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.