All Roads Lead To Bowie
Walkerville Town Hall
Thurs 12 Mar

Jazz Fechner-Lante and Pam Makin are the artistic minds and organisational force behind Ellipsis Poetry, a collective founded less than two years ago, but which has already become a central part of the Adelaide spoken word scene.

In their monthly open mic events at Arthur Art Bar and quarterly Poet’s Take Over curated readings held in the  Page and Turner Bookshop, inclusive participation has been at their project’s heart. Indeed, their debut Adelaide Fringe show Eclipse sold out in 2025 and focused explicitly on the issue of body image, with seven poets taking the stage to present and explore their differing experiences of that significant subject.

Unsurprisingly, this same curious, open-hearted and staunchly, genuinely humanist solidarity is also key for All Roads Lead To Bowie, in both practical and thematic ways. Making the audience feel “safe and present” – whoever they are – is done with thorough precision, specificity and the kind of commonsense decency which reflects a care for people in all their rich and varied diversity.

A combination of theatrical memoir, performance poetry and pop cultural ode, the plot traces a mostly autobiographical tale of how these two poets met (the teenage volunteer and dedicated-yet-burnt-out youth worker, who bond over the music of David Bowie) became friends (despite most people mistaking one for the other’s mother) and ended up where they are now, moving the world – even if “just slightly, together” – through both their own words and collaborations with or facilitation of others.

The tagline of Eclipse asked: “What is obscuring your heavenly body?” Halfway through this new production’s narrative arc – in the wake of Bowie’s 2016 death – Fechner-Lante reflects plaintively, “where were we without the Starman?”

This is a well-crafted moment of thematic resonance across the expanding conceptual universe of Ellipsis Poetry’s creative endeavours. At its core is a concern with social justice and inclusion, especially for those who are queer or gender nonconforming, disabled or neurodivergent, racially marginalised or economically abandoned. As we are reminded, David Robert Jones himself was “just a kid with a distant father, a cursed mother, a schizophrenic brother and a kit-bag full of talents he was aching to explore.”

And indeed, there is a kaleidoscope of resonance these talented poets pull from the work and legacy of Bowie’s kit-bag – as a champion of youth, a Starman who taught cosmic outsiders – those who hate the suffocating, confusing binaries society so often imposes – that they don’t “owe anyone an answer” just for being themselves.

This sense is movingly linked with a tribute to “Adelaide’s own Lady Stardust” – the artist, slam poet and dancer Alison Paradoxx Bennett, who passed away in 2024. Bennett was “more than a simple fan” of Bowie, with his image inked on her neck and the ability to “see who you could be through who you thought you were.” The parallels with Bowie are poignantly emphasised for a poetic comrade, “a rebel-rebel with the prettiest star of homo superior” who did so much for herself, for others, for the community which called her “the best of us” and who “did all of this just by being herself.”

The quiet tenor of this well-paced show works to engage its audience in a mix of conversational monologue, fourth-wall breaking meta-reflection and set-piece poems interspersed much like a musical playlist, although these core poetic ‘numbers’ could perhaps be further highlighted to showcase that central performance craft for their audience.

In the end, this is a story about togetherness and time. The importance of our present and who we share it with – and what we do to change it. The spirit of youth as it is, not just in nostalgic memory. And about the people who can inspire us to all of that. “We only have forever to keep his memory alive,” Fechner-Lante says of Bowie in a final summation: “and really, that’s not long at all.”