After suc­cess at Lit­Crawl last year, Dominic Hoey  is return­ing to Welling­ton with Your Heart Looks Like A Vagi­na at BATS The­atre next week. It’s a one man show about being diag­nosed with Anky­los­ing spondyli­tis, a form of inflam­ma­to­ry arthri­tis that affects the spine and joints in the low­er back. Treat­ment aims to min­imise symp­toms and pre­vent com­pli­ca­tions. Hoey is care­ful to note that the show is “way fun­nier than it sounds!”

“The show is myself and tech woman Ruby Rei­hana-Wil­son, award win­ning direc­tor Nisha Mad­han and producer/drunk Tay­lor Mac­gre­gor. I orig­i­nal­ly wrote the script at an artist retreat in Raro­ton­ga and then work­shopped it with the team. I’m super lucky to have such an amaz­ing bunch of peo­ple involved, all of them all top of their per­spec­tive games.”

Despite a cou­ple of rea­son­ably high pro­file musi­cians also pub­lic about hav­ing the con­di­tion (Mick Mars from Mӧt­ley Crüe and Dan Reynolds from Imag­ine Drag­ons) Hoey says the main reac­tion from oth­ers is ‘you have what?’ “I’d like to raise aware­ness of con­di­tions like Anky­los­ing Spondyli­tis and help peo­ple with sim­i­lar dis­eases feel less alone. I know when I first got diag­nosed I felt real­ly con­fused and iso­lat­ed. The whole time I was going through the diag­no­sis and treat­ment I was mak­ing men­tal notes about all the crazy and ridicu­lous things that were going on, whether that was in the health­care sys­tem or with WINZ etc. Then when came time to write the play I start­ed to link them all togeth­er and use all the skills I’ve devel­oped as a per­former and poet.”

Those skills have seen Hoey release four stu­dio albums, two books of poet­ry, and one nov­el. So far.

Here’s a Load­ing Docs short they made about the show.