Sunny Drake is a writer, performer, producer and educator who has toured shows to over 60 cities in Australia, the USA, Canada and Europe, with a focus on multi-disciplinary work by queer and trans artists.
In 2015, Sunny toured his one-person theatre show, Transgender Seeking…, to regional Queensland communities.[1] The work is a fast-paced take on dating in an age of social media and technology, and features highly interactive projections and sound. The show was performed in both traditional and non-traditional venues for theatre.
The tour also focused on skills building with regional artists and community groups. Workshop topics included video and multimedia in live performance, autobiographical writing and independent tour production. In addition, four workshops were held with LGBTIQ+ young people.[2]
February and March 2015
Cairns, Nambour, Hervey Bay, Toowoomba, Townsville, Gold Coast
$20 930 - Playing Queensland Fund
Heartwarming, hilarious, intimate and refreshingly confronting performance.
Even as a straight man I identified with the struggle to accept self and handle parental issues.
Well worth travelling four hours for.
The impact of Sunny’s show and workshops will be felt long into the future in this community.
Sunny reflects on the benefits of collaborating with local community groups to deliver the tour, including performances and workshops:
Providing the community presenters with mentoring in how to present a theatre work was worthwhile as they were able to bring a very grassroots audience. Workshops presented by community groups (separate from the performance presenters) also increased audiences for the show.
The greatest challenge encountered was presenting content which some communities perceived as confronting:
Whilst we were delighted with the audience response to the show and presenters also got introduced to new audience members, we ran into some challenges in terms of overall performance attendance … Transgender content was a new area for each presenter and some regional areas were more conservative than the presenters had anticipated.
As a result of this experience, Sunny has made some changes to his marketing strategy:
I have decided to rename the work to ‘No Strings (Attached)’ so that people don’t immediately label it as only relevant to transgender communities. The show is more broadly relatable and some presenters found the work difficult to market because of the assumptions people had about who would and wouldn’t enjoy the show. There are other aspects of the show that we would also have marketed differently – making sure that LGBTIQ+ communities knew there was something special in the work for them, but that broader audiences would also enjoy the work.
Email: sunny@sunnydrake.com
Website: www.sunnydrake.com
Video trailer: http://www.sunnydrake.com/#!__gq-video
A printable PDF version (PDF) (304.58 KB) of this case study is also available.
[1] The name of the work has since been changed to No Strings (Attached).
[2] LGBTIQ+ – lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer and questioning.