Who am I?
Hello, I'm Josh.
My pronouns are he/him,
I live and work on Kaurna land,
and I have synaesthesia.
And in lieu of having a real brand,
I've designed this website around my synaesthesia.
I like to sing and play piano,
write music, lyrics and play scripts,
and sometimes you'll even find me conducting a choir.
I do these various things in my theatre shows,
which I make with my partner, Matthew Briggs,
and we present through our company
Under The Microscope.
When we're not creating shows,
we are often touring them.
Hopefully soon we'll take them to you . . .
30,000 Notes
In my synaesthesia, 30,000 Notes is green.
This show started off as a concert of my classical choral compositions.
which I was going to conduct live with a choir of 16 and string quartet.
Then Matthew and I realised there's more of a story to be told.
So it became this cross-artform theatrical experiment
with a virtual choir and string quartet,
a series of monologues,
and everything I've ever written spread out on a 13 metre-long wall.
It premiered on the 19th of February 2019
at the Adelaide Fringe
and the reception was a little bit out of this world.
I am still trying to wrack my brain over what happened, and what to do next.
Scarred For Life
Scarred For Life is red to me.
(well, it's actually orange, but my scar is red, so the show is red by association).
This was my debut cabaret show.
I filled it with original songs,
about the time I fell off my bicycle,
ruptured my spleen,
and almost bled to death.
I know – perfect material for a musical comedy.
I premiered it at the 2017 Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival
and something really interesting happened:
all kinds of people came up to me afterwards and told me their own medical stories.
Many showed me their scar(s).
And their stories inspired me to keep telling mine.
Now that I'm done with 30,000 Notes
I'm resuming touring it around Australia.
Our first stop is Brisbane for the Queensland Cabaret Festival!
Dear Malcolm Turnbull
'Malcolm' is blue.
So was his (former) political party.
And in 2017 he did some things which made me feel pretty blue.
So I wrote an open letter to him
Where, in rhyme, I outlined my outrage and grievances against him.
And it sort of became my own queer rights anthem
during a period that was so horrible for so many of us.
I posted it online
and it got shared around a bit.
So I released the song for purchase, where the money went to charity
and as a result some very generous people raised over $3,000 for QLife
– Australia's national queer counselling service.