“The humour is there to make it palatable,” Antonette Rea says, getting right to the point. “Because humour is what got me through.”
It’s incredible that someone with a story like Rea’s can still find something to laugh about.
Once a middle-class husband and father, Rea faced a gender identity crisis before ending up in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, amidst drug addiction and work in the sex trade.
But she’s a survivor. And, armed with her poetry, she sets the stage for a PuSh Festival production reflecting on the past, with eyes set firmly on the future.
Rea pitched the idea of a full-length piece to festival producers years after first setting pen to paper. The work was emotionally charged, she says, having been written in some of the most challenging times of her life.
“They’re all different pictures from a bigger story,” she explains. “I’m just trying to share my experiences, telling the story in an abstract kind of way.”
The interdisciplinary performance, written with and directed by James Fagan Tait, uses her street poet handle Miss Understood, to open a broader discourse involving gender, sexuality, homelessness, disability, and oppression. Her poetry, once a coping mechanism for a life spent living and working on the streets, is now her art, and her voice.
“Most people don’t have any idea, can’t imagine some of the adversity I’ve gone through. It takes incredible courage to be yourself,” she says. “We’re all related, we all have this gender playing within us. It’s the outside everyone focuses on.
“But, there’s a mental part,” she continues. “What people don’t understand is that gender identity and sexuality are two different things. It’s very difficult, because it’s very complex. It’s easier to whitewash it. You’ve got to keep an open mind.”
Rea volunteers at Carnegie Hall, running a poetry cabaret and has seen a lot of positive change in the DTES neighbourhood. A firm belief in breaking down the barriers of ignorance, or as she says, “getting the word out” is now the focus of her work.
“There were no role models before to show us why we are the way we are,” Rea says. “And there are going to be a whole lot coming up, transitioning younger who may not understand what those who went before them had to endure.”
When asked if she understands the impact of work like hers, given this revolutionary time for gender, Rea chuckles modestly and simply says, “gender has always been revolutionary.”
She dedicates the show, “to all the girls who have gone before, my sisters who have had a difficult life, who suffered, who fell victim to the HIV epidemic.”
“Most of the women in my trade don’t live to be my age, and I think wow, I survived.”
• ‘Miss Understood’ runs Jan. 27-31 at Performance Works, as part of PuSh Festival. Tickets here.
