Writers: Dan Daw, Sofía Valdiri, Tiiu Mortley, Joe Brown, and Brian Lobel
Directors: Dan Daw and Sarah Blanc
EXXY is a waiting room, it’s Dan Daw’s nan’s backyard, it’s a series of movement-based vignettes interspersed with pieces of unpretentious poetry from the creators’ own lives. Put simply, EXXY is part theatre, part performance art. It lives in a liminal space between those two genres, just as complexly and beautifully as its subject matter. EXXY uses various vignettes to meditate on the experience of disability and what acceptance and freedom feel like. Through simple moments of action, EXXY encapsulates the complexity of having lived a life at the margins and finally taking centre stage.
Central to its themes is saltbush: the hardy plant of the Australian Outback that fights its way up to breathe despite all the odds. For Daw, EXXY is a homecoming, a return to the backyard of his youth, an elegy to the love and freedom provided by his nan.
Yet not all is peace, love, and understanding. There are embodiments of the struggle forced on disabled youth by doctors. Yet, when reimagined through the voices and movements of Daw, Sofía Valdiri, Tiiu Mortley, and Joe Brown, these slip and slide amorphously from encouragement to beratement. Emerging from this confusion is a glimpse of a complex world where disabled people compare themselves to one another while supporting them, put each other down while lifting each other up. These windows of knotty confusion are the real moments of electricity in EXXY.
The ongoing theme of pay for work is present, though never fully examined. There is a sinister nature to some of the choices of music and the choreographed movement that, at times, feels like Daw is invisibly pushing or pulling Sofia Valdiri, Tiiu Mortley, and Joe Brown. Yet, despite being cast as the architect of these moments of discomfort, Daw is also the victim of them. One gets the feeling that if Daw is exhausting himself for pennies, then there is more to unpick in how he feels about working with collaborators. What’s admirable and perhaps frustrating about this theme is Daw’s willingness to pick at that thread but never fully pull it, when the audience would never have noticed the issue without Daw pointing it out.
Where EXXY lacks efficacy is in its focus on drool. It is a fact of life that is clearly immensely important to Daw, but where these elements would shine in a compact and intimate gallery space, they get lost in the vast space of a theatre. Even for an audience member sitting four rows back, the drool fails to either shimmer with glorious beauty or have any discomforting impact.
Nevertheless, EXXY is an experience of togetherness. Even if one does not feel captured by certain elements, the captions provided will pull in the audience thanks to many additional flairs of wit and joy. So too will the music. At times pumping and energetic, at times touching and slow. This culminates in an undeniably beautiful audience sing-along, which clearly has much emotional resonance for Daw.
We live in a society where displays of athleticism are confined to a certain type of person. Even when we watch the Paralympic Games, there is still a certain expectation of how bodies in athletic effort should look and move. Perhaps EXXY’s most revolutionary choice, and one it returns to numerous times in its relatively short runtime, is its demonstration that these bodies are athletic. Naturally, one wishes that our society did not consider that a revolutionary statement, but we are not there yet. EXXY can help get us there.
Runs until 10 October 2025
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
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7
