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By Ben Hurley The Epoch Times, 25 September 2005  What started as an entry in a short play competition has become the Opera House's latest stage show, as actor Georgina Naidu goes live with her life-long search for identity. In her frank and comical autobiographical show Yellow Feather, Georgina collaborates with DJ Schmidti to perform her life of searching for representation in popular culture, beginning with her childhood as a "confused four year old" from an English-Indian family in 1970s suburban Melbourne. "Once I started to actually sit down and write it I realised that I was always searching for myself in popular culture, so there didn't seem to be any representation of what I knew as my Australian experience," Georgina told The Epoch Times. "I never saw any families like my family or the families I mixed with. All I saw were white families." Assuming that Australian television was a reflection of Australian society, Georgina as a four year old began to fashion herself around the American Indian character Yellow Feather in Daniel Boone, and grew up thinking Stevie Wonder was her uncle. "Anything I saw that was vaguely familiar I would really latch onto," she says. "The same with music. My family in the early seventies, they were obsessed with Stevie Wonder... As a really little kid they'd say, you know, we love him, and I thought he was an uncle who lived in another country, who was too busy to come and visit." In her adult life as depicted in the play Georgina made her way through drama school and at 29 eventually landed a role in Seachange as "traditional" Indian woman Phrani before finding her place on the stage as a performer. "I guess what I was trying to do was have a laugh about and celebrate the difficult moments in life that end up forming who we are, and directing where we would like to be... so you can have a look at it, think about it and have a laugh and then move on but be informed by all those things." Yellow Feather is showing from September 21 to October 1 in The Studio at Sydney Opera House. |
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