pop culture, queer theory, and theatre history to explore queer disability, State of Play asks audiences to question their assumptions about the way queer and disabled people live their lives. Flickering between a performance lecture interrogating the classical representations of queerness and disability we’re used to, and allowing these characters to take the stage themselves, State of Play builds four walls around the audience before slowly deconstructing the spectator-performer divide. The audience are invited to join Bryant onstage and take part in centering their own joy: through confession, through dance, physical contact, and artistic creation.

We’re not here to explain, defend, or validate. (We did that in our last two shows, and whether you saw them or not, we don’t need to repeat ourselves). We’re here to take audiences on a journey to dispel the deep-seated fear of a fallible mind and body. Anything can happen at any time: a car might hit you while you cross the road or a blood vessel may burst in your brain while you sleep. Even so, we have to keep on living: ideally from a place of joy and curiosity. 

What happens when you realise the disabled person you pity at the supermarket every day not only doesn’t want your pity, but in fact totally rejects it? What happens when you realise that we have rich and full lives not in spite of our disabilities, but because of them?