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Photo – Heidrun Lohr

The softly spoken man at the front of stage is dwarfed by two large projection screens behind him. Each shows a picture of himself, larger than life in more ways than one, dressed in ostentatious traditional Chinese court dress as part of a promotion for an Asian Australian arts festival. “That’s me in drag,” he quips.

The man is William Yang, who has been a fixture of the Sydney arts world since he first made waves with pictures of the gay social scene in the 1970s. Delivering intimate monologues in front of photo slideshows is something of a signature style for him, one he has often used to explore issues of cultural and sexual identity with shows such as Blood Links, Sadness and Friends of Dorothy.

This latest work, I Am a Camera, is another personal journey, an illustrated retrospective of moments from his own life. Commisioned for this year’s Sydney Festival, and playing for three nights in Parramatta before moving townwards to the Seymour Centre, the show is a collaboration with composer Elena Kats-Chermin, who crafted the live soundtrack of cello and percussion.

As a story teller, Yang has an unaffected style and affable wit. He drifts freely from subject to subject, interweaving anecdotes from the arts world with travel tales, little known moments in Chinese Australian history and family reminiscences. Yang’s stories may set up a joke or a philosophical musing or they may at a moment’s notice flip from mundane to dramatic. Other times, they go nowhere in particular except to show off a tasty meal he had or an interesting person he met, before he moves on to something else.

I Am a Camera is a show about small moments and fleeting impressions. Yang cites as one of his inspirations for it the continuous visual record people keep of their lives through Facebook. Yang himself seems to have photographed his every waking moment and whether he’s capturing exotic scenes on tropical islands or photographing his favourite teapot, he has an uncanny ability to elicit beauty.

His eye for visual composition is at times breathtaking. He’s also not afraid to throw in family happy snaps or pictures taken in profoundly personal moments. The use of twin projection screens is powerful, creating an immersive effect and enabling him to show the same subject from different viewpoints or at different moments contemporaneously, giving the still images a dynamic quality.

Fluidity emerges as a recurrent theme, through the shifting stories and shifting fortunes of the people in them, through the music that rises and falls like a gentle tide and in the slideshow itself, which frequently turns to images of water or things shaped by fluid action, such as glaciers, sea creatures or lava flows. Life, Yang seems to be saying, is a state of flux. You never know whether it will bring you tragedy, spiritual revelation or a nice meal but the constant state of change is itself a thing of beauty.


2012 Sydney Festival
I Am A Camera
William Yang

Venue: Lennox Theatre | Riverside Theatres cnr Church & Market Sts, Parramatta
Dates: January 13 – 15 at 7pm; January 14, 15 at 3pm
Tickets: $30
Bookings: 1300 668 812

ALSO
Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, January 17-22