Apocalipstick | Polytoxic
Apocalipstick opened with the whole cast on stage dancing in high heels, boxing punch bags, and roaring at the sound of upbeat music. This set the mood for the show: a witty feminist theatre smashing the patriarchy one dance move at the time.
Apocalipstick is a fun and energetic variety show produced by the Polytoxic Collective that screams FEMINISM! Its hilarious vignettes, sexy acts, and skilled performers offer witty commentaries about the life of women and gender fluid people under White supremacist patriarchal conditions, the things that we are required to do fit in, and the questions that we ask ourselves.
What brings everything together is the word ‘intersectionality’. Feminism is toothless and complicit when it avoids questions of racism, class, ableism, and sexual difference. Polytoxic’s directors Lisa Fa’alafi (Hot Brown Honey) and Leah Shelton (Bitch On Heat) remind their Brisbane audience that feminism needs more than a focus on women to ‘clean up’ the mess of patriarchy. The reminder came from two fronts. First, the show featured women and gender fluid people of different ethnic backgrounds, including the circus performer Mayu Muto, the MC-lyricist Busty Beats, and the beatboxer Hope One, to name just a few. Second, these women and gender fluid people were not just a token of diversity in a show about White feminism and women. They offered a view into their own experience as women and gender fluid people of colour that revealed where they feel oppressed and how they reclaim their power.
Image + cover image: FenLan Photography
Apocalipstick used drag and gender-fuckery to engage the audience through laughter, the absurd, and the excess. There is nothing better to make someone think about serious issues than to make them laugh! Laughter sits with you in a light vein and it makes you come back to the funny sketch again and again looking for one more laugh. Drag invites laughter by highlighting the contradictions of gender through the excess: hoping for a fuck, office tape and markers become the perfect beauty tools for a face-lift and make-up, and thin-glass toxic masculinity is the weapon of the man looking for acceptance in the wolf pack.
We never knew what was coming on stage next. We blushed at the sight of big black hairy dicks, balls hanging loose, and a plastic doll’s strip tease. We were amused by the sexy and sassy dance of Lisa Fa’alafi commenting on the exoticisation of Pacific women, the aerial skills of Mayu Muto, and the soulful voice of Lana singing about solidarity. We laughed with the Hot Brown Homies and the Wrong Direction, respectively the parody of a hip-hop group and a boy band.
Image: FenLan Photography
Apocalipstick is a must-see show because it is hilarious and high energy. I walked out of Metro Arts theatre shaking my booty and thinking to myself that I needed that reminder to keep sassy and wild. Patriarchy thrives on well-behaved women. But above all, Apocalipstick is a must-see because it offers a radical feminist politics that calls out patriarchy from the multifaceted perspective of intersectionality. As Indigenous women have been saying for decades already, White feminism is complicit in the oppression of people of colour and we need to create space where people can come to power by representing themselves and expressing their own condition. Apocalipstick does just that by filling the space of shame with laughter and solidarity.
