Donné Restom, a Central-Coast-based playwright, storyteller, singer and mum, presents two new productions at the Sydney Fringe Festival this week. ‘Kink in the Tale: Storytelling for Grownups’ – a collection of stories about sex, intimacy and our kinky quirks told live on stage and ‘Everyone in my family is dead or about to be’ – a touching one-woman show presented and written by Donné which explores the suicide of Donné’s brother, other family members and themes around death.
I recently had the chance to speak with Donné about her shows. Here’s what I found out.
Interview:
What do you do and what show are you doing in September?
I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, singer, writer and story-teller. I’ve got two shows – one is, ‘Everyone in my family is dead or about to be.’ It’s a one woman show: a dark comedy that aims to make life’s inevitability a little less threatening.
Basically, that show came about from a lot of storytelling. I started just becoming interested in writing a group of stories focusing around death. My brother committed suicide when I was 15 – he was 10 years older than me. My parents are in their 80s now and so we’re talking about death a lot and their preparations for when they’re gone. They’re planning to go through all their stuff. Deciding what is worth keeping and what they’re getting rid of. There’s also stuff coming out about euthanasia and superstition around that.
There’s a lot of talk about death that has kind of got me thinking about all these interesting things that we don’t normally talk about that have a big impact on how we live our lives. So, questions around what is valuable in life, what we hold on to or what we get rid of. Questions about ‘what you do with a beloved one?’, ‘how I want my body dealt with when I die?’. I basically started writing all of these little stories around the theme of death and I read them out.
[‘Everyone in my family is dead or about to be’] runs from the 3rd to the 7th of September in Sydney Fringe.
I also have another show in Sydney Fringe called, ‘Kink in the Tale’ which is storytelling for grown-ups. I’ve been running it for 8 months now and we’re starting to sell out. I’ve had people who are good at writing and performing write and read a story that is in some way about sex – it’s a really hilarious night usually. That one is on the 19th and the 21st.
I have an amazing line-up of storytellers: Duncan Fellows, who is an actor; Luke Carman, who is an award-winning author – one of the best story-tellers I’ve ever heard; Dylin Hardcastle, who’s an extraordinary story-teller – they just had their fourth book released, ‘A Language of Limbs’; Dan McIvor, who’s an emergency services worker who has very funny stories, and me.
You talk a lot about sex and kinks in your stories, do you want to talk a bit about that?
‘Kink in the Tale’ is really about opening a door to people being fearless about talking about their sexual desires and experiences. I think there are a lot of people who, when talking about kink, suddenly get very afraid or have a very specific idea of what that thing is and probably relate it very specifically to particular fetishes. But, to me, kink is much, much broader than that.
We often define sex as genital sex – which I think is an incredibly limited way to think about how we have sex, how we experience sexual desire and action and what is possible in the world of sex. So, for me, I take kink in a much broader meaning. From the typical BDSM community-style kinks something as simple as getting immediately, incredibly turned on by direct eye-contact, or a hand at your throat, or a piece of rope.
It’s my belief that a lot more people have kinks than they’re willing to admit to themselves. I think the more that we talk about it and tell stories, the better world we can make with more open conversations about our desires.
In your shows you mention cremation along with death, can you expand on your thoughts on this topic in relation to the shows?
One of the stories that I talk about in my show ‘Master Stock’ is a conversation with my parents about what to do with my brother’s ashes. My mum told me that she had a very specific idea of what to do with the ashes – which sent me into a spiral of impractical forward thinking. I wanted to scatter the ashes, and I thought it would be great if maybe we went for a trip as a family to scatter them: go to the places my brother loves in Australia – because he used to travel a lot.
My mum, in this one conversation, informed me that their plan was that they were never going to scatter the ashes and instead when they died they wanted their ashes to be put in the same box as my brother’s – so to create this family box of ashes which I relate to a master stock. In Chinese cooking, when new stock is made the old stock is added, becoming this master stock that keeps getting added to and passed down to generations. I find that this box of ash is our family master stock.
But when I went into a spiral I started talking about what happens when they go in it.Does that mean that my sister is gonna go in and that I’m going into this stock? And, ashes aren’t light, they’re a whole human, you know.
I started to think that these ashes are going to get passed down to my son and then he’s going to get stuck with this huge box of ashes. What are we doing just keeping this box of ash: this generational load which is constantly being loaded with this responsibility? Literally, just carrying around the dead or housing the dead.
For me, that brings up these questions of what is left of the human, of the person that you knew, when it gets to the stage of they’re just ashes? Is it better to bury them and have them merge with the Earth? Is that actually the best thing that we can do for the environment? Ultimately, there are so many humans on the planet, what happens to all of the corpses?
I have another story in the show where I was given this axolotl and the axolotl eventually died. I was left with this huge conundrum about what to do with this little axolotl corpse. Flushing it down the toilet is not a really good idea and to bury it felt like a bad idea – if there was any consciousness left in his body, I felt like he would be trapped in the Earth as a water creature. I thought it’s just an axolotl, just a pet, put him in the bin. But I couldn’t bear putting him in the bin. So, I ended up putting him in some water in some Tupperware and putting him in the fridge. I was left with him frozen in the fridge and I didn’t know what to do with his body.
It was getting gross to have him frozen in this block of ice for months. Eventually, my son and I decided to take him down to the river. We had a little ceremony for him and then sort of frisbee-ed him out into the river. He got caught in the current and came back. This block of ice washed up on the rocks with a whole lot of Maccas rubbish and that was kind of awkward. I had to tell my son to look away as I sort of fished the axolotl out and threw him really hard into a current that could take him away.
At the time I felt that that was a great idea until I spoke to an environmental lawyer friend of mine who told me that the parasites in the axolotl now were probably destroying 10-years worth of environmental regeneration of the river. Like damn, you really can’t win with this whole corpse situation.
For years I was obsessed with the idea of a sky funeral. In Tibet, they lay the body up on a platform. So many vultures come and eat the body that it’s devoured in 15 minutes. Then [the Tibetans] pulverise the bones and mix the bone dust in with flowers. They make the fat into a ball and throw it in the air and the vultures fully finish the whole thing. I think that would be the most amazing, epic way to go.
So, the same thing is happening in that show as my show about death and with ‘Kink in the Tale’ – I really enjoy taking these quite brutal subjects and finding the light in them.
Ultimately, it’s humans. We have so much power and on so many levels we just really don’t have our shit together. We just bump through life, trying things, failing, fucking up in the world and finding love in between. We just kind of go along trying to make life good. For me, to take these topics of sex and death and talk about them with brutal openness and brutal honesty while also finding the light and the humour, I think is really important.
I think that’s kind of why I’m doing this – to sort of lighten the thought of it. To take some of the darkness out of what can often become sort of fraught or heavy topics. Death becomes wound up in attachment and grief, sadness, pain and letting go. And, sex can be so easily wrapped up in shame and abuse and feelings of inadequacy or feelings of just shame about really enjoying it. I love taking those things that have this kind of heavy stuff attached and make it lighter.
To get your tickets to Donné’s shows visit our links here:
Kink In The Tale: Storytelling for Grownups, 9pm (60min run time), 19 & 21 September 2024. Cost: $30 | $22 (conc/deadly tix) | $25 (Group 6+). Where: Sydney Fringe Festival,
Cabaret Hub, Kings Cross Hotel: Bordello Room 244-248 William St, Potts Point NSW.
Visit: https://sydneyfringe.com/events/kink-in-the-tale
Everyone In My Family Is Dead Or About To Be, 6pm (50min run time), 3-7 September 2024. Cost: $14 / $10 deadly tix. Where: Sydney Fringe Festival, Emerging Artist Sharehouse, Erskineville Town Hall, 104 Erskineville Rd, Erskineville, NSW.
Visit: https://sydneyfringe.com/events/everyone-in-my-family-is-dead-or-about-to-be/