You’re So Brave, Georgi Ivers · 
The Blue Room Theatre, 20 October 2022 ·  

You’re So Brave is a tender collection of stories that reflect on the travels, dance classes and personal growth of local theatre maker Georgi Ivers, as she has learned to live with multiple chronic illnesses. The work is co-devised by its solo performer with director Joe Paradise Lui and dramaturg Michelle Hall.

In Adelaide Harney’s distinctive set design, scattered personal items build an intimate impression of Ivers’ years living in Hong Kong. The Blue Room Theatre’s Studio stage is painted white, and softly neon-lit domestic and liminal spaces are demarcated by bold industrial scaffolding, constructed by Aidan Bayliss.

At the centre of the stage stands an inconspicuously weighted studio pole. Its silver surface echoes the same architectural tone of the scaffolding, and effectively positions a typically stigmatised dance tool as an ordinary part of this story’s world. 

Ivers enters the performance with a cheeky but potent clown persona. With her injector pen, she mimes an epic take-down of the non-disabled gaze on her everyday care rituals. Her persuasive performance crosses many disciplines, from clown to dance to personal soliloquy, and dares the audience to see her as directly she addresses us. Whether spoken or shown, comic or smooth in timing, her voice is unwaveringly confident throughout the show’s emotional and aesthetic range.

It’s through her own embodied confidence that Ivers deftly explores her first diagnoses of fibromyalgia and ankylosing spondylitis, her grief that surrounds that time, and how pole dancing formed an important but sometimes isolating step in her evolving relationship with her body. 

The show’s eclectic choice of methodologies creates access for Ivers to reclaim some events that weren’t in her control – ridiculing the outrageous insensitivity of the specialist who diagnosed her, and soaring freely around the pole as she recounts short-lived relationships where her illnesses weren’t discussed.

In a gentle weaving of her own reflections, Ivers presents an image of learning to accept her new reality that is multi-faceted and self-directed, and unequivocally places control of the narrative in her hands.

The stories in You’re So Brave are shared in a nonlinear structure, moving in and out of Hong Kong and so-called-Australia across the last few years, and adding depth to some moments revisited through different emotions. A sense of narrative slowly builds through these faintly interwoven episodes, but it leaves audience members with more impressions of an overall journey than solid stories. 

This structure isn’t necessarily a weakness in post-dramatic theatre but what I did feel was missing from the show was an adequate interrogation of Ivers’ relationship, as a white person, to Hong Kong. Exploring place and identity wasn’t an intention of this show, but an honest positioning of Ivers’ whiteness could have enriched and grounded the work.

Nonetheless, I left the show feeling moved, satisfied and seen in other ways. I was captivated and affirmed by You’re So Brave’s dynamic representation of living with chronic pain, and its brilliantly personal homage to how we take care of ourselves with what we have in our control. 

Afterwards I found myself reliving one of the show’s most impressive and tender scenes, of handling a sleepless night caused by significant pain. These moments are rarely represented with the agency and nuance of living through them, and I was grateful to recall some of the reclamation that Ivers offers.

Theatre can be a kind of thoughtful alchemy that recreates the real world, allowing us to access it through new emotions. For people with under-represented stories, a good show can gift us a version of our own lives that gathers all our complexity into a place of safety and strength that is otherwise difficult to find.

In a society — and still, sadly, in an industry — where the telling of our stories is given more validation and privilege when coming from non-disabled people, You’re So Brave is an unassuming and playful act of resistance. Ivers gloriously basks in her own trademarks as a theatre-maker, and in doing so, denies power to the social pressures that sideline our individual voices by homogenising or pitying them.

You’re So Brave continues at The Blue Room Theatre until 29 October 2022.

Pictured top: Georgi Ivers in ‘You’re So Brave’. Photo: Minni Karamfiles