actor Sherilee Kahui wearing exciting blue eye makeup looks quizzically at the cameraHank of Thread presents (a smidge of) Pidge, a black com­edy about iden­tity and the anxi­ety that is inex­tric­ably tied to it. The show fuses clown­ing, song and dance to show the myri­ad ways that we are all sim­ul­tan­eously the same and dif­fer­ent, ulti­mately cel­eb­rat­ing the absurdity of it all.  

Writ­ten by Sherilee Kahui and Jimmy Sutcliffe, dir­ec­ted by Han­nah Clarke, the show has played in cit­ies around Aus­tralia and New Zea­l­and. Solo per­former Sherilee Kahui answers some of our ques­tions.

“The first pro­voca­tion for this work came when my co-cre­at­ors and I were pack­ing in my Master’s Major pro­ject The Review­ers at Anvil House in 2014. A pigeon had built the sad­dest nest you ever saw: lit­er­ally just a couple of twigs on con­crete, and there was a lonely, sol­it­ary little egg lay­ing there. It was too much.

It star­ted us think­ing about the innate tragedy of exist­ence and how ridicu­lously absurd the world is. When we thought of a show with the solo per­former being a pigeon, we star­ted think­ing about what it means to be an indi­vidu­al in the world, but also what it means to be a part of your com­munity, or flock. We had ini­tially based the struc­ture of the piece on the stages of an exist­en­tial crisis, but now it is more of an explor­a­tion of social anxi­ety. Much relat­able awk­ward­ness, which the pigeon phys­ic­al­ity lends itself to per­fectly!  

This show seems to res­on­ate with people who are into out­sider art, regard­less of age. I had thought it was­n’t really for your cis hetero dudes, but then my friend’s boy­friend loved it in Mel­bourne. He felt the “slice of life” vign­ettes were true reflec­tions of how he exper­i­ences the world. In say­ing that, the “WTF” com­ments have all come from that demo­graph­ic.  

I think it is a good show for people who think a lot about life and maybe get into their own heads a bit much. I think it helps to know that were are all exper­i­en­cing a vari­ation on the same theme, and that we aren’t alone, even though we are very much alone. I hope people leave feel­ing good about them­selves. Or maybe bet­ter. Even if it’s just a smidge? Ugh. sorry.

Ummm. I think the show is pretty coo..l… ( I hate myself).”