Joana Nastari makes performance art with an activist edge.
The creator of Fuck You Pay Me on the show's long journey, and what she is up to next.
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For a while in the mid-2010s, Joana Nastari fell out of love with acting.
“I’d done some training, got an agent, and done little bits of work here and there, but I was finding the whole thing very unfulfilling,” the London-born, British-Brazilian performance artist remembers. “Like a lot of young actors, I had these visions of all this amazing stuff I was going to do, and ended up disappointed by the reality of the industry. I was craving something more artistic and expressive and creative.”
Nastari decided to do something about it. She threw herself into all kinds of artistic endeavours – from writers’ groups to cabaret nights, from stand-up to slam poetry – in an effort to find creative fulfilment. Eventually, she arrived at Fuck You Pay Me, her acclaimed debut solo show about a day in the life of a fictional stripper, inspired by her own experiences working in strip clubs to support herself.
“I went to this work-in-progress night run by Brainchild Festival on my own, with a rucksack full of weird costumes and a USB full of songs and performed ten minutes of really strange material to a room full of strangers,” Nastari says of the show’s origins. “I had no idea what I was doing really, but it seemed to go down pretty well.”
Nastari developed those ten minutes into an hour-long show, produced by Ellen Spence, directed by Bethany Pitts, with dramaturgical support from India Crawford, which she took to VAULT Festival in 2018, then to the Edinburgh Fringe, then to The Bunker and the Arcola Theatre in 2019. It won a Sexual Freedom Award in 2018 and continues to be, Nastari says, a show about stripping, for strippers, by a stripper.
“I was very nervous about it at first,” she says. “It is obviously quite an exposing story on a personal level, and I was worried about ruining relationships with other professionals and other people in my life. Yes, there have been loads of negative experiences that have come from it, but there have been loads of positive ones, too. I have did lose some people along the way, but I gained so many more.”
“Maybe I have been one little brick in the wall that other artists and activists have built…”
Along its journey, Fuck You Pay Me has evolved, both as a performance – it has become an entire evening of entertainment, featuring live music and special guests – and as a piece of activist art, campaigning everywhere it goes for the rights of sex workers to lead safe and un-stigmatized lives. “The show has pulled me along with it,” Nastari says, “rather than the other way around.”
“I don’t know whether Fuck You Pay Me has played a part in this or not, but the conversation around sex work has definitely changed in recent years,” she continues. “It does finally feel like people are starting to absorb it into their feminism. Maybe I have been one little brick in the wall that other artists and activists have built. ”
Fuck You Pay Me has been on a long journey, and it is still going: it has recently been reimagined again as part of Soundworlds’ latest series of podcast plays, with a new score and a new ASMR-inspired sound design by DJ and composer Charlotte Bickley. The show has been a big part of Nastari’s life over the last four years, and has led to her involvement as a writer, performer, and dramaturg on a lot of other projects.
There was Amazonian Sweat Lodge, a piece of gig-theatre about shopping and spirituality. There was My Uncle Is Not Pablo Escobar, an ongoing experiment involving theatre and activism around the London Latinx experience that had a work-in-progress showing in the Paines Plough Roundabout last year. And there is the several different TV projects Nastari is currently working on, including an adaptation of Fuck You Pay Me.
“There is this kind of great emptying that happens when you make your first show,” Nastari reflects. “You don’t use only one of your ideas. You use, like, 100 of your ideas. You put everything into it, and it can be scary when you come out the other side. I’m making a new show now, though, another one that is fictional but based on real events.”
“It’s a dance-theatre piece about a Queer parent trying to get their kids back, and I’m really excited about it,” she continues. “Making theatre with an activist angle attracts me and it always has, ever since I got interested in Brecht as this anti-establishment, radical, grassroots thing in high school. It is just the kind of work that I’m interested in making. It’s just who I am.”
What do you want to do?
I want to have my new show – as yet untitled – put on somewhere. I feel like the stars are aligning with it, a bit like they did with Fuck You Pay Me, and the bits I have tried out have seemed to really resonate with audiences.
I’ve also started making a new show with Andrea Spisto – a Queer, clown, performance art piece called Fifty Ways To Kill A Slug – that I would love to develop further somewhere.
What support do you need to get there?
It would be really cool to connect with a choreographer for my new show. I’d love to meet the perfect person to make it with.
I’d love to have a coffee with people who run buildings and literary departments and stuff, too. I have a tiny circle of people that I know and work with, but I’d love to make some new relationships. Everything moving onto Zoom means you never just bump into people anymore and have those accidental conversations that lead somewhere surprising.
How can people find out more about you?
People can listen to Fuck You Pay Me via Soundworlds. They can follow me on Twitter and Instagram. And one day I will make good on my promises and centralise all my details on a website somewhere.
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Fergus Morgan