Tawdry Heartburn in Tasmania

In this square-shaped, Arabic-influenced tent, there stand six bulletin boards surrounding three sides of the wall. And on each board, piles of posted notes are round-head-pinned on the surface, spread-out and side by side. You may be thinking in your head, “What’s on there?” “Shhh…it’s a secret.”

Indeed, it is a secret. And not just one, but buttloads. From a secret as serious as a fourteen-year-old confessing that she is too susceptible to peer pressure—he/she has had sex, smoked weeds, and taken drugs multiple times, to a frivolous I-suck-my-thumb-when-I’m-nervous classic, you can find all sorts of imaginative, yet mostly honest secrets to intrigue you.

James Berlyn, the Sydney-born, currently Perth-based artist, was the mastermind to set up this real-life social network in Womadelaide last weekend.

This soulful workshop was titled Tawdry Heartburn’s Manic Cures. The enticing deal that Berlyn proposes is that if you trade a secret, you’ll get free nail-polishing or palm reading. “Do two, do three, get it off your chest,” he passionately convinces.

The magical moment doesn’t really begin until you make up your mind and start telling the good old typewriter a secret of yours. The typewriter then punches letters on a slip of vintage brownish paper. Once you get that secret off your chest, you will then fold the slip up, nice and symmetrical, and drop it into a mysterious pad-locked box.

When the time comes, staff will unleash those cheeky little secrets and pin them on the boards—also known as the Wall of Secrets. On there, this is when your secrets work their magic to tickle passers-by into sheer laughter or throw people into an infinite heart-breaking abyss. You, on the other hand, will be sitting down, thrilled and excited, receiving Berlyn’s professional manicure.

James Berlyn graduated from the Victorian College of Arts some 20 years ago. Over the years, he has worked as a dancer, choreographer and a lecturer. But these remarkable achievements seem to be too small for this visionary human being. Berlyn tries, experiments, and learns. Hopefully someday, he will land on a project that he truly likes.

“I was inspired by an American community artist Frank Warren, where he has a site(Postsecret) for people to post secrets. Beautiful!” Berlyn says. “People post him secrets, and then he produces books.”

One day, in one of Warren’s books, a secret touched Berlyn so much—he decided to do something about it. “I used to write secret for you Postserect, but never tell you. Now I’ll tell my friends and family. I don’t need you anymore. Goodbye Postsecret,” he recalls it with a confident familiarity.

But with his passionate personality, publishing books is still far from meeting Berlyn’s insatiable desire to interact with his audiences.

“I think as a performer, I’m interested in an audience-performer relationship that’s not traditional, by which I mean you’re on stage and the audience is on the auditorium,” he explains.

His aspiration is to seek for something exploratory and intimate. “I wanted to build a show that’s a one-on-one performance, with a degree of intimacy and inviting for participation,” he adds. This is how Tawdry Heartburn’s Manic Cures was born.

Surely not everyone is willing to share their secrets. Occasionally, you will get people kidding about them murdering a person and they love it;or saying the only secret they have is they don’t have a secret.

However, some people do engage. They open up their heart and talk about things that they were too scared to tell anyone before. Due to the anonymous nature, people feel secure to let go of their darkest secrets.

“One of the ones that I got the first time I did the show was a secret that was ‘I helped my mother in the 70’s euthanise my grandmother. She was permanently ill and we never regretted it’,” Berlyn says. “That’s quite a big secret.”

Although that didn’t surprise Berlyn, it did put him in a dilemma. “A friend of mine says to me you realise that makes you accessory to murder,” he says. “If I can’t identify the person and I can’t connect the person to the secret,” he continues. “Then nah!”

Berlyn also says there is no proof whether a secret is authentic or not, even though sometimes you can glean it from the tone and wordings. But one thing about this secret keeping paradise, he reckons, is pretty straightforward. “This is an art project, not a crime stopper,” he says.

The morality of the secret wall is fairly flexible—for instance, secrets about people cheating on their partners or having sex with best friend’s partner are common; there is also one about a married couple who first met each other through a bondage experience, but was too embarrassed to ever tell anyone.

But Berlyn does check all the secrets before they go onto the wall to ensure no one will be offended. “Some of the ones that are racist or incite hatred I don’t put up there,” Berlyn says. “There are some really pornographic ones I don’t put up because it (Womadelaide) is family-friendly.”

The greatest thing about Tawdry Heartburn’s Manic Cures is that people are free to choose their degree of involvement. If you are touched to share a secret, do so. If you are just after a bit of fun, hang around, become a reader and have a bit of laugh. “I like the idea that people can come and they can engage if they want to, and not if they don’t want to,” Berlyn says.

At the end of the day, there is one thing you have to take part to understand. Instead of having Berlyn hypnotising you what a wonderful workshop it could be, it is an unforgettable moment when you find out how many people literally share similar secrets with you. Guess this is how “Manic cure” works–letting secrets off your chest and knowing that you are not alone.

Berlyn will be storming to Tasminia for his Ten Days on the Island tour from the 25th March to the 3rd April. He will perform in nine locations, including at the Salamanca in Horbart on the 26th March. To find out more, please visit http://tawdryheartburn.com/. If you can’t wait to tell your secrets, you can also submit them to his website.

Let me tell you a secret. James Berlyn is cool.