‘The most elaborate coming out’: Yoz Mensch’s road to happiness
In their new “part-theatre, part-performance art” show My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me On Instagram, Yoz Mensch revisits a cross-country road trip that brought unexpected revelations about family, social media, and queer identity.
In the European summer of 2024, Yoz Mensch escaped Adelaide for the northern hemisphere. Leaving behind a job they felt was consuming their soul and ruining their mental health, they had a plan to perform their award-winning solo show, No Babies in the Sauna, at Prague’s Fringe festival, before studying clowning at the famed École Philippe Gaulier in Étampes, France.
In between, however, was a three-week window and a grandparent who already had plans to make an annual pilgrimage from country Victoria to the United Kingdom.
“My grandfather was like, ‘Let’s go and I’ll take you to where your grandmother’s ashes are!’” Mensch tells InReview.
Lacking a drivers’ licence, the trip meant Mensch spent hours in the passenger seat as their 80-year-old grandfather drove them from Cornwall to Inverness and through to the Scottish Highlands. Before they left, Mensch had bought a new smartphone to take photos along the way.
“I discovered once I got there that it had some bug that wouldn’t allow it to take still images at all,” they say. “Every time I took a regular photo, it would crash.”
The video function, however, seemed to work fine, and across the trip Mensch began to film and post clips of their travels to Instagram, documenting the two-week trip over hundreds of uploads.
“The end of the day, I’d always post us cheersing our beer at dinnertime,” they recall.
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Along the way, Mensch noticed something about the person they saw in the posts, opposite their grandfather. It was them, but also, it wasn’t.
“I found that the more I was sharing the stories and these fun little anecdotes, the underlying narrative that emerged was that I was sort of masking who I am from him,” they explain.
At the time of the trip, the award-winning comedian and longtime Fringe performer had already been living as a non-binary person for several years. Seeing themselves on the screen, they could see their own “learned behaviour” at play – an instinct to downplay their queerness and avoid being open about their gender identity through subtle cues and bigger silences. It was a kind of performance – both for their grandfather, and for their followers on Instagram.
“I was stifling who I was, but also presenting a version of me, a third version of me, on Instagram at the same time.”
Two years later, Mensch will revisit the trip with their latest Adelaide Fringe show, My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me On Instagram: A Guide To Trans-generational Road-Tripping. The show will feature Mensch playing off that wealth of Instagram content to reflect on everything left unsaid.
This time, however, Mensch is a little further along their own journey than they were during the 2024 trip. Speaking to InReview hours before their opening night premiere, Mensch reveals they have been on hormone replacement therapy for the past six months, adding more distance between the person onstage and the one on the screen.
“It’s kind of like I’m doing a duet with myself,” they explain.
These last few months have been revelatory for Mensch.
“It’s like thinking you’re always taking a deep breath, and then suddenly your lung capacity increases,” they say. “You’re able to access all of your breath, and you go, ‘Oh, wait, no, that’s what a big, full, deep breath is.’
"That’s what so much of my life feels like now; social interactions are so much easier, happiness is so much easier to access."
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“That’s what so much of my life feels like now; social interactions are so much easier, happiness is so much easier to access. It doesn’t feel like I’m qualifying it through all of these external barriers, even having lived as a non-binary person for five years before this, it still didn’t feel as deep a breath as it does now.”
My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me On Instagram sees Mensch channel their creative voice with “all that breath” behind them.
“It’s part-theatre, part-performance art, it’s autobiographical, it’s a little bit fantastical, but it’s probably the most sincere piece of work I’ve ever created.”
The show also draws on their time at clown school during that northern hemisphere summer. Like many Adelaide Fringe performers, they studied at École Philippe Gaulier, the school of the famed clown and teacher Philippe Gaulier, who died last week. Gaulier had already stepped back from teaching at the time of Mensch’s arrival – Gaulier suffered a stroke weeks beforehand – but was already “a myth and a legend”.
“This group of 50 strangers from around the world were brought together because of him; the people that were teaching us had been taught by him; I was eating in the same courtyard, from the same garden, that people had been eating in for many years – hundreds and hundreds of clowns.”
Today, the experience puts Mensch in touch with a different kind of family – and there’s plenty of space in the clown car.
“It’s chosen, we’ve been brought together by this magnetic impulse to be really stupid,” they say, “There’s this moment when you lock eyes and you both realise that you’ve been through the same place, and you go, ‘Oh, wait, hold on, we know the same language’.”
Those lessons, and that language, are all over the show, developed with director Mary Angley who encouraged Mensch to discard thousands of words of written preparation to perform a first pass of the story off the top of their head.
“I mean, the core of clowning is not knowing what you’re doing, and being okay with that. And I think improvising away the rock until the statue emerged really would not have been possible for me before.”
As for Mensch’s grandfather? He still doesn’t use Instagram, but Mensch expects he will see the show’s Melbourne Comedy Festival run in late March – with all the revelations it brings.
“Yeah, the most elaborate coming out I think I could have put together.”
My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me On Instagram: A Guide To Trans-generational Road-Tripping runs from February 19 – March 7 at The Breakout
This story is part of a series of articles being produced by InReview with the support of Adelaide Fringe
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