Long Sentence No Suggestions

Drawings

2010-05-29T13:33:00.006+10:00

Sometimes, when everything shatters, what you're left with is something unexpected. I've been really enjoying drawing over the last month or so. I've never really done it before. I think I may pursue it. This is a drawing of Patrick White, from a William Yang photograph.

'After the Rainbow'

2010-05-09T15:16:00.003+10:00

By Soda_Jerk

King's Artist Run Initiative

Level 1 / 171 King Street, Melbourne

From 7 May - 29 May

Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm

Next Wave

In 1995 I was in 'The Wizard of Oz'. It was the nadir of my musical career at high school. The yearly musical productions were my moments in the sun at school, the singular time of year in which I was totally accepted. The one time of year that I felt comfortable. I basked in the small-scale stardom that the annual musical production brought me. Over the years I had put in the hard yards. I had patiently worked my way up the rigid hierarchy, making brief but memorable stops at Tom Thumb in 'Barnum', the Artful Dodger in 'Oliver!', Professor Abner Sedgwick in the little known musical interpretation of Superman's life: 'Superman', Sancho Panza in 'The Man of La Mancha', and here I had arrived at the role of the Scarecrow in 'The Wizard of Oz'. I was the subject of high expectations, from none more than myself. The highest. It was the year after I had corralled scores of people to work on my first film (coincidentally titled 'After the Beanstalk') and a few months before I directed my first large-scale theatre work, a school production of 'Amadeus'. Ambition was writ large in flames across my future which lay before my like a golden duvet. My first true relationship had yet to come to a close. I had not yet experienced any real pain, rejection, loss or disappointment. I had not yet begun the process of developing a veneer of sadness, a veneer that comes with age and wisdom. I was still raw, I had no self protection. I was cloaked in unbridled self-belief, or at least, the belief in my skill, if not my self. My self was nothing more than a vessel for my perceived ability.

I shudder to imagine my disappointment if I could have seen myself as a broken thirty-one year old at that tender, ambitious, uncompromising age of fifteen.

At the Doctor's surgery during the week, my Doctor, as he has every right to do, began to tell me that with a chest infection and all, it really might be time to quit smoking. I have been at the Doctor's a fair bit of late as a month ago I broke my hand playing in a playground. My fifth metacarpal was shortened, angulated and twisted, ushering a titanium plate into my otherwise metal-free right hand. My hand is now strapped up in a plastic splint by electric blue velcro and somewhat out of habit I nurse it like a broken wing. Sat there, in the Doctor's surgery, with the now habitual posture borne out of protecting my broken hand, my entire body hunched around it, the Doctor told me: "You're not Peter Pan, you know." Believe me, I know.

The very day I turned thirty-one, everything was blown apart. Any expectations that I once had of stability and any sense of a future now lies in tatters. I've yet to gather any sense of what may emerge.

Judy Garland is the perfect figure to represent the dissonance between the promise of youth and the disillusion and dissolution of age. Her face in 'The Wizard of Oz' always appears as if looking into a glorious sunset. Her voice follows the cadence of expectation and promise. It is partly this vocal quality that marked her performances as an older woman with such poignancy.

To hijack Dorothy's journey to Oz to illustrate Garland's very public passage from youth to age is a master-stroke.

The journey and particularly the vision provokes a near profound tragic inevitability.

And it's gorgeously done. The groundbreaking cyclone scene disintegrates, the celluloid of the rear-projection burns away. The artifice is made tangible.

Soda_Jerk have produced the remix with an acute attention to detail, utilising the best possible footage of Garland, both from 'The Wizard of Oz' and from 'The Judy Garland Show' some twenty-three years later. The terror of the apparition is quiet and solemn.

'After the Rainbow' runs on a loop of about ten minutes. I watched it three times over.

It may well be the vulnerability I am currently feeling, but I experienced profound grief for the loss of Garland's, and all of our promised futures.

See it.

Review: Mortal Engine

2009-03-11T17:12:00.006+11:00

Mortal Engine

By Chunky Move

Choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek

The Malthouse as a part of Dance Massive

I didn't receive Mortal Engine as a piece of dance theatre, or even as choreography. It therefore felt a little strange to be applauding the dancers at the conclusion of the piece. I would never deny a performer their applause, I think I wanted to applaud Frieder Weiss, the program author whose genius generated the stunning real-time projections.

Mortal Engine seemed to me to put humans in the roles usually served by machines. The dancers were input devices, the choreography not the end result but one of many contributing brushstrokes creating this masterwork.

I have an interest in this kind of technology, often discussing with a friend the various possibilities of real-time digital projection and generation and often swapping links to projects that realise one permutation or another to varying degrees of success.

Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington, an interactive installation created by reading visual locational data (the shadow of one's hand in front of a screen) running it through a program which adds sounds and digital visual manipulation of the image and projecting it back, onto another screen.

Or LASER tag, developed by the Graffiti Research Lab. I'm not at all sure how this works, but its a similar result. That is: real time projection of a manipulated image.

Mortal Engine achieved this with stunning virtuosity. I wish now I had seen Glow, yet it sounds as if I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as ME. I left the theatre extremely excited.

I do, however, have some (what I think may be) interesting notes, notes which may lead me down the digital garden path into a deep dark binary forest, where I will get lost, eaten, spewed up and then will commit (justified) murder.

The production didn't solely use projection. It also used good ole incandescent lighting. This added an interesting tension that I don't feel was fully explored. The tension being, the difference between projecting an image which is being refreshed 25 or 50 times a second (depending upon how you look at it, or indeed if I am even right) onto a body moving fluidly and continuously, and lighting aforementioned body with continuous light. There is a perceptible difference and I think more could have been made of that. When watching someone lit by incandescent light there is an inevitable warmth and fluidity. We see it and we think 'human', 'natural'. When lit by a digital projector we think 'cold', 'digital' 'unnatural'.

As virtuosic as Frieder Weiss' projections were, the use of them fell into a trap common for new media use in performance, that is to say, they were used in one way only. As mentioned by Alison Croggon, your mind does play tricks on you in such an experience. The negative image left in your field of vision after looking at a bright, still image is one these optical illusions. These things were occurring but not used at all. The aesthetic of the projections sometimes mimicked the organic visual world of shadows, negative images, interplay between light and dark, I think the digital illusions needn't have been all that was going on. For instance, there is this:

Stare at the black dot. The grey haze will eventually seem to disappear.

It was a part of the exercise that all of the projection be real-time. I understand that as an exercise. As an viewer, however, once I come to understand the rules I want them broken. I think it would have added to the pieces complexity if some of the sections were not being driven by the dancer's bodies, but rather they were following prerecorded projections. This kind of subtle shape-shifting within a format is thrilling as a viewer. Is that a physical image, or is it my eyes? It would have been wonderful.

Early on the projections mimicked an oscilloscope in what I believe to be an attempt at integrating Robin Foxes LASERs later in the piece. It didn't work. As much as I admire Robin Fox and his LASER shows, and acknowledge the desired effect, it just felt like too much of a gear change.

I'll finish with what I think is a fantastic example of technology integration and playfulness. I'm a little sheepish about it being a Kanye West clip. Its awesome.

KANYE WEST "Welcome To Heartbreak" Directed by Nabil from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Review: Melbourne Spawned a Monster

2009-03-11T01:35:00.007+11:00

Melbourne Spawned a Monster

Dancehouse as a part of Dance Massive

Choreographed and Directed by Jo Lloyd

Performed by Luke George

Music by Duane Morrison

Set by Rob McCredie

It’s an alarming space you enter at Danceworks for Melbourne Spawned a Monster. Hazard tape slung about, a huge plywood monolith in front of you. Turns out it’s the back of the steeply raked seating bank – seats pushed right up against the stage. The lighting is dim. Dimmer than dim, the kind of dim that pixelates your vision, as your brain fruitlessly attempts to compensate for the lack of visual information it has to process and makes stuff up instead.

And then it is dark as dark can be, the kind of dark in which you can trick yourself into not being sure if your eyes are open or not.

Out of nowhere: the peculiarly identifiable sound of tennis balls being bounced off a wall and falling into the audience. What was going on is amazingly clear, considering that it was one of the most unlikely things to have happened. Scattered laughter rose up from the audience. It really was what was happening. It was one of the most joyously playful ways to break the fourth wall on one hand and alienate the audience on the other.

I regrettably missed the original incarnation of Melbourne Spawned a Monster which premiered at Danceworks in September 2008. (Read Chris Boyd’s lucid review here, after you’ve finished with my ramblings you will crave lucidity. Trust me, you will.)

And having only seen Luke George’s performance of the work (and this in no way denigrates his interpretation, for it was glorious. Yes, glorious) I find myself yearning to be able to compare it with that of the piece’s Choreographer and Director, Jo Lloyd, who for matters I know not of, was not performing this time around.

I suppose this desire of mine to have seen her can be broken down thus: a) I’m having a hard time imagining anyone other than Luke George performing Melbourne Spawned a Monster. (This in itself may be either because he was very, very good and inhabited the work totally, or because my imagination is woefully limited). b) I think a woman’s performance may have absolutely re-contextualised the work. Although, perhaps her performance wouldn’t have re-contextualised the work,

Perhaps George’s performance was sort of genderless (which now that I mention it I think it may have been). Not genderless so much as not really masculine. (I mean masculine in the broadest possible manner.) And perhaps Lloyd’s performance was similarly androgynous.

Hmm. I think I need to back up the truck here. In my youth I craved a certain kind of male role model, one who was comfortable with his masculinity, one who could be poetic and graceful and humble and self-deprecating and not be competitive or protean, not needing to always prove his masculinity, one in whom the presence of softness and sensitivity needn’t mean femininity – it just didn’t really mean anything. I didn’t consciously crave this. Its wasn’t as if I was knocking about as an eight year old testing the men in my life on their verse, line, and emotional maturity, I think I became aware of the limitations implicit in the notion of “The Australian Male” early. This was the eighties. One had two choices a) Warwick Capper b) Bernard King.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that Luke George displayed the kind of humanity that is all encompassing. His unchallenging, passive, yet commanding gaze was disarming and reassuring. It was another way in which the performance toyed with the audience and both alienated you and brought you closer to itself.

This was a proscenium show. From the front of which dangled strings of LED lights, illuminating both the performer and the audience and drawing our attention to the divide and when it was being crossed. He is us. He’s with us. The LED light reflected on a simple, kitsch, ingenious backdrop of the Melbourne skyline, defined only by its windows, cut out of foil.

The choreography made little sense to me intellectually (as I’ve said before, I have no dance background, apart from tap-dancing lessons in a West Brunswick church hall with three middle-aged women. Not the most thorough preparation, I’ll admit) yet as it passed I was struck by its playfulness, its humour, its familiarity and its lack of equilibrium.

Duane Morrison’s perfectly realised music leant a pulse and a twitch to Luke George’s movements, reminding me of Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts:

Or, perhaps more to the point:

Melbourne Spawned a Monster is a wonderfully original piece of work.

Review: No Success Like Failure

2009-03-08T18:09:00.008+11:00

No Success Like Failure

The Fondue Set

Arts House

North Melbourne Town Hall

Season ended

I saw this work in 2008 and it was one of my favourite performances of the year. When I saw it had been collected for the sublimely programmed Dance Massive I rounded up a posse to attend.

I, you see, am a fan.

The Fondue Set is somewhat unique in the Australian performance landscape, in particular, the Australian dance landscape. Akin to Wendy Houstoun (who directed No Success Like Failure), the ubiquitous Forced Entertainment, Lone Twin and even perhaps Panther’s recent work, The Fondue Set position themselves, with panache, in the realm of the amateur, that is to say they embody the joy of performance - the naff-ness of it. Their choreography sits somewhere between a jazz ballet class in 1989, a school formal and a drunken party. Yet it skilfully transcends kitsch for the sake of it.

Aesthetically, this work is very much a part of the current zeitgeist, as is, say, this:

I find its aesthetic disarmingly familiar and comforting. I know what I’m getting. And I like it.

(Interestingly, isn’t the zeitgeist as a concept itself becoming a part of the zeitgeist? What happens then? How can it objectively select movements, works and things to become a part of it, if it, itself, is a part of it. Perhaps it operates like the Freemasons, or Rotary: entry by invitation of another member.)

Positioning itself loosely as a dance company and No Success Like Failure as a dance work, in Dance Massive, certain fundamental elements of their work come as a surprise. For me, a pleasant surprise, for others, perhaps disconcerting, or even tiresome. There is an overwhelming amount of text, and much of it is situated within the oeuvre of post-modern performance. For myself, with little to no dance background, this works.

Their comedy, arising from the tension between the performance act and the performers’ inherent self-awareness, is masterful and wonderfully executed.

The position that they inhabit, somewhere between dance and comedy is unique, and I must say it’s refreshing to see women embodying both dance and comedy without any particular nod to femininity. The role of women in comedy is dubious at best and The Fondue Set has carved their own niche, outside of the norm. They have a supreme self-awareness that never results in self-consciousness. There is an absolute humanity to their self-revelatory routines, the comedy arises not only out of awkwardness and irony, but recognition. There certainly would have been more room for abstracted movement, without irony.

Bear in mind that I have seen this show twice. Upon a second viewing there are certain fundamental issues at play. What I had taken to be an extremely live event (by which I mean: fallible, susceptible to change, dangerous) now seemed much less so. In fact, I saw a lot more polish. Which isn’t a good thing where No Success Like Failure is concerned. There was a live-ness that was faithfully mimicked but somewhat disingenuous. The event that the audience is attending is always going to be roughly the same. Which is a shame. I can see how this work could genuinely fail, how many or even most of its sequences are journeys into endurance for both the performers and the witnesses, how many of its parts are journeys into failure, or at the very least uncertainty. But the thing is, they no longer are. They are very rehearsed. Some sections of direct address were hurried through without any real sense of the audience being read and responded to legitimately. This is the adversary of a live event. The creators must design mechanisms open to pure chaos. To achieve the desired spontaneity they must include the purely random and expose themselves to its inherent danger.

This is all upon a second viewing, remember. After seeing it the first time, I exited the theatre on a kind of taffeta and spandex induced sugar high. This time, I just had a bit of a come-down.

What resonated most was its genuine emotion: the ability to stimulate pure, atavistic emotional reactions from uncontrollable laughter (quite close to the beginning of the piece I heard one of my companions whimpering, not wanting to be the one audience member with the weirdly overzealous laughter) to extreme pity and grief. Even at its most self-reflexive it is offset by the inclusion of some movement, or some external stimulus that runs in counterpoint to the potential intellectual feedback loop and at one point leaves you in tears as your mirror neurons are working full time mimicking the performers’ induced emotional states.

And this is their genius: embodied by the truly confronting and hilarious nature of staring into their faces, contorted with grief and sadness, as they dance their way through an instrumental version of Everybody Hurts. It is something that begins purely as a mechanism (and is hilariously antithetical to jazz ballet) and is completely disingenuous tapping into our emotional cortex whilst we are forced to be absolutely aware of the intellectual conceits being utilized.

Dance Massive

2009-03-08T17:51:00.004+11:00

The extraordinary but somewhat dubiously named Dance Massive has sidled its way into my life, devouring (in the most consensual way possible) my weekend.

Please stay tuned for reviews of No Success Like Failure, Mortal Engine, Roadkill, Limina and Melbourne Spawned a Monster.

In the meantime, my attention has rightly been directed to this wondrous thing, a mindblowing amalgamation of various youtube performances :

And go here, to the genius' site. Now. Don't dilly-dally. Or delay.

Review: Woyzeck

2009-02-05T21:56:00.011+11:00

Woyzeck

by Georg Büchner

Adapted by Gisli Örn Gardarsson

January 31st to February 28th

Merlyn Theatre

The Malthouse

Seems as if I'm the first cab off the rank here. I am not, I confess, an institution enough to warrant a ticket to the season proper and it was a preview that I attended.

Humbled and overawed.

So let's get Nick Cave and Warren Ellis out of the way: the music is great. I would've liked to have heard it as a set. In relation to Woyzeck itself, as an extension and addition to the material, I prefer Mr. Waits' Blood Money. But maybe that's just me. And I didn't see the Wilson and, I admit, things can oftentimes take on mythic proportions in my imagination, oftentimes I tell you.

So, yeah, the music's good and the cast perform it well.

One more admission is that apart from Herzog's film, I have never previously seen Woyzeck.

Me and my friend almost didn't make it, too. We both had arrived at Melbourne Airport at 6pm, after a day in Tasmania (another story) and the show started at 6:30 so we were weaving through the traffic to get there. And after a brief, inadvertent detour across the Westgate Bridge toward Geelong (I've told you about my sense of direction), I was in disbelief when it looked like we were going to make it. "We're going to make it!" "Don't say that" "But we are. We've got like 15 minutes and we're just around the corner!" "Anything could happen. We could break down." "I'd just put my hazard lights on and leave the car."

Then I went through a red light and almost killed us.

This goddamned show. What, I ask you, has happened to Michael Kantor? In my formative years I saw Kantor's Caucasian Chalk Circle, Ubu and The Ham Funeral at Belvoir and they excited me like a kid high on Whizz Fizz and skittles.

Woyzeck, in comparison, was staged so unimaginatively and the production as a whole suffered from the Bell Shakespeares and was filled with "cultural references" so that we could understand who everyone was. But the thing with these references, be they military uniforms or plastic outdoor chairs, they're so shallow. By which I mean, they are visual references only.

So, hands up who's sick of seeing puncy, floppy, insipid actors dressed as soldiers and carrying on like a bunch of emos? (Let's have a little competition for the best collective noun for emos. A gaunt? A slash?)

You'd think that Soundtrack to a War had never been made. Their collective idea of soldiers is exactly what I would have come up with whilst waiting for my coffee to brew. And that's not why I go to the theatre.

These visual references give us nothing experiential. They don't challenge our perceptions, they don't add to our empathy, they aren't artistically imaginative or extending in any way. We see them in the manner in which we've always seen them. That's it. See. We don't learn anything. We don't empathise. These kind of shallow cultural references are lazy. The only purpose they serve is to compound stereotypes.

I'm also really sick of watching actors getting so into themselves, into their hair, or their amazing guitar skills that they forget to experience anything, to connect, to react to anyone.

Bojana Novokovic was fantastic. Watching her, I believed (unlike most of the actors) that she has actually been through stuff in her life. Tim Rogers has that too, in spades.

But where on earth did the idea to add an intervening narrator of sorts to this play come from? What the heck? This conceit is bizarre. I can't imagine the reasoning behind it. Dramaturgically, I found it very discombobulating. To have an sort of emcee, a puppeteer, a trickster just adds to the general miasma that this production became. I guess it also didn't help that Rogers seems to have been directed as has every high school Puck of the last decade or so: lurking mischievously and somewhat sinisterly upstage throughout most of the action. I guess it also didn't help that his role seems to have diminished throughout the production.

And the production's representation of the aspirational was just condescending. There was no mirror to society, which I imagine there can be in Woyzeck, just a lot of self-satisfied condescending representations of people who we are supposed to believe we are better than, because they think they are better than Woyzeck. I mean what in the hell is the point if Büchner doesn't mean for us to examine our own desire to victimize and be on the top of the heap? Is Woyzeck not an allegory about chaos and social Darwinism and class and being driven into reprehensible actions? Am I an idiot? Tell me, I may learn.

And while you're at it, tell me how is this different from the MTC staging a play with Guy Pearce and the music of Tim Finn? The target audience is just a little younger here, that's all. It's the same godforsaken thing.

Musicvideodrome

2009-01-29T13:32:00.004+11:00

I feel a little sheepish about not writing an end of year list of my favourite performances. What I am doing instead is producing a list of my five favourite music videos of 2008. Some you probably will have seen, some not.

In no particular order:

Francis and the Lights "The Top"

This is amazingly simple and captures a great performance from the front man (I'm assuming Francis). The song doesn't do it for me, but to be able to enjoy the performance in a single shot is a rarity.

Omaha Bitch "Orgasmic Troopers"

At last. Ballet and metal. A match made in heaven. The concept doesn't really sustain itself. But its a great concept.

Justice "Stress"

I have my qualms about posting this. It is very violent, it is clearly in a moral grey area, it has been controversial. It is, however, a great piece of work technically. It generates stress in the viewer very successfully and breaks the 4th wall really amazingly, in a manner I have never seen before and am unlikely to again. Its extremely compelling.

Be warned.

Beyonce "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)"

Think what you may, this is a great clip. I don't care what you think of me for posting it. Call me what you will. I don't care about my street cred. I love this clip. Great to see editing which serves the choreography. This clip has been widely abused for being a Bob Fosse rip off - I couldn't care less. I love Fosse if there's anyone to rip off its him.

Rip him off more. Come on. Do it. I dares ya.

Beyonce - Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) [Official Video]
Uploaded by Yannicklord

Kanye West "Flashing Lights"

Again, I don't care. Sticks and stones will break my bones... I love that of all the things in this clip to pixelate, they've gone for the lighter fluid. That'll stop those damn kids.

KANYE WEST "FLASHING LIGHTS"
Uploaded by kanyewestofficial

Gnarls Barkley "Going On"

I can't imagine a clip more unexpectedly suited to the track. Fantastic performances, choreography, art direction and concept.

I love it.

Gnarls Barkley - Going On
Uploaded by zegonzag

Things that I would say to a five years younger version of myself

2009-01-28T15:02:00.006+11:00

Years ago, when I was 16 I think, I wrote a letter to myself to open when I was 21. It was a horrible experience and I would recommend it to no one. I was crazily ambitious (for all the wrong reasons) and unyielding in my opinions.

So I've inverted the paradigm and decided to write down some things that I wish I had been told when I was younger, when I probably wouldn't have listened anyway...

You will never know how to direct.

You will never know exactly what directing is.

A by product of the work of a director is slowly making yourself redundant. Socially and theatrically, creating an atmosphere whereby you are no longer necessary.

Directing is lonely.

Directing is intangible.

It is important to continue learning and to continue being a student.

Never claim to know anything, but shoulder the responsibility if not knowing is problematic.

Work with writers, as many as you can.

Create experiences rather than direct plays.

Collaborate as much as possible on many things, including things non-theatrical.

Becoming known for an aesthetic, or a kind of theatre, or a certain set of themes means that you have stopped developing and you need to throw everything away.

Those who look up to you will never critique you.

Honest critique is one of the most important things you will ever receive - seek it out, encourage it and engage with it. It is more important to invite someone who will challenge your work than someone who will give you your next job.

Humility and social laziness are different things. Try not to be socially lazy.

Because the outcome is so intangible it is easy for a director to imply ownership of the entire piece. Try not to do that. Give credit where credit is due. Try not to need any approval. Try to have self contained goals where you are the only judge and you are only measuring yourself against yourself.

You need to see a lot of theatre, art, music, dance, live art, performance etc. You need to understand the landscape. You need to be politically and socially informed in order for your work to sit within that landscape. Never let up.

You need to direct a lot. It's very difficult to find the opportunities to direct a lot, without directing things you don't want to direct. Therefore, workshop settings are very good.

Work hard. You know when you are, so do it. Set parameters to work within (a number of hours per day) and stick to it. Within that you can do anything pertaining to the task at hand, workshop, research, find music, research, find visual reference material, research, or rehearse. Don't worry so much about the appearance of research, or hard work, much of the work no one will ever know about.

Listen.

Oh, and finally: probably best to avoid this kind of thing. At all costs.

A Little Bit of a Not Properly Formulated Rant About the Arts and Mental Health

2009-01-22T00:16:00.009+11:00

I Was a Teenage Dirty Old Man is currently on at Gasworks as a part of the Midsumma Festival. It is a cabaret piece by Eric Kuhlmann. It was brought over from Adelaide by the Feast Festival, after only six previous performances.

It is incredibly raw. Incredibly. It is unlikely that you'll ever see something this raw again. And that rawness contains the seeds of its success and its ultimate destruction.

It begins with Eric naked (with a figure rather like that of Buddha) curled up, sitting cross legged on a small coffee table, looking rather like those garden scultptures of bald naked men curled up in a ball that were everywhere 10 or so years ago. His electronic backing music began, and his voice - scratchy, hoarse - began almost chanting taboo breaking, stream of consciousness lyrics. The byline described him as "Ian Dury meets Billy Brag in a public toilet" which seemed a good call at the beginning. As the piece unfolded, however, I was increasingly reminded of Daniel Johnston. Eric's nerves were palpable, he was visibly shaking much of the time and rarely opened his eyes at all. The room (the larger space at Gasworks) was totally unsuitable for his material. The show itself wasn't really in tourable condition yet. It suffered a lack of structure which rendered it an onslaught and somewhat exhausting, and could have used some gentle direction and or dramaturgy. I would have preferred to see a gig, rather than the uncomfortable moments of forced interaction.

The piece raised a whole host of issues (not issues it intended to raise) as I watched a performer get totally burnt, as I'm sure he is after the experience.

I have spent some time professionally working with people who have an experience of mental illness. Arts related activities undoubtedly increase participant's mental health, yet I have always struggled with the notion of these processes being staged and ticketed - with the work of Rawcus for instance, feeling that it is morally fraught (beautiful, yes. Freakshow, a bit). I think this area of community arts practice needs some serious scrutiny, professionalisation and training.

But those ill-formed thoughts aside, it became increasingly clear throughout I Was a Teenage Dirty Old Man that Eric has a history of mental illness, he directly alluded to treatments and medications a number of times. Whilst he remained non-specific about his diagnosis, it was, by the show's end, clear to me as an audience member.

I would suggest (and this may well be contentious) that his mental health, which became such an issue for the show as a whole, should be addressed in the publicity material. It would take the edge off this being revealed throughout the process of the show and would encourage a wholly new and perhaps more forgiving audience (not more forgiving than myself neccessarily, but more forgiving than the audience I was a part of) and Gasworks is, perhaps, the place for it. They are, after all, hosting The Art of Difference Festival in March. This show could find a home in that festival or a plethora of other events supporting mental illness.

This is very tricky territory for me to be getting into. I'm not suggesting this because he didn't belong, I'm only suggesting it because the show was clearly underdone and he was clearly incredibly uncomfortable and needed support and encouragement in order to fully realise the magnificent material.

It saddened me greatly to see him there, already with such revelatory material and such vulnerability, with such total lack of support.

There is a singer-song-writer & visual artist named Heidi Everett who has flourished with the right kind of gigs, support, encouragement and venues. She plays regularly supporting the Bi-Polar Bears and at Roarhouse gigs and her material and performance skills have gained depth and confidence.

I really felt like Eric Kuhlmann will never perform a show again.

Having said that, like Daniel Johnson, Eric Kuhlmann may not want to flag his mental health as an issue, or to perform at events tailored for performers like him. It just didn't seem like he had the support or the relationships to make it possible, like Daniel Johnston is illustrated as having in the brilliant The Devil and Daniel Johnston.

Any thoughts?

Things to do when you're thirty

2009-01-13T13:10:00.013+11:00

Every once in a while I get obsessed. I have the make up of a zealot so let's all consider ourselves lucky that I am in no way religious, new wave, politically conservative nor radically active.

For my thirtieth birthday last November I received two gifts in particular that alluded to my obsessive nature. I was given me a turntable and a first pressing of The White Album, coincidentally released exactly 10 years before I was born. My parents gave me a mixmaster. Pastry and LPs ensued.

It seems that last year I was briefly obsessed with blogging - and now in the cold, sober light of the morning I've looked over what happened here and am in amazement and wonder. You were there, and you were there.

I am humbled by what occurred when I flippantly began to publicly rant. When I reconsider the spirit in which this venture was born and the state of mind I am now in, I think I have this little pastime to thank in no small part. I was reengaged with the performance scene in a way that hasn't been the case for years. I had a voice and an opinion that seemed to be held in some regard. And the voice, at least shall continue, comrades.

Last year during the fringe I had a wonderful, spirited, challenging, honest and generous exchange with Marcel, the director of 'There' which I had every intention of publishing as I believe in a right of reply, but the moment seems to have passed. Marcel will be the first to be invited to review my next work, and I will invite him to published it here.

I saw a few more things at the end of last year, things which uplifted and confounded me as much as anything else last year, but again, the moment has passed.

Oh, and there was a delightful evening of Throwies.

So, there are many things I am seeing this year. There are many things I am looking forward to seeing. My own work will, at some stage, be a part of the mix.

And if there's anyone still interested out there: ta.

Review: That Night Follows Day

2008-10-26T13:07:00.007+11:00

That Night Follows Day

Created by Tim Etchells & Victoria

For a number of years now I have worked with kids (young people, really) spanning the ages of ten to twenty five. I have had the pleasure and priviledge to make performance work with them. One of the most rewarding experiences in this time was creating a work for a skate park in the area. At the time I was dismayed at the State Of Things and as a response to my preoccupation, I began to bring in articles to the workshops, anything from reports covering the Palestine / Israel trouble, some terror raids in London... We watched Van Sant's 'Elephant'. I was blown away by the young people's responses to these articles and by the wave of opinion, outrage, compassion and intelligence they displayed relating to the source material. They told me that no one asks. People assume they don't have an opinion. In my adulthood, I had always assumed that the younger generation was even more apathetic than mine, I had assumed that they (being the ultimate post modern, capitalist, digital generation) would not have a particular stand. Boy was I wrong. Throughout the process they floored me with their objective view of events. They were rarely binary in their understanding of complex issues. They approached each source story with compassion, impartiality and a great deal of humanity. They seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fragility of it all, the shades of grey, the fallibility of human interaction. I have tried to never condescend to them again.

'That Night Follows Day' is such a profound use of the theatrical paradigm, and of working with children as collaborators. It is a stand-off, a confrontation, a turning of the tables. It is non judgmental, it is objective, it is overwhelming in what it illustrates through simply listing facts and memories. As many of these statements are in some way positive as those that suggest a negativity.

These items, when placed together into one overwhelming whole, delivered in an entirely non-theatrical manner, suggest both the wisdom and individuality of children, the complex and fraught task of raising a child and the lies that we tell (as parents, guides, society) in order to protect them from the truth of the world and of humans.

'That Night Follows Day' isn't a call to arms to let children be, its not a polemic dissecting and criticising our treatment of children, it just shows things the way they are. And the totally disarming thing about it is that you don't expect it from children. It is exactly the experience I had making the work for the skate park. Humbled and moved. The children are never asking for anything. They are never demanding anything. They just stand there in various sized groups telling us what we do (not who we are, or what we mean, or if its good or bad). Adults come across as being caring, ambitious, cautious, shambolic, racist, placating, encouraging, mean, uncertain, superstitious, atheist, rational, emotional, rushed, flustered, dismisive, disappointed, full of love and deeply flawed.

And that we are, aren't we?

As the piece concluded I was grieving the fact that we tell children "it's all going to be okay". Not only is that a lie, I realised that I am, as an adult, still coming to terms with that fact. I saw how much of my life has been guided by the belief that it's all going to be okay. It is, we believe, our right for things to all be okay. And they're not, they never will be. But that's okay, we can just get on with it.

Children, it seems are much more able to accept the fragility, the futility, the deep flaws of humanity than we are. They haven't yet learned to try not to be human.

Review: Appetite

2008-10-25T12:06:00.004+11:00

Appetite

Melbourne International Arts Festival

Fairfax Studio Until 25th October

Don't go. Even if you have a ticket. Even if you paid for a ticket, like I did, don't go. Your time is better spent watching babies vomit on youtube.

What a total, abject, insulting, embarrassing mess.

Chris Boyd used the Hadron Collider as a metaphor when describing 'Sunstruck'. I would now like to borrow that metaphor and use it to describe 'Appetite', but not in the way that Mr. Boyd has. This is like people's worst fears about the particle accelerator realised. 'Appetite' took various bad, bad elements: ordinary, ill-thought out dance and movement, really banal, jarring yet fence-sitting original songs, and a terrible, terrible script, and collided them into each other, which caused a black-hole.

I'm not exaggerating. This was terrible.

I honestly don't know where to start. I don't think this was a programming issue. It looked good on paper, good enough for me to book a ticket. I don't think it was down to the performers by any means all of whom are good, and two of whom were responsible for one of my favourite performances this year: 'Disagreeable Objects'. I don't know how this could go so far off the rails and deviate so thoroughly. You see, the thing is, it was bad in so many ways. Mueller doesn't strike me as the kind of writer whose words compliment dance or physical theatre, and nor does it pull strongly in the other direction (of course I see it now, in retrospect). I'm not familiar with New Buffalo, but c'mon, this was poor man's Sarah Blasko in 'Little Fish'. The songs were just ordinary, and really seemed to belong to something else.

But, by god, the direction.

It was amateurish at best. The poor performers having to upstage each other, with such, such puerile slapstick. I felt terribly sorry for each and every performer. Everything was so obviously flagged and emoted, there was absolutely no subtlety. What's happened to Kate Denborough? 'Headlock', that Frank Woodley solo show and now this? Diminishing returns or what? I'm really glad that generally, people are calling this for what it is. I do place the blame upon Kage and Denborough for this. It just was so poorly directed that there wasn't anything redeeming. And c'mon, reading this excuse for writing would be enough for the alarm bells to be ringing. Three disparate and opposing elements working unintentionally against one another shows a lack of vision. It shows a lack of certainty and courage.

Now, I'm a cook. I love cooking. I love cooking on stage. They had every opportunity to actually cook, they had burners, they had ingredients. There was a promising moment of pop corn, and also of flambe, but is amounted to absolutely nothing. The pinnacle of culinary sensuality was McClements cracking eggs into a bowl, adding oranges, champagne and vodka. It was just stupid. Why not actually cook? This was childish, like something from 'You Can't Do That On Television'.

This was such a disgusting waste of food, time, resources, intelligence, space, festival hours... I could go on.

And who are these people? There were no characters, just caricatures. I'm so, so, so sick of seeing writing like this. Its like seeing a David Williamson when you're a kid. You sit there and think "Oh, so that's what its like being an adult". But I don't know anyone who lives this life. It didn't come from a truthful place at all. I've never met anyone who fits into that mould. And I used to work in advertising. I've met the bourgeoisie, I've met CUBs, but who were these people? It just made no sense.

And is Catherine McClements being groomed to be the next Sigrid Thornton or what?

Oh god, it made me angry. I just hope I can remember both Michelle Heaven and Brian Lucas for 'Disagreeable Objects' which was at least one thousand times better.

Oh god, I just noticed it had a dramaturge. That's ridiculous, what was he doing?

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE STOP THEM???

Review: Sunstruck

2008-10-21T11:35:00.003+11:00

Sunstruck

Concept collaboration Helen Herbertson & Ben Cobham

Season Ended

What with all the excitement I have completely neglected to write about 'Sunstruck'. In case you have missed aforementioned ruckus see here and here. Read the comments and be excited for me. This is a big deal in the life of this fledgling little venture.

So, it's late in the game, the season has ended and it sold out. Do you really want to hear about another show that you probably missed?

Years ago, when I was living in Sydney, I used to regularly catch the train to Central Station. The train would always pull up at the same platform. The platform would be on the train's left. Once, however, the train pulled up to a different platform. The platform was on the train's right. I hadn't yet noticed the anomaly. When I 'alighted' from the train I strode confidently off in the absolute wrong direction, because, you see, I was walking in the direction I was used to going in: stepping off the train, onto the platform and turning to my left.

It wasn't until I was about half way down the platform that I computed that something was wrong. I stopped. And I has this amazing dislocating sensation of the world correcting its position in my perception. Directionally, everything was opposite to what I had thought.

That was back in the day when I still had totally unfounded confidence in my sense of direction. Is it something men are born with - not the actual sense itself - but the absolute belief in it? I only recently accepted (with the gentle prodding of my companion) that my sense of direction is terrible. I actually get lost regularly. Melbourne's grid is a blessing to someone like me, it gently supports and encourages my locational ability. But then you find yourself riding to shed 4 in Docklands. Unbelievably, I found my way there okay.

'Sunstruck' appealed immensely to my general sense of discombobulation. Space was gently created and destroyed, distance and perspective were both teased. Spacial awareness was manipulated and stimulated.

The simplicity with which 'Sunstruck' seemed to gently bend both space and time is a credit to its intelligence.

Emotionally I was somewhat devastated by this piece. It just seemed to encompass everything about men and joy and inexorable tragedy and struggle and continuation and children and inevitable loss and sadness and wisdom and compassion. It was one of the most empathetic pieces I have ever seen.

I'm not really going to add anything that Messrs. Boyd and Born Dancin' haven't already spoken of apart from rejoicing in the skill involved in evoking so much with so little - one light. Its simplicity was its greatest tool and one which it used with unbelievable viruosity.

Emerging into the night with my tear-streaked cheeks I found I had parked my bike on a mummified squashed rat.

And then I got lost.

Review: Exercises in Happiness

2008-10-20T00:16:00.005+11:00

Exercises in Happiness

Created and presented by Panther: Sarah Rodigari and Madeleine Hodge

Until Saturday 25th October

Both Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari are friends of mine. They, as far as I know, don't know that I write this. This happened once before after I reviewed Tom Holloway's 'Red Sky Morning', Tom read it and the jig was up. He didn't, you see, know that I was writing a blog. More correctly, I hadn't told him. Then he read it. I was embarrassed.

'Exercises in Happiness' occurs in a gallery-like space. I was there Saturday evening. It was hot and it was crowded. I found myself informally queueing in order to complete the exercises. It made me cross.

As has been written by others this is a diverting installation / intervention, and it is quite submersive. I think this misses the point though. Or it does to me at least.

What I got, and this really might be more revealing psychologically than I would like it to be, was the absolute flimsiness and futility of a search for happiness alone - as a means to an end. You potter about in a garden, something I usually love doing, and all I was thinking about was the drainage of a container within a gallery and how the plants really don't stand a chance. You make awkward conversation with a stranger using topics from a little glass bowl, while eating trifle and rather than begin a conversation, it halted one that I was already having with a stranger. I sat for about 20 minutes trying to tune up a left-handed electric guitar and when I finished, I had to start again because the tuning had not held. I went into the video room, pressed 'next' on the computer screen after I had recorded my first answer, nothing seemed to happen, I got impatient and clicked it again and missed the next question and had to record my response to the second question where my response to the third one should have been. I read people's responses to 'One Thing You'd Like To Do before You Die' and got despondent because zero population growth is really not going to happen.

There was an activity (actually a couple) that I didn't get to due to aforementioned overcrowding, which I wanted to get to because it alluded to something that I like exploring. The activity was watching porn. The reason I liked its inclusion is because porn, by its very nature, is generally somewhat exploitative. And I believe that our desire for happiness, our belief that it is a birth right, comes at a cost to others, to society, to the earth, to ourselves.

Now, and I'm going to tread carefully here, I do not believe that happiness itself comes as a cost, just the pursuit of it on its own. Happiness isn't an endpoint, its a byproduct. It doesn't come at a cost when it's achieved as a byproduct, but by god we exploit many things in order for us to happy. And in presenting that exploitation, that flimsiness, futility and emptiness, I believe, lies the success of this piece.

Agog

2008-10-19T23:46:00.007+11:00

I'm all aflutter at what seems to be Wendy Houstoun's response to my previous post (am I an idiot for thinking it might actually be? Could it be? Will we ever truly know?)

Had I any inclination that she would be reading this drivel, I would:

-have written much, much better

-have probably gotten someone else to ghost write my review

-be arrogant

I've had a couple of interesting conversations re. Beck's signage and sponsorship including one with someone who works at the Meat Market. I have every intention of following this up a little, in probably a fairly half-assed way (with delusions of 'All the President's Men' flickering away in my little brain box) when I get some more time up my sleeve.

In the meantime though, rather than wish I had written a better review, rather than editing what I have written, in the spirit of Houstoun herself, some intentions:

1) I had intended to discuss The Fondue Set's 'No Success Like Failure' and Forced Entertainment's 'Bloody Mess' in relation to Wendy Houstoun. I just forgot and next thing you know I had kind of finished what I had written (therein is the 'craft' in what I do here - stumble about blindly until I finish). 'No Success Like Failure' has been one of my favourite theatre-going experiences this year. And I'm not just saying that. I'm not a sycophant. Promise I'm not.

2) I had intended to reflect thoroughly upon our drinking culture in this country with statistics, socio-economic break-downs and hypotheses. And to make a series of stunning insights about the manner in which our society both tacitly and not so tacitly endorses a culture determined to drink itself to death. And just how much Beck's' sponsorship of this event undercut any valid social criticism. At which point I would have tied it all up to illustrate the pervasive nature of big brewery company's advertising.

3) I had intended to be more self-deprecating and funny. I can be. I also can, at the drop of a hat, get all high and mighty. Which is what I apparently decided to do instead.

4) I had intended to delve into the structure of both 'Desert Island Dances' and 'Happy Hour', compare, contrast and discuss. Or at the very least quantify why the structure of 'Desert Island Dances' seemed to support the performance more than the structure of 'Happy Hour' did.

5) I had intended to be erudite.

6) I had intended for there to be more structure to what I wrote, to support the arguments that I was making.

You would have loved it.

Review: Happy Hour

2008-10-19T11:46:00.012+11:00

Happy Hour

Created by Wendy Houstoun and Tim Etchells, Performed by Wendy Houstoun

Until 19 October

What a long way it seems Wendy Houstoun has come in the intervening years between 'Desert Island Dances' and 'Happy Hour'. Structurally, dramaturgically and stylistically, 'Desert Island Dances' is way in front.

The subject matter of 'Happy Hour' is more profound, relevant and challenging than in 'Desert Island Dances' on the surface. What appealed, however, in 'Desert Island Dances' was its eventual universality, its transcendence of self-reflexivity and deconstructionism, to encompass something total and human.

'Happy Hour' was awkward, half-baked, somehow disingenuous and severely displaced within the Meat Market.

It was developed as a site specific piece to be performed in bars. The Beck's Bar is a bar, no two ways about it. But it's an ad-hok kind of affair. What I really desired was for this to be performed at the Old Colonial on Brunswick Street or some such place, lurid carpet heady with the memory of indoor smoking, formica table tops, a sea of wood panelling and, perhaps most importantly, people actually going there to drink.

The Beck's Bar was full of us. Expectation writ large across our faces, positioning ourselves, craning our necks, full of anticipation and knock-about adoration for Wendy Houstoun.

It just didn't do it for me. It was such an artifice, really such a long way from being site specific. It wound up feeling totally nonspecific, could have happened anywhere. Why on earth would a 'site specific' performance be programmed within such a performance venue for three days? How is that site specific? It site specificity is not more than any live performance anywhere.

There was a part of the performance that occurred on a small rostra. This section was mostly dance and she is an incredible mover. Behind the rostra, however, were a couple of huge Beck's banners, which took my thoughts into a feedback loop of sponsorship, signage and double selling. I got really confused.

Obviously the Beck's Bar is sponsored by Beck's. The MIAF website cites Beck's as a supporter of this performance. Now, what is the nature of this sponsorship? This must be the only performance that has such prominent sponsor signage. How was this deal struck? How did they score this kind of overt, totally unsubtle advertising? I sometimes resent what I call 'double-selling', where, usually in a glossy magazine, you find that you've paid for what has perhaps already been paid for by advertisers. Magazines pretty much full of advertising, advertising features, product reviews, you know... Newspapers rely on advertising, and its not so much of a concern to me in that context, newspapers are cheap, journalism is not.

This is a context, however, where the lines are blurred, are they not? Festivals need sponsorship to subsidise the works they are presenting, particularly in Australia, where the costs of travel could otherwise be prohibitive to an arts festival. I'm not anti sponsorship, just one for disclosure. I am becoming increasingly perturbed at the blurring of the line and I really have not encountered it in live performance before. And it scares the whatsit out of me.

Is it not enough that the performance occurred in The Beck's Bar? That the Beck's logo appears on the web page and the program? And that Beck's was the only beer available?

I mean come on. We're not idiots. They had a captive group of people waiting eagerly for a performance, with not much else to do besides buy a beer. They didn't need to erect banners reminding us of their branding.

And this seemed a strange kind of union, between a piece that is sort of critical of drinking culture - certainly doesn't romanticise it - and a big ole liquor company, in fact, the largest brewery company in the world.

I'm really interested to hear what others make of this. It was a kind of controlling, under-handed, yet unsubtle kind of sponsorship. I imagine that anything programmed for this venue throughout the festival ends up doing some nice business for Beck's.

After I'd stewed on this I found that I'd missed a good five minutes of the performance. Oh well.

And I have never seen a performance whose backdrop is a couple of Australia Council banners.

Review: Desert Island Dances

2008-10-15T20:11:00.012+11:00

Desert Island Dances

Devised by Wendy Houstoun and John Avery

Performed by Wendy Houstoun

Season Ended

As I was seeping in the miasma that was fringe and stewing in my disappointment of 'An Oak Tree', 'Desert Island Dances' caressed my young, follicly blessed cheek like a cool, tropical breeze (to mix metaphors).

Houstoun is incredible. Her presence is so disarmingly reachable and unassuming that she manages to bring so much in, without you necessarily even being conscious of it. And, bejesus, is she funny.

In one of my favourite novels, Ondaatje's 'In the Skin of a Lion', there is a line which seared into my brain the first time I read it. I quote it often, so apologies to anyone I know who may be reading this, but its the first time in memory I have quoted it in relation to theatre.

It appears at about the midway point in the narrative, from memory, and it reaches out to you, it pulls itself through the (at that point) sticky layers of narrative and speaks clearly, honestly and humbly. It made me love Ondaatje.

Trust me. There is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.

I've never forgotten it. Its like some of those great fourth wall breaking moments in Spike Lee's movies, or Haneke's. It has a definite point and utility, yet is done with such grace and intelligence. Startling and exhilarating in its honesty.

Houstoun's 'Desert Island Dances' is beyond what I was expecting which essentially is artful artlessness, de-constructing our notions of performance and the interface between us. The piece does somehow transcend its postmodern self-reflexive origins to encompass a whole lot. Her images are delivered. The movements are surprisingly often poignant and allowed to settle.

And it is incredibly funny.

The only moment that didn't do it for me was when she turned a video camera, that had been recording the audience around and watched it and charted our enjoyment. I liked the charting, I liked what she was doing - I just got hung up on the fact that she wasn't watching the video, or at least I didn't think she was. And what she was saying wasn't necessarily in regards to our image on the little screen she was looking at. I would have preferred it if it were. Or obviously not - a superfluous theatrical mechanism that fails. Like the hilarious moment of black-light with nothing glowing on stage at all (there was, however, a woman in the first row dressed entirely in white. I am strangely and prejudicially mistrusting of people who dress all in white, it doesn't seem natural) and Houstoun describing what she intended to do.

I'm going to throw in another quote here, its relevance compounded by the fact that its Tim Etchells, a frequent collaborator of Houstoun's.

Inside the theatre there are only the performers and the audience. Onstage the performers have some material items - flimsy or not so flimsy scenery, various props and costume stuff. The audience, for their part, have their coats and their handbags and the contents of their pockets. But that's all. The whole of the rest of the world - its physical locations and landscapes, its entire population, its complete set of objects and its unfolding events - is invariably outside, emphatically absent.

Theatre then must always (?) be: the summoning of presence in the context of absence. A bringing in of the world.

Tim Etchells - Step Off the Stage, opening polemic of the SPILL Symposium

This is exactly what Houstoun has achieved with 'Desert Island Dances'. Something all about bringing the world in, giving context. Performing an annotated thank-you list. Its all so incredibly human.

Magnetic Movie

2008-10-14T16:46:00.002+11:00

So this is what happens when you are an artist in residence at a Space Sciences Laboratory.

Incredible.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Review: An Oak Tree

2008-10-13T20:31:00.009+11:00

An Oak Tree

Written and Performed by Tim Crouch

Guest Actor Julia Zemiro

Melbourne International Arts Festival

Season Ended

I wanted this to work. I was open and receptive, attentive and generous. I am enamored with the power of suggestion. I am perpetually entwined with and fascinated by the neurological and psychological effects of imagination.

The conceit had me, the mechanism fascinated me.

Apart from its much publicised fixation with the power of suggestion, I would proffer that this is as much, if not more, an exercise in objectivity. An attempt to an achieve objective view of a character, subject, story and concept from both audience and performer. Or it could be an exercise in moral neutrality. Tim Crouch describes a "process of co-authoring that takes place between audience and performer".

Crouch has put forward 'An Oak Tree' as a rebuttal to the theatre of psychological realism. He states in the program notes that he is "frustrated by... those moments that have been carefully honed by research and rehearsal to the point where their 'liveness' has been nullified".

I get this. I like this provocation. It was a similar provocation that drew me to Richard Maxwell's 'Good Samaritans' a few years back (see here for Theatre Notes review), which I loved.

I did not, however, love 'An Oak Tree'.

Where 'Good Samaritans' was all artful artlessness, 'An Oak Tree' was all artless artfulness.

The experience was so controlled - to almost an inch of its life - by Crouch, the delivery gave no space for silence, doubt and uncertainty. Is it not somewhat of a futile task to ask an actor onto the stage, in front of hundreds, and ask them "not to improvise" but to "remain open"? They will be vulnerable, they have their craft on display and who would not play to their strengths within that context? Who, I ask you, would not begin to interpret, to behave, to emote, to improvise?

Zemiro did, as I think anyone would, play for laughs a bit, make obvious that the words were not hers, play 'open', emote, but I can't blame her. She was being shunted around the stage, told this and that, her performance was very much being directed - it was far from a neutral delivery or direction - by Crouch.

The central conceit here was, therefore, totally undermined. It failed spectacularly as a piece of open theatre. It was boring. So boring that I found myself self-chastising because I was losing interest. "You're not being open enough" I told myself, "You're attention span is woefully stunted, you're probably one of those people who can't even be hypnotised, who aren't 'open' to it."

An aside: a friend of mine has a song called, I think, 'The Non-Consentual Squeeze', written about those men, (they mostly are, aren't they) who come up behind you and give you an unsolicited massage whilst saying: "you're really, very tense, you need to let go of some tension", all the while your stress mounts because you're being kind of kneaded by a looming man with one of those soft, sensitive, 'I'm a good listener', creepy voices. These men haunt community choirs, yoga classes and the theatrical arts. Trust me, I was one as a teenager.

I felt like 'An Oak Tree' was in that kind of realm. It was a passive-aggressive control-freak of a play. It nodded and smiled at you whilst pushing you away and insulting you. It gave the careful impression of granting autonomy and the power of interpretation to its audience and its guest actor whilst yielding absolutely no control.

It is a theatrical experiment and I have some respect for it as one - but it is so far down the road. He has performed it with hundreds of people. It has become one of those "carefully honed" pieces of theatre that it was designed to reject.

I feel ridiculous for pointing out that we have zero trouble accepting suggestion. That is what the theatre is. Absolutely. If not that, then what? Approximately 30% of my total time in the theatre (or t.t.i.t.t.) is spent strategizing about what physical position would best allow blood flow back into my buttocks. I am never in danger of forgetting where I am. I mean, where would we be in the theatre without the power of suggestion, without the 'liveness'? This was established pretty early on in the theatre. You know, the whole massive plaster masks thing, the whole adolescent boys playing women thing. Who exactly is Tim Crouch expecting as an audience? And with what kind of previous theatrical experience?

I think he means film. Seriously. Film is what he should be playing with. Film is rife with psychological realism. Film is where 'realism' really is.

So, Tim Crouch then, in film, I suppose would be doing what Lars Von Trier has been. Destroying the artifice and concentrating how much we will suspend our disbelief in what is ostensibly a realistic medium.

So, then. Its been done.

And how can we achieve objectivity, openness, moral neutrality in the theatre? We can't.

I'll leave this confusion by quoting from Atwood's marvelous 'Negotiating With the Dead' and hoping no one sees me escape behind the smoke.

Was it possible, I said, to write a story with no moral implications at all? 'No,' she said. 'You can't help the moral implication, because a story has to come out one way or the other, and the reader will have opinions about the rightness or wrongness of the outcome whether you like it or not.'... It was Chekhov who famously said, and not quite truthfully, that he never judged his characters, and you will find many a critical review that tacitly endorses this sort of restraint. But the reader will judge the characters, because the reader will interpret. We all interpret every day... Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires.

Review: There

2008-10-09T09:55:00.003+11:00

There

The Loft, Festival Hub, The Lithuanian Club

Devised and Performed by Emily Tomlins and Angus Grant

Directed by Marcel Dorney

Until the 11th September

Presented by Elbow Room

People are saying very good things about this piece and with some good reason. It is very diverting and entertaining.

It is, however, very cute. And that is both a good and a bad thing.

At its simplest level, 'There' reminded me of an old Aardman animation I remember called 'Adam', a very well executed creation allegory.

And that's the thing - here we go - 'There' didn't feel like anything new. Let me say (and I'm not placating here) that it is all executed very, very well. It is funny, it is extremely entertaining, and I agree with Born Dancin' that it is, perhaps better if one goes in expecting and knowing nothing. But I had heard about this and heard that it is something I shouldn't miss.

Now, I gotta say that I expelled a sigh of exasperation upon the revelation that these two 'blank slate' characters were actors. Jesus. Does this industry (and, yes, I use the term loosely) have to be so self reflexive and insular? Is there nothing more interesting in the world to represent? I understand that it was perhaps a mechanism used to achieve a degree of self-revelation and vulnerability, but the metaphor became hackneyed as soon as that revelation was made. This is well trod ground. The stage and actors as a representation of the world and humans. Didn't someone once suggest that 'All the world's a stage'? Who was it? (Sorry, I seen to have stepped in some facetiousness).

There were some interesting teases after this point - there were a couple of good points made about gender roles within traditional theatre, but those points were dropped pretty quickly. There was a fantastic moment in which one of the characters became a vessel for the flotsam of consumerism, spouting an advertisement as if it were the word of god. Again, though, the notion seemed to be forgotten - humans and human intelligence as a product of the vast amounts of stuff we vomit into the ether. Much complexity, whilst briefly addressed did seem to fall by the wayside in favour of simplicity and neatness. And that's what bothered me really. God knows, now, if at any point in history, we as a society understand the cost of existence. What it costs the world, other people, ourselves. This existentialism, this struggle was barely addressed, but I have to say there was a striking and all too brief final image that redeemed the piece somewhat. I just wish they had earned it a little more, forsaken laughs, cuteness and cleverness for some further truth. Lord knows they could have gone there. The audience was in the palm of their hand, they could have taken us anywhere. The final image was resonant, and true, but way, way too quick for me.

As an antidote to exploratory, non narrative based, non linear performance it is probably refreshing. But, my friends, I likes me my non narrative based, exploratory performance. Sure it doesn't always work, in fact it probably doesn't work more than it does, but it mostly feels new, unique and truly brave. And I didn't get that from 'There'. It felt pretty damn safe and comfy, within the realm of, say, 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead'. The theatrical metaphor was overstated and at no point did I ever genuinely question what was going on. There was no point of true chaos, or loss of control. I felt the performers and the audience always remained quite, quite safe.

It is, however, very, very well performed. The actors both have obvious skill. And it is funny. It just remained to be clowning for me - never moved beyond it - and had a little too much bathos.

If you see it you won't be bored, you'll be charmed and entertained. I promise.

The more I see in this festival, the more I reflect fondly upon 'Scattered Tacks' and hope, in my heart of hearts, that you can get to see it, if there are still tickets.

Review: War Lounge

2008-10-04T13:46:00.004+10:00

War Lounge

Directed and Devised by Suzanne Kersten

Artists Clair Korobacz, Paul Moir, Julian Rickert and Christine Logan-Bell

Presented by t.v.

Here's a disagreement. How exciting. 'War Lounge' is something I went to see based pretty much solely upon Born Dancin's endorsement.

I had so many problems with this piece, and not in a good, provocative, questioning things I had previously believed to be self-evident truths, kind of way.

There are, in my humble opinion, problems with this piece on pretty much every level.

Level One: Semantics

There is a basic semantic point I will make - not in order to be petty - because I believe it to be indicative of one of the problems of this performance. At least one-third of the piece paraphrases the experience of people who have lived in Iraq, sometimes in their own words, sometimes not. While this is, in itself, interesting, I call its relevance into question simply because the title of the performance is: 'War Lounge' and it is clearly stated that the intention was to make a piece about war.

There is a serious argument that the occupancy of Iraq is not a war. War has never been formally declared.

This may seem trivial but I believe it is integral. Part of the ideological problem with the US led invasion of Iraq is that it is not legal.

This doesn't mean that it is not a good starting point for a performative exploration (on the contrary, last year's 'Gifted and Talented' was my favourite performance in the Fringe), it just illustrates a simple research problem (which I'll go into detail about later) and naivete.

Granted - Iraq, its decimation, population and internal conflict was only one third of this piece, so I'll move on.

Level Two: Distance From the Material

There was interest for me in the stories and opinions of Iraqis sought and collected by the performer. I would have preferred to hear them directly - recorded on video or audio - but they were presented sensitively and interestingly in the garage / store room of the performance site, which was set up as a kind of museum.

Whilst this was pleasing it did keep all the content at an arm's length, seeming to categorise these experiences as cultural or anthropological curiosities, viewed by us at a distance, through the prism of one performer's experience and understanding. I thought there were a couple of missed opportunities to let us as an audience experience something for ourselves, such as lining us up against a concrete wall, which was done, but so gently and nicely that the experience was one of relative comfort.

Level Three: Performance

Another way in which war was addressed in 'War Lounge' was an exploration of the life of poet Wilfred Owen and the parallels between his life and the life of one of the performers and this exploration was much more interesting to me. However, the performer of this section was somewhat stilted, stumbling over words and lacking in charisma. The content of this section was far more appropriate and relevant. And there is no doubt over the legal or semantic status of the First World War, in which, Owen took part and about which he wrote.

The nature of some site specific performance works is an intimacy between the audience and a performer, and this particular performer seemed awkward and uncomfortable, not necessarily with the intimacy, but the intimacy made it all the more obvious.

Level Four: Installation

The final section I will address took the form of an installation. Formally, this kind of work - art installation / intervention within the context of a site specific performance can be problematic - someone who is presumably a performer / theatre-maker producing something partly as a visual art response and partly as an intervention recording the experience and then feeding that back into the performance in the form of a projection or installation. It succeeds not as a piece of visual art installation because it is not executed with the skill and craftspersonship reflective of contemporary art practice - it still looks like a show (ie, visible cables gaffer taped to the floor). I am aware that this sounds fussy, and perhaps it is. I don't mind these things in theatre, its partly its charm, but as an installation it doesn't reflect the level of skill that art installations are executed with. And the video work was incredibly shonky. Video art has come a long way in twenty years, the bar is quite high in terms of technical achievement. The video in this was bad to the point of distraction.

Is the video a recording of the specific intervention, or a piece of the installation itself? These things have very different purposes and therefore different demands. I think its an important distinction.

Each audience member is given an ipod through which to listen to a soundtrack accompanying the installation. From what I understand, each soundtrack was identical, and despite being told that we could skip tracks, or even press stop, I don't think anyone did, consequently everyone was listening to the same exact thing at roughly the same time, rendering the individual ipods somewhat redundant. Unless I'm missing something.

So I understand, broadly, how 'Balloon Diplomacy' was arrived at in response to War. To me it trivialised the subject matter somewhat in its whimsy and flippancy. That is just me though, I'm not stating that as an error of judgement upon the performer's / creator's part, just my taste. Which is, it must be said, questionable to begin with.

On the other end of the spectrum, as much as I disliked the distance created by the museum installation, it was executed beautifully.

Level Five: Research

My final issue was with the misappropriation of a quote. It was not an intentional misappropriation, but again, nothing some more research couldn't have addressed. 'The act of War is a failure of imagination' is a well used quote and one which has various sources attributed to it, however I don't believe the original source to be a philosopher residing in Tempelstowe, as the performer told me it was - and while he may, indeed, have quoted it, that doesn't make it his. Personally I am familiar with it through Andrew O'Hagan's excellent opening address to the 207 Sydney Writer's Festival (if you haven't read it, do, now. Don't read any more of my drivel, just go, save yourself. While you still can). Whilst he doesn't use the quote directly O'Hagan makes a point that I think the creators of 'War Lounge' could have benefited from - imagining other's loss, not just listening to it, or reading their account of it but applying it to ourselves.

Going out and actively meeting Iraqis is probably a good thing to do. Asking them about their country, their experiences and their loss is a great thing to do. Asking them for an object that represents their country is a good, if somewhat difficult, thing to do. But to make a performance directly out of that experience and using the content gleaned assumes certain things about us as an audience. That we don't know any Iraqis, that we haven't heard their loss, their grief. It was not disingenuous, but it was condescending. And those experiences weren't the performer's to tell - she no doubt had permission - but her experience was one of asking people around Flinders Lane if they knew people from Iraq, then meeting people from Iraq. Then asking them things. Then listening to their answers. Then telling us. In a show. In South Melbourne.

Not my cup of tea.

So as you will have assessed by this point, I don't think this is a must see performance.

'Gifted and Talented' succeeded on so many levels. At its core, it applied a certain specific experience foreign to us to another certain specific experience familiar to us, and illustrated how closely aligned these two experiences are. One experience, an atrocity, the other, a right of passage. The show by Post was so formally daring and the darkest comedy I have seen in ages. Its point was made effortlessly, without angst or earnestness.

But what do I know.

Review: Scattered Tacks

2008-10-02T10:36:00.008+10:00

Scattered Tacks

Performed and Devised by Skye Gellman, Terri Cat Silvertree and Alex Gellman

Festival Hub, Rehearsal Room

Until 11th October

Without wanting to unduly raise your expectations, this is magnificent. I had no expectations going into this, I saw it because a show I was supposed to be seeing was cancelled. And boy, was that fortuitous.

From the opening I found this to be totally compelling.

The three performers / devisers work against the performative history of circus to create something weird, silent and non-theatrical in a traditional sense. The minutia of their performances are heightened and sit in the foreground, the tricks receeding and becoming byproducts. Some moments seemed purely voyeuristic - on the one hand you're watching something that is a private moment, on the other a quite incredible trick is pulled off. But the the performer looks straight at you. Not challenging - somehow submissive. And it forces you to reassess your presence.

And this is their feat, and it is by no means a small one. To reverse the paradigm of traditional circus, to dare you passively not to look. To emphasise the elements normally glossed over.

Whilst the tricks are excellent, they are not what matters here. And this moves circus into a newer, more theatrical area, I suppose in that sense it is somewhat aligned with 'Acrobat'.

The experience was that of a series of vignettes and resonant images, lit largely by the harsh, isolated light of head mounted LEDs (and you know how I love LEDs), exaggerating the performers' seemingly translucent skin and ethereal, almost over-exposed appearance.

There are some fantastic moments of the performers forcing your attention to a tiny detail - the sound of a bowling ball that is being rolled around and balanced upon, picked up through an onstage mike held close, or their final trick, only seen by a couple of short flashes of their LEDs.

There is a convention amongst a circus audience to applaud tricks which was quite uncomfortable here. It never really took off and was always quite sparse and self-conscious. In itself, that is a credit to the show - it really is absorbing and the silence that fell on the audience was total, apart from those sporadic moments of obligatory applause.

I understand the need to applaud, particularly if you have a vocabulary for this kind of performance and understand the degree of skill that the performers are utilising, for me though, this sat more comfortably in the world of theatre than circus. And the applause broke the tension and was too intrusive. It threatens to destroy the strange, delicate little world that these performers had done so well to create.

This left me quite exhilarated.

Without wanting to sound presumptuous, I would probably go if I were you.

Teasing my Fringe

2008-09-29T00:46:00.020+10:00

I've now dipped my toe into the waters of the fringe. I've only seen a couple of things thus far. I will see more, really, I will. Although nothing like what Born Dancin' has committed himself to. What is this, an extreme sport? Jesus.

Blinkers

Devised and Performed by Natalie Medlock and Dan Musgrove.

Directed by Sophie Roberts

Festival Hub, Meeting Room, Arts House

26 Sept. - 11 Oct.

I'm not really sure what drew me to this in the first place. It really was on a whim that I went. I liked their publicity image. I liked the promise of something that sounded a little like Perec's 'Life: A User's Manual'. This was bafflingly charming, and it's not a backhanded compliment, it's rather like the human species - you know, deeply flawed but likeable. I don't want to be mean here, there is a lot to like and there is a lot that is worth supporting here - young artists making their own work, international artists putting themselves on the line to get to the Fringe. And hell, its $16 that could be much much worse spent.

There just isn't a lot to talk about. Natalie Medlock played a wonderful character who truly was bordering between caricature and pathos. Her accent was obtrusive but so much so that I began to feel as if it was an affectation of her character, in which case it was quite a feat, if not it was a bad accent. Dan Musgrove was a caricature. Despite promising to be something more, it wound up conforming to a conservative structure and story. The two young performers are really promising though. And good for them - creating their own show and bringing it here. That sounded really patronising and I didn't intend for it to be so. I mean it.

Diatribe

It is a wee bit of a testament to the show that I wound up thinking about the venue a little too much. It's on at the Meeting Room of North Melbourne Town Hall. Now: this place gets kitted out for the Fringe, as does Trades Hall for the Comedy Festival, and this in theory is no bad thing. Fringe needs a hub, and young international artists such as these need a place like this to know they'll be on where the action is and not in some enterprising person's garage in Glenroy. There is just something so... perfunctory about the way it's set up. It's run with great spirit largely, as I understand, by volunteers and this is not the problem, in fact it contributes to what atmosphere there is, absolutely. I just felt that a show, particularly like this, would have benefited from a more interesting space. Something warm and quirky, something as charming as the performers were. And the way the rooms are set up at North Melbourne Town Hall is totally devoid of any character or charm. A few lights, a rig of scaff holding them up, a couple of speakers - on stage pointing straight at us, and blacks surrounding the space. It's unimaginative. I've never seen something that benefits from a set up like this. It's alright for comedy. But for the Fringe? Isn't the Fringe all about quirk and peculiarity? I just think it was cheaply and rather cynically done. They pack shows in there, in what is a curated season, in the Fringe which prides itself on not being curated, charge them I'm not sure what, possibly very little, maybe they do run at a loss, I'm not sure - but to me it isn't worth it. Some rooms of the Lithuanian Club has character. The Meat Market has character.

I remember seeing Suitcase Royale's 'Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon' in a room like this at Trades Hall during Fringe. And it did nothing for them, they were working so hard to bring their atmosphere to the room and they kind of pulled it off - but they're Suitcase Royale goddamn it, they have so much stuff that they can bring. For a show like Blinkers, it just looked a bit drab.

Whew. Sorry about the rant. Ahem. Yes. Anyway...

The Correction Tour

Devised and Performed by Nathan Little and Amy Bodossian aka Bad Father

Glitch Bar

27, 28 Sept. & 8, 9 & 13 Oct.

This is something. It goes on for a bit too long and its a bit underdeveloped and underdirected but it's really funny, just often enough to make it worth it. And its bizarre. And I've never seen or heard of these two before. And I liked them a lot.

I would have preferred it if they steered away from the comedy a bit more and really went for something. I think they were headed there (there's a wonderful clip of Peter Finch from Paddy Chayefski's 'Network' played for the dramatic value I think, which was great to see and reminded me of how much I'd like to see that film again and also of how much Peter Finch at his age then reminds me of Albert Finney now. Incedently, 'Network' was Peter Finch's final film - except for something made for TV in which he played Yitzhak Rabin - what a coupla swan songs!). And I would have preferred it if a particularly sketch comedy-esque video weren't in it. But on the whole its a really fun thing to see. Kind of Boosh, kind of Conchords, kind of Die Roten Punkte and strangely kind of Forced Entertainment on the surface and I suspect completely unintentionally, although it could have benefited from the kind of deconstructivism manifest in Forced Entertainment and was kind of close at moments.

You'll have fun if you go. Although I just noticed its only on like five times. Jesus, that's not much. Okay, so go. I think these two will be something soon and then you can be the one saying that you saw them in a funny little place in Fitzroy. And you'll be awesome. And everyone else will be awestruck. And you'll win.

Empire Falls

2008-09-28T16:08:00.011+10:00

This is a clip I made for Plastic Palace Alice 's single 'Empire Falls'. It was directed by my good self and shot and edited by Aleks from Aleks and the Ramps aka Cobra Kitten. It was devised and performed by First Impressions Youth Theatre. We made it over a year ago and there are certainly things I would change, seeing it now.

I was thinking about Haneke's shot for shot remake of 'Funny Games' the other day. It was first made over ten years ago. I don't know anyone who would recreate something ten years later shot for shot as it were. Where does he get the chutzpah to do that?

Anyway have a good ol' butchers at this. Even though there are things that I would change, it still makes me happy.

Empire Falls from long sentence on Vimeo.

Tournis

2008-09-27T15:50:00.004+10:00

This is astonishing. I remember once, when I was a kid standing at a railway platform waiting for a train. I must've been about seven I think. I was standing there and there were a lot of other people waiting for trains also. I clearly recall being almost overwhelmed by the realisation that everyone there had a different visual perspective of the train station. There would have been perhaps one hundred people there and I just couldn't fathom how there was room in the world for all of those perspectives. And I mean perspective in the most literal way. It's a phenomenon that I've never really shaken or forgotten.

Anyhoo, have a gander at this. It's incredible and the closest thing I've seen to a physical representation of the aforementioned sensation.

There... I've said it.

2008-09-21T13:12:00.008+10:00

I must now impart to you my reasons for airing my thoughts through such a public forum as this.

It really began as a whim. Actually not so much a whim as a fit. A fit of impotent rage brought about by what has been, for me, a tough year. I needed to be heard. I needed to be honest and transparent. I needed to have an obligation to objectively and subjectively reflect. Reflect upon what I've witnessed, what I've heard and what I'm going through.

It has, as I said, been a tough year.

Masculine nonchalance tells me that it thickens my skin, toughens me up, engenders me to be more able to cope with a life in the arts. And I hope that this is true. It does not, however, stop me from being sad, exhausted, filled with self-doubt and loathing, bitter, angry and envious. And lets face it, who, in this line of work, hasn't honestly felt these things from time to time?This racket tends to require irrational degrees of self-belief which I simply don't possess - and nor will I pretend to.

I've always been a spectacular failure at protecting myself. I always get my hopes up, I always tell everyone what I'm applying for and get excited. I always set myself up for a fall. And I can feel this changing. I've begun to get secretive about my hopes and desires. I've begun to withhold information from the people closest to me. I've begun to 'take it on the chin' without fully allowing myself to be openly disappointed. This is not good. This is out of character for me. This is typically masculine - and as I near my 30th, I fear the kind of man that I may be becoming. One that doesn't go to the Doctor, doesn't express his fears and vulnerabilities in order to not show weakness. One that doesn't confront his inherent lack of control.

So here, in one of the most public ways possible, in the interest of transparency, and in the hope of expressing honestly, fully and eloquently the turbulence of a life in the arts I will divulge my fears and display my weaknesses.

Over the last twelve months I have applied for several grants. Three or four to develop a project that has been hanging around for a few years, one for a community arts organisation of which I am the artistic director. I have also applied for two awards.

I have been successful in none of these applications.

Now, I'm not complaining. The funding and the awards were granted to people, groups and projects that are very deserving. I don't desire to be comparative as it helps no one. But, Jesus, it's hard. And I don't know that this was ever communicated to me as a young artist. Actually, it probably was and I possibly ignored it believing (with the arrogance of youth) that it would not apply to my future stellar career. But let me tell you, it does apply.

Now, I have had my good years. In 2006 I received a number of grants for a number of projects and I was on could nine. It was great. But now, after sitting on a project for three years, it's hard to keep believing in it. It's difficult to continue believing that it will be successful after so many knock-backs, and artistic success and worth is totally beside the point as it is so subjective.

And this is the thing: these applications, these rejections begin to fertilize comparison, envy and jealousy. As you read who won the grants, the awards - it really is hard to not go: 'Who, [insert name here]? How are they more deserving than me?'. And this is poison. I don't want to have to build myself into a lonely tower of moral righteousness, against the vacuous hordes, just to save face. I don't want to have to believe that my project, my skills or myself are any more deserving than anybody else's. I don't want to have to push myself into artistic martyrdom just because I missed out on a couple of awards and a bunch of goddamned grants. All this will do is leave me lonely, bitter, angry and irrelevant.

I don't know what the answer is. I am not able to write an application without a modicum of hope. Whilst studying I never said that I wrote my essay the night before. I didn't. Whilst writing grant applications, I am never able to distance myself from it. In order to summon the energy to write the cursed thing I have to believe in it. I have to buy into it. I cannot write it without imagining myself in the job, imagining the opportunities that would arise from it. I am just that way inclined.

And I shouldn't have to erect this armour of false self-confidence and nonchalance. It isn't me.

So here I am. I'm disappointed. I'm a little bit broken. My self belief has taken a battering. I honestly believe that the aforementioned grants / awards went to the right projects / people. I'm just disappointed that the right project / person wasn't me.

This is not a cry for platitudes to buoy my spirits. I'm okay. I have a great job doing something that I'm privileged to do. I collaborate with great people. I have great friends.

I am responsible for my self-motivation, self-belief, inspiration.

I'm just saying it's hard to cop sometimes.

I have used the words impotent and erect in this post. What a man.

Professor Ramachandran's Suggested Ten Universal Laws of Art

2008-09-15T23:31:00.004+10:00

1. Peak shift

2. Grouping

3. Contrast

4. Isolation

5. Perception problem solving

6. Symmetry

7. Abhorrence of coincidence / generic viewpoint

8. Repetition, rhythm and orderliness

9. Balance

10. Metaphor

From the illustrious neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. I sometimes recoil from this kind of reductive theory however, for some reason, I really like what he has to say.

The full lecture: The Artful Brain.

At last. Art-making can become tangible! We can all just tick the boxes.

Review: Red Sky Morning

2008-09-15T00:54:00.010+10:00

Red Sky Morning
by Tom Holloway, directed by Sam Strong.
With David Whiteley, Sarah Sutherland and Erin Dewar.
Red Stitch Actor's Theatre until September 27.

Let me begin by making a couple of declarations. 1. I have and continue to collaborate with rising star of Australian theatre, AWGIE award winning young playwright Tom Holloway. 2. I have directed three shows at Red Stitch over the years.

Melbourne hasn't been graced with a production of Holloway's in recent years. Beyond the Neck was performed in Hobart last year and Don't Say the Words in what was by all accounts a brilliant production at the Griffin in Sydney a couple of months back. Holloway is going places. Not only do you need to see Red Sky Morning to see what the fuss is about but to be privy to a seminal moment in Australian theatre. Seriously.

The writing takes my breath away. Honestly it does. And it is a risk. Holloway has made a huge leap in Red Sky Morning and taken a risk. But, and this is important now, the form is perfectly suited to the material. Perfectly. There is a very good reason to take that risk. Or conversely the risk works on a level that resonates deeper than sheer style because of the content.
Some is not as tight as it could be, yes. Some things land a little too heavily, yes. But jeepers creepers, there is a whole lot that works the hell outta me.
The technical feat that Holloway and director Sam Strong have achieved sent shivers down my spine. Not only does this feel and sound new, it is directly of our time. it is pertinent now. This is a story that needs to be told. And we need to hear it. How often does one get a chance like this in the theatre in this country? To be there when...
It is heavy material, but is written, directed and performed with a grace, dignity and a lightness of touch. It is, I imagine, difficult material to deliver. It would be a temptation to emote rather heavily, to compensate for the lack of action, activity or communication. None of the actors fall into that trap. It, for the most part, rings true. There is an understatement and poetry that reminds me of Egoyan's 'The Sweet Hereafter'.
Just see it. Really, I mean it.
Now, a couple of things. The following criticisms by no means counter my central thesis here which is This Is Important Work, so I will continue, and you may not if you so choose.
I have an issue with the regional setting. On the one hand, I know that statistically speaking, male depression is worse in regional areas of Australia. On the other hand, it just grates me a little - to sit there in a theatre in a metropolis, surrounded by middle class, educated people, looking at these regional characters. It always feels just a little condescending. I think it distances us from the terrifying stasis and drama. It ceases to become a mirror. Also, I don't think the play needed it. I'm not certain whether it was something Holloway specified, or was something that was a directorial choice. It just didn't sit well with me.
The alienation generated by the design is great. But it isn't seen through. I would love to have had my view obscured by the venetian blinds for the entire play, it would have completely worked.
Some of the staging is a little heavy-handed. Material like this is really hard, because there's really nothing to direct, it just got a little clever at points and drew attention away from the story.
The climactic moment is undercut by the staging. Totally. It forces the actors to over play the scene which is not good. This whole play is about less is more, and that concept is seriously compromised by the staging of the climax.
But these quibbles are beside the point. We need to see this. We need for this to be seen and we need to talk about it.
Godspeed.

Review: Vamp

2008-09-14T18:56:00.004+10:00

Vamp
by Meow Meow and Iain Grandage, directed by Michael Kantor, musical direction by Iain Grandage.
Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Opera House @ the Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse until September 20. Sydney Opera House, September 24-October 5.
Bookings: (03) 9685 5111, (02) 9250 7777

I saw Vamp on Thursday night. I have a feeling it's going to divide us, hoo-boy, how exciting. In fact, it has already done so perhaps.
Before glancing upon my ill-thought-out nonsense, one is advised to peruse the vastly superior musings of Ms. Croggon.

Now, I am a director. I am involved in theatre and cabaret. I am the goddamned target audience of piece such as this. I am an urbane young hipster. I have a beard. I am bald, however, so that's a draw-back.
Thus let us begin: Vamp is stunning musically, but I had trouble with it as a whole. Meow Meow is such a great performer. I left, however, wondering whether I would have preferred the show to be just her and a piano. Without all the flotsam. Now, there's a part of me that was thoroughly seduced by the world of Vamp. There's also a part of me that gets a thrill when classical references land, a plethora here from Wilde's Salome to Pabst's Pandora's Box (with the ultimate vamp - Louise Brooks). But these satisfactions are brief, placatory and somewhat vacuous. They also render a piece somewhat critic proof methinks. (You know... Emperor's New Clothes and all that - who wants to be the one leaving themselves open to 'you didn't get it's? This wide-eyed chump, that's who.)

There is an aspect of the Vamp that Meow Meow thoroughly inhabits. Her control of the audience is total, despotic, maniacal and hugely entertaining. This is not, however, anything new for her. That's what she does. And it's awesome. But here I was expecting promises to be delivered. And there was all too little tragedy, vulnerability, and victimhood. It existed in the content perhaps, but wasn't inhabited by the performance. There must be a flip-side. I was aching for some kind of real collapse, such as Faye Dunaway's sister / daughter revelation in Chinatown, some kind of honest exploration of the Vamp as both manifestation and victim of a morally corrupt society gone to seed. There was never a true sense of collapse. I knew that she was in control every single moment.
Is this a directorial problem? Partly, perhaps. But I think it's indicative of a larger issue, that there seemed to be no centre to this. It was wheeling about without an orbit. It wasn't her show, it wasn't Kantor's show, it fell between the cracks. The theatre and spectacle brought nothing to her performance and she brought nothing to the theatre of the piece.
There are a couple of moments that I loved and would liked to have seen more of, including some stillness and vulnerability during a Radiohead number (she still had to clamber over someone and exert her control in order to express her vulnerability - but it worked. And, oh, those lyrics: 'If I could be who you wanted...'). Also, the dance of the seven veils worked on that same level, but her previous (performative - yes) insistence upon applause destroyed what could have been a marvelous, quiet, awkward moment of her failing. But by that point, the audience were oh-so-keen to please her that the moment was not served.
I think what left me somewhat bereft was that the wonderful content was not matched by the performance and the form. And that the performer and the form had not informed the content. I got the feeling that Meow Meow trusted neither the content or the audience to 'get it', and I know, I know that is a part of her character - so again I say 'critic proof'.
I don't really know who this show was for, or from. This is a problem of under-development I'd hazard to guess. Which is frustrating as there are so many theatre-makers, who can garner support to do not much else but develop material, and then there are these strange hybrid pieces that have resources spewed at them that strive towards a concept without any cohesion, honesty or symbiosis.
But that's just me.

Throwies

2008-09-14T18:34:00.016+10:00

Whilst many in the great cyber pea-soup post the mischief-work of others, here, my friends, it shall not be. No siree.

The miracle of LED realised at last. What a lot of whimsy these little morsels are.

All you need, dear minion, is: LED lights, batteries, magnets & tape.

My handiwork, yes but not my original idea, mind. Follow the link to GRL's website and to some easy to digest instructions from instructables.
Let throwies abound.

Long sentence no suggestions...

2008-09-14T18:21:00.000+10:00

... is the most frequent alert I receive in word. It struck me as the story of my life. Or anyone's really. It will be here that I will diarise, review and discuss things I've seen, things I'm into and things that I'm about to be into.
There are many of these amorphous blogs and I'm loathe to be one of them. So let's see how we go, you and I. Let's see if we can evolve a manifesto over time.