William Yang is an Australian photographer and theatre artist. He was recently in Vancouver performing Sadness, a monologue with slides, at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. His performance work combines storytelling and visual art to explore universal themes, such as identity, history, love, death, and grieving.

Yang's work is exceptional in the sincerity with which he relays incidents from his life and the lives of his friends. Through the use of simple tools, his voice and his images, Yang invites his audience to delve into territory, unfamiliar, but imperative to being human. He disseminates his work further by exploring different mediums. Sadness has been adapted for print. The North, Yang's fourth performance with slides has been released as a CD.

The following is drawn from a conversation Adrienne Wong had with William Yang in his room at the Hotel Vancouver December 97.

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REAL STORIES: I've always had a background in theatre, most of my work as a photographer is very much in [a] factual, documentary mode. I don't think I'm that good at fiction, I'm much better at documentary. In some ways I can't see the point of fiction. Real Stories are much more satisfying to me. You can think up some story, but the real story is better. There's a part of me that thinks,"what is the point of fiction?" There is an art to fiction, just like there's an art to studio photography. I just don't think that's my particular strength, to make up stories.

This particular form that I've started happened in the early eighties. I had a collection of transparencies and I started projecting them as a way to show them. The first ones I did were just slides and music. And then I heard the monologue of Spalding Grey. I was fascinated by him because [his work] was quite personal; it was discursive and yet it was very engaging. I thought perhaps I could do this.

I'd worked out a form. It can do certain things well and there are certain things it can't do well. You've got to keep the anecdotes personal. Keep the story close to you; I think that's teh main thing about it. It's not an exciting form, it's a slow form. I try to keep the lid on it. If you go for too energetic, you end up struggling to maintain that excitement. I've worked it so that the actual experience of it is more internal - Like people digging in their own experience rather than you showing something to them.

I think that it's almost classic theatre because it is ritualistic. It's not really avant garde at all. Telling a story is as old as the hills. I think I've tapped into that tradition, which we don't use that much nowadays because of television. People don't have any faith in it. I think that's teh strength of the piece: that I don't have to spell things out, people can work it out. There's astrong interaction where the audience is putting the story together rather than having it given to [them] in a formulaic way.

This next one I'm doing, Friends of Dorothy, will be about sex. It's an interesting topic, sex. I think there is room to talk seriously about sex and examine how it affects our lives. It really is quite a potent motivator. I'd like to cross-over so that straight people could see a gay man talking about sex and yet relate to it. I think that's the trick of the Friends of Dorothy. I wouldn't like it to be just for gay people.

SUBJECTS I'M DRAWN TO: I suppose I do see [the subjects I am drawn to] as taboo. I just try to examine things as real-ly or honestly, as I can. Then you start peeling back those social attitudes towards them. If you can get close to the essence of things, if you could get back to a truthful base, or an essential base of things, then I think that is what people will respond to. And that then doesn't need to be presented in a big way because it's basically a very simple thing, and you can present it in a simple way.