OzAsia Festival review: William Yang – Milestone
William Yang returned to OzAsia with his latest monologue-with-pictures. It is called Milestone, and is a reminder of how many of them he has had.
Occasioned by his 80th birthday in 2023, Milestone is William Yang’s most complete retrospective to date. First presented at this year’s Sydney Festival and, after Adelaide, immediately headed for a major arts festival in Seoul, this work is Yang’s most extensive, inclusive, and, perhaps, most personal. It is the William Omnibus – bigger in scope and it revisits many of his greatest hits.
Since the 1994 Adelaide Festival when, at the Institute Hall, Yang presented his extraordinary signature work, Sadness, we have been captured and moved by his minimalist, forensically precise, and candid social memoirs.
With the simple format of slide projector and quietly sparse, measured commentary, it seemed that (with a little help from Spalding Gray) Yang had both invented the TED talk and discovered a new theatrical form.
Since Sadness – with its dual focus on the catastrophe of AIDS in the Sydney gay community, which Yang documented with all the courage of a war correspondent, and on the murder of his uncle William Fang Yuan and the subsequent judicial travesty of his killer’s acquittal – there have many more one-William shows.
The North, which followed in 1997, focussed further on his early life in Dimbulah, North Queensland and these family threads are even further extruded in Milestone. Still as idiosyncratic and wry as ever, Yang also brings a quiet clarity and meditative calm to his narrative which is almost hypnotic. He said that, in the making of Sadness, he found his voice.
And, it seems, also a Taoist clarity which suffuses his performances.
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On stage at the Adelaide Town Hall, in crisp red shirt and waistcoat, Yang is as dapper (and spry) as ever. Larger than previous venues, this is a bigger space to command, but he is equal to it – and he has eleven musicians to assist him.
Distinguished composer, Elena Kats-Chernin, who worked previously on his show, I Am a Camera, has written a series of evocative interludes for the visual montages between commentary. She is joined at the piano by the nine members of the excellent Ensemble Lumen, under the baton of Luke Dollman.
Yang likes to begin with beginnings. Early photographs of his parents and grandparents, his Aunt Bessie, wife of Fang Yuan, as well as his older siblings Alan and Frances. This is the rhythm of the bygone living room slide-show – comments brief, and plain, and slow-paced, letting the images speak, giving us time to gaze at the faces gazing back at us. There are also documented returns to significant places in rural Australia where he lived and went to school, and bemusement at the dim, vanishing traces of a time past.
This is the storyline of the becoming of William Yang. He comes home from school reporting a racial slur. “Am I Chinese?” he asks in astonished bewilderment. “Yes, and you better get used to it,” chimes in his brother Alan.
He describes later how he “came out as Chinese” and muses on the fact that when visiting China he feels like an Australian with no language – until an epiphany in Mongolia when some steel workers accept him unconditionally, telling him: “The blood of China runs in your veins.”
As a teenager at boarding school he reads articles about homosexuality and begins to identify himself. “I thought there were only four homosexuals in the world,“ he notes with dry wit. “Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde – and me.”
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Yang charts his progress after moving to Sydney in 1969 and his immediate connection with the gay community and its Venn diagram cross-over with the wider avant-garde art world.
He describes how his camera served as both protective barrier for his reticence but also gave him licence to capture private, secret and, in their time, transgressive worlds. The grainy black and white images of bath houses, drag parties, and shadowy intimacies, are startling and often confronting. Expertly framed, but seemingly snapshots, there is an evident trust and bond between subject and photographer.
This porous barrier between Yang and his world made him a celebrity himself. He was the Annie Leibowitz of Sydney as his party shots of the Patrick White circle, Brett and Wendy Whiteley, Kate Fitzpatrick, Jack Thompson, Jenny Kee, Cressida Campbell, the mercurial Martin Sharp and his Yellow House crew, all attest.
Also featuring are other artists such as Peter Tully, a prime mover in the Mardi Gras Pride marches, which William Yang also immortalised, not in aspic, but in acid and speed.
Still the most poignant and terrible are Yang’s portraits of his friends suffering the torments of AIDS in the late 80s and early 90s. His sequence of photos of his former lover, Alan Booth, captured in his last days and in extremis, are as graphic as they are courageous, testimony to Yang’s steadfast camaraderie with the community which embraced him.
He also bears witness to other losses in what is now his later life. He reports the deaths of his own family. First his father, to whom he was not close, then his mother who accepted him as a gay man, and more distressingly, the death of both his siblings, Alan and sister Frances. In true fashion though, Yang also celebrates the future, fondly introducing his nieces and nephews (and their children) as part of the continuing Chinese sense of family.
Milestone is another remarkable William Yang creation. He is a paradox. His photographs illustrate his talents so powerfully, vividly, sometimes alarmingly, and then his presentation (co-directed by Tessa Leong) seems so apparently basic and low key. Yang’s is the art which both proclaims, and conceals itself.
While Elena Kats-Chernin and her musicians were splendid and the interludes in lyrical, upbeat and pensive sync with the images, overall, they might have been used more sparingly.
It would then enable us to experience what is the most quintessential William Yang moment: when he pauses his expertly cadenced narrative, turns to the screen, and we watch the montages unfold in what seems like the most eloquent silence.
Milestone was performed at Adelaide Town Hall on October 31 as part of OzAsia Festival 2025