We’ve been at it for millennia, but sex on the Fringe is something else

Artistic fashions come and go, but there’s one topic that’s always been discussed at every fringe festival. We may have been at it for millions of years, but there’s always something new to say about sex. This year’s Melbourne Fringe is rife with all things erotic, but as you might expect, much of it is far removed from the narrow version of sex that dominates the mainstream.

Jodee Mundy is curator of Disabled and sexya party taking over Arts House in North Melbourne for an evening celebrating sexuality in all its different forms.

“I think intimacy and sexuality are both very public and very private,” Mundy says. “There’s a huge industry that revolves around it. It’s on our screens and our televisions…what’s not seen as often is the visibility of deaf and disabled people having intimacy and sexuality in our public spaces.”

Mundy says Disabled and sexy is about reclaiming “that birthright we all have to intimacy and sexual expression”. She will co-host the evening with deaf drag queen Mademoiselle Coco, alongside artists who draw on the many forms long associated with the erotic: “kink and seduction, striptease, burlesque”.

The party may be a chance to increase the visibility of underrepresented artists, but it’s also a chance to let off steam. “The deaf and disabled community spends most of their time advocating, constantly pushing, explaining ourselves,” Mundy says. “And I really wanted to have a night where we didn’t have to do that. Where everyone could just let loose, have a good laugh, dress up.”

“You’re going to meet people you’ve never met before, you’re going to have conversations you’ve never had before, and it’s going to open your eyes to how amazing it is to be human. And how sexy we all can be.”

Solo show by Dr. Martha Tara Lee, Orgasmic AFhas a similar goal. Lee is Singapore’s leading sexologist, but she’s also very familiar with Melbourne (she has two degrees from Monash University) and the contrasting attitudes toward sex in each country.

“Asians tend to be a lot more inhibited because of the lack of sex education. But with Australians I find you have a better work-life balance and people prioritize their relationships and sexuality a lot more.”

They’ll have a lot to learn from Lee’s Fringe debut, a collection of revealing stories, tips and humor gleaned from her years on the front lines of sexuality.

The show will feature audience interaction, but Lee won’t be letting anyone down. She’s used to making fun of herself. “I have no problem laughing at myself and having people laugh at me. I’ve been doing it that way for a long time. I don’t want to embarrass my client during workshops, and clients’ stories are confidential, so I often end up sharing my stories.”

The mixed messages surrounding sex often leave Lee’s clients confused: “I often get asked how often people should masturbate, how often they should have sex. As if there’s some kind of benchmark.”

Perhaps the mismatch between sex in the media and our lived experiences partly explains the eternal hunger for art that promises to demystify the whole business. It has certainly found an audience for Bianka Ismailovski’s solo show Working girlin which her career as a sex worker is explored.

“People love hearing stories about sex work,” she says. “I think a lot of people struggle with understanding how someone does that for a living because they can’t necessarily imagine themselves doing it.”

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Like many of her peers, Ismailovski’s sex education was influenced by the kind of advice she received from Dolly Doctor, an advice column in the Doll teen magazine that guided young women between 1970 and 2016. “Sex for female pleasure was unheard of. I didn’t even know I could have an orgasm, so I didn’t have one until I was 21. Because it was all about how to control it… and I think for women especially, it’s a real learning curve to understand that sex requires a lot of vulnerability.”

Working girl is comedy, but it’s also potentially empowering. “Talking about sex and normalizing it and letting people know that this doesn’t have to be something that lives in the shadows, it’s a pleasurable experience that we all do, I think it helps the audience feel seen and feel okay with it,” Ismailovski says.

Chou Kuan-Jou’s dance training in Taipei was hardly an exercise in empowerment and self-expression. Students were required to maintain the same hairstyle throughout high school and college, while their weight was made public every week, with punishments for those who didn’t conform. She soon realized that she would forge her own path after graduation.

“I’m a lazy dancer, I don’t really train, and what interested me more was the performing arts… What really inspired me was when I started studying feminism and started thinking about my perspective on my body and my relationship experiences.”

Her Melbourne Fringe Festival debut is TOMATOa trio exploring lust. “We talk a lot about our personal sex lives among friends, but in public or in a dance piece, it’s not really common to talk about lust or desire,” she says. “We might talk about sexuality or gender identity, but not lust.”

The starting point for the work was the act of masturbation, and Chou wanted to capture the awkwardness and secrecy that usually accompanies solitary sex. “I don’t want to offer something beautiful about desire and the dancing body. I want to show the reality of the difficulties, the uncertainties, whether it’s about sex or masturbation.”

TOMATO is playful and messy, and goes in new directions every time it’s performed. Our attitudes to sex are culturally charged, and the show played out differently in Taiwan (“the audience is really tense”), says Chou, than it did in Edinburgh (“the audience was half drunk and there was a lot of laughter”).

That cultural baggage could also play a role Temple of Desirein which Bharatanātyam dance gets an erotic twist. While the show starts in a very spiritual place, says director Govind Pillai, “it ends in a hot queer mess”.

Temple of Desire There are 16 artists participating who are trained in classical Indian dance. The practitioners often start their training at the age of four or five.

Getting out of shape can be tough when you’ve been in a certain style of dance for so long. “A lot of our dancers had a hard time moving in different ways because they said, ‘I’m not that trained, that’s a little too voluptuous,'” Pillai says.

Pillai explained to them that Temple of Desire is not a departure from tradition, but a return. The work “has its origins in the temples of India, about 3,000, 4,000 years ago, when the dances were performed for the idols as a kind of erotic expression of love for god and the divine. It was based on the idea that it was a sincere and beautiful way to express affinity with the divine, to be one with the divine.”

The show is an attempt, Pillai says, to reconnect with an era when a person’s full self could be embraced. “There was gender diversity and sexual diversity in the way sensuality and spirituality were understood,” he says. “But today it’s very shocking, particularly for the Indian community, because customs have been sanitized and things have become more chaste. We’re probably going to get into a lot of trouble with this show.”

Words every Fringe performer could live by.

Disabled and sexy is at Arts House, October 12; Orgasmic AF can be seen at The Motley Bauhaus, from October 14 to 20; Working girl can be seen at the Chinese Museum, from October 8 to 12; TOMATO can be seen in Dancehouse, from October 2 to 5; Temple of Desire is at the Malthouse Theatre, 4–5 October. Melbourne Fringe runs 1–20 October; http://melbournefringe.com.au.

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