The Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2022 series
Louise and Elaine chat Ania Upstill over Zoom. A clown bringing their show Transhumance to the Festival for the first time. We chat moving from directing to clowning and the gender binary.
Transhumance
Take a surreal journey through the landscape of gender with Transhumance, winner of a Best Weekly Award for Circus and Physical Theatre at Adelaide Fringe in 2020. Award-winning clown Ania Upstill playfully explores what it means to be a trans human—or any human—in a society where the gender binary often blocks us from the richness of human experience.
Join Ania Upstill (they/them), a NYC-based theatre and circus artist for a heartfelt, physical exploration of gender norms. As a genderqueer and queer performer, the American Kiwi Upstill is excited to bring Transhumance to the largest theatre festival in the world. “I think of Edinburgh as the great art hub of humanity,” says Upstill, “and I know we will find an audience that needs, wants, and will enjoy this journey.”
For Upstill, clowning brings buoyancy, joy and fun into the heated conversations around trans and nonbinary identities. ‘I think often we only hear about how difficult it is to be part of a gender minority, for instance having to explain your pronouns all the time. And yes, it is hard,’ says Upstill, ‘but it is also beautiful and exciting to be able to play with all the performative aspects of gender and find what feels right to you.’
Transhumance comes to the Fringe laden with praise from America and New Zealand: 'A work of joy and playfulness – whimsical, witty and replete with wonder' (TheatreView.org.nz). 'Manages to be both a deeply personal story of self-identification and a universal experience of gender paradigms' (TheatreScenes.co.nz).
Ania Upstill started identifying as genderqueer and using they/them pronouns in 2018. ‘I started seeing more and more content about non-binary identities online. I remember I started to sob uncontrollably because I realized, ‘oh, that’s me too’. I think we often overlook how a binary concept of gender isn’t really fun for anyone, including people who identify as cisgender.’
The title of the show, Transhumance, happens to also be an agricultural term meaning to move sheep – or other livestock – across a landscape in a migratory pattern. For Upstill, this reflects how gender is both a limitless landscape and an intriguing place to explore. Thinkery & Verse co-artistic director JM Meyer also observes that ‘the multiple meanings of transhumance also demonstrate both the jolly usefulness of prefix ‘trans,’ and the pleasure of slant rhyming with ‘romance.’
SHOW: transhumance
INSTAGRAM: @butchmermaid
WEBSITE: aniaupstill.com
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