Musings, Music & TRANSmeditations: Patricia Wilson and David Bateman call and response
21 May 2018

Sometimes unlikely partnerships make for spectacular art. Patricia Wilson is well-known for her work at Buddies, admired for her spiritual musings on social media, and notorious for Crackpuppy; David Bateman's prodigious artistic output includes Mad Bent Diva, The Case of the Golden Purse and People are Horrible Wherever You Go. Together, with some assistance, they are presenting the fruits of their collaborations and individual pursuits in a night entitled Musings, Music & TRANSmeditations.

Both are seasoned performers but in slightly different genres. "Patricia has this wonderful sort of casual direct, off hand way of presenting her work," says Bateman. "A dry and fun way of presenting. The rock personality comes through in the writing, in some of the repetition. Almost like a lyric. There's one poem called 'I Feel You' and there's this repetition of the idea of 'I feel you, I feel you, oh baby, oh baby' and it's not an easy thing to present on stage in a spoken way. It works in a different way when you're singing it and you have a back-up of guitars or whatever. But Patricia really pulls it off in the way she performs it, it all comes together in a powerful presentation."

The pair began working together at the suggestion of cultural bon vivant RM Vaughan (Compared to Hitler, Bright Eyed). "Patricia had asked him to edit some of her work that she wanted to turn into a collection," explains Bateman. "He was living in Berlin at the time so he recommended me, he thought it would be a good fit. We worked on that collection that became Musings From the Bunker and then part way through Patricia came up with the idea of writing something together. We started writing back and forth, sometimes in person, sometimes by email. It has a kind of call and response feel to it, because I will take the last couple of lines from Patricia's poem, she wrote the first poem, and I will talk about my own stuff that is related to it."

Presenting the work in a live setting and pre-publication was not Bateman's idea. "Patricia booked Buddies initially and then told me later. I love working with her and it's all fun but it's a battle of personalities for all of us sometimes," says Bateman. "We wanted some variety in the evening because Patricia says, as often as she can, 'Poetry's boring you don't want to listen to it for too long.' I said, 'Well if that's how you feel, we'll get Helene to sing every 15 or 20 minutes. That'll break things up. When people get bored, they'll get to hear an aria.'"

Instead of just adding arias from diva Helene Ducharme's extensive and eclectic repertoire, Bateman gave selected pieces to composer Stewart Borden and asked him to set them to music. "Some will be sung in English and some will be in Italian," says Bateman. "Stewart's partner Raymond Helkio has taken the lyrics and created projections, sort of surtitles, so that people will be able to read the words as they hear Helene sing them." I had the good fortune of a preview of one of the completed songs, and hearing Ducharme's ethereal and gutsy voice soar over propulsive beats and lush orchestrations is indeed a thrill.

Bateman too is ecstatic to hear his and Wilson's work in a new way. "One from the collaborative piece Parting; This Waltz with Words, is called 'Pirate Swagger,'" says Bateman. "It's a wonderful piece about inhabiting the idea of what it is to be a woman but always measuring that up against a biological woman. I think Patricia's referring to Helene but I'm not certain. It's a metaphor about a date with a kind of butch lesbian persona. Patricia is writing about that and how in a sense that would be a dream. I'm not saying that trans is an imitation, but in the poem there is this sense of always trying to measure up to the dream of transitioning from one gender to another. "

As in Partings as a whole, "Then there is 'The Thrill of It All' where I'm responding with a similar idea, but from a different point of view as a very effeminate gay male and trying to inhabit a gender that I can't always measure up against. The very rigid idea of what gender is, which is one of the dominant themes of the whole piece. Our different identities, even though they're very different, they are both very queer in the struggle to move between the masculine and the feminine which we both have had to do in very different ways in our lifetimes."

Ducharme and Borden will also be performing "The Colonoscopy Rag" ("Where I use a colonoscopy as a metaphor for ridding the system of all sorts of toxic ideas and pathologies," says Bateman) and "The Phantom of the Drag Queen" taken from yet another upcoming project of Bateman's. "I've been working on this piece that might be a short film, I'm not sure where it will go. It's called 'The Usual' and it's about a group of people coming into a bar asking for their usual, and talking about really difficult things going on within their community. So it makes very indirect gestures to the violence that's been happening in the queer community in the last year or two. Not just around the serial killer but all the stuff we've all been dealing with. I sent Stewart the script and he just turned it into a short aria."

But the majority of the evening will be devoted to launching Parting. "There are also sections from Patricia's project Musings From the Bunker," says Bateman. "And I'll read from my work." It is wise to take advantage of this preview because "It can take five years to get somebody to publish you in two years," says Bateman. "You have to just making stuff and submitting and hoping that something will happen." He laughs. "We're both so young, we have lots of time. We're very close in age. Patricia, even though she looks 20 years younger than me, she's only a couple of years older. That comes up in the poetry, there's stuff about aging and getting older, considering your identity over the last 40 years. Thinking about how it can evolve in the last section of your life. I think that's where I came up with the title Partings, the idea of coming together and moving apart at the same time."

Any night devoted to a theatrical presentation requires sartorial splendour. Patricia is always prepared with her should-be-patented rock n roll armour, but what will Bateman wear? "I really have no idea. It could be anything from Dame Edna to a really boring version of what I wear on the street everyday. It will depend on how much money I have that day and what I can afford to buy. I'm thinking maybe drag but I don't know. It's hugely last minute for me at this point. I'll throw something together."