We’ve all been on a terrible night out. Sometimes, it’s partially our fault for getting too excited and having one too many party favours. But other times, it’s because we don’t know how to exist in any other way than in our own truth – and the wrong people take notice. Takatāpui is a spoken word performance, a window into one of the more terrible nights out you can have as a person who cannot help but look different, and all the thoughts and memories that carry you through it.
Writer, performer, sound designer and antidisciplinary artist Daley Rangi (Darlo Directors’ Lab participant for Overflow) works with recorded sound compositions by Anesu Matondo as well as beloved queer disco tracks to create rich soundscapes collaged together from the songs and intrusive thoughts that swim through their head. “Forced performance breaks” start off very funny before taking starkly sinister turns, as the dance becomes an eerie reminder of the ways queer people are expected to perform their identity in the world. Rangi is physically compelled to perform for us, while also signaling to the stage manager in the sky to cut the music. These gestures could have been more impactful, but the point is still clearly made.
The visceral imagery and throbbing rhythm of the stories Rangi tells is hypnotic, pulled further into the world of their memories with the use of a vocal processor and coloured lighting changes. This is not a monologue, nor is it ‘just’ poetry, it’s something entirely different. The processor changes Rangi’s voice into a threatening bass, their inner voice that’s constantly misgendering them, asking “you a big commando now?” Then comes the high-pitched screech of white boys in suits on the train, hurling “faggot” and other slurs across the blue fuzzy seats. The white man they narrowly escape on a bad date, Dave, takes on a similarly high-pitched tone, feeding little racist, transphobic comments to them along with their steak dinner, whiskey and a forced tongue down their throat.
It’s confronting, to say the least, but delivered with care
It’s confronting, to say the least, but delivered with care. At the beginning of the performance, Rangi invites us to Google what “takatāpui” means ourselves, but also to step in and out of the performance if it ever becomes too much. Their sense of humour is biting and dark, yet still inviting. In between scenes that recount physical, psychological and sexual assault and self-betrayal, Rangi creates an ethereal world of queer joy. Blue lights shine down on them as they stand up from their sound desk of sorts, and turn to face the back curtain – they speak through the microphone in expansive, warped tones of chosen family, of love, love, love surrounding them like Donna Summer’s disco anthem ‘I Feel Love’. Their voice is so loud through the microphone that it vibrates under your seat, so loud that it drowns out the suits and Dave and the deep inner voice, so loud that it ropes you into the joy – it has to.
A version of Takatāpui was published in Kill Your Darlings’ Anthology of New Australian Fiction in 2021, and that version is relentless in its unflinching recount of the events of the night. This performance brings something new, something joyous, and something even more alive to the original text. The ending is decidedly different, too. Despite it all, we must continue, if only to see what we might write next. Take your chosen family for a ride on Rangi’s terrible night out, and remember why you take turns holding each others’ hair as you vomit on the side of the road.
Takatāpui is performing a limited run at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Unwrapped series from November 17-19, 2022. Get your tickets and find out more here.
