Jack McGee
Teaching cycle skills at a primary school the other day, I asked a 10-year-old to define integrity for me. She said that “integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching.” This is one of her school values and, as a teacher coming in just for a day, it’s a relief to hear. I can turn my back.
The definition of integrity that I’m more familiar with was given to me by a friend of mine. She described integrity as “when your inside matches your outside.” Integrity as authenticity. Consistency is the common denominator across both definitions, but the latter feels more relevant to me as an adult. I can’t turn my back on myself. I have to live with the inconsistencies between me out there and me in here.
Last year, Joana Joy’s show Standing Still (Still) brought me to tears. It was a cathartic experience, one I’ve sat with over the past twelve months. Joy’s new show Miss Tui Whanganui 2009 made me profoundly sad. There were no tears, just a creeping, internal ache. Based on the other reviews I’ve read, it appears I’m alone on this. I’ve spent the past few days trying to figure out why.
At its heart, for me, Miss Tui… is about integrity. It’s a life seen in ongoing battles, between the outside and the inside. The story ripples out across various time periods in Joy’s life, but it all tracks back to an anecdote about her deeply catholic parents. She describes how, when she would head out to parties as a teenager, they wouldn’t warn her about drinking or tell her “not to do anything they wouldn’t do.” Instead, forebodingly, they’d remind her, “remember who you are.” Who is Joana Joy?
In her late teens, she was a musical theatre kid with disordered eating and grand showbiz ambitions. She was also a high achiever, gallivanting around Europe doing gymnastic education in Copenhagen and performing Shakespeare at the Globe. To quote Aretha Franklin on Whitney Houston, “she was a talent.” She is a talent. Joy continuing to remember who she is, in the face of all that the world throws at her, is where the stakes of the show lie. We are emotionally invested in her maintaining her integrity, because frankly, we like her. We’re rooting for her. Most of the work of developing these stakes is not done in content, but in presentation. It doesn’t matter what Joy is saying about herself, it matters how she says it. It speaks more to her singular character than any of her lore ever will.
She is one of those people whose brain seems to run at a million miles a second. She speaks at rapid pace, with vibrant enthusiasm, and challenges you to keep up. Oddly, perhaps uniquely, her physicality matches this. A dancer and gymnast, Joy moves around the space with the same speed and precision as her mind. The combination is overwhelming, it’s a spectacle within itself and every word she speaks is a reminder of the gravity of integrity. Here is someone who made it out of being “the talented teenager,” out of Whanganui, someone who got to hone her craft(s). Thank god, it appears, she knows who she is.
Until she doesn’t… A lot of tension comes from how Joy talks about herself in past tense. She is often harsh. Upon returning from Europe, nineteen-year-old Joy wound up stuck back in Whanganui. She brought with her an elevated sense of status, a serious walk, and a lingering faux-English accent. Joy gets acres of material from the accent in particular. The inauthenticity of it is the ultimate Kiwi faux-pas. She gets an equal amount of cracks in on the emo hairstyle she had at the time. This is where my sadness starts. While funny, I find the autopsy of her teenage battles with self-image confronting. It’s hard to blame a teenager for being inauthentic, and despite Joy’s vivid caricature, I find it difficult to laugh at her.
This is largely because the show presents us with crucial social context. It is vitally aware of the expectations placed on young Joy by the world around her. Joy does not mince words in interrogating the role that gender has to play in all this. Expectations from the outside world, both rejected and accepted, warp this idea of self and make the internal divide more perilous. She describes her Mum using the time she spends saying grace as an opportunity to get digs in on her young self for the clothes she wears. Her description of her high school dating experiences is quietly revealing. She describes feeling like a great second choice, the best of the B-tier. This discussion of gender and sexism, is brought to a front by the show's central subject, the titular event everything is building towards: Miss Tui Whanganui 2009. Joy’s description of the Tui girls and the things they represent are cutting, and only make Joy’s story of choosing to compete in this late-night-pub-set-beauty-pageant all the more challenging. We go into the show knowing that she wins. We know what this is building towards.
Part of the thing with integrity is that our battles with it are rarely confined to ourselves. Things leak and the standards we hold ourselves to and can’t meet—or are boldly choosing to defy—become easy targets: internalised misogyny. Early on in the show, Joy attests that she’s striving towards non-aesthetic compliments, because what are we really saying when we primarily praise people based on how they look? The thematic battle of Miss Tui… can be tracked in how Joy describes not just herself, but her attitudes towards other women. There are some stunningly poignant non-aesthetic or post-aesthetic descriptions. I’m stuck most on Joy describing her Mum as the first woman she knew with biceps. But she doesn’t sugarcoat her feelings. One of the core motivators for signing up for Miss Tui Whanganui is that she can’t stand the idea of losing to a girl she went to high school with. She’s better than her, right? She’s been to Europe.
If Standing Still (Still) is about Joy striving to allow herself to slow down, Miss Tui… is about her trying to push through the dogmatic expectations of integrity in order to love herself and all the women around her. The desire to be some pure, authentic version of herself is as oppressive as it is self-defeating. Judgement, both hers and ours, is a trap. Early in the show, becoming Miss Tui Whanganui seems like a betrayal of integrity. It’s difficult to watch young Joy decide she wants this and go through this journey, it feels demeaning — especially when she chooses not to put her high level dance skills to use. But in a moment somehow out of time, after sculling a half-pint of Tui onstage, Joy sees herself in the bottom of the glass and reclaims this moment. She reclaims the Miss Tui title, as one of pride and not perceived shame.
She ties us back here to the show's opening, where she does impressions of the audience’s favourite native birds. Of course, she takes particular pride in describing the Tūi, in all its multi-voice-boxed glory. In her reclamation of being Miss Tui, Joy also reclaims the word “bird” as a descriptor for women. Our native birds are beautiful, unique beings. Tui girl is a pretty good title, all things considered.
And yet, despite dozens of callbacks paying off in quick succession around this, despite the depth of forgiveness and warmth for herself, I don’t leave feeling much lighter. I feel like I should; this is where everyone else gets off the ride. Joy has confronted the integrity demon, she has given her younger self a proverbial hug on stage. Review ends here.
But I leave still thinking about competition. Joy is not shy about her aspirations. She is—a dirty Kiwi word—ambitious. As a child, she would walk into the background of news cameras as if she was the star of their movie. She’d lurk outside theatres in the hope someone would drag her in as a last-minute understudy to sing Phantom of the Opera. Nowadays, she performs every show as if the casting director for Magic Mike Live was there, waiting to her whisk her off to serve as the new MC (as a staunch disciple of Magic Mike XXL, Joy being 2-for-2 on Magic Mike allusions in her comedy shows fills me with joy). The resolution of Miss Tui… doesn’t close this thread off completely, but its call to action for self-acceptance suggests that Joy has a good relationship with it.
Miss Tui… is in a brutal slot, the 9:45. She’s candid about her ticket sales, and asks us to put the word out for her. As a huge fan of Standing Still (Still), I’ve felt like Joy is Wellington’s best-kept secret, frustratingly so. She performs with such craft that it’s hard not to project a hunger onto her, whether it’s there or not. I think the reason I’m still sad days after Miss Tui… is that Joy is not famous and that feels wrong. It feels unfair. I think the real tragedy is that all this makes me as upset as it does. It’s revealing of how I’m wired to think about success, of how toxic our ideas about integrity can be: that I’m not allowed to be happy for Joy until the world has caught up to her level of talent, as if the depth of her work is any different when delivered to twenty people or two hundred. The thesis of the show suggests that Joy has got past that, and so should I. Thinking back on it, I’m beginning to suspect that the 10-year-old was onto something. At least in art, it doesn’t matter if someone’s watching.
 | Jack McGee is a Te-Whanganui-a-Tara based playwright and theatre maker. Some of his notable works include Boys and the Silent School Disco, Edit the Sad Parts, and Music Sounds Better Out Here. He works regularly with Squash Co. Arts Collective where he is a co-director, and is in no way related to Greg McGee. |