“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
These words, first spoken by writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her now-famous TED Talk, are recited early on in alt-cabaret show Hot Brown Honey, by DJ and emcee Kim ‘Busty Beatz’ Bowers. In a sense, they represent the raison d’être of the show, which features six First Nations women beatboxing, singing, dancing, acrobating and stripteasing their way into the narrative, one stereotype-smashing routine at a time.
There’s a more prosaic reality behind the philosophy, however: Bowers (formerly of indie band Spdfgh) and her long-time friend and collaborator Lisa Fa'alafi (of dance/theatre collective Polytoxic) wanted a mainstage gig. “It started as a kitchen conversation between Lisa, me and my sister Candy, who’s doing a heap of acting work at the moment,” says Bowers. “We were talking about how there weren’t really any spaces for us. And how the kind of work we were making, and have always made, could never be on a mainstage.”
From among their peers, Bowers and Fa'alafi assembled their line-up of co-stars: Materharere Hope 'Hope One' Haami, Juanita Duncan, Ofa Fotu and Crystal Stacey. Between them, the six Honeys have Aboriginal Australian, Samoan, Tongan, Māori, Indonesian and South African heritage, and cover off skills as diverse as World Championship beatboxing, funk, circus, contemporary dance, ballet and hip hop.
“We’ve been working on the fringes for so long, we have just met so many amazing artists – that have never had that bigger platform,” says Bowers. “It’s not that they’re not working, they’re working really hard; but that platform was never there to push them into the mainstream.”
Not so now: since it debuted at the Brisbane Festival in 2015, Hot Brown Honey has played the Arts Centre in Melbourne and the Sydney Opera House, and won the Green Room Award for Best Cabaret and the Edinburgh Fringe Total Theatre Award for Innovation. Its return to Sydney Opera House this month feels like a victory lap.
“These characters are sort of our superhero versions of ourselves,” says Bowers. “We wrote ourselves and these other amazing women onto the page and into history – or herstory, I should say.”
Hot Brown Honey runs Jun 7-Jul 2 in the Studio, Sydney Opera House. See what else is on stage in Sydney in June.