Adelaide Fringe 2016

“Ze”: Queer as F*ck!, Adelaide Fringe Festival 2016

0 Comments 28 February 2016

"Ze": Queer as F*ck!

Michelle/Ryan Lunicke takes us on hir¹journey of self-discovery in “Ze”: Queer as F*ck!. Warning of adult content and glitter (amazing mix), Lunicke laughs, yells, and whispers hir way through recollections of queer existence. Once in Tuxedo Cat, the audience for Queer as F*ck were called to go through to the Rivers Studio. As we headed in, I heard someone behind me saying: ‘and all the queer people stand up.’ And I mean, it’s true. It’s something of a niche show, I suppose. That’s not to say that straight, cisgender people can’t enjoy Queer as F*ck, but queer people are likely to get more out of it.

Entering the studio was memorable: there Lunicke is, doing warm-ups presumably, while wearing a purple dildo. Once you’ve processed the ‘oh, there’s a dildo’ thing, it just becomes kind of funny, watching Lunicke exercising while incorporating the dildo for comic effect. Once the show officially begins, Lunicke describes how ze views sexuality as a musical spectrum, demonstrating with a xylophone. Ze then hands out kazoos and slide whistles and asks the audience to play where they are on the spectrum – the first show I’ve been to in which every audience member outs themselves in the first five minutes.

Lunicke recounts hir past, exploring the many identities ze has collected, beginning with hir parents’ evangelical Christianity, all the way through to being genderqueer. Ze talks with raw honesty about personal experiences with identities and mis-identities ze has thrown off. Lunicke wanders through hir life with the audience, with humor and with sadness intertwined as they so often are in real life stories.

The music, much like the rest of the show, is pretty queer. Queen, Village People, Madonna, and Lady Gaga are just a few of the musical artists that pop up in the show’s soundtrack. The music is used to transition between topics, as well as to accentuate the stories that Lunicke tells about hir life.

Queer as F*ck! is an entertaining hour of thoughtfulness, contradiction, and exposed internal conflict, and is definitely worth seeing, especially for those who have struggled with identity themselves.

¹Ze/hir are gender neutral pronouns used by some genderqueer and non-binary people instead of binary pronouns such as she/her or he/his.

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Ceri is a creative writing student who is most often tired because her cat, Asparagus, wakes her up at 6am every morning. When she's not boasting/complaining about her cat, she's probably sleeping.

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