“I’m a little torn answering this, because this isn’t a scholarly exercise,” says Joel Bray. “I don’t feel I have to be distant from the stories the way a scholar does. In fact, there’s a real strength in being willing to share the tough stories about my life.”
I’ve asked him how he maintains the necessary distance to perform such a deeply personal, autobiographical piece on the public stage, and he has rejected the premise. For Bray, a Wiradjuri man bringing his solo performance Daddy to Summerhall’s Main Hall as part of the House of Oz line-up, the boundary comes from the artistic process itself rather than clinical detachment.
“There’s also something about the process of making the art — turning those memories into poetry or movement — that creates the distance I need to perform it,” Bray says. “I’ve always been comfortable being vulnerable with an audience, and in a way that’s my superpower. I’m not the world’s most virtuosic dancer, but I have a willingness and an ability to bare my soul in front of people. And that resonates, because when a performer shares their deepest, darkest secrets, you as an audience member feel less alone in your own.”
Humour as a weapon
While the piece addresses paternal absence and childhood trauma, Bray relies heavily on comedy to connect with the room rather than trade in sympathy.
“Humour is essential — it’s one of the most powerful weapons we have as oppressed minorities,” he says. “Look at the Scots and the Irish, the original English colonies, both famous for their humour. It’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to be coming to Edinburgh. Humour creates a connection between the performer and the person watching, and once that connection is made, it becomes a conduit for truth-telling. It generates trust and breaks down barriers.”
Beyond political utility, comedy offers relief from daily attrition. “And let’s face it, it also just makes life more fun – especially right now, with the cost of living and war and everything going on,” Bray adds. “That’s why I’ve woven Daddy through with it. It’s more fun for me, and more fun for the audience.”
“I’ve always been comfortable being vulnerable with an audience, and in a way that’s my superpower. I’m not the world’s most virtuosic dancer, but I have a willingness and an ability to bare my soul in front of people.”
Searching for a title
Selecting a title took time, with Daddy emerging as the fourth option. For Bray, the phrase operates across several ideas: referencing paternal inheritance through his father’s line, queer dating culture, and Bray’s transition into middle age.
“On the one hand, there’s the story of my cultural ancestry through my father’s line — this idea of inheritance, good and bad, coming down from parent to child over time,” Bray says. “But of course it also captures the queerness: that sense of searching for love in a complicated gay dating context. And to be honest, it also captures my own ageing. Despite my best attempts to imagine myself as an eternal twink, I am becoming a daddy — and that’s got its own challenges and its own beauty in it.”
First created in 2019, performing the show seven years later in his late 40s introduces distinct physical realities.
“Ha — I’ve been joking that if I keep doing this show much longer, I’ll have to change the title to Granddaddy,” Bray quips. “I made it in 2019 and never expected to still be performing it seven years on. But there’s something poetic about that: a work partly about growing old and becoming a daddy, and here I am, still doing it.”
Maintaining that performance standard requires confronting practical limits. “And yes, it’s a challenge on my body now, in the second half of my forties. My leg doesn’t go as high, and my jumps aren’t what they were,” he says. “There’s a scene where I fall in love with an audience member and get caught in a repeating choreography — looping gestures that mirror the endless business of trying to pick up a guy — and the music gets faster and faster until it’s impossible to execute. I do this in every work: I plant an ordeal, an impossible task, for myself. Every time now, I curse the younger version of me who made it — but it reads precisely because of that genuine ordeal I’m going through.”
Crafting physical languages
To tell this story, the movement spans contemporary dance, traditional Wiradjuri dance, ballet, and clubbing. Bray connects these forms through an improvisational methodology developed over a decade.
“On the one hand, there’s the story of my cultural ancestry through my father’s line — this idea of inheritance, good and bad, coming down from parent to child over time,” Bray says. “But of course it also captures the queerness: that sense of searching for love in a complicated gay dating context.”
“It’s a way of playing with texture, muscle tone, memory and imagination in a particular way – it’s a bit hard to put into words, but it means that when I’m making choreography, I can draw on this toolkit I’ve created and then drop in these other modes,” he says. “I think of club dance as the twenty-first-century folk dance we have. So I can weave all these different ways of moving together by sewing them with this improvisational methodology of mine. And the result is really unique. There are little things in it where the audience goes, ‘Oh yeah, I see that’ – they catch the associations, the connections to these different physicalities.”
Despite the physical strain, Bray refuses to be daunted. When you experience him at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, you will find him in a celebratory mood…
“Generally, though, I’m really happy with how my body is dancing,” Bray says. “The hardware might have degraded, but the software is highly developed. I’m dancing with more nuance and skill and connecting with the audience through my body in a way I never could as a younger dancer – simply because I didn’t yet know how.”
Featured Image: Joel Bray’s Daddy – photo by Bryony Jackson
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