Capital Idea

Interview: Frank Woodring

2011-12-08T13:56:00.001+11:00

Jesus and the Bear

Earlier this year I was given the opportunity to interview Frank Woodring, and after the initial shock and disbelief had passed I thought “who?” I knew he had something to do with comics and did some hunting around and quickly came to the conclusion that he was a bit of a revered figure in the underground comics scene (correct) and that his stuff was psychedelic acid-y trip-out art (incorrect). The first was enough to beat down the second, so I started researching the fellow further.

Turns out that Woodring is one of the most compelling artists working in any medium today. It's impossible to translate the experience of reading one of his full-length books into words, and it takes quite a while to begin to comprehend the vast and complicated visual vocabulary he has developed. His art often seems like random squishy shapes and organic scenery and crazy fractal patterns, but there is an immense level of highly developed symbolism in every frame; if there is accident, it is measured accident.

Frank Gets the Joke

An excellent starting point for novitiate is Weathercraft (2010): it's in black and white, there's not a word of text, and yet by the end I realised I could hear the voices of each character and had begun to see the panels in full, vibrant colour. His panels hum. Woodring's aesthetic is almost synaesthetic, and at his Melbourne Writers Fest panel this year the fans in attendance all seemed to have the same response. One asked about the omnipresent squiggly lines which are such a prominent feature in Woodring's work and it was noted that, subliminally, they make his universe seem to “vibrate”. Bang on, said the artist, that's exactly what I hope they do.

What's surprising is that he describes his art as autobiographical – not just the older work which featured a Jim Woodring-like guy called, er, Jim – but the outrageously fantastic stuff that seems pure imagination. I think the key may lie in a fascinating refusal to cordon off the subconscious and let the ego do all the talking: Woodring's art is autobiography of the imagination and the id, a portrait of interiority so rigorous it can border on the terrifying. As a child he was subjected to what he now calls “apparitions” - distorted, disembodied heads which would float above his bed. With typically dry wit, he characterises the time as “exciting”, full of “poetry and paroniria” (the medical term for excessive, morbid dreaming). His art, then, seems the result of a life spent in conversation with, not retreat from, these confronting experiences of the self.

Woodring in person seems anything but the intrepid explorer of the far reaches of consciousness – he describes himself as an “inquisitive bearlike man” and his acute turns of phrase suggest a fascination with language itself. This makes it all the more peculiar that the Frank series is almost entirely wordless, though he has said that this helps prevent the work from being bound to a particular place and time. Why is that a goal?

“Because the stories are about forces, morals, dilemmas and transformations,” he says, “and I wanted to convey those things without any kind of cultural markers. The last thing I want is for these stories to be perceived as referring to any specific culture, person or situation.”

Apotheosis

For this reason Frank is set in a universe Woodring calls The Unifactor, a place governed by a particular dream logic. The Jim stories, on the other hand, seem to bring us back to a world more recognisably our own. The relationship here between 'reality' and what at first glance appears surrealism is complex: “Well, I wouldn't call the Frank stories 'surreal'; they are more like deliberately constructed caricatures of our world. They can be understood in a way surrealism cannot. I think the Jim stories are more illogical and obscure, and full of non-sequiturs. I love Surrealism – that mid-20th century movement – but there are a lot more categories of spooky, obliquely symbolic art than 'surrealism'.”

And so the vibrating Unifactor and the cartoonish Frank and Woodring's amorphous landscapes are elements of stories firmly rooted in 'real' experience: “Well, they usually do turn out to be autobiographical; sometimes embarrassingly so. Part of the game for me is to concoct stories that I can sense have meaning without my knowing what that meaning is. And of course aspects of my life appear in the stories. I don't really have any other source material. My new book Congress of the Animals is the most overtly autobiographical Frank story I've done... partially intentionally, partly not.”

Woodring has said he won't draw himself (as Jim) any more: “For one thing I've gotten so old that if I draw all the wrinkles I look like a desiccated turnip and if I leave 'em out it doesn't look like me. But mostly it's because the autobio stuff is the work I have most trouble showing around. Once it's done I feel like hiding from it, pretending it doesn't exist.”

Though he's usually associated with “autobio” comics, he calls the genre “tricky”: “For the same reasons that talking about oneself or describing one's dreams is tricky. You have to find a way to make it interesting to people who don't necessarily find you as fascinating as you find yourself. Also it's difficult to strike the right balance between sincere self-adoration and false humility.”

Autobiographical comics have been a major component of underground and independent comics since at least the 70s, and Woodring points to just one example as an influence on his own work. “Justin Green is the great progenitor of the autobio comic. He showed everyone the way. A lot of people, including me, think his 1970 Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary is the greatest underground comic ever made. After Justin there was no need for any other comics autobio influences as far as I was concerned.”

I tell Woodring about a thought I'd been tossing around before our interview, comparing comic studios such as Marvel and DC with classical and Renaissance art, whereas independent and underground comics seem closer to modernist visual art. In both of the former you have artists working with an accepted array of iconography and visual styles and the individual's signature is less important than their role in a workshop (I know superhero artists can have their own style but for argument's sake...) And then with the emergence of underground comics you have artists presenting their own unique take on the world and the possibilities of cartooning, much like the modernist movement in which an artist's distinct voice became integral to the work they created.

“I think you nailed it,” says Woodring. “I never cared for superhero comics precisely because they are too obviously product made by teams of interchangeable craftsmen at the behest of businessmen. R. Crumb changed that with ZAP. He was the first great artist to make comic books that were also pure self-expression.”

People who haven't engaged very deeply with comics often see them as frivolous or lacking any kind of seriousness. Is Woodring's work serious? “There have always been serious, talented, even great artists who have chosen to work in cartoons and there have always been connoisseurs who have appreciated them. Heinrich Kley, Thomas Nast, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Cliff Sterrett... there are too many great cartoonists to name. But if you send someone who knows nothing about comics into a comic book and ask them to root out the good stuff they'll find it a daunting task. Of course I consider myself a serious artist. Don't we all? Yes, I want my readers to feel things and think things when they look at my work, but I don't try to tell them what to think or feel. I concern myself entirely with how clearly I express my ideas and not at all with how they will be perceived.”

For the most part, making independent comics is a solitary pursuit – there's this image of the artist working alone in their bedroom or garret painstakingly crafting these tiny windows on their mind. “Unfortunately, yes, and it really bothers me sometimes. The sense that the world is passing me by as I spend day after day alone, hunched over the drawing board, is quite oppressive to me. There are times when I wish I worked in a bullpen or group studio. But then I'd probably want to get away from the people around me... it's a pickle.”

Woodring did work in an animation studio for a while early in his career, but it was one of the less reputable ones that churned out Z-grade kids' cartoons such as Mister T. It's hard to reconcile that stuff with the work he produced afterwards. “Socially it was great,” he says. “I worked with some great artists. Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, Alfredo Alcala all worked at the studio when I was there, as well as a lot of lesser-known but tremendous cartoonists. Why Ruby-Spears hired such good people only to have them produce such dreck I don't know. It paid well and it was fun but it was impossible to take any pride at all in the cartoons we produced. When I would run into cartoonists who worked at good studios - Richard Williams was just up the street - it was mortifying. I felt like such a whore. Then again, I couldn't have gotten a job at a good studio, so what the hell.”

In one interview he described the age between 12 and 40 as 'the age of Jim' because it was all about his ego. “What I mean by the Age of Jim is that period when I was entirely focused on myself, my interests, my perceptions and my work. There's a Hindu admonition: 'Dwell, O mind, within yourself; enter no one else's home'. My goals were only partially spiritual but that was the approach I took. It wasn't a choice, it just happened. Things are different now because the intensity of that drive has diminished somewhat and I'm more engaged with the world. Still learning to be, actually.”

"Why is Pupshaw smiling at the likely catastrophe awaiting her chuckbuster? Because she is only a witness, in the enlightened sense of the word."

In the same interview he said that art and drugs (and religion) are similar. “Art and drugs are similar because they both show you places but can't actually get you there. If I ever included religion in that category I misspoke, because the truth is I believe that religion can get you there.”

Here's an anecdote from the Writers Festival discussion: along with everything else, Woodring invents contraptions. If you step through the front door of his home you'll be confronted with one. It came about due to an unusual circumstance. The artist had a bunion on the sole of his shoe which he used to absent-mindedly scratch while otherwise occupied, and it got to the point where he was using the ring-pull of a soda can to dig at his foot. He'd heard that one symptom of schizophrenia is the cutting of ones feet with metal, so he did what any of us would do: he made a casting of the afflicted foot (almost frying it in the process) and built an enormous device around it – by squeezing a lever the foot would be lowered onto a spinning grind-stone which would shoot sparks from the friction, and beneath which was a metal tray containing unpopped popcorn kernels; sometimes the heat will cause them to fire off. Now he can spend hours letting off steam by squeezing that lever.

I ask Woodring about the recurring significance of frogs in his work – this is only due to my personal fascination with the symbolism of morose banjo-playing frogs in American history, and I wouldn't normally include that part of a conversation in a published work, but his answer really tickled me: “As Little Lulu said, there's nothing prettier than a frog. They lend themselves strangely to anthropomorphism, hence the banjos. They sit stock still for hours but they are always alert and can move like greased lightning in an instant. They live in two worlds. They metamorphose. Your frog has a lot going on. You could do a lot worse than to spend some time with a frog.”

POST MELBOURNE FESTIVAL POST: RISKY BIZ

2011-10-28T14:17:00.001+11:00

A few weeks ago, as the caboose-end of the Melbourne Festival was trundling into view, I wrote a short piece for The Sunday Age addressing the notion of artistic risk. There'd been a couple of disappointments in an otherwise strong program, and some people (non-Festival goers) had asked how these works had managed to make it into such a prestigious festival. For me it's hardly even a question – as Francis Ford Coppola puts it in this interview: “An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby.”

It's both an exaggeration and a simplification, but you could argue that the act of creation is by definition a risk – otherwise it's just manufacturing. As Artistic Director Brett Sheehy puts it, his role is one of “calculated” risk, but there's no equation that will result in a positive for every audience member every time. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try, of course. But since my Sunday Age piece was in the news section I couldn't really present a few of the opinions I have on the concept of risk as it's frequently invoked in the arts world. Often it seems to bleed in from the world of business – a kind of empty buzzword that doesn't require interrogation but doesn't really say much, either. When an emerging artist and a main stage director talk of risk, are they talking about the same thing? Does risk mean experimentation, speculation, gambling, uncertainty, investment, courage? Rather than pondering what constitutes a 'good' or 'bad' risk, I've been thinking about what the term means in practice today, and how as a structural concept it can help explain the particular economy of cultural production in which we find ourselves. It would be cheap and easy to compare this economy with other modes of discourse, so that's exactly what I'll do.

In both religious and secular terms, risk might have something to do with faith. I think there's an epistemological distinction between belief and knowledge – to believe implies a corollary doubt, even if it's unstated or denied. You don't believe in a deity or a political figure or an ideology the way you believe in piglets or pencils. To say that I believe in something is an implicit admission that I don't know it. Our knowledge can be wrong, obviously, but if that possibility makes any serious inroads into our consciousness then we enter the realm of faith. We don't ask our parents if Santa Claus is real because we know the answer. To ask them is to challenge them to lie to us. This is what art is for.

Similarly, when we describe any work of art in qualitative terms, we're rarely speaking from a place of absolute knowledge. We know that someone might disagree. That doesn't make us wrong. But it does allow for an element of doubt, and it's this doubt that gives aesthetic experience its curious energy. To doubt – from the Latin duo and habitare – is to inhabit two places at once, and that's a fine place for aesthetic inquiry to commence.

But faith is never without its dangers – to deny that doubt, to claim absolute certainty, is to risk a fundamentalism that closes off possibility. Equally, doubt itself can prove crippling, preventing movement as your feet become mired in opposing viewpoints. Maybe these aren't useful terms here at all.

What about science? Can art be theory? Not absolute knowledge, but experiment based on provisional truths? I like the hypothetical method. If all available evidence points to a particular conclusion, we can treat it as likely. Given enough support, a hypothesis can become a theory. But it's still a theory, not an inviolable fact, and contrary proofs will always make these truths susceptible to revision (Newton's theory of gravity is kind of wrong, for example, but that's a headache we shan't get into here).

Perhaps art itself is hypothesis, then, and all art works test-cases. This would explain why the questions that have been asked of art – what is beauty? what is function? what is meaning? - have changed over time. Art, in this sense, is the frame, not its content.

While there's an abstract purity to this notion, it doesn't really help us down here in the muck. It doesn't get at an art work's materiality, its situatedness, but most of all it doesn't tell us what's at stake when we think of risk, and who bears those stakes.

Let's turn to the dirty world of commerce. One of the most provocative and unexpectedly moving books I've read this year was, of all things, a history of the Cadbury family. It goes by the totally sexy title Chocolate Wars - From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 Years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalries. Mmmm. Don't let the name put you off. When I picked it up I had no idea that 300 pages later I'd be holding back a tear or two while muttering “Damn you, Kraft, damn you to hell...” through teeth firmly gritted. The book itself is a hook on which its author hangs an elaborate and compelling cultural history of the past three centuries, taking in business, theology, slavery, internationalism, social welfare, war, consumption and debt (debt, my god, debt – it's virtually guaranteed to shift your opinion on debt).

The terrifying conclusion of this number is that we've created a world in which the sharemarket rules, but we've only done this by divorcing stakeholders from the corporations they support. How many shareholders have a personal involvement with the groups they financially sponsor? Even our superannuation (sorry, freelancers, don't mean to exclude you/us) are managed by hedge fund managers – we may request 'ethical' investment but most people aren't paying too close attention to what this means. That's how we got where we are. The Cadbury family founded their business on the Quaker principle that debt was a terrible moral failing, since an inability to repay a debt might well mean your creditor can't put food on their own table. 200 years later Kraft bought the company in a hostile takeover. At the time Kraft had debts of almost thirty billion Australian dollars. This is not a company you want taking you over.

What's all this got to do with art? I'd argue that little of the discourse surrounding art addresses its stakeholders. Not its audience, but those for whom the results of risk, speculation, investment, are real and tangible. It's one thing to ask “to whom does this speak,” and another to ask “to whom does this matter?” In most cases, most obviously, the makers of a work and those who enable its production hold the majority of the figurative shares. When it comes to larger performing arts companies, there's subscriber bases to factor in too – keeping these stakeholders satisfied is as essential as it is to any stockbroker. On an even broader scale, everyone holds a stake in artistic speculation since it's an economy whose capital gains aren't monetary but cultural.

But as with our financial markets, I wonder if the gap between culture and its stakeholders isn't becoming ever-wider. We can become involved in small projects, cottage industries, but our engagement with the structures that shape our sense of the artistic landscape is limited to buying a ticket (or not), liking a Facebook page, entering a competition or sitting in for a panel session. The real risks are those taken by artistic directors, season programmers, curators, funding bodies. Some of these make bold decisions, while some play safe. Despite the rhetoric, is the disproportionate funding going to opera and classical music really risk-taking with the potential for great gain, or just pouring financial capital into areas that already bear the veneer of cultural capital? Then again, why should we expect these decision-makers to take risks when so many of us don't take a gamble on work ourselves? What's in it for us, anyway?

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL THREE, OR(NITHOLOGY)

2011-10-21T16:53:00.001+11:00

AVIARY

Last night I had the pleasure of sitting a few seats along from one of the strangest audience members I've ever encountered. She couldn't shut up for five minutes. Throughout the entirety of this world premiere she kept involuntarily babbling appreciation: “I love it.” “Thank you for that.” “That was lovely.” Her comments weren't directed at anyone (and her much older, serious-looking companion was livid). They weren't an attempt at grabbing attention, and were delivered in a calm, quiet monotone suggestive of Valium or narcolepsy or a dissociative state. She looked gently apologetic when reprimanded, then proceeded to film some of the show with her phone.

I've always had a personal fascination with people who break the social contract we make when entering a theatre. I can understand why these incidents usually annoy most everyone nearby, but in the case of Balletlab, at least, it's hard to complain: why shouldn't one of the most eccentric, perverse, off-kilter companies around attract the occasional peculiar fan?

Phillips Adams' work has always been defined by the twin polarities of obsession and chaos. They're like the homes of hoarders – seemingly stuffed to bursting point with meaningless debris, but also hinting at an insanely particular logic of order that can only be understood by its inhabitant. Each of Adams' shows reveal another object of fanatical pursuit: taxidermy, origami, woodchopping, bullfighting, Morris dancing, cryptozoology, cults. Balletlab makes choreography of the fetish, and here it's birdwatching, beards and the dandy that are put on the pedestal.

Aviary is composed of three parts: the first is the most straightforward and, to me, the least interesting. The dancers are dressed in elaborate, delicate black and white costumes reminiscent of plumage, and perform in a pretty literal bird-like manner, including squawks and trills and chirps. The score to Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux is scattered around the floor, and the performers respond to it both physically and orally, as if “playing” the music with their bodies.

The second sequence is a dramatic shift: Adams himself strides out in militaristic dress with a flamboyant white feathered cape. Now the bird cage is an 80s nightclub, complete with Simple Minds soundtrack and throbbing dancefloor lighting. A squad of dancers join Adams, who takes on the charismatic air of religious leader, army commander and fashion guru. It's ecstatic and ironic, linking the liberation of trangression through style with the fascist tendencies that often accompany such movements. One recurring image here is the fetishisation of facial hair – at points the entire playing space is covered in tiled images of beards and moustaches – as a reaction against the waxed and tanned bodies that once dominated gay culture's ideal of sexy, but whether this hairy fetish is can be its own kind of confining dictate is left open here.

The final third of the work is the most provocative. The dancers are once again birds, engaging in courtship rituals, preening, constructing their nests from a gigantic mound of branches heaped to one side of the stage. They're garbed in outrageously feathered headdresses and grass-skirts, and its here that things get difficult. The explicit object of reference is the bower-bird, but there's also a sense that the dancers are playing the exoticism of the tribe, making us both birdwatcher and amateur anthropologist at the same time. Adams hammers mindlessly at a piano to one side while the performers respond to the noise – if he is playing the anthropologist here, it's one whose dumb observances themselves create their subject, and it's an appropriately damning view of the cultural colonisation of 'primitive' tribes by those who have recorded them. Adams is wearing a hat styled with two horns, as well. Eventually he joins the group as well, at first entranced by his own reflection in the mirrored stage curtain (some birds have been known to attempt to court their own mirrored image) but it's also apparent that the observer here has fallen in love with the vision of himself in the environment he has been studying. Soon enough he's rolling around on the floor with his subjects, sanctifying their unions, once again placing himself in a position of monstrous leadership. But it this critique part of the work, or my own projection? I can't be sure. There's always the danger that Adams is simply reproducing these exotic fetishes, and that danger is what lends this final section such power.

It's maddening, as most of Adams' work is. He regularly goes through an intensive process of creation, exploring his subjects from all angles and building up a wealth of tightly defined material. Then he guts it, throws the heart out the window, leaving a glittering shell whose insides the audience must infer themselves. I've seen him in the rehearsal process and spoken to him during the development of new works, and what ends up on stage is often precisely the opposite of what I'd expected. It's massively brave dance-making, almost as demanding of its audience as it is of its performers. And certainly worthy of comment, even if it is from a strange duck a few seats down from me.

Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall until Sunday.

ASSEMBLY

There's something bird-like about Gideon Obarzanek's final work for Chunky Move, too. In one striking sequence, a flock of performers (around 64 I think, composed of both dancers and Victorian Opera singers) swarm around the stage in a shifting mass, the group moving as one, guided by decisions made spontaneously but not communicated in an obvious way. A random member switches direction, those nearby follow, and the change ripples outward. Sometimes two or three will shift at the same time, and the mass experiences an equally conflicted pattern change. It reminded me most of the amazing mating rituals of flamingos.

Assembly isn't about birds but patterns themselves, and the way the crowd is more than just a bunch of individuals. Crowd behaviour plays out throughout the work – the performers become spectators at a sporting match, or warring gangs, or aimlessly wandering commuters. They're dressed casually, which makes it all the more astonishing when they abruptly congregate into groups coded by colour. When the space is occupied by only one or a few people, it seems the lesser for it. While the dances performed by individuals are accomplished here – Harriet Ritchie, especially, is the show's star – the choreography is really most impressive when it's dispersed across bodies, not confined to them. My only real complaint about the work was the unexpected appearance of Paul Capsis near it's end, popping up to belt out a tune for some reason. We've gotten to know this motley bunch so well by this stage; why introduce a new member who brings his own aura of uniqueness that seems at odds with the shifting dynamics explored thus far?

If Aviary draws on ornithology and anthropology, Assembly is closer in intent to sociology. There's nothing academic to it, though. Obarzanek doesn't seem to have any particular point to make – he's not examining the dangers of the crowd's de-individuating force, or the way a mass can accomplish things beyond the individual. But there's a subtle, persuasive effect to the work that comes simply from watching an experience shared by such a large mob. In a way there's a note of sadness or alienation to it, as well: while the group onstage at times fleetingly join to form a united, intricately assembled whole, in the audience we're left as isolated voyeurs occupying a space and time but not aware of ourselves as any kind of community. How could we be? You need wings for a bird's eye view.

Season ended.

WHITELEY'S INCREDIBLE BLUE

More birds! This time it's herons, which are introduced as a pretty laboured pun on Brett Whiteley's heroin addiction. It's not the only pun on offer here, and it's not the only one that doesn't add much to proceedings. Barry Dickins' script is less a biography than an improvised jazz riff inspired by the iconic painter, appropriately accompanied here by a jazz trio noodling away throughout. Neil Pigot plays the man himself, but despite his valiant efforts the whole feels more haunted by its subject's absence than anything else.

If you didn't know much about Whiteley, you'd likely come away from this thinking of him as a thoroughly unlikeable egotist whose fame is frankly baffling. His art doesn't actually feature much, and while I'm aware of his reputation as an utterly charming cad, that charm is never on display here. I don't know if this is deliberate – it's not as if Whiteley can object – but this painter comes across less as a rakish genius than a misanthropic dickhead. Like many of history's most revered artists, I guess.

In between the herons and the jazz there are what you could call story elements, but they're presented in a way that could charitably be described as free-flowing and loose or uncharitably as obtuse and undisciplined. Some of the wackier sequences feel like spackle to paste over the cracks in the very structure of the work; it certainly doesn't approach the surreal, coming across more as beat poet word association. Dickins' writing is impressionistic, so it's unfortunate that this wasn't a work that much of an impression one way or another.

Fortyfivedownstairs until Sunday.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL TWO, OR, THREE PLUS BRAMBLES

2011-10-17T16:44:00.000+11:00

FOLEY

Michelangelo is supposed to have said that every block of stone contains a statue and it's the sculptor's job to find it; Gary Foley is like a sculptor whose medium is history, chipping away at facts to reveal the truth behind them. His one-man show is a lecture on the history of Aboriginal independence in Australia (a narrative in which he himself figures prominently) but it's as far from a dry classroom lesson as you could imagine. He paces the stage with a nervous energy, throwing out observations and recollections with a raconteur's wit and a keen ear for irony – indeed, it's a bitter joke that that he's even here to deliver these words, since at 61 he's well exceeded the life expectancy of the average Indigenous Australian male.

It's a meandering hour and forty five, though Foley's digressions mean that the show's length varies from show to show. Some of his most interesting ruminations occur when he goes off-script, though he's quick to reprimand himself and get back to business. At times this means that some of the prepared material is a bit rushed, but at the matinee I visited there wasn't a single unnecessary moment. Indeed, condensing more than a century of history into such a short span is a feat in itself: Foley manages to include Marcus Garvey and Jack Johnson, Malcolm X and Charlie Perkins, the creation of the Aboriginal flag (designed over two slabs of beer!), the Freedom Ride of the 1960s, the great migration of Indigenous Australians into our urban centres, the sporting controversies, segregated cinemas, the outrageous compromise that is Native Title, the broken promises of governments both Labor and Liberal, the ABC-commissioned Aboriginal comedy show Basically Black (one episode was produced in 1973 and from the excerpts we see here, it was a ridiculously groundbreaking moment in Australian television that was consigned to the vaults). The show's peak is an extended detailing of the Tent Embassy in Canberra, and some of the footage Foley uses to illustrate his words is revelatory. It's also testament to his charm that his audience can be laughing at film of a young Foley himself being beaten unconscious by police on the lawn of Parliament – it's a genuinely hilarious presentation of something that in reality is deeply unnerving and should be hard to watch. That's Foley: an enlightening and sometimes disturbing polemic, proudly political, presented in the most generous and accessible terms.

I caught a show where at least half of the audience were school kids, and Foley often addressed them directly, suggesting they get political and keep the fight going. When he asked if they were on-side he was met with a rousing cheer. His is a history that should be kept alive. That so much of the material he proffers isn't an acknowledged foundation for every Australian's sense of identity – well, that's the biggest joke of all.

DOUBLETHINK

There's more to this new dance work than meets the eye. Choreographer Byron Perry has previously shown promise with the affable I Like This, co-created with Antony Hamilton, and this first outing on his own extends those expectations further. It's performed by Kirstie McCracken and Lee Searle, two of the most physically striking dancers around right now, but in an odd way the actual dance is secondary. Perry's background is recognisable in the choreography itself – there are obvious gestures to Chunky Move as well as other companies and dancemakers in Melbourne – but the larger frame in which the dance is situated is what's most intriguing here. If anything it's reminiscent of Helen Herbertson's investigation of darkness, absence and duration and shock, but Perry evinces an originality that deserves consideration on its own.

In a way I found myself a bit bored by the work, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way. Some art manages to evoke the kind of boredom theorised by Heidegger in the 1920s – a kind of forced disconnect that can free the mind from convention and leave us floundering desperately for something, anything, to grasp onto for support. It demands the mind become active, hyper-alert to its own role in the production of sensation, rather than a passive receptor of stimuli. That's what occurred to me, here: subtle light shifts and an evolving score gradually loose the spectator's sense of stable space and at times the two dancers are visible only at the edge of vision, as shapes that can't be perceived directly. A dance work where you can only see the dancers by looking away? Sure. It's a small but minutely detailed piece where the performance itself is half distraction: while you're busy paying attention to the movement, something else sneaks through the back door of your brain and starts rifling through your mental belongings. I wasn't in love when I was watching it, but I emerged into the night with that peculiar kind of clarity that usually accompanies insomnia, and every object I saw seemed to possess some kind of inner life I couldn't quite access. I don't know if that's what Perry intended, but it's enough for me.

HALF-REAL

Video games have come a long way since the days of Pong and Pacman, now offering sophisticated and immersive experiences that occasionally aspire to the status of art. It's a pity that this new work's convergence of new media and theatre could have been conceived in the days of point-and-click adventure games. A CSI-style murder mystery is played out and at key points audience members are given the opportunity to decide which direction the investigation will take; sadly, the novel interactivity isn't far removed from your average impro comedy night, and while it's all pleasantly diverting it doesn't leave anyone with very much to ponder once the game is over.

That's the short version. I'm going to go on a long excursion into the relationship between games and art here which might isn't directly related to Half-Real, so feel free so skip to the end for any conclusions I might reach (not promising anything).

I'm of a generation which grew up with video games, to the point that I only realised it today. I was swapping games on cassette tapes and floppy disks with kids at school long before my family had a VCR, more than a decade before I'd seen a ballet or an opera, possibly even before I'd enjoyed a book that didn't contain pictures or at least a map at the front. My friends and I knew how to hack into games and code our own (though I have no idea how to do any of this now). If you'd ask me then whether games could be art, I probably couldn't have answered you, since I wouldn't have had a clue what you meant by 'art'. Games were first.

I drifted away from computer games for a long time, but I suppose they always popped up as an entertainment option every once in a while. There probably hasn't been a year in which I wasn't at least aware of some game or other, trying out a new title when visiting a mate's house or reading up on the latest controversial release. If you'd asked me five years ago whether games could be art, I would have said: sure. If art can alter your experience of the world, or offer a new way of engaging with it, or tap into the Benjaminian optical unconscious, then why not? Games can do all of these things.

Earlier this year I came upon the fuss caused by film critic Roger Ebert's longstanding claim that games cannot be art. His argument is a bit fluffy and has shifted over the past half-decade and doesn't to me make a compelling argument. It's worth noting that he hasn't played any of the games he discusses. It's not worth reading his essays on the topic unless you're especially interested. They didn't convince me, at least.

But then I read an article by someone who does work in the gaming industry, has played those games people put forward as art, and who unexpectedly found himself coming to defend Ebert's claim. His piece is here, and is essential reading. The various arguments it explores are too many for me to summarise – it covers Kant, Schopenhauer, Bob Dylan, intersubjectivity, free speech, the sublime, kitsch...

“If you consciously set out trying to make an "art game," it's possible that you will instead create an arty game, a game with the trappings of sublime art. Solemn themes. Classical music. Literary quotations. Participation by artistic celebrities from other media. These things don't necessarily make a game artistic.”

The reason, argues writer Brian Moriarty, is that “games are purposeful. They are defined as the exercise of choice and will towards a self-maximizing goal. But sublime art is like a toy. It elicits play in the soul. The pleasure we get from it lies precisely in the fact that it has no rules, no goal, no purpose.”

Moriarty is passionate in his defence of games, but to conflate (some) with art is to miss the very thing that makes them games. To paraphrase him: it took a long time for photography and cinema to be understood as art. New technologies always face this. But to expect video games to follow the same path is a categorical error, since “games” aren't new at all! We don't consider Chess or Go as great art, though they're stunning achievements. We don't consider baseball or kiss chasey to be art, either. Games are structurally different to whatever art is – you can have elements of play in a work of art, and 'arty' elements to a game, but this doesn't mean they're the same thing. Games are about the exercise of will, whereas sublime art (according to Moriarty's understanding of Schopenhauer) allows us to transcend Will. Again, art can involve play – the audience can take on the role of artist – but that should be valued as play, as game. It's a good thing. But is it art?

Until I came across this article, I hadn't really been following what was going on in the game world for a few years. I decided to see how things were faring. Put the thesis to the test. Some results:

LIMBO:

I'd had this indie game recommended as a “a fantastically atmospheric, dark and confusing masterpiece” so it's a good place to start. It's certainly one of the most visually arresting games out there – the old platform-game (think Super Mario) re-imagined as a Gothic shadow play. There's no introduction or scene-setting to explain the scenario, but as the piece unfolds there are hints as to what's really going on. A little boy wakes in a forest and goes wandering; he crosses a river in a boat, sees other shadowy children running ahead who set traps for him; is chased by a fairly terrifying giant spider; makes his way into an industrial ghost-town; ends up... well, I won't spoil it. The game takes very conventional elements and infuses them with a melancholy you wouldn't expect from this kind of thing, and the ambiguity of the backstory is enough to have generated plenty of theories online. It's lovingly crafted, and demands reflection on its more profound meanings once you're done. Does this make it art?

BIOSHOCK:

This one's pretty old by video game standards, but is touted by many as one of the shining examples of innovation in the form. It's a shoot-em-up that doubles as a satirical condemnation of the political theory of Ayn Rand: the player finds himself stranded in an undersea metropolis created by a supercapitalist megalomaniac whose philosophy of extreme individualism is an obvious take on Rand's objectivism. The outcome is affected by moral choices made during gameplay, and these choices themselves end up part of a larger discourse of free will versus determinism, as the conventions of the form itself put into question how much choice the player has had in terms of real freedom. The setting is a sort of steampunky alternate history version of the postwar period, but it's clear how the political philosophy explored has formed one of the foundations for the world we find ourselves in today. Does this make it art?

DEAD ISLAND:
The trailer for this one alone had people in tears. It's worth watching if you don't know how far games have come in the past decade, but be warned – it's a zombie game, so it IS pretty gory. What's more surprising is how it condenses a tragic narrative, recognisable characters and a tangible sense of space into a short video clip for a computer game.

The game itself is visually ravishing and viscerally sensational – it's legitimately scary and at times provokes a bodily reaction of panic (I didn't really want to play it after a while for this reason). It's not that thought-provoking, but it definite has a real effect on the player. Even more intriguing is the fact that of the four characters the player may choose from, two are black, one is Chinese and one is an American of ambiguous ethnicity. A best-selling zombie game in which the lead character is (or can be) an Indigenous Australian woman! Compare this to other media. Does this make it art?

MASS EFFECT 2:

Battlestar Galactica is one of the most interesting TV series of the new millennium; it reinvents a kitschy 70s sci-fi as a sort of West Wing in space, presenting a complex post-9/11 allegory of competing theologies, racial paranoia and technological determinism. The Mass Effect series seems like an unofficial game adaptation of Battlestar, so it makes sense that President Bartlett/Martin Sheen himself voices one of the main characters, along with two of the leads from Battlestar.

The game is densely plotted and features countless characters with long backstories and intricate relationships; again, moral choices feature prominently, and as with other 'sandbox' games the player is given a great deal of freedom to explore and interact with the game world in their own way. While the narrative is solid, the way it plays out is determined by the player – a distinction between story and plot which is one of the key differences between gaming and other forms of art, I think. But despite the player's role in the narration itself, the story is certainly as present as any other form of literature, and this isn't just free play with no goal other than overcoming obstacles. Does this make it art?

PORTAL 2:

This is the game that really had me wondering if a video game could be a new kind of art in itself. Even the end credits had me transfixed! It's quite impossible to convey in words almost anything about the thing, though I can state the facts. There are more than 13,000 lines of dialogue – much of which is laugh-out-loud stuff – co-written and voiced by The Office's Stephen Merchant along with a bunch of other outstanding actors. The visual design is astonishing, and deeply, thickly immersive. The score (which includes an original song by The National) is truly dynamic, gaining in complexity in response to the player's actions. And the story, oh, the story. It's brilliant, but it's in the way the narrative is produced by the player that the game becomes something truly new. Most games with any plot to speak of feature cinematic cut-scenes – bits of story where the game as game stops and the player watches a fairly conventional sequence that might as well have been cut from a movie. Interactivity ends, actors speak lines, and we cut back to the play. Portal 2's genius is in the way the entire game is a cinematic, but the player maintains control throughout. It's operatic in scope, but you get to be part of the performance.

Still. Does this make it art?

Who cares?

A game, like any form of media, can be political, hilarious, emotionally wrenching, physically affecting, thought-provoking, offensive, entrancing, enlightening, boring. It can take you to other places or make you aware of your own. Does it help us if we decide that one of these things makes it art, or does it just set up a boundary dispute that tells us nothing about anything anyway? I'd rather hear that something is political, hilarious, emotionally wrenching and so on than that it's 'art'.

Back to Half-Real: in attempting to find a point at which games and art (in this case, theatre) can converge, it seems to me that the work what makes either so special. As a game, it offers only a few choices with no obvious rewards, and even these choices are subsumed into the will of the crowd – imagine a game in which half of your attempts to do something produce no effect. And as theatre, the story is hobbled by the interactivity, lacking a complexity of narrative and character. The performances are fine, but their liveness is at odds with the flat, affectless nature of the presentation itself. We're introduced as part of that liveness but are never given any reason to invest in anything that goes on. It's mildly diverting, and definitely not dull or irritating, but there's not much to do, and even less to think about afterwards.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL ONE, OR, OR.

2011-10-12T14:13:00.000+11:00

Earlier this year Guardian film critic Mark Kermode wrote a provocative essay entitled “How to Make an Intelligent Blockbuster and Not Alienate People”. It's since been removed from the Observer website, but a few of its points have stayed with me, and I reckon they're a good way into some of the concerns I've been feeling towards the local theatre scene here in Melbourne.

Kermode argues that not one Hollywood blockbuster has died at the box office due to bad reviews. Even films that have been universally panned – take Pearl Harbour, for instance – have actually raked in (very) significant profits. In part this is due to certain complex structures of film distribution which aren't relevant here; more interesting is Kermode's point about “diminished expectation”. We expect 'event' films to be big and dumb. For a critic to point that out doesn't alter our moviegoing habits. We go into a blockbuster with diminished expectations, and if it does turn out to have something intelligent going for it (Kermode cites Christopher Nolan's films as examples), well, that's just a bonus. An exception.

I wonder if a similar set of reduced expectations exist in regard to Australian theatre. I'm not just talking about committed theatregoers, whoever they are. Whatever anyone might like to believe, people don't go to the theatre the way they go to the movies, or even to big budget musicals. I'm pretty sure, even without empirical evidence, that there's a decent slab of Australia that thinks of the theatre as important, culturally significant, worth supporting but generally not that fun. Not relevant to their lives, not expressive of their beliefs, not challenging to them in a useful way, not preferable over a night in front of the Tube if it comes down to a choice. They don't expect that theatre will be great, though they'll appreciate it if it is.

The same diminished expectations probably exist amongst a lot of regular theatregoers, too. They (we) love what live performance can do, and have been witness to astonishing, perhaps even life-changing works of art. But have you never heard an arts-loving friend say something along the lines of “it's been a long day and I really wish we could just be watching a dumb movie instead of going to this show tonight...” Exchanging one set of diminished expectations for another, because at least a half-witted film offers the rum soporific of colour and movement and mind-lulling spectacle.

All mere speculation, but it's been bubbling away in my mind for a while. Something rose to the surface when I visited FOG's Cumulus Nimbus recently, and before the performance began a man tapped me on the shoulder and asked where I was from. I was sort of confused by the question. I'm... from... all over. I don't understand. It dawned on me that he wanted to know why I was at the show. Surely I had some kind of investment, or was involved somehow, whether directly or more generally in the area of theatre of disability.

Do so many people really take a punt on a show just because it's written by David Williamson, or stars that person on the telly, or looks like it has a bit of money behind it? More disturbingly, to people take a punt on that show despite the fact that it's been panned by the critics, but can't be roused to fork out for a universally lauded number just because it's playing in a backyard in Brunswick or looks like it might have been cobbled together on goodwill and optimism?

Why didn't Back to Back Theatre's Ganesh Versus The Third Reich sell out every seat before it even opened?

GANESH VERSUS THE THIRD REICH

Though I doubt it had a negative impact on Malthouse's box office, the protests which accompanied this production did put some audience members in a bit of a quandary. An American Hindu evangelist called for the play to be banned, sight unseen, and some members of the local Hindu community picked up this plea and put the same demands to Malthouse Theatre, Back to Back and Melbourne Festival. To the credit of all involved, quite a lot of effort was made to conciliate, but as far as I know there were still protesters out the front for the final showing of the season.

Part of the problem, for me, comes from a somewhat blurry categorical difference between text and scripture. Most of us, even the religious, don't have much truck with scripture these days – with writing that bears a Platonic connection with some essence we might call divine. Rather, we're more Aristotelian: texts are something to be interpreted, and it's in that interpretation, that articulation of meaning, that meaning makes itself. This could even be seen as a default position in contemporary theatre, where acting itself is synonymous with interpretation (as opposed to the production of an ecstatic link with a transcendent essence). The closest theatre gets to scripture today might be something such as Beckett, but even though we're not supposed to tamper with his hallowed words there's still a requirement that they be subjected to at least some baseline of interpretation. Elsewhere theatremakers speak of staying true to the 'spirit' of a text, but that's not quite the same as treating the text itself as a holy artefact.

Is there a place in a secular society for scripture? For a literal reading of a sacred text, and the construction of boundaries regarding who is permitted to touch? Or must we all treat texts as inert resources to be played with, their significance only found in that very play?

No answers from this quarter, especially given that Ganesh Versus The Third Reich is one of the most impactful pieces of performance I can recall. It's ferocious and hilarious, a thrust to the heart, and of course it directly speaks to the politics of representation on many, many levels. That it's created and performed by artists who themselves are often spoken for, rather than to, only adds to the complexity.

Here we have the all-powerful elephant-headed deity Ganesh travelling across Nazi Germany to reclaim the sacred symbol of swastika from Hitler. There are other strands to the narrative – a young Jewish escapee fleeing persecution; an encounter with Mengele, the “Angel of Death” – but this central story is embedded in a much more interesting frame in which a theatre company is attempting to stage the work only to find that its politics are tearing the group apart. What seems to be most at stake here is power and agency: who is the creator of this work? Does the director/actor dynamic necessarily lead to inequities of agency? What's the audience's role in this? There are way too many questions brought up in the short span of the show than I could possibly describe here – and indeed, it's one of those rare productions where I walked out not wanting to talk about what I'd seen for fear of reducing it to mere words, while at the same time feeling compelled to talk to make sure that it was something shared. But there are moments in this piece that cut to the quick, and definitely left me both shattered and profoundly reassured of the potency of contemporary performance. This is one of the world's leading theatre companies creating work of the greatest significance. Wish more people had seen it.

Season ended.

SITE UNSEEN

Of a vastly different order is this maddening attempt to create an immersive experience of homelessness for audiences. I've no doubt whatsoever that its intentions are pure, but the result is an anaemic pantomime that reduces the harsh, lived reality of destitution to a fun romp through the back streets of St Kilda.

There is a gesture towards the kind of self-awareness made evident in Back to Back's work – while it's billed as a walking tour, we arrive to be greeted by a tour operator who is clearly divorced from the world into which she is supposed to introduce us. When her regular guide fails to show up, she's aghast at the possibility that she'll have to take on the job herself. From here things get inexplicably silly, as a magician, a 'soul reader' and someone in a purple elephant costume show up and start engaging in some business so important that it's kept top secret from the audience. We're eventually led up the street past some actors playing homeless people, including someone dressed like a bag lady in a shocking fright wig, and a character named Wozza who joins the tour uninvited (Chris Bunworth's performance here is the highlight of the piece, and one of the only things with which I was able to connect).

Soon enough we're in Theatreworks, dressed up as a soup kitchen, and more fussing and bussing goes on before we're thrown headlong into a first-hand experience of homelessness and by that I mean we're told that we're suddenly homeless and have to squabble over a bunch of mattresses and cardboard to construct a shelter for the night. To reduce such an experience to a wacky exercise in cubby-house construction is a baffling choice, bordering on offensive. But it's sadly about as far as Site Unseen takes us – forcibly absent is anything that might really challenge its audience, replaced by a sanitised series of encounters which make sleeping rough seem little more than a serious inconvenience. There's no real sense of violence, of danger, of the emotional and psychological effects of homelessness, of the desperation it can engender, even though we're sometimes told of these things throughout the work. The closest we get is a short sequence in which the recorded thoughts of Melbourne's real homeless are played during a moment of darkness. It's a flash of reality before we return to the mild and mediated performance that surrounds it.

If this were just a shot that failed to hit its mark, it'd pass by without much comment. But it's what's at stake here that makes it so much more (and less). If we approach this with lowered expectations simply because it's 'community theatre' then we're slighting what community theatre can be. This is not enough.

Or, judge for yourself. Until Oct 22.

Melbourne Fringe 2011 Awards

2011-10-09T20:47:00.002+11:00

And that was the festival that was. Below are the winners announced at yesterday's closing night shennanigans - copy and paste job on my behalf but I'm still recovering from the festivities, so give me a day before I start writing any more original content here (Melbourne Festival, you're next).

Professional Development Awards

Best Emerging Circus Performer, Supported by ACAPTA

WINNER: Tilly Cobham-Hervey, Freefall

AWARD: ACAPTA membership for 1 year and participation in an ACAPTA presented master class.

Tour Ready Award, supported by Adelaide Fringe

WINNER: Uta Uber Kool Ya

AWARD: The winner of the Adelaide Fringe Award will receive free registration and $2000 support for Adelaide Fringe 2012.

Best Emerging Producer, suppoted by Auspicious Arts Award

WINNER: Erin Voth from The American Astronaut

AWARD: One term in the Auspicious Arts Incubator, worth $1200

Outstanding Comedy Show Award, supported by Brisbane Powerhouse

WINNER: Me Pregnant!

AWARD: Entry into the Brisbane Comedy Festival 2012 and presentation support including $2000 towards flights, accommodation and remounting costs.

Innovation in Theatre Award, supported by Brisbane Powerhouse.

WINNER: Bunny

AWARD: Entry into the World Theatre Festival 2012 (Brisbane) and presentation support incuding $2000 toward flights, accommodation and remounting costs.

Original New Circus, supported by Circus Oz Award

WINNER: No Such Thing as Normal

AWARD: Two weeks training/mentorship at Circuz Oz with Artistic Director Mike Finch.

Outstanding Indigenous Artist Award, supported by the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts

WINNER: Vicki Kousins from Re: appropriate

AWARD: Participation in a short course at VCA

Melbourne Cabaret Festival Award for Excellence in Cabaret

WINNER: The Unexpected Variety Show

AWARD: Double gold pass to all shows in the Melbourne Cabaret Festival 2012 and an invitation to perform in the Melbourne Cabaret Festival

Best Experimental Performance Award, supported by PACT Centre for Emerging Artists

WINNER: Sweet Child of Mine

AWARD: Presentation as part of PACT’S Presents….series in Sydney in 2012.

Best Original Australian Work, in Memoriam of Caz Howard, supported by Theatreworks

WINNER: The Waiting Place

AWARD: Presentation at Theatreworks in 2012

Best Emerging writer, supported by Victorian Writers Centre Award, in association with the Melbourne Theatre Company

WINNER: Dan Giovannoni, Amelia Evans and Paige Rattray for Cut Snake

AWARD: $250 worth of professional development with the Victorian Writer’s Centre and tickets to Opening Night performances at MTC for 2012.

Innovation in Culturally Diverse Practice, supported by Kultour.

WINNER: In Fact, This Crease in Your Trouser is Good My Friend

AWARD: Development time with Kultour

CATEGORY AWARDS

Best Cabaret
WINNER: Tommy Bradson in Pirate Rhapsody, Mermaid Requiem

Best Circus

WINNER: Freefall

Best Comedy

WINNER: Lawrence Mooney in An Indecisive Bag of Donuts

Best Dance

WINNER: Proximate Edifice

Best Live Art

WINNER: A Window in Mime

Best Music

WINNER: Musical Thoughts for a Darkened Room

HIGHLY COMMENDED: No Place Like Home

Best Performance

WINNER: After All This

Best Venue

WINNER: Revolt

Best Visual Arts

WINNER: Rendered Bones

People’s Choice Award

WINNER: Mercedes Benz….Awkwardly

FRINGE FESTIVAL PART FOUR, OR, THE PERILS OF HAIRDRESSER LOYALTY

2011-10-07T12:12:00.000+11:00

BUNNY

Two guys in a pub, or a bar, or a nightclub, old mates, or maybe strangers, can't tell, don't want to give too much away or I mean I don't want to give the wrong impression here, but you know, you know what I'm implying so I don't need to say it, or maybe you are thinking the wrong thing entirely but that's not what I said is it, I haven't even said anything, but you should see this show, you should check it out at least, see if it's for you, I loved it, you should try it at least, probably not for everyone, I reckon you'd love it though.

Possibly the most engaging, hilarious and edge-of-your-seat-can't-look-away piece at this year's Fringe. A lot of booze is consumed, a lot of things aren't said, a lot of emotion erupts when least expected. Can't say any more. Mustn't say any more.

At Tuxedo Cat until Oct 8.

SO BLUE, SO CALM

This new work from Mutation Theatre employs a tone and setting similar to Bunny but to vastly different effect. A couple of dudes are hanging around in a suburban backyard, talking crap, playing tunes, occasionally making a pointed observation on life. Some people have compared it (unfavourably) to Ranters' sublime Holiday, but I don't think that's quite right. There are any number of companies working within the loose mould of the post-dramatic, and every element of this production could have emerged without any knowledge of Ranters. Hell, Holiday didn't spring forth from a void itself.

Unfortunately, So Blue, So Calm still doesn't quite work even on its own terms. Where it does aim for poignancy, it falls a bit short. If it was intended to be a piece exploring the way young men's 'profound' ideas are really pretty shallow, it might have been closer to the mark, but there's a sense that the work itself is meant to be deep, if understated, and I couldn't find that much to engage with. It could also be the slippage between text and performance: the actors wear their faces and speak their lines as if they were someone else's, and there are a few more layers of polish that need to be stripped back before this will have that almost translucent shimmer that turns banality into something entirely engrossing. There's much promise to the experiment, but it's still at the trial stage, and I'm interested to see where the ambitions displayed here will eventually lead.

At Mutation Theatre, 294 Smith St until Oct 8.

LOVEFRIDGE

You don't find experiences like this outside of festivals – I was killing some time in one of the Fringe bars when someone invited me behind a curtain for a six-minute performance. Sure, why not? It's a tiny as it is short – one performer with a guitar and a few props, and only two or three audience members at most. A couple of songs about the love between vegetables in a refrigerator, a casual chat once it's done, and back off into the night. Modest but pleasant.

The Warren, Fringe Hub until Oct 8.

DIFFERENT

At Hairy Little Sista until Oct 8.

ADHD is usually thought of as a problem limited to children, with public discussion centring on kids jacked up on energy drinks and videogames, doped out on Ritalin, or victims of the over-pathologising of childhood itself (“kids are meant to be distracted! It's just their lovely imaginations at work!”). But as Kelda Kellie makes clear here, the disorder of the constantly restless mind is for life – sufferers don't get over it, they just get used to faking. Kellie isn't that good at faking, though, and the flaws of this production are also integral to its success. It's messy, disjointed, meanders off track every couple of minutes and often fails to resolve itself. This is because Kellie can't help it, despite her efforts, and it's through the constant state of collapse that the show conveys a real sense of the terrible burden of the disorder.

The performer was only diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, in her late 30s. She was listening to a doctor on RRR talking about it and when a checklist of symptoms was offered, she began ticking off the boxes. It was a revelation, as if someone was describing her entire life and experience of the world. Though she only came to the realisation recently, it's fascinating how obvious the signs were from the beginning and how we write them off as personality quirks. The show is presented as a kind of lecture or seminar in which Kellie takes us on a tour of her childhood (I think there may have been a lot more about her adult life which she had to discard on opening night since we were running overtime, again due to those incessant digressions). But even limiting the material to her youth, there's much insight to be gained here.

When Kellie reads out her report cards from prep to Year 12, the descriptions given to her by teachers provide glimpses of how we rationalise the disorder: Kellie is routinely told that she's not applying herself, that she doesn't try or, far too often, that's she's just not very clever. To grow up with your elders constantly instilling this idea that you're somewhat stupid is one of the heartbreaking revelations of the show, but it's not the only one. Kellie's difference meant she was singled out not just by her class, but by her entire school, and even the tech school next door, and she was mercilessly bullied. As one casual aside puts it, if she'd known about the concept of suicide as a nine-year-old, she probably would have gone there.

Again, the whole doesn't hang together very well, but the result is something that lingers in your mind and even disorders your own thinking a little. I'd had a long day when I saw this but combined with its successor, Bunny, I ended up with a huge amount to think about when I got home. Which in turn led to a bout of...

INSOMNIA CAT CAME TO STAY

I don't really suffer insomnia (though I have), and it was a shock to have a mostly sleepless night recently. It's nothing – not a speck – on Fleur Kilpatrick's experiences, though. As a chronic insomniac she's faced innumerable long nights that see her wide awake at five in the morning, hyperalert and gnawed at by the knowledge that tomorrow will be another day spent in a stupor. Somehow she's used those moments in the wee hours to write a journal reflecting on the experience, and instead of garbled, wake-drunk ramblings, the results are quietly fascinating. These thoughts are couched in a much broader framework that posits facts about the illness, poetic ruminations and personal anecdote, along with a bunch of songs that break up proceedings (I thought they were the weakest and least necessary part of the show).

There's an ingenious set – Kilpatrick is strapped into an arrangement of sheets that evoke both a bed and a pair of wings – and while this renders her pretty much immobile, some animations projected onto the space provide a great sense of movement. The effect is hypnotic but not soporific, and it does a great deal to evoke that sense of intensely focused but not entirely awake consciousness that comes with insomnia, a kind of clarity narrowed down to a sharp point.

The title is a surprisingly apt metaphor, too, with insomnia's comparison to a stray cat you didn't ask for, don't feed or pat but can't keep off your property one that rings true throughout. A small but finely considered piece, though thankfully not one to keep you up at night yourself.

At Loop until Oct 8.

LESS THAN <3 THREE, BECAUSE I HEART U – THE OVERDRAMATIC LIFE OF KYLE MCCONNELLY

The last show I saw by this company, The Play About Nothing, was a winner – an immersive night with a couple of deliquents as they travelled around Melbourne getting up to no good. Each audience member played a character in the tale, and there was a sense of energy and unpredictability that really got to the heart of the disaffected kids under scrutiny.

That promise really took a wrong turn here. Where TPAN was stylistically innovative, Less Than <3 is a straight-up comic play, and not a great one. Some hammy performances, an uninspired plot and high-school level jokes prevent it from really going anywhere interesting, and while its predecessor really brought to life a particular culture of youth, this one distances us from its emo and hipster subjects, who themselves are merely thin caricature.

Kyle is the last emo, shunned by his school peers, his only friend a Tamagotchi and his only outlet for expression a livejournal account and angst-ridden vlogs. There's potential for something here, if Kyle was treated with any seriousness, but for much of the piece he's inexplicably shunted aside to make room for a confusing plot surrounding a media project by his cool schoolmates and a homeless artist taken in by an unscrupulous gallery owner (the artist is haunted by a really annoying clown for no reason I could fathom).

There's some kind of statement about postmodernism going on, but damned if I could hear it through all the noise. I think it might have boiled down to “postmodernism is a bit wanky” and given that there's a mention of John Docker's Postmodernism and Popular Culture I have to assume that the company has at least encountered the subject somewhere, but nothing here resembles a coherent comment on, well, anything.

Luckily none of this undermines the interest generated by The Play About Nothing, which wasn't just a happy accident. There's talent in here somewhere that got lost during this piece's development. Hopefully it'll return to the fore next time.

Fringe Hub until Oct 8.

FRINGE FESTIVAL PART THREE: LEPIDOPTERY FOR YOU AT HOME

2011-10-04T11:21:00.000+11:00

The festival proceeds apace! With less than a week to go, I might as well rustle about in my bag of "things you missed out on" and see what I can dig up. Sorry that these shows have all closed, but perhaps they'll inspire you to try out something that is still happening. What a poor excuse for a post. Let us commence.

JASON CHONG – REEL LIFE

If I'd seen this show as a 14-year-old boy, I'm pretty sure I would have spent the next six months trying to recreate the cool technology Chong employs here – with the aid of a video projector and editing software he's put together a piece where he interacts with a bunch of onscreen versions of himself (shoulder-based angel and devil, clones, etc) in a shaggy dog narrative that really exists to allow for the rapid-fire visual gags. You know the sort: throwing something at the screen and having the projected character catch it, or waving an 'x-ray' machine over your body to reveal your skeleton. Some of the effects are impressive in a consciously lo-fi way, but the story never attempts to be more than a silly, fluffy affair. It'd be a great one for kids, especially if you want to convince them pestering you for a video camera for the next while.

AFTER ALL THIS

Aw, geez, you really missed out here. I'm not sure why this Elbow Room show had such a short season, given the scale of the production itself. It might have been because performers were committed to other shows. It might have been because it's just one stage in a bigger project intended for next year. Whatever the reason, it was pretty spesh.

The production is broken into three parts (with a sort of coda) and takes place throughout the various storeys of a large building. At first we're seated on a staircase watching an intimate conversation between two kids. It gradually becomes apparent that they're young members of a cult, and as you'd imagine, that's not a particularly good thing. From there we move upstairs into a situation far removed (in time, theme and theatrical style) that addresses philosophical questions surrounding religion and modern life while only obtusely bearing any connection to what's preceded it; next up is another new situation that takes us back into the heart of a cult. I'm trying not to spoil much, since the achievement here is in the delicacy with which the work's concerns unfold – suffice to say that by its end, I'd found real insight in the appeal of a crazy sect. It's not at all an apology for the often destructive and abusive reality behind such cults, but it does show that for those who fall into this mindset, there are profound motivations that go beyond 'I'm a wacko who just wants to belong somewhere'. And in its own way, their decision can even be seen as kind of admirable. Hard to explain, but if the show comes back to life somewhere down the track, find out for yourself.

IT'S GOOD TO SHUT UP SOMETIMES

I signed up for this show because, hey, how often do you get the chance to see one of the world's leading mimes in action? I don't know what it means to be a world-leading mime, but it's got to count for something. And it's an artform I don't know that much about (beyond the jokes) so the educational component was an attraction too.

Miklos was raised in Hungary and (I think) now resides in New Zealand. His teacher was a student of Marcel Marceau which makes him one of Marceau's grandstudents. He performs a famous routine by the world's most famous mime, too, and on Saturday afternoon it had one punter in particular losing his shit with laughter. Like, the kind of laughter most comics will never be able to provoke. The kind of laughter where you're wondering if an ambulance needs to be called. That said, the show would be better off in the 'performance' category of Fringe rather than 'comedy', because humour is only one mode of theatre it offers.

That's where the educational bit comes in: Miklos takes us through a variety of genres of mime, including dramatic mime and a 'poem without words' that's closer to interpretative dance. Miklos is far from silent throughout the piece, instead introducing each sequence with some contextual banter. One of the most interesting bits dramatises the plight of Romanians fleeing Hungary during Ceaușescu's reign. Admittedly, this was also a point at which I let out an involuntary laugh myself, since the desperate escape was inexplicably accompanied by the "Peter Gunn" theme.

There's a wide-eyed innocence to the performer reminiscent of Buster Keaton – I don't mean the characters, but the performer himself. It's such a sincere piece, without a trace of irony, that it's a real oddity in the Australian landscape and welcome for that reason. Some of the physical punchlines are groaners, and Miklos seems genuinely eager to please. How can you not laugh when a mime signals the end of a sequence by saying “now is the time you clap”?

I KNOW THERE'S A LOT OF NOISE OUTSIDE BUT YOU HAVE TO CLOSE YOUR EYES

It's amazing how two people can witness the same piece of art and come away with completely different interpretations. Not as to its meaning, but as to what went on. I recently heard a friend describe this short work and was astounded that we had constructed completely dissimilar narratives from the events we were shown.

Well, not completely: the opening scene here is quite straightforward. Two women in their 20s meet up at a bar after a long period of separation, and while they were close as children (or teens) it quickly becomes obvious how different they've become – one a Fitzroy hipster, distanced and drenched in ennui, the other a Collette Dinnigan-loving suburbanite seemingly lacking the irony gene. From there on things get murkier. A succession of solo scenes take us well out of the domain of realism – we might be witnessing youthful memories or sublimated desires or something else. This fugue state is what gives the work real power; it's as if we're made privy to the subconscious drives that are the stuff of the psyche but which are only allowed the narrowest of outlets. It's dark, often brutal stuff, and when we occasionally return to the opening relationship it's fascinating to see how inexpressible interior urges are distorted and compressed into 'acceptable' social exchanges, which suddenly take on new gravity. My interpretation, anyway.

The writing is excellent, for the most part. The performances are fine, too, but didn't serve the nature of the piece as well as they could have – the depths plumbed here require a corresponding rawness, a tearing off of the mask, while the actors seemed rather to alternate one mask with another. It could be that the more irreal passages went for the kind of 'poetic' style of performance we glibly describe as dreamlike, without recognising that both poetry and dreams are more potent when they expose the nerve endings rather than offer a salve. It's a huge advance on the last outing by this company (I'm Trying to Kiss You), however, and definitely a sign of some minds making serious work.

THE DOLLHOUSE

For the last few years Daniel Schlusser's work has been essential viewing for anyone serious about theatre. It's representative of a number of trends in contemporary European performance, but also possessed of a distinct method that stands alone. He doesn't exactly deconstruct texts – that abused word is usually invoked when someone simply reorganises or rewrites a play. Rather, his process seems more akin to smelting. He breaks down a text into its component molecules and then cooks up a chemical stew in which those elements form strange new relationships. Most of all, his stuff is hot.

In the case of The Dollhouse, he's taken Ibsen's classic and refashioned it as an urgent drama very much of the moment. Nora is a product of the post-feminist era, and the complexity of her character creates a wonderful ambivalence – she's the seamy underside of the Sex and the City stereotype, mired in a swamp of self-obsession, desperate for validation, substituting shopping and the image of motherhood (despite the lack of children on stage) for real connection with others. Husband Torvald is a distant, passive-aggressive banker who spends his off-time on the Playstation, preferring his trophy wife seen but not really heard. The rotten core of this coupling – and the wider social dynamic it's indicative of – is the work's real subject, but there's so much more going around this.

As with most of Schlusser's work, it shears away at the line between theatre and 'reality', so that actors are always actors, not just characters, and the performance itself always teeters on the edge of breakdown. The result is a tightly-wound tension: at any moment the escalating drama might be dissolved of its energy by a reminder that it's all artifice, but Schlusser and his performers use that threat to heighten interest rather than dispersing it.

It's not Ibsen's play, though it retains much of the original's pathos, and purists would likely find fault in that. But as a work that speaks to contemporary concerns, it's full of significance. I'm looking forward to 2012, where he has a slate of hugely promising new projects.

FRINGE FESTIVAL PART TWO, OR, BRING ME MY ORGONE ACCUMULATOR

2011-10-03T11:21:00.000+11:00

The other day I woke up in a real funk. The emotional kind, not the aromatic variety, though a late Fringe night meant I'd had reheated Indian for dinner so you never know. I may as well have woken up in a massive bovine fart haze, though, was how nose-wrinkingly grumpy I was. It had been a week or so building up, mostly unnoticed, but the source of this malaise was pretty obvious to me.

It's the small audiences at certain shows. Not that small audiences are unexpected at Fringe – I'm always guaranteed to catch a few where I'm one of just a handful of onlookers. I've even heard of a show that went on despite the arrival of only a single attendee, and to my great joy said lone spectator actually proceeded to good-naturedly heckle. That's the spirit.

I know great productions often go unnoticed. That's the way it is, and has probably always been so, historically speaking. But when I – or anyone in my line of biz – do everything conceivable to generate interest in an act, and it proves for naught, it makes me wonder. Oooh, and it makes me wonder.

I'll explain through a series of reviews and then I'm going to listen to Giorgio Moroder and execute a series of backflips while considering the Cosby Sweater Paradox.

POND

After I saw Grit Theatre's Us in 2010 (and again earlier this year) you couldn't shut me up about it. I raved about it in print, named it one of my two top shows in an end-of-year wrap-up (along with Bell's Twelfth Night), banged on and on during multiple segments of Richard Watts' SmartArts program on RRR, praised it in various social media, and so on and so forth. It won Best Performance at last year's Fringe, a title it shared with Hayloft's Thyestes (and that was a show so popular you basically had to track down and murder a ticketholder so as to wear their skin in order to get in). Us also scored Best Independent Production and Best Ensemble at the Green Room Awards, and netted strong reviews across the board.

Pond is the company's next project and on opening night there were plenty of empty seats. Come on.

It's not necessary viewing, by any stretch. Where Us tapped into a vital essence, Pond is characterised by absence. It's cold, monotonous, empty, and deliberately so. It presents us with a couple who've retreated from the world to their apartment, where their only connection to humanity (and often each other) is via technology. They're online all the time, occasionally pausing to order food to be delivered. There are key moments in which they interact directly – blunt statements of commitment, mechanical sex – but even these are leeched of real connection. The point here seems obvious: that life in a 'connected' world can be anything but.

The set is visually lush but the soundtrack is a better indicator of the production's tone. Initially it's just a quiet hum of white noise of which you're not particularly aware; as the show proceeds the buzz of audible chaos becomes more apparent. It's an aural replication of the flow of information that is the weave of the fabric of daily life, and this is what Pond seems to be: not the content of the tapestry, but its warp and woof. It's dissatisfying theatre. Like life.

In its vacancy it reminded me of slow cinema. Not the interminably long shots of Tarkovsky, which imbue the material world with a vibrancy bordering on the transcendent. More the modern flatness of Antonioni. Here's one of the most memorable sequences in my viewing history, the ending of The Passenger. Was bored by the film. Jaw dropped at the end.

If you can't watch it all the way through, there's Pond's problem. You can't understand the impossibility of the scene without submitting to its duration. And who has the patience to get through a clip like that? Not when you could skip to the end or go check Facebook or something.

At Fringe Hub until Oct 8.

CANDY B – AUSTRALIAN BOOTY

Exhibit B: Candy Bowers was one of the members of Sista She, and whenever they put on a Comedy Fest show I'd drag along various unsuspecting friends who you wouldn't put in the target demographic for queer feminist hip-hop comedy cabaret. Every time, the response was exactly the same: less than ten minutes in, my plus-one for the night would be grabbing my arm and whispering “we need to gather everyone we know and come back to this party again and again”.

Candy's first solo show nabbed Best Performance at 2009's Fringe. This year's follow-up should be playing to full houses. It's a brassy look at Australia's shyness towards the big, be it booty, blackness or dancefloor bravado. It's hard to rouse a crowd to hip-shaking action (or activism) when you're playing to a cool dozen, and I want to imagine what this show could be in front of 200 punters. Bowers has the charm to win over a reluctant crowd, but she needs that crowd first.

As it is, the show goes up and down. Her routines have stuck with me – confessions of her romantic obsession with red-headed blokes, the eye-opening racism of former boyfriends such as the one who had to mention that his girlfriend was black at every turn. The show is patchy as a whole, and hasn't yet struck the right balance between comedy and reality, as Bowers has put it. The projected visuals, too, don't match the sophistication the piece deserves. But there's a killer act in here trying to hit its stride, and I don't know how you do that playing to ten sympathetic souls.

At Lithuanian Club until Oct 8.

LAWRENCE MOONEY IN AN INDECISIVE BAG OF DONUTS

Another Friday night gig as one of about 20 or so audience members. Unlike the previous two productions, this one arrives with rock-solid reviews and word-of-mouth from its Comedy Festival season. Mooney is one of those comic's comics who garner unmitigated praise from their fellows, and people perpetually wonder why he isn't one of the most popular stand-ups in the country. I've heard his name used in the same breath as Louis C. K., for instance, who's easily considered one of the finest examples of the form in the world today.

The subject of this show sounds pretty standard – Mooney narrates a day spent procrastinating when he should be writing the show itself. He does the cleaning, walks the dog, visits a shopping centre. But the writing here is so acute, the performance so rich, that you rapidly forget the quotidian nature of the material. In fact, it's remarkable precisely because he extracts so much that's fresh from within the familiar.

I didn't love it quite as much as most (actually, everyone, from what I've heard around the traps). That's just because it doesn't do so much that's inventive with the form itself, which is more about my preferences. But I can't deny that this is one of the sharpest shows you're likely to catch this year, and I can't imagine a soul who would walk away disappointed.

At Lithuanian Club until Oct 8.

CUMULUS NIMBUS

Enough of the moaning: here's a show that did get a decent audience, and that's the most intriguing thing about it. Theatre by people with disabilities faces its own problems attracting crowds. It's a true crime that Ganesh vs the Third Reich at Malthouse hasn't sold out yet, as it's an astonishing production unlike anything I've seen. And despite the much-publicised protests by a small number of people decrying the depiction of the Hindu deity (most of whom haven't seen the show), I don't think this would have hurt box office. There are committed theatregoers who don't rush to see theatre of disability, however.

That's a bigger issue than can be addressed here, but it is worth pointing out its flip side. Australia is actually a world leader in the area of disability arts, largely to do with the de-institutionalisation of the 80s which saw people with disabilities moving from private and state care into the community, finding more employment, independence and social visibility than ever before. This hasn't occurred around the world, and it makes us the envy of some. There are countless ongoing problems, of course, and access isn't universal, care is far from perfect, participation in public life still riddled with discrimination, etc, etc. But it's of note that Melbourne can support several disability arts festivals and a healthy number of groups which produce fine work, even if it often goes unnoticed by many.

I didn't know anything about FOG's Cumulus Nimbus going in, and it took me a few minutes to work out what I was seeing. By the halfway mark I was enthralled. It's a large-scale work (I didn't count the numbers on-stage but it was more than a dozen). It's not the theatre or physical theatre made by the likes of Back to Back or Rawcus, but is made up of dance sequences loosely improvised by the performers around particular provocations. The mass scenes which book-end the piece are fine, but it's in the solos and duets that a seductive and sophisticated dynamic emerges. Each is accompanied by an improvised score performed by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, and the interplay between movement and sound is absolutely live; you can never tell who is responding to whom; or, rather, the relationship is so syncretic that the question doesn't even make sense.

A lot of classically trained dancers find it very hard to unlearn the choreography that's been etched into their bodies (that anti-choreography forms the impetus behind Deborah Hay's work, for example). I suppose from a dancer's perspective Cumulus Nimbus would be the equivalent of 'outsider art', then, but if it achieves the goal of so many highly-skilled performers that conclusion might be flawed. Moreover, where shows as Back to Back's Ganesh explicitly address the agency of the performers (is this really their own work?) there's no such question whatsoever here. We're not only watching the performers create their own expression, we're watching it happen in real time, right before us. At times the enactments of decisions were breathtaking, and induced audible gasps from the audience.

That sizeable audience was the other revelation for me, here. At least half were people with some form of disability themselves, and many found deeply personal connections to particular sequences. A movement that appeared entirely abstract to me would elicit a murmur or nod from someone who clearly found in it the articulation of an experience or thought or relationship that I missed. What's more, the whole show had me reflecting on the idea of arts access from the other end – not simply who gets a chance to be on a stage, but who gets to watch it. What are the barriers that face someone with very particular needs, someone who requires easy access to a bathroom, for instance, or who is very vocal throughout a production? Do they have the opportunity to see our leading actors on the main stage? Are there cinema screenings that cater to them? Live music? I honestly don't know, but would like to.

One thing for certain, though, was that this was the most diverse audience of which I've ever been a member, and that's saying something.

Theatreworks, season ended.

REALEYES

realeyes featured a number of performers I recognised from FOG as well as some familiar Rawcus faces. Its ambitions aren't the same as Cumulus Nimbus'; here, the lives of its cast make up the matter, and their hopes and anxieties are played out for the bulk of the piece. It wasn't as successful for me, as a lot of sequences seemed to stop just when they were getting interesting, and the whole seemed disjointed. I did get a strong sense of a number of the personalities behind it, though, and a few sequences (one monologue in which a performer described the clouds in her head, especially) offered glimpses of real beauty.

The audience here was, again, small, but it was interesting to see so many actors associated with Red Stitch in the crowd (RS ensemble member Sarah Sutherland co-directed the show). If the general public isn't rushing to see theatre of disability, it's good that people who do work in the arts are seeking it out.

(And on a side note, I saw that MTC were looking for a deaf male actor for a production next year, which is encouraging. One of my only quibbles with the company's current production of Clybourne Park was the casting of a hearing actor in a deaf role, though it wasn't a major objection and sort of fell away in the second half. I don't imagine there are too many roles for deaf actors on our main stages, though, so it could have been an opportunity missed. Good to see that opportunity being made the most of next year, hey?)

Chapel Off Chapel, season ended.

FRINGE FESTIVAL PART ONE, OR, THE FURRY BELLY OF DELIGHT

2011-09-29T15:24:00.002+10:00

Apologies for the din. All that hacking and spluttering is just me yanking on the starter cord on this here blog, trying to get it running for festival season. My, it's been a while. Feels a bit like an ill-advised reunion special of a bad sitcom. Still, with Fringe a week in and Melbourne Festival about to hit, I thought I'd see how long I can keep this thing juiced up to cover some of that territory. So here, unedited, ill-thought-through and dashed off faster than is clinically recommended are some ponderings on a bunch of show I've already caught. Entry one: COMEDY.

REBELS AND RADICALS

I’m a pretty free spirit. I’m content spending most of my days pottering around the vegetable patch, checking the water tanks for unwanted chalk deposits, tending to the jerry-rigged wind farm I’ve assembled on my roof from hard rubbish refuse (while battling the fascist local council and their Orwellian planning permits), sometimes letting off steam of an evening by talking to the endangered Powerful Owls who live in the area and pondering the animal wisdom that will vanish with their passing. Occasionally I’ll stop to chat with one of my neighbours, the friendly banter about our chances in the Grand Final also an opportunity to slip in a few consciousness-raising comments about regional salinity problems and my embattled cultural heritage. And when the defenseless need defending, don’t think a letter to the editor is beneath this jaded old soul. In short, I have walked this earth and find it good, but know that some things are worth standing up for.

Education is an obvious candidate for standing up, even when it's done sitting down. I've grown up with a generation who can't imagine the fact that a tertiary education in Australia was once free- that there was a time when people could go to university with no more expense demanded than a cheerio wave to the benign government official handing out enrolment forms.

But anyone with any experience in the arts can tell you this for nothing: you can give yourself a full university education simply by attending student theatre. There’s never been a student production that didn’t betray the courses its makers have enjoyed most. You can tell the pomo fans, the gender studies majors, the classics kids from curtain up.

What you’re also watching when you’re watching student theatre is this: you’re watching somebody else learning. And that in itself is an interesting thing to me, though for most people I imagine it’s a load of wank since the idea of assisting in someone else’s learning is pretty alien. Also: a lot of student theatre is a load of wank, too. Which makes the audience more crucial. If a student making theatre is to learn, it’s through the audience that they’ll do so. Some of those early lessons include: your audience may just be you and your friends; a broader audience doesn’t mean a more appreciative audience; audiences who don’t share your interests aren’t necessarily wrong; you have more learning to do. These are probably the lessons I hope emerging theatremakers learn early on. Once you’ve got them down, you can actually start making what you want without getting all worked up about how nobody understands just what a genius you are.

Same deal in comedy: while someone grows as a performer you can spot their influences, interests, prejudices. Most often the influences are other comics, but there's another trend that I find enormously fascinating.

We've reached a point whereby History Comedy is a thing. And Science Comedy and Statistics Comedy and all kinds of other educational humour (ouch, strike that description) but my focus here is on History Comedy. Andrew McClelland probably leads the pack locally, but there are plenty of others plundering the books for nuggets of entertainment based on real events.

Micah Higbed is one such man. Rebels and Radicals turns to Australia's historical roster of upstarts, revolutionaries, utopians and subversives as inspiration for an hour of stand-up that isn't consistently funny but is entertaining (and informative) enough to keep you intrigued every minute of the while. Did you know there was a King of the Australian Empire? I didn't! And that a New Australia was settled in Paraguay by malcontents looking for a better alternative to our nation (albeit a racist and pretty awful-sounding one)? And it's STILL THERE? The late, great Charlie Perkins also gets a solid go-round and I was compelled to go straight home and read up on the guy once the show ended. These are the little morsels of fact that make up Higbed's show, and while they don't add up to constant laughs they're doled out with a heaping helping of gags that prevent the evening from ever approaching the dustiness of an actual lecture.

Higbed himself doesn't have the manic energy of many factoid comics – there's never a sense that he's trying to persuade you that this is interesting stuff. Rather, he finds it endlessly intriguing and probably assumes you will too. There's nowt geeky about the feller either; he's just a friendly dude who happens to have a few smarts to bang together. Which is a welcome change in stand-up.

At Southpaw, Fitzroy, until October 9.

ANNE EDMONDS – MY BANJO'S NAME IS STEVEN

Someone recently said that Anne Edmonds has funny in her bones, and the phrase has stuck – I've heard or read the same sentiment a dozen times since. It's entirely true. When she passes on I hope she donates her corpse to comedy so someone can work out where the hell she gets it.

Edmonds is one of the rare comics who makes me laugh just thinking about her act. It's as if she was made for a universe where all laws are slightly different, but somehow ended up in this one. She's a bundle of contradictions: fearless but self-conscious, focused yet casual. You can't tell if she knows exactly what she's doing or has no idea, if she's hilarious because of or despite her awkwardness. The line separating admirable bravery from wince-inducing revelation is a fine one and Edmonds pole vaults it while suffering an attack of explosive diarrhea (figuratively).

The show itself is a collection of anecdotes and the occasional song (she plays a mean banjo and has an accompanist on keyboard). On paper they sound pretty routine, but Edmonds knows that no account of a country netball team's trip to Warrnambool is complete without someone screaming “GET IT OUT OF MY ARSE GET IT OUT OF MY ARSE!” At times Edmonds comes across as a kind of filthy nana after one too many sherries, at others like a teen who hasn't quite worked out the rules of life. I know she's been mentored by John Clarke and like him has a really unique shtick that's hard to convey. So many comedians have the self-aggrandising thing down pat while really squaring up as all hat, no cowboy. Just as many go the other route, turning self-deprecation into a form of battle-dress. Edmonds is neither of these creatures.

She's only got a few more shows to go, and comedy-wise she's one of my top picks of this year's Fringe.

At Fringe Hub, Lithuanian club until Sept 30 (tomorrow).

BART FREEBAIRN IN UNDERGROUND AWESOME QUEST

I think I can speak for the entire audience when I say this show had a terrifying start. That's because the entire audience was me! Ok, ok, and a housemate I'd invited at the last minute. That, er, smallish attendance is where the terrifying bit comes in. Stand-up to an audience of two puts a lot of pressure on everyone in the room. I don't know if I can feign interest in a friend for an hour, let alone a comedian. Bart Freebairn turned it into one of the most enjoyable experiences of live performance I can recall.

Stepping off the stage, he pulled up a chair and sat down with us. What followed felt less a performance than a conversation, even though I didn't say a word for the forty-odd minute running time. A fourth latecomer joined us shortly in, and wasn't at all put off by the sight of three people just sitting together while one told funny stories. The show didn't even end, really, since it eventually dissolved into a chat that was the logical extension of what came before.

The ostensible conceit here is a quest to discover the essence of awesomeness: Freebairn picks at the notion of the hipster, scours his childhood for the things that seemed most magical, and tries to locate where awesomeness might reside in his grandparents' world. There are some terrific moments of humour but the intimate dynamic meant that we weren't being performed to, but were a part of the performance itself. Like spending a bit of time with a friend-of-a-friend who's a first-rate yarn-spinner.

We live in a collection of warrior cultures. We raise our kids to be fight-ready, in war-zones or job markets or sporting arenas or affairs of the heart. They're drilled in campos of intellectual violence. We are old children wary of play. In comedy as elsewhere – stand-ups talk of slaying them in the aisles, killing a routine, nailing a punchline, blowing an audience away.

It's refreshing to see a comedian who looks not to murder but to seduce. I can't imagine what this would be like if Freebairn was playing to a full house; I'd happily catch it again if numbers picked up, since it would be a completely different experience. But is it wrong to be glad that a performer didn't pull in an audience, just once? Because I am.

At Caz Reitop's Dirty Secrets, Collingwood, until October 9.

ME PREGNANT

Nick Coyle was one third of Pig Island, a group who pretty much set the benchmark for the art comedy scene that's emerged in recent years. Depending on your preferences, it's a mode that either cleverly merges stand-up and sketch humour with off-kilter absurdity, in-joke allusions and a kind of indie cool, or gives hipsters a chance to indulge in excessive whimsy and deliberately crap stagecraft. I've long been a fan of Pig Island, but I can appreciate that their stuff isn't for everyone.

Coyle's first solo show at Fringe is certainly in keeping with his former company, but shows a flair for writing and a range of characterisation that probably goes beyond it. It's similar to fellow Pig Claudia O'Doherty's Monster of the Deep 3D but where her shows are all about Claudia qua Claudia, Coyle sinks himself into the fictional figures he plays here, never really producing a persona as Coyle himself.

What we do get are a teenage girl who slays a ravenous monster to save her village (which then shuns her as a witch), and the godforsaken offspring of the beast on a mission to avenge the murder of its mother. The setting is deliciously anachronistic (decidedly medieval, but the baker rides a segway, for instance). It's like a cross between Beowulf, Mean Girls, The Little Mermaid (Disney version) and The League of Gentlemen. With excellent writing. And really funny characters. The heroine is introduced as The Miller's daughter, Emmaline Miller, and if you don't get that gag you might scratch your head at much of this. Indeed, there's some very odd references I still don't get – what Amelia Earhart has to do with any of it – but that's partly the point.

This kind of comedy can be dangerous. Not tightrope-walking dangerous – more like flinging a teabag over the neighbour's fence. It won't offend, but if it's not your bag it might leave you with a wrinkled nose. But if you're unafraid to go an hour in the presence of a prancing man in black smock and bright red tights, go for it. Or you could, you know, just go shopping and text a bunch of friends for no reason. I'd suggest the former will leave a more lasting impression.

At Fringe Hub, Lithuanian Club until Sept 30 (tomorrow).

NAUSEA'S REPRIEVE

This sketch show features a rubber chicken, along with all that implies. Given that the title seems a nod to two novels by Sartre, I was expecting some kind of existential humour but what results is closer to the dystopian obsessions of your standard undergrad show: soul-crushing corporations, Soylent Green-style science, plot resolution via aforementioned rubber chicken. The company members are clearly pretty young. Of interest is the curious and inexplicable cross-gender casting – everyone plays the opposite sex, but nothing is really made of it (I didn't even notice until halfway through). Not much else to say on this one.

At The Owl & The Pussycat, Richmond, until Oct 1 (Saturday).

LOU SANZ – NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN

Comedy and horror and pornography are often seen as less serious modes of artistic expression because they implicitly seek to make us leak stuff involuntarily from our bodies. I can't imagine a horror film that would literally cause a person to soil their pants but it's still the kind of terminology we use when describing fear, and we indicate a great laugh due to the apparent crying/pissing it provokes.

Lou Sanz's hour of storytelling didn't call for a red-faced trip to the drycleaner for me, but its confluence of comedy, porn and very bleak matter most certainly aims for a visceral response, even if it's just a hearty chuckle. She sits reading from a journal, once or twice pulling out a large sketchpad to illustrate things, but this relatively sedate staging is in contrast to the lurid subjects she vividly describes. There's the wonderfully harsh original tale “Annie, You'll Never Amount to Anything,” a revision of The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe in which the titular lady is desperately sex-obsessed but hobbled by the circumstances of her dwelling, and a reading from Enid Blyton's (very real) children's book “Mr Pinkwhistle Interferes” that needs no added colours or flavours to take on sinister connotations.

I think it's the storytelling framework that prevents this from reaching bladder-evacuating hilarity, and the whole could be a little more varied in tone. Sanz leaves quite a bit of space for the audience to fill in their own meaning. Of course space can be hard to interpret it is, or it'd be called “English” or something. But for those who like a bucket of wrong dumped on their tales, Sanz gets it awfully right.

At The Workers Club, Fitzroy, until Oct 1 (Saturday).

A Brief Ramble on the "Funny Funny" Debacle

2011-04-21T12:44:00.000+10:00

Oops, we did it again. Someone in my not-so-esteemed profession rolled out the old “women can't be funny” line and folks got riled up (myself included). In this case it was a review on the Herald-Sun's website which seems to have since been removed. The offending line began “very few female comedians can pull off funny funny...” and while I don't know where the sentence was headed, there's enough right there to give you that face you pull when you uncover what's been giving off that persistent aroma at the back of the pantry.

But it's a whiffy attitude that no amount of scrubbing can seem to remove. Every year during the comedy festival it makes itself known in one way or another – check the comments on any review site and you find throwbacks asserting the genetic inability of women to be funny; in a subtler, but perhaps more insidious form, there are the regular articles showcasing “funny women” which only work to reassure us that such a thing as an oddity.

I'm not going to argue that women can be funny because it should be a goddamn given by now. And clearly, compiling lists of women who prove the point hasn't worked to change much opinion. There's something more endemic to the culture of comedy – or the culture that watches comedy – that needs some investigation. Let's check out the back of the cupboard.

When someone states that women can't be funny, they're usually talking about a specific kind of funny. I don't think I've ever come across anyone claiming that women can't be funny in theatrical comedy – in comic plays, for instance. And it's pretty much a given that TV comedy features countless brilliant female talents: the anti-XX brigade can probably still find the genius in Kath & Kim or Ab Fab or 30 Rock or Roseanne. Same deal with film. The only kind of 'funny' women apparently can't do, it seems, is stand-up.

So let's amend the statement “women can't pull off funny funny” to “women can't pull off stand-up”, which seems to be the real argument here. And to clear up another point, it's not the sight of femininity in stand-up causing all the moaning: plenty of male comics imitate some kind of 'femininity,' from the ain't-no-thang cross-dressing of Eddie Izzard to Sam Newman-style misogynistic parody. People can laugh at a man playing a woman (and, historically, there's been a rich tradition of women playing men, from the breeches roles of Restoration comedy to the 'mashers' of the Victorian stage). So, again, let's edit the problem a bit: not “women can't pull off stand-up,” but “for some reason, today, I can't laugh at an actual woman performing stand-up.”

Well, obviously some of us can laugh at an actual woman performing stand-up. Just as obviously, some of us can't. Why not?

To even begin to answer that, we have to look away from individual comics and turn our attention instead to an archetype of the comedian – one function that stand-up plays in contemporary culture. The solitary man with the mic addressing what's wrong with the world, pointing out our own foibles, and giving us a way to laugh at life's absurdity is a long way from the comic of film or TV or theatre. He's not part of an ensemble. He's not part of a story. He's self-made, and we pay for his wisdom. We relinquish our own authority for an hour – or a tight five – in order to allow him the authority to explain something of our lot to us.

The real model of the stand-up comic isn't the clown or the storyteller. It's closer to the dad giving a speech at a wedding. Historically, he grew out of the master of ceremonies who controlled the unruly crowd of the music hall or vaudeville show; later, he was the entertainer who provided relief for the troops during wartime. In each of these situations, the laughter he sought was balanced by the authority he exerted – he gave us reason for high spirits, but reminded us of our place at the same time. The stand-up comic is no different. We laugh at his jibes, while waiting, terrified, for the moment when his attention will settle on us.

The good stand-up, in Western culture, is the good father.

He makes us feel safe while keeping us reminded of his power to cut us down with a word. He commands his crowd. If he falters, he dies. If he dies, it unsettles us. The entire performer-audience dynamic of stand-up is geared towards this relationship (and I won't write an essay on the Oedipal dynamic of hecklers, but I could).

This paternalism plays out across the spectrum of popular culture – anxieties about appropriate and preferable father figures can be read into everything from Shakespeare to Star Wars. Whole books have been written about 70s and 80s cinema's crisis of paternity, citing absent dads from ET to The Exorcist as proof of an ongoing search for a new model of masculinity authority. And this seems to me one of the suppressed drives of stand-up: do you prefer your Jason Byrne, dragging his punters around on stage in a cardboard box while yelling till he's tomato-faced? Or your David O'Doherty, gently serenading you with quirky ditties that maintain a space for innocence? Or do you like to see men failing to command respect, their shows deliberately falling apart or dissecting their inner workings and demystifying our own desires towards comedy? Who's your daddy?

Obviously it doesn't have to be this way. And just as obviously there are plenty of folks who don't need stand-up to play out some personal-cultural male authority crisis in order to find the funnies. The whole relationship between performer and audience can hinge on completely different processes; at the same time, I don't think the culture's going to change in a hurry, just as I don't think people who only want theatre to be light escapism or film to be action-packed spectacle or dinner to include at least one portion of meat will be going away any time soon. There's way more going on in here than whether something's 'good' or not.

But it's not all subjective, either. "Funny" is a relationship between performer and audience, and this is made even more complex by the social nature of stand-up. Anyone who's been to a couple of shows will know that the “funny” in a room empty but for a handful of people is different to the “funny” of a hall packed with cacklers. It might be precisely the same show on offer, but our laughter is inflected by the crowd in which we find ourselves.

So if you're watching a stand-up – of whatever sort – and wondering why everyone's losing their shit while you can't find a thing to smile at, check what's really going in your head. Do you need a man in front of you to reassure you it's ok to laugh? Do you need the crowd around you to let you know the same thing? Do we laugh because we're honestly confronted by something new, or unexpected, or does laughter come from somewhere much more conservative, more reactionary? Do we ever laugh at something with which we fundamentally disagree? Do we ever laugh at a person whose very identity, in some way, doesn't signify something much more than the words coming out of their mouth? Fact is, nobody is “funny funny” on their own. Look away from the stage, and start asking some different questions entirely.

Reviews: Dance Massive

2011-03-23T18:42:00.000+11:00

THE WEIGHT OF THE THING LEFT ITS MARK

By Shaun McLeod

I'm just going to have to accept that my job brings with it the very small chance that on any given night a flying soup spoon is going to hit me in the privates. This is a conclusion I've reached after much reflection brought on by a flying soup spoon hitting me in the privates. I can't come up with statistical proof that I'm more endangered than most in this regard, but when I compare the number of times most people have been hit in the privates with a flying soup spoon (0) and the number of times I've been hit in the privates with a flying soup spoon (1) I think there must be something to it.

You know, now that I think about it, it might have been a dessert spoon. The offending piece of cutlery was just one of hundreds of knives, forks and spoons which were employed for various obscure purposes by the four dancers of The Weight of the Thing Left Its Mark, but perhaps ironically it was the thing that had the most impact on me. It wasn't much of an impact, though, and it left no actual mark or anything.

The Weight of the Thing... is improvisational dance directed and choreographed by Shaun McLeod. I've read others praising the piece but I didn't really find myself responding to it in any particular manner. Improvised dance can often leave me that way – it's as if I'm being presented with a bunch of answers without being informed of the question. It can be surprising, but if I don't have an inkling why this movement or phrase was chosen over all of the other possibilities which might have occurred, it can be the choreographic equivalent of peach loggerhead very adagio the crepeee bullfrog bullfrog inodoro. The soup spoon thing was an accident (OR WAS IT) but with impro, the distinction between accident and intention can be fuzzy.

You could say the same thing about someone like Deborah Hay, whose technique literally involves dancers addressing themselves to particular questions in the moment without letting the audience know what those questions might be. But at least I know Hay's philosophy quite well, and can see how an individual performer is embracing the kind of challenges she sets out, if not the particular problems themselves. It might just be, then, that I don't know Shaun McLeod's work, so I don't know what's informing the choices of his dancers.

Season ended.

MUSIC FOR IMAGINED DANCES

By Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey

There's not a terribly strong critical community discussing sound art in Australia today. There are voices out there, but compared to artists working in most other art forms I imagine sound artists have a pretty tough time being heard, so to speak. And I don't claim it as an area I'm particularly schooled in, either, though I know there's a very rich tradition of avant garde aural art that's being furthered by some very talented people in this country today. It would be hard to visit this exhibition/installation/event without gaining an inkling of appreciation for that tradition, too: it's worthwhile even just as an impressionistic historical record.

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey have assembled an enormous archive of music with a connection to dance – from works specifically composed for choreography to music that inspired people who compose(d) for dance. The track listing is played randomly for the audience, who are left on their own in an installation setting lit by a dazzling, subtly shifting lighting array. The effect isn't immediate. It takes a while to feel immersed in the space, and it's recommended that you try to stay there for half an hour. I managed that easily, and could have stayed longer. Best of all, I was the only person around when I visited the piece, and this made it an even more powerful experience.

What shocked me was how gently disorienting the whole shebang can be. At one point a vocal line emerged during a song (by Ligeti, I think) and I jumped, suddenly sure there was someone else in the room with me. Later I was a bit afraid again, for a different reason. Near the end I thought I might be having a mild stroke, but it was just my eyes having trouble focusing on the shadows I was casting on a wall. All of this was inspired by a bunch of songs on random. It's a really good selection.

And dance seems somehow intrinsic to their composition. Even though there are no dancers in this work, it's hard not to start to see a dance in your mind's eye, or feel one in your body. Maybe it's just your imagination attempting to fill the void where the choreography should be (it's part of Dance Massive, after all) but I did have the distinct feeling that some music, or sound art, has a connection to choreography that's much deeper, more embedded.

Anyway, it's free and it's on days and some evenings until Sunday night. At Dancehouse; bookings not required.

IN GLASS

By Narelle Benjamin

This is beautiful dance performed by beautiful dancers. There's no arguing that. You'd be hard pressed to find a pair of performers more watchable than Kristina Chan and Paul White. It left me a little cold, though. While it's technically elegant and immaculately danced, I think it could have benefited from some close dramaturgy – there are ideas in play, but they're thrown around in a loose manner that doesn't match the amazing accuracy of the dancers themselves.

The central motif is the mirror. Chan and White interact with mirrors large and small, echo each other's movements, dance with video projections of themselves or make reference to countless stories of mirrors, from Alice in Wonderland to Sleeping Beauty to the myth of Narcissus. In one particularly striking sequence White sprouts mirrors like wings, tripling his reflection so that he becomes a kind of vain Cerberus. I'm not really sure why, except that it looked great.

There are moments when the reflections have a strong impact. At times it seems as though there are four, six, eight dancers on stage at the same time, though the conscious mind knows that isn't the case. It seems a potent evocation of the mirror stage of psychoanalytic thought, when we misrecognise ourselves in the glass, not comprehending that the reflection is our own, and pondering the strange power we have over this puppet's movements. But for all its power, I wasn't particularly energised by In Glass, and was left wondering if I'd missed something.

Season ended.

SWEAT

By Branch Nebula

I have no idea who Branch Nebula are but this show was a sheer delight. Not that its subject matter is particularly joyous – it addresses the lives of menial and industrial workers in our cities, from cleaners to hospitality staff, in ways that are often troubling (you learn more about bacteria than you might want to know, for instance). But the cleverness of the presentation can't fail to charm.

It commences with the audience wandering into the playing space, where there are no chairs, no set, no props. There's a sole performer, who immediately begins to explain what we've done wrong so far and how we should appropriately respond to the rest of the work. We're to empathise with the situations of performers when required, and at other times maintain a cool objective distance in order to appreciate the points being made. She then asks audience members to help her remove items of clothing one by one and, almost naked, suffers some kind of terrible violence (a factory accident? A workplace assault?) She lies on the floor in abject humiliation, screaming at us to look away. It's a sublime theatrical moment – we're there to look. That's part of our job description. And over the next hour, we look at people we normally don't see, despite their constant presence in our lives.

This is dance theatre, but the spread of performance styles it engages with is broad. Breakdance, contemporary, martial arts, parkour, song, spoken word, even soccer. Soccer! There's a riveting sequence in which a man messing around with a soccer ball – the way he might on a lunch break – begins using a woman's body as a sort of human goalpost, manipulating her more and more violently as a tool for his entertainment. There's no didactic point to be made, but the wealth of associations it conjures is gripping.

The coup de theatre comes in a late scene, where a crew of serving staff, grins fixed like a rictus, seat a group of audience members at a long table for a feast. Without revealing too much, the culinary presentation quickly comes to resemble the old Pro Hart Stainmaster ad. The look of unbridled glee on the face of a kid who planted herself front and centre seemed to express what everyone else was thinking right then. This is messy art – and the dance styles on offer are a long way from the cool, technically precise formalism of a lot of Australian choreography. But we live in messy times, and this production seems to have nailed something of the world we live in despite its ragged edges. It seems fitting that one of the questions I left with was: who's going to clean all of this up?

Season ended.

Green Room Awards 2010

2011-03-21T23:10:00.000+11:00

Here's ya winners, folks - reading through this list reminded me of what an exceptional year 2010 was for Melbourne performance. Then again, this week I was thinking about how 2011 has already thrown some amazing stuff in my direction, so perhaps the exception is becoming the norm. Either way, things are looking pretty healthy.

Theatre – Alternative and Hybrid Performance

Outstanding Production: Pin Drop – Tamara Saulwick

Composition & Sound Design: Jethro Woodward – Irony is not Enough (Fragment 31)

Production Design: Claire Britton, Matt Priest, Danny Egger – Conceptual Design – Hole in the Wall (Matt Priest & Claire Britton / Next Wave Festival)

Video Design: Fleur Elise Nobel – 2 Dimensional Life of Her

Mise-en-Scene: The Bougainville Photoplay Project – Paul Dwyer

Site-Specific Production: Southern Crossings – One Step at a Time Like This

Cabaret

Best Production: Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert – Gasworks & Arts Victoria in association with Melbourne Workers Theatre and Yana Alana and tha Paranas

Artiste: Yana Alana – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert

Ensemble: Yana Alana and the Paranas – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert

Original Songs: Yana Alana and tha Paranas – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert

Director: Anni Davey – Yana Alana and the Paranas in Concert

Musical Direction: Sarah Ward, Bec Matthews & Ania Reynolds – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert

Innovative Use of Form: Emily Taylor – Hello You

Contribution to Cabaret: Kaye Sera

Dance

Music/Sound Composition and Performance: Ezio Bosso & George Gorga – We Unfold (Sydney Dance Company)

Design: Jacob Nash – Set – Artefact (Bangarra Dance Theatre)

Male Dancer: Tim Ohl – Mix Tape (Chunky Move)

Female Dancer: Emily Amisano – We Unfold (Sydney Dance Company)

Ensemble: Bangarra Dance Theatre – Of Earth and Sky

Concept & Realisation: Private Dances (Next Wave Festival & Natalie Cursio)

Betty Pounder Award for Choreography:
TIE: Frances Rings – Artefact (Bangarra Dance Theatre)AND: Stephanie Lake – Mix Tape (Chunky Move)

Theatre – Independent

Male Performer: Thomas Conroy (Henry) – Something Natural But Very Childish (Dirty Pretty Theatre / La Mama)

Female Performer: Justine Campbell (Jane Franklin) – The Fate of Franklin and his Gallant Crew (Four Larks Theatre)

Ensemble: Us (Grit Theatre / The Function Room)

Design: Sebastian Peters-Lazaro & Ellen Strasser – Set & Properties Design – Body of work (Four Larks Theatre)

Lighting Design: Bluebottle – Ben Cobham with Jenny Hector – Lighting Design & Realisation – Madeleine (Jenny Kemp & Black Sequin Productions / Arts House)

Sound / Composition: Mat Diafos Sweeney (Four Larks Theatre) – Music/Sound/Composition – Body of work

Direction: Gary Abrahams – Body of work

Production: Us (Grit Theatre / The Function Room)

Music Theatre

Direction: Richard Eyre & Matthew Bourne – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Costume and/or Set Design: Bob Crowley – Set & Costumes – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Lighting Design: Trudy Dalgleish – Hairspray (Dainty Consolidated Entertainment / Roadshow Live)

Sound: Peter Grubb – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Choreography: Matthew Bourne & Stephen Mear – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Musical Direction: Michael Tyack – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Female Artist – Leading Role: Verity Hunt-Ballard – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Male Artist – Leading Role: Geoffrey Rush – The Drowsy Chaperone (Melbourne Theatre Company)

Male Artist – Featured Role: Philip Quast – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Female Artist – Featured Role: Esther Hannaford – Hairspray (Dainty Consolidated Entertainment / Roadshow Live)

Featured Ensemble or Full Ensemble Performance: Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Best Production: Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Opera

Production: La Sonnambula – Opera Australia

Design: Adam Gardir (set) and Harriet Oxley (costume) – Angelique (Victorian Opera)

Female Lead: Emma Matthews (Amina) – La Sonnambula (Opera Australia)

Male Lead: Peter Coleman-Wright (Harry Joy) – Bliss (Opera Australia)

Female Support: Catherine Carby (Orovsky) – Fledermaus and (Hippolyta) – Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Australia)

Male Support: Conal Coad (Bottom/Pyramus) – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Australia)

Conductor: Paul Kildea – The Turn of the Screw (Victorian Opera) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Australia)

Director: Julie Edwardson – La Sonnambula (Opera Australia)

Lighting: Nigel Levings – Bliss (Opera Australia)

Theatre - Companies

Lighting Design: Rachel Burke – Moth (Malthouse Theatre / Arena Theatre Company)

Set/Costume Design: Shaun Gurton (set) – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)

Sound / Composition: Jethro Woodward (composer) – Moth (Malthouse Theatre / Arena Theatre Company)

Female Actor: Alison Whyte (Queen Elizabeth) – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)

Male Actor: Ewen Leslie (Richard) – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)

Direction: Simon Phillips – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)

Production: Thyestes – Malthouse Theatre / Hayloft Project

Ensemble: Thyestes – Malthouse Theatre / Hayloft Project

Association Awards

Lifetime Achievement Award: Carrillo Gantner AO

Technical Achievement Award: David Miller, Production Manager, Malthouse Theatre

Award for Outstanding Contribution to Melbourne Theatre: Lisle Jones

Best New Original Writing for the Melbourne Stage: Declan Greene – Moth (Malthouse Theatre / Arena Theatre Company)

Best Adaptation for the Melbourne Stage: Simon Stone, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan & Mark Winter – Thyestes after Seneca (Malthouse Theatre / The Hayloft Project)

Review: Save for Crying

2011-03-01T16:47:00.000+11:00

SAVE FOR CRYING

By Angus Cerini.

You may have missed your chance to see Angus Cerini's latest; I have a feeling it might have sold out the rest of its run. If not, do whatever it takes to score a ticket – it's not just his finest work to date but one of the finest pieces of theatre in a long time, and lingers in the memory long after it's over.

I won't write too much about the specifics of the show here because part of its power is derived from the experience of entering its unique world on your own trajectory, trying to determine just what it is you're encountering. I did want to throw up a few thoughts in the meantime, though, if only as a way of thinking through the eerie dynamic that sets the piece apart from most frameworks of interpretation we might bring to the production. In some ways it seems so reminiscent of territory explored by Beckett, Pinter or Keene, but it's also utterly distinct. I'm trying to pinpoint just how.

The outsider is probably the key figure of modernism – the alienated individual existing within but not as a part of society. He (it's usually a he) is Ellison's Invisible Man, Camus' l'etranger, Chaplin's little tramp, Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Dostoevsky's Underground Man, and pretty much everyone Beckett ever wrote. I doubt you could get through high school English without discovering a whole bunch of outsiders to add to the list. The modernist outsider is usually a tragic but noble figure, sometimes comic but in that deep, melancholy way. And being an outsider, his existence at least implies a majority, a norm from which he is excluded or made absent. It really, thoroughly sucks to be him.

What's so powerful about Save for Crying is that it doesn't seem to be an Outsider story. The two central figures of Luv and Alfie most definitely fit the bill – we're left constantly wondering exactly what their situation is, and throughout the show I felt I spotted references to homelessness, incarceration, mental illness, physical disability, institutionalisation, addiction, illiteracy, abuse and racial vilification. These are rarely pinned down – victimisation seems to be the ocean these people swim in.

But they're also not outsiders, since there's nothing in particular that they're outside of. If there's one aspect of the production that almost everyone I've spoken to has remarked upon, it's how close to these characters we become, and how their strangeness (in language and action) come to seem entirely normal within this world. It's a remarkable achievement.

The only way I can think of to understand it is to discard the model of the outsider versus society in favour of the older, theological distinction between the elect and the preterite. Preterition was a pretty obscure branch of eschatology in which scholars suggested that the End of Days wasn't something we're heading towards, but something that has already occurred. All of the biblical prophecies have already taken place, judgement has been rendered, and our eternal fates secured. God has decided the few He will save – the Elect, or in some translations, Elite – and the rest of us poor sods will forever be preterite, the passed over.

If there's some currency to this esoteric bit of doctrine, it's that the preterite aren't the tiny fraction of people excluded from the warm embrace of contemporary civilisation but are the mass itself, everyone who knows that they will never be given the key to the inner sanctum, because they were never supposed to. The state of preterition is entered when one realises that our place in today's world system has already been decided, and that the structure of that system prevents any true escape or self-ascendancy.

Save for Crying goes one further, too – Luv and Alfie's tormentor, Ratspunk, is himself one of the preterite, just as anyone who is handed the robes of the Elite today (celebrities or politicians or the moneyed classes) must realise that to truly reach the top of the tree would require them to become a concept, an abstraction, a disembodied angel. Better to live in the muck than scrape off your skin trying to escape it.

La Mama Theatre until March 6.

Review: Apologia

2011-02-28T17:30:00.000+11:00

APOLOGIA

Melbourne Theatre Company.

There's a certain kind of theatre that strives to give an impression of significance while leaving me feeling as if I've just watched a quadratic equation being solved. Apologia seems fresh from the mould: it observes the classical unities of action, space and time; derives its conflict from generational differences; injects references to another great artist to imbue itself with authority (in this case, Giotto); brings everyone together through a token situation (birthday party); features characters who represent strict ideological positions (US evangelism; 60s socialism; post-capitalist liberalism; self-obsessed consumerism); uses the excuse of celebratory drinking to allow these figures to 'loosen up' and have a bit of verbal biffo; lets the complex fissures between these discursive positions slide into individualistic, personal differences; presents a 'shocking' revelation or two that interrupts everything that's gone before; everyone has a bit of a moment and learns something about themselves and leaves in the morning.

Apologia has it all, but somehow flips the equation around. It's as if playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell has taken the form of the safe, middle-class family drama not as the desired end his script will try to reach, but as the starting point for something that will problematise, rather than resolve, the weltanschauung this kind of theatre posits. Then again, it could well be that it's the performances this production offers which make it more than the sum of its parts. On the page, the central figure of Kristin Miller could be read as a reactionary caricature of social idealism, but there's no way of watching Robyn Nevin in this role without being on her side all the way.

Don Parties On addressed the failed legacy of 60s activism and the 70s cultural revolution by turning to the audience, shrugging palms up and raising its eyebrows with a “whayagonnado?” Apologia charts similar territory while asking its audience “what did you do?” Nevin's Miller can't be written off as a type, or a relic, or a judgement, but is a startling character accorded a great deal of dignity here. She tried to change the world and, along the way, caused a fair bit of damage to people in her care, but unlike most dramas of this sort the underlying hum doesn't seem to be suggesting that utopian dreams are always doomed to failure and we should therefore restrict ourselves to cultivating our gardens.

To take seriously the beliefs of someone other than yourself is a fine starting point for any playwright, and Campbell's ability to do just that might be what marks this play. Even a born-again Christian is allowed some of the piece's most affecting moments, though once more it's actor Laura Gordon's performance that makes this such a powerful turn (and really, Gordon's work with Red Stitch only reminded me how that company should be on the MTC casting department's speed dial).

If the play follows the form of a straight-up conservative drama it does so in a way that begs its audience to understand, rather than decide upon, the validity of all views expressed therein. I have no idea where Campbell stands on the beliefs of any of his characters here. But as John Cassavetes put it: “To tell the truth as you see it, incidentally, is not necessarily the truth. To tell the truth as someone else sees it is, to me, much more important and enlightening.”

Fairfax Theatre, the Arts Centre, until 9 April.

Review: Ruben Guthrie

2011-02-22T10:57:00.000+11:00

RUBEN GUTHRIE

Red Stitch Actors Theatre.

As Picasso put it, every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. Picasso was a bit of a dick, but I often think it's a nice way to think about narrative. I don't often think that, really. I just thought it was a good way of introducing the point I want to make, and starting with a quote by someone like Picasso might lend an air of authority to proceedings. Actually, I just went trawling for quotes by Picasso with no real point in mind and when I found a neat one I began working on a thesis to justify its inclusion. Though, to be totally honest, that's a lie too – I did know what I wanted to say and recalled that quote and had no idea who said it so I turned to the internet to find out. One thing's for sure: Picasso was definitely a bit of a dick.

Ruben Guthrie is a bit of a dick. A self-serving advertising executive on a whopper salary with a supermodel girlfriend, he finds himself manhandled into an AA meeting after one of his typical nights of drink and drugs proves too much for his loved ones. From there we embark on a sustained investigation of the place booze occupies not merely in Guthrie's life but in Australian society at large. It's tersely written, at times hilarious, and gently provocative without ever appearing didactic in the least. I really liked it.

Creation entails destruction: when you posit the existence of something, you erase the infinite possibilities that formerly existed in that same moment and space. You reduce the boundless field of what might be to the hulking fact of what is. It's a little less certain when you apply this to storytelling – you can make a distinction between plot (what happens) and story (the broader realm of implied possibilities allowed by the plot but not necessarily limited by it). Some of the most effective stories are wondrous precisely because of the difference – a sharp, concise, tiny plot that produces a huge world which exists only in the imagination of its audience. I'm reminded of something Edward Albee said to the effect that the finest piece of playwriting will never need a character to mention anything from their history – rather, the way they act and speak now, in the moment, will reveal everything that's vital about their past. I don't think this is the only way, but it's a fascinating ambition.

Some of the stories I like best – especially the theatre I like best – keep the possibilities alive as long as possible. As they progress, you imagine the different paths they might take and what the story might really be about and when things boil down to an inevitable resolution (or at least an ending) those other paths stay lit somewhere in your mind.

The obvious paths offered by the story of Ruben Guthrie are typical of the addiction narrative – will that bloody Guthrie beat the demon drink, or will he fall off the wagon? The great strength of Brendan Cowell's writing is that he answers yes, and yes. And yes and yes and yes. While narratives are usually resolved, the life of a recovering addict (the life of anyone, I guess) never resolves itself with the same kind of finality. Even death doesn't really mean the end of a story, since that story always bleeds into other stories. And stories themselves are just ways of ordering things far more messy and polluted. So the apparent trajectory of Ruben Guthrie (will he or won't he?) turns out to be less important than the other questions raised along the way – who is he? Why is he? What could he be?

This is one of Red Stitch's sharpest productions of late – the performances hit every mark, and the casting is just perfect. Nobody tries to be liked, but at the same time there's an empathy extended to every one of the flawed characters presented. And it's a tough ask; Cowell's script is sophisticated enough to render each of his creations with an invigorating complexity. A dying man can still disappoint us. A woman who triumphs over her own problems can still make others' lives harder. Parents can want the best for their child while delivering their worst.

There was a point in the show where I thought it was finishing and sat up thinking “great show, stunning ending, you bloody bewdy etc” before another scene began. There were at least another fifteen minutes to go, perhaps more. I could have walked away entirely satisfied at that point, and in the end I felt one of the later scenes was a bit of a let-down after what had come before (it fell back on a style of writing that seemed more obvious and strained). But really, it only added to the piece – if it had ended when it felt natural to do so, it wouldn't have been true to the kind of life it was enacting. There can be death, there can be redemption, there can be things of any magnitude, and then there will be the next scene.

At Red Stitch until March 5.

Review: A Behanding in Spokane

2011-02-21T16:07:00.000+11:00

A BEHANDING IN SPOKANE

Melbourne Theatre Company.

A recent comment by Chris Summers over at Theatre Notes got me rethinking my responses to the MTC's latest. So far I've been feeling that my reaction accords with the general consensus, which could be summed up as follows:

Strong production of a very darkly comic play; excellent performances; some laugh-out-loud moments; not much depth but makes the most of its modest material.

Summers points out a flaw in this mild critique – it completely overlooks the possibility that A Behanding in Spokane features some profoundly offensive racism. This wasn't missed in US productions of the play which inspired a range of protests. I hadn't come across anyone making much of a point about it here, however, and that includes myself, despite the niggling concerns I'd had when watching the production.

Let's back up a step for the latecomers. A Behanding... was written by Martin McDonagh, Irish playwright of some renown, who penned a bunch of black comedies in the 90s and then dipped out of theatre for a good 15 years before returning with this number. Unlike his earlier work, it's set in contemporary America, and speaks to racial history and racist violence in the US on a number of levels. The monstrous figure at its centre is a one-handed psychopathic white supremacist who lost his paw at the hands of mysterious hill-billies decades ago and is on a quest to recover the missing glove-filler. A couple of deadbeat weed-dealers try to sell him the hand of someone else and quickly find they've chosen the wrong one-handed psychopathic white supremacist upon whom to pull a swiftie. Locked in a no-tell hotel room with the gun-waving killer, their only real hope lies in the figure of a truly strange reception dude whose notions of fatalism, revenge and rescue make him something less than an ideal saviour.

I'm not giving too much away there, since there are a bunch of cool surprises that are worth experiencing first-hand (hurr hurr). As I say, it's a pretty funny piece and there's a nice fight using severed hands and Ben Grant's sound design features excellent and strategic deployment of banjo. While there are obvious nods to the classic Western and the revenge drama, it doesn't leave you plumbing subterranean meanings to work out what it's all about. You laugh, maybe cringe a bit, head off for a late supper.

Which is the odd problem here. I'll be the first to call a production on its odious race politics but found a muting of affect when watching Behanding. There's racism in the piece, for sure – it's all about a violent bigot terrorising two people, one of whom is black (I forgot to mention that before). There's great swathes of racist abuse and much use of offensive epithets but I don't think that's exactly at the core of the controversy in the US, which is more about the characterisation of an African-American as a kowtowing clown patched together from film and television cliches. It's not necessarily that a white Irishman can't write a black American character, but if you're going to write a play that puts race front and centre, that handling of race certainly merits extra scrutiny.

So why didn't I leave Behanding with my hackles up? I don't think it's about a cultural distance from the US, for me, although I guess some Australian audience members wouldn't really care one way or another when it comes to the massively problematic legacy of US racial history. And I don't think it's because people who find fault in the play are overreading; if you find racism there, you do you should feel free to point it out.

I guess it's that the play's moral compass seems epitomised by that weirdo reception guy, Mervyn. Late in the piece a guy points a gun in his face and asks “why do you want to die?” He replies that he doesn't want to die. He just, well, doesn't care either way, and the logic of his character's actions so far becomes clear: he's able to take the narrative in bizarre directions because he's completely unburdened by an instinct for self-preservation. This means he could be a hero or villain at any one moment, and in a way shatters the very notion of either.

But A Behanding in Spokane seems to me to be on Mervyn's side all the way. If it's racist, it's because it doesn't care one way or the other. Its racism feels like the product of disinterest, not concern – as if McDonagh didn't set out to ignite bonfires of passionate outrage but just started playing with some matches in an underventilated hotel room. If I left the theatre thinking “I enjoyed it but didn't really care about anything I saw,” then I'm sort of becoming Mervynesque myself, and I wonder if the play positions its audience thus. If we shrug off its racism, it might be because the play does the same.

I wonder what to make of all that.

Sumner Theatre until March 9.

Review: Invisible Atom

2011-02-10T23:11:00.000+11:00

INVISIBLE ATOM

By 2b Theatre

Look at this image. Look at it. Does it make you want to rush out and buy a ticket to this show? It doesn't make me want to rush out and buy a ticket to this show. I know people don't rush out to buy tickets to shows these days but anyway. Invisible Atom is about as visually rich as this photo suggests. Which is strange, because in terms of writing, directing and performance it's bursting with ideas and imagination, all of which are astutely rendered. I don't know why the design is so drab and lifeless. It seems as if the entire production was consciously intended to prevent the possibility of a more compelling promotional image.

I know you probably didn't come here looking for Capital Ideas About Promotional Images By Someone Untrained In Marketing and Publicity and it's not like I'm some kind of Johnny Sparkles who wants every show to look like Hairspray. I've seen plenty of productions with similar designs that really hit the mark, such as Elbow Room's There, which shared more than a few common points with Invisible Atom, or last year's wonderful 5 Days in March, also in the Fairfax. But in those cases the extreme minimalism serves to focus our attention to a needlepoint. Here, it seems that design was just overlooked.

Or, rather, that this was a problem of context. I had the pervasive feeling throughout the affair that this was a superb small production in a large room. It was intimate and centripetal and wants to be shared but can't fill the Fairfax Studio, even if a fair bit of the space has been blocked off. It's not that the Arts Centre shouldn't have programmed it, since it's exactly the kind of piece that deserves to tour here, and I can't really fault the production for not reinventing itself in a way more appropriate to the theatre – I doubt the team had the resources to do a lengthy new development in Melbourne before the season. It's somewhere in the middle, perhaps.

Then again, I'm also inflating the problem quite a bit here.

Because, really, Invisible Atom has a lot to recommend it. It's smart writing, full of allusion and subtle metaphor. Anthony Black can hold the entire show on his own, and Ann-Marie Kerr's direction prevents the piece from getting too bound up in its own clever-cloggedness.

What's it about, right, right. Well, Atom is a guy who was abandoned as a child but who has built a hugely prosperous life working as a stockbroker, with a terribly expensive house and designer couches and big TV and a lovely wife and newborn boy. A series of philosophical crises see him embarking on a slightly unhinged journey to discover the truth of his parentage and his discoveries don't just result in a re-evaluation of his life but have implications that resonate across history.

There's plenty to think about, here: the work stitches together a fabulist tale out of particle physics and critiques of advanced capitalism (there's a throwaway line about an “invisible hand,” making this the only production I've ever seen that makes economic theory in-jokes). Adam Smith and Isaac Newton are the presiding authorities in Atom's life, and his struggle is really that of anyone attempting to free themselves from the yoke of those bastards.

The story is ultimately a fairly humanist one that returns to people as a way of escaping ideas; the internal correspondences are at times too twee, and the resolution lacks the ambition which has preceded it. But if it seems as if I have a whole bunch of quibbles about the show, that's all they are. Invisible Atom is about as rewarding as most of the work being produced in Melbourne today. Just a bit plain-looking.

Fairfax Studio until Saturday.

(Not a) Review: Don Parties On

2011-02-07T13:48:00.000+11:00

Photo: Jeff Busby

Last year a friend told me how she counts the lights when bored during a theatre production. It turns out this is a more common practice than I'd expected, and I've since come across several people who do the same thing. I wasn't exactly counting the lights during the first half of Don Parties On, but I did find myself doing something not dissimilar. While I was watching, a part of my mind idly began listing the productions I saw last year which genuinely surprised me.

The list grew pretty long. It began with moments that honestly moved me, from the body-slamming ecstasy in Grit Theatre's Us to Terry Yeboah's wracking sobs in Acts of Deceit to the stirring final sequence of MWT's Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime. I was also thinking about the authentic shock of Thyestes' more outrageous sequences, the physical fear I felt during And Then Something Fell On My Head, the uncontrollable laughter induced by both The Pajama Men and Asher Treleaven, the simple fact that I could watch the Four Larks band for hours regardless of the plays they accompany, the giddy insanity of an Imperial Ice Stars show (which inevitably leave me whacking the arm of my plus one screaming LOOK AT WHAT THEY ARE DOING THERE!). There were lots of instances where an otherwise flawed production had a sudden point that bolted me to my seat; and, of course, there were shows that seemed to me so ill-conceived or badly produced that my response was equally passionate, in a negative sense. When I got home I had a quick flick through the catalogue of whatevers I saw in 2010 and soon had around 85 that provoked an immediate memory of something impactful that I took away from the experience.

The thing about Don Parties On is that I didn't find myself having any particular response at all. Which is fine. That happens all the time. The play's not really aimed at me, I suppose, and Williamson's style isn't my favourite kind of theatre. I liked Let the Sunshine more than most critics, but it wasn't on that little mental list of mine.

I don't begrudge Williamson his success, either. I think anyone who makes a living from writing plays deserves a nod. And while there's some validity to the argument that his prominence in main stage programming prevents new voices from occupying that space, it's also true that the financial success of plays such as Don Parties On allow companies to program “riskier” work from lesser known artists. This year's Lawler season is a direct result of the earnings of The Drowsy Chaperone. I sincerely hope that DPO's profits in some way assist smaller productions in MTC's calendar, which this year includes work by Robert Reid and Lally Katz, for egs.

Williamson has penned some duds, as he admits. So have Reid and Katz. So have Rayson and Murray-Smith and Romeril and Wright and any other Australian playwright who springs to mind. That's cool, too. I've written plenty of shit. I might be doing the same thing right now.

Look at this! I'm totally defending Williamson. There's more: even though I don't personally dig his plotting, characterisation, dialogue, handling of themes or choices of subject matter, I'm happy that there's a sizeable audience who do. I might sit there utterly bewildered by their laughter, even worrying that it's almost dangerously conservative, but that's not a strong argument against their right to laugh.

What really got to me about Don Parties On was the fact that so many people I know were eager to get along to the thing. People who only go to the theatre perhaps once a year wanted a ticket to opening night. The play is being treated as Event Theatre. Don Parties On isn't Event Theatre. It's a play that achieves its success by providing what its audience expects and wants. Again, that's not a bad thing. But to me it felt as if half of Melbourne was lining up to be the first to check out a new Starbucks, or catch the premiere episode of the new season of Packed to the Rafters, or snap up a Michael Buble album the second it hit the shelves.

Williamson is a franchise, and like many successful franchises he pleases a lot of people by sticking to a general formula and not serving up something completely unexpected. Obviously he tinkers with the recipe, but there's a certain safety his core audience can feel buying a ticket to one of his plays. The same can be said of all kinds of artists, including those that aim to offend or confuse. The shock of the new is itself an expectation some people bring to the theatre, but novelty isn't necessarily a more worthy goal than mildly predictable entertainment.

I'm not reviewing Don Parties On properly here, but rather the response it's produced. Before it had premiered, it had created the buzz of an major event, and since it opened it has been subjected to critical scrutiny from all corners. I've probably read a dozen long reviews, countless blog comments, responses from Williamson himself, even a two-part (!) essay in The Age by Julian Meyrick. I am bewildered. I can't think of another local play, great or rubbish, to provoke so many words from commentators, or to be given so much space in the public sphere. That a kind of average, middle-of-the-road play has managed such a feat is the one way in which Don Parties On moves me at all.

I left the play at interval. I knew that the piece itself would be granted plenty of attention by other reviewers and take up a lot of premium newspaper real estate that could otherwise be given to more interesting work that's less often discussed publicly. It didn't need my own shoulder-shrugging response, the very existence of which would only add to the sense that the play is something eventful. I didn't want to contribute to the wealth of words which have been dedicated to this play. And I just did.

Review: Basically I Don't But Actually I Do

2010-11-27T11:33:00.000+11:00

Basically I Don't But Actually I Do

By Jochen Roller and Saar Magal

Earlier this year I read some kind of sciencey study arguing that the process of putting our gut responses into words often causes us to reverse that initial position; that is, in verbalising an instinctive reaction, we engage in some kind of interior dialectic that sees us taking up the side opposing ourselves. The people who took part in the study weren't critics, per se, and I've no idea of the validity of the testing, but it's an interesting conclusion, donchathink? Certainly one that most critics can probably find some connection with. It's a similar response to the one I had watching Jochen Roller and Saar Magal's Basically I Don't But Actually I Do. I distinctly recall feeling, during the performance, that much of it was naïve, confused, overly difficult, overly contrived. In the days since I've revised that opinion, and now I find a lot of intellectual pleasure in pondering the piece. Is that a bad thing? Is a gut response somehow more intrinsically authentic, more real? Maybe. But we don't live in the moment of reception; if I were to try to hold onto the feeling of that moment, I'd be writing my name in water.

Language plays a big part in Basically I Don't... but besides the actual spoken component (which isn't that much) it's language in a much deeper sense. We (I) tend to consider metaphor as a primarily linguistic notion – there's even a realm of neuroscience proposing that language is a convenient by-product of the evolutionary need for metaphor as a survival mechanism. But this production activates metaphor through spatial and physical means. We're not told meaning. We're not told much. But we're put into an environment that forces association, articulation, an internal rewording of what's occurring around us.

Upon entry we're asked to remove our shoes and place them in a line along one side of the playing space. They sit there, our inert and mute items of footwear, for the next hour, in full view. They're our traces. We weren't warned of this before arrival, so they're also our embarrassingly intimate lives put in a spotlight. They're what we have to publicly reclaim if we want to walk out, as a couple of people did during the show. They might, if we let them, be the mounds of shoes stripped of millions of Jews in WWII, or the images of such that have been indelibly stamped on the modern consciousness. But we need to make our own words to make sense of this, if sense can be made.

The show is replete with images and situations that ask us to make connection. There's an apparently simple sequence in which the two performers stack books on their heads, each attempting to make a teetering tower taller than the other. When one pile collapses there's a sense of defeat. But what do we make of it? In one way it's a literal 'balancing of the books' that proves impossible to maintain. In another, it's trying to win a contest of knowledge – the weight of my learning is greater than yours. Yet again, it might make me think about history as contest rather than collusion, or about the way it takes great precision and dynamism to make a book more than just a dead thing or, worse, a weapon (during an early sequence the pair fling the same books at each other across the space).

Some moments seem too obvious to me: a heavily stylised routine where the physicality of Hitler's showmanship is repeated and amplified to an abstract kind of dance. But then, you had to make the connection to Hitler at all, since there was no overt sign that he was the subject of this sequence (I even wondered if I was just reading the dictator into it – then again, even if that had been the case, it still gave me pause to reflect on the performativity of tyrants and the terrifying artificiality of charisma).

If I had a vaguely negative reaction during the piece itself, it's not unwarranted. I recoiled a little when Magal walked along the line of the audience unspooling a thread of audio tape and asking particular members to hold it, helping erect a barricade of sorts. At the same time, Roller wore a backpack emitting a recorded speech in German, and from my very limited ability with that language it seemed to me as if something anti-Semitic was being said. I didn't know why any of this was happening, particularly, but I didn't want to be complicit in it and wasn't going to help hold up no darn fence. I still don't know if I was reading something into this that wasn't there but, again, I had a long think about how terrible things are helped along by people just doing what they're asked to do, and how the aura of performance (including that of tyrants) can seduce us into an unreflective participation more dangerous for the passivity it seems to allow. Doing what everybody else is doing can seem as innocent as doing nothing at all.

As I've said, some of the production still seemed too blunt, or ill-considered, or I just didn't get it. Maybe I didn't get it at all, and did a bunch of wrong-headed post-show revision or projected too much onto the work. But if I saw something compelling and deeply provocative where no such thing existed, I'd rather live with my illusion.

Basically I Don't But Actually I Do ends today at the Meat Market, North Melbourne.

Review: Four Larks' Peer Gynt

2010-11-26T13:56:00.000+11:00

PEER GYNT

By Four Larks Theatre.

I've seen all three of Four Larks Theatre's productions this year, and I'll be trying to get along to anything they do in the foreseeable future. But their adaptation of Peer Gynt, currently playing in the beautiful old building hidden down a Northcote laneway that they seem to call home, confirms just why the company is such a fascinating and frustrating anomaly in Melbourne. It's a case of extremes: what they get right they do better than almost anyone around, but the shortcomings of each work are just as pronounced. I can't think of any other group I'd subscribe to both because of and despite what I think I'll be getting.

Firstly, the strengths. On the level of design and music, this is a truly astonishing company. You could be deaf or blind and still be floored by what you witness here. The sets are imagined and realised with such lavish detail, the costumes and makeup ravishing, and the whole extra-performance experience – of arriving and passing through that liminal space which separates the rest of your day from the moment of the theatrical encounter – all very generously considered. The sound, too, is pivotal to the event: Four Larks are as much a band as a theatre company, and there are always at least half a dozen musicians sharing the stage with the players, pulling out all sorts of instruments to create soundscapes or melodies that don't merely complement the action but are an integral part of it.

In this case, the company has produced a version of Peer Gynt that might be subtitled O Bror, Where Art Thou? It's Ibsen given a hillbilly and bluegrass makeover, set in a world of corrugated iron and dirty overalls and hay bales and woodpiles and banjos and gospel. The score is just as American Rustic, though it also seems profoundly influenced by the indie art music of the US (think Antony, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, etc). Basically, Peer's love interest Solveig is here played by Joanna Newsom.

The weaknesses? The performances. The direction of the performances. The choreography of the performances. If these aren't up to scratch, most shows would be a write-off. But it's testament to Four Larks' uniqueness that even when all of these elements don't work, the productions as a whole still make a great impact. They're billed as “junkyard opera” and I wonder if the opera tag is what I'm overlooking – perhaps the one-dimensionality of the acting and the artificiality of the movement are deliberate, as consciously distancing as white-face and exclamatory, outward-directed theatre can be. But given the bewitching immersiveness of every other aspect of each Four Larks production, it just doesn't seem that alienation is a particular goal here.

It's A Midsummer Night's Dream acting, if you know what I mean, where there are too many Pucks and not enough Lysanders. It might be deliberate, as I say, and oddly enough each individual performer has a moment to really shine and prove that there are no weak links when it comes to casting. I can't quite work out where my problem lies, then. Maybe I want the artifice to be ramped up, or toned down, or tightened in on.

But if I was the boss of everything, I'd say that Four Larks are a couple of collaborations away from being one of the finest theatre companies in the country. I'd beg Daniel Schlusser to spend a few weeks with this crew – I missed Schlusser's own recent production of Peer Gynt, but the rigour of his method when it comes to re-imagining classics is what the company needs. I'd find playwrights with sparkling new ideas that deserve the fullness of production Four Larks seem to pull off effortlessly. And I'd introduce them to companies who make far more limpid productions at far more expense. Because, despite my problems with Peer Gynt, there's still something going on here to makes it a triumph, if not an easy one.

The Little Bakery, Northcote. Ends 2 Dec. fourlarkstheatre.com

Review: Electronic City

2010-11-19T19:03:00.001+11:00

Preamble: I wasn't going to review Hoy Polloy's new production Electronic City because one of my oldest friends (and current housemate) is in it. This is, in the classic parlance, a conflict of interest. But it's had me thinking about that old doozy for a while, and of course it's something that every critic in Melbourne probably bumps their shins against once in a while. In a way, I think a critic who doesn't have conflicts of interest might be in a more difficult position than one who does. After all, a 'conflict of interest' can also be shortened to an 'interest' and the whole idea of the disinterested critic is, to me, a troubling one in an artistic culture of the sort this city boasts.

Maybe 'interested' and 'disinterested' are too vexed terms to employ here, bringing with them a long history of argument over the objective and subjective relationships between a critic and a work. For 'interested' I could substitute the word 'invested', because I do feel that anything I write about local theatre is an investment I'm making – I want it to result in a better return. But investment implies an economy, a financing, a fiscal dynamic that sours as it hits the tongue, too close to the imperatives of funding bodies and business models and strategic planning.

So we can replace 'investment' with 'involvement', cuckoo-like, and see what hatches. There are problems when a critic writes about something with which they have a personal involvement. How can we be assured of integrity and transparency and even-handedness, despite any number of disclaimers? It's why I haven't written reviews of Melbourne Fringe shows in The Sunday Age for the past few years, since my partner was Creative Producer for the organisation, and now that she's Artistic Director of the Next Wave festival I'll be doing the same for that (but also partly why, incidentally, this blog was established, since I think the hundred-odd Fringe shows I saw over that period deserved discussion somewhere).

But I also find it hard not to have an interest, an investment, or an involvement in the things I write about. I don't know any writers who don't. It's why, despite any claims to the contrary, Melbourne is an astonishing city to live in if you're at all interested in the arts. Just dip your toes in and you'll soon find yourself doing laps with someone whose worked you'd admired from afar, or who'll one day be treading the world stage. I can't count the number of judging panels, critic discussions, post-show foyer evaluations or on-air reviews I've been witness to that didn't include someone uttering the words “I have to point out that I'm a friend of so-and-so in this production”. Of course. That's why you're qualified to speak. Because we're all friends with some so-and-so, somewhere. That's what got us interested in the whole shebang.

I once sat in a pub stairwell with a maudlin Rose Byrne as she lamented a break-up. Once an award-winning local comedian asked me for a cigarette paper so he could roll a joint, and he hung around for a long chat about his dreams and disappointments. I once had a chorus role in a Daniel Keene play. I had a lead role opposite a Red Stitch ensemble member, alongside the director of new Australian flick Summer Coda. I went to uni with Ben Ellis and Caroline Craig and Angus Cerini. I was in a VCA film with Dan Spielman, and his performance put me to shame. I had an impromptu dance-off with Lally Katz (she won when she brought a full pot of boiling water into the mix). I've even been in a short play alongside Age critic Cameron Woodhead.

These (among others) aren't professional anecdotes but dim recollections, since for most I was working in a convenience store or getting fired from waiting jobs or scribbling for the street press. Short of arriving in Melbourne from overseas and leaping straight into a career as a critic, I don't see how someone could avoid personal involvement with the people you're writing about, and in that case I'd be wary of the authority such a person invoked to discuss the thing they witnessed. All the time, I see people checking out a show that a friend or family member is in and years later run into them making work themselves, embedded in a community that has sprung up around them.

Maybe Melbourne's artistic culture is like a virus, and close proximity must result in infection. Maybe the best critics are those with a rare resistance, or those who've been inoculated somehow. I doubt it. I think the best critic is someone who has the energy to discuss what they see, whether they're involved or not, whether they have an investment or otherwise, whether they have a personal interest in any sense of the term. I guess I hope that the handful of paid critics in this city have the professionalism to disregard personal bias, if not personal interest (and just between you and me? They do).

But maybe this is all just the longest disclaimer in blog-gone history.

Review: Electronic City is a damned fine piece of work, and I'd recommend it to all.

Mechanic's Institute, Brunswick. Ends. Nov 27.

Malthouse Theatre 2011 - season one

2010-11-09T12:15:00.001+11:00

Malthouse Theatre's first 2011 season was announced last night – the first under incoming Artistic Director Marion Potts – and while I'll get to the line-up in a bit, I thought it might be worth a quick look at the company she's taking over and the fellers who are vacating the building as she arrives.

Now, all of God's children got blogs; there'll be no peaceable garden of murmuring agreement when it comes to assessing the achievements of misters Michael Kantor and Stephen Armstrong. I'm writing about the two as a unit, as well, because while Kantor has been the public face of Malthouse since he took over in 2005, almost every decision made by the company can been equally attributed to Armstrong. The two have a remarkable dynamic and I think their jobs have often overlapped, so to discuss them in isolation doesn't make much sense to me. The fact that they've both decided to move on at the same time makes the change of leadership at Malthouse even more momentous. Things will definitely look different in a year or two.

To run a company such as Malthouse, you've probably got to be a fool, an elf, a gardener and a monkey. Sometimes it seems that Armstrong and Kantor were gamblers with all their money on three chords and the truth; there were definitely productions in the last five years that ran on optimism rather than certainty. There were flops, financial and critical. These were remarked upon in their time, and will be part of the legacy The Lads leave behind.

But the least remarked upon thing that Kantor and Armstrong did is also, for me, the most fascinating. Wherever you look in the arts world, companies and individuals are searching for more audiences. I've long had a particular stink-eyed look reserved for this notion, since it seems to me that most of these artists would be better off forgetting about more audiences and focusing on better audiences. Anyone can pin down Joe Public in a cave and force them to watch their shadow puppet show, and if they're arrogant enough they'll be convinced that Joe will be improved by the experience. But I think it's more fruitful to find the right monkey who'll evolve along with the work, or the fool who'll reflect back some of its wisdom, or the elf who'll point out its hiccups, or the gardener who'll take something away and make new life on their own.

When Playbox became Malthouse, it didn't just try to expand its pre-existing audience: it turned away from them. It said: we know what you want, but we're going to give you something else. If it don't suit you, take your business elsewhere. Malthouse wasn't just looking for a bigger audience, but a different audience. Which it found. Of course, plenty of Playbox subscribers stuck around and probably liked what they found. And some probably didn't.

This is really the challenge facing the MTC, which is certainly looking to attract younger audiences and those who haven't felt catered to in the past. But against this is a clear concern toward the existing audience. The MTC doesn't want to alienate its current subscribers by reinventing itself, and why would it? That would be damn fool crazy talk. But sometimes, when Winter is icumen in, damn fool crazy talk has its own rewards.

Winter is icumen in,

Lhude sing Goddamm,

Raineth drop and staineth slop,

And how the wind doth ramm!

Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,

An ague hath my ham.

Freezeth river, turneth liver,

Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.

Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,

So 'gainst the winter's balm.

Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,

Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

2011. So who's on first?

Potts is kicking off the year with an adaptation of John Ford's TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE. I can't remember if it's technically a revenge tragedy but it's sure one of the goriest and taboo-breaking plays of the seventeenth century. Lots of stabbing and eye-gouging and waving hearts around on swords and the central incestuous relationship will probably still be an eyebrow raiser to contemporary audiences. I first saw this play in a bloody production at the Carlton Courthouse maybe 15 years ago – I'm looking forward to seeing what it will be like with the full might of the Malthouse behind it.

Next up is solo rendition of Beckett's THE END – haven't we been spoilt for Beckett lately? Good stuff. This one's performed by Robert Menzies and directed by Eamon Flack, who will be a welcome addition to the Malthouse as he's a good fit with the company aesthetic. In contrast to Tis Pity this will likely be a very intimate piece, I'd say.

Chunky Move's CONNECTED might be the work I'm most looking forward to in this season, if only for the collaboration with US artist Reuben Margolis. Here's a quick profile of Margolis, and when I first saw this I thought “New. Favourite. Artist.”

I've got no idea what Connected will end up being, but I can't wait to find out. Anyone who dug the interaction between technology and nature and the pure mystery of the animate/inanimate dynamic played out on stage should probably check in on this one. Interesting to see Gideon Obarzaneck moving from the ethereality of light sculpture (Glow, Mortal Engine) to the mechanical materiality of the automaton.

Then there's IN GLASS, a Sydney dance piece by Narelle Benjamin. It centres on the idea of the mirror with all of its connotations. Again, I don't really know how it will turn out but it does feature two pretty incredible dancers, Kristina Chan and Paul White.

AMPLIFICATION was Balletlab's first production and the only one by the company that I've never seen, so big ups to Phillip Adams for next year's remount and the Malthouse folks for giving it a home.

Obarzaneck's back with FAKER, another fascinating conceit. I'm not sure why the precise starting point of Faker wasn't mentioned last night – maybe they don't want to spoil it – but it's a very exciting one. Obarzaneck received an email from a dancer a while back while charged him with all kinds of problems – this one-man show sees the choreographer looking at his own practice and engaging in a kind of self-questioning that seems very daring. Whether it will be an honest assessment or a performance masquerading as the same will have to wait and see.

BAAL sees Simon Stone directing one of Brecht's first works with a couple of Black Lung boys in the lead. It's a nasty, funny, wonderfully dark play with no redemption or grace; if Thyestes is anything to go by, it should be a huge hit.

I don't know Sydney writer Vanessa Bates' other work but her play PORN. CAKE is an odd post-dramatic comedy with touches of magic and a real linguistic playfulness. It's sort of in the mould of a lot of interesting writing coming from the UK at the moment, or perhaps some German stuff with more of a focus on social rather than political dynamics. You could say it's about excess and obscenity and how everything is the new everything and cake is porn and porn is cake but it's the kind of open work that may end up completely unrecognisable by the time it hits the stage. Pamela Rabe directs, which another unexpected ingredient to the mix.

A GOLEM STORY is Lally Katz' take on the classic Rabbi of Prague story. It's always puzzled me how the golem figure hasn't attained the same traction as Frankenstein's monster or the vampire or werewolves or whatever in the modern age, since its a genuinely creepy and resonant myth. Not the weedy CGI gimp from the Lord of the Rings, but the towering man of clay fashioned by mystics to protect the powerless or carry out their own nefarious schemes. Katz is pretty faithful to the original tale here but injects disturbing undercurrents and an element of metafiction that meshes very well with the strangeness of the source material; Michael Kantor returns to direct, and while Katz has had a long history with Malthouse Theatre under Kantor's artistic direction, I can't off the top of me noggin recall him ever directing one of her works himself (anyone? anyone?). Should make for an intriguing dynamic for that alone.

The first half of the year is rounded out with a return season of Arena's MOTH, which was a highlight of 2010 and was missed by hundreds who couldn't score a ticket. A fine way to round out Potts' first season, which to me seems to present both a new and original direction for the company while maintaining connections with and respect for the five years preceding it. Which is, says I, a Capital Idea.

MKA Richmond closure (sort of)

2010-11-05T14:28:00.000+11:00

When I first heard about the opening of new theatre/playwriting hub MKA Richmond I thought it sounded like the kind of ambitious venture on the young, drunk or mildly deranged would attempt to pull off, but I checked out the opening the other week and was impressed to see an ambition being realised in a pretty professional way. Lots of industry support, nice venue, plenty of credibility, not a lot of naivety. One of those so-crazy-it-just-might-work things. The first gambit was a month of new play readings, a different one each night, and the season sounds like it kicked off well with sellout performances.

I've just received word that after only two days, the council has told MKA to shut down. A couple of local residents complained about increased foot traffic in the street (it's a 44-seater, so that's odd). The MKA folks have already found an alternate space to carry out the rest of the month's shows - in the QV complex - and the Richmond space will continue to operate as a kind of lab for development.

The full release is reproduced below:

CALL FOR SUPPORT / 5 NOVEMBER 2010.
LOCAL COUNCIL SLAMS THE DOOR ON CULTURAL HUB

Melbourne’s only new writing theatre as of Thursday November 4 is at the behest of City of Yarra bureaucratic red tape. Despite the intrinsic role of local government to support the values and beliefs held by the community through a rich cultural program, City of Yarra has opted to close the door on a promising creative venture that is set to benefit not only its constituents, but artists nationwide.

MKA Richmond, an intimate 44-seat theatre, from the outset offered itself as a gift to the artists of Australia. Artistic Director Tobias Manderson-Galvin said in his inaugural message “MKA Richmond will support the growth and development of Australian playwrights and dramaturgical practice as never before. Our company is committed to developing and producing extraordinary Australian theatre from new and established playwrights, and we will be persistent in our mission to have these voices heard here and abroad”. MKA was established primarily to foster a burgeoning community of playwrights in Melbourne, a contribution to the local theatre scene that not only has been lacking to date, but that many have been crying out for.

It is therefore most surprising that complaints from two nearby residents about additional pedestrian traffic in the area would lead to the closure of such a valuable artistic enterprise. MKA’s neighbours on Tanner Street include a hairdressing salon, a commercial gallery, the Cricketers Arms pub, a design studio, a brothel, and local residents. In this mixed-zoning area, it is inconceivable that a small writers theatre should be under attack.

Preliminary discussions with City of Yarra Statutory Planning Office together with the Arts and Cultural Services Office were extremely positive, insisting that MKA Richmond would be waived usual requisites such as the want for additional car spaces, due to its convenient proximity to the major public transport thoroughfares of Richmond Railway Station and Swan Street trams.

Co-founders Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Glyn Roberts were assured by the Council that they were a 'rubber-stamp away' from a gaining a permit to operate the space as a permanent professional theatre. Body Corporate of 24 Tanner Street similarly expressed its support for MKA Richmond and, additionally, their delight in the presence of a new cultural hub within the building. These meetings instilled in MKA the substantial confidence to warrant forging ahead with a short month long season of rehearsed readings in its pre-built theatre space and licensed bar.

Like Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre in the 1980s (now Belvoir St Theatre), the inability to secure the venue’s longevity initially disrupted artistic practice. However, through a wave of support from the likes of Patrick White, David Williamson, Peter Carey and Max Gillies, the future of the prestigious company, which continues to operate out of the same building today, was secured.

Yet unlike Nimrod, MKA Richmond’s pressures come not from the threat of demolition, but from the City of Yarra’s lack of support for a plentiful arts precinct in Richmond. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights serves as a pertinent reference under these circumstances, for Article 27 stipulates, “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”. The trampling of a promising professional theatre operation in a densely urban locale is in clear breach of the basic human right to experience culture within the community.

On the same day that MKA Richmond’s Tanner Street home was silenced, the company was overwhelmed by tenders for the housing of MKA OPEN SEASON in alternate venues.

MKA will be temporarily transferring to a new location in Jane Bell Lane QV: MKA Melbourne. OPEN SEASON will perform the remainder of the rehearsed readings in this new venue, while MKA Richmond will continue to operate as the home of Melbourne’s new writing theatre.

If you feel inclined to rally against the City of Yarra’s decision, we welcome written gestures of support in any shape or form to info@mkarichmond.com.au. All messages would be sincerely appreciated.

Melbourne Festival - After the Fact

2010-10-30T12:50:00.000+11:00

Euyrgh – I sure failed in the blogging race this Melbourne Festival, didn't I? That's ok. It's not a competitive thing and the teeny-tiny seasons of most festival events make reviews more of a postictal twitch than anything else. Still, while the two and a half weeks are still relatively fresh I guess it wouldn't be too hard to make a few late comments on this year's extraordinary reception.

Extraordinary in its lack of contentment, is what I mean; much of Melbourne's critical and artistic community seems to have characterised the 2010 festival with a collective shoulder shrug. 'Is that it?', the consensus. This is quite a cruel and unusual response, to me, for the simple reason that if art can be averaged out, this was probably the most creatively successful festival since Kristy Edmunds' first, at least. The vast majority of things I saw deserved high praise and were very successful in what they attempted to do – I'd count in this category Stifters Dinge, Intimacy, Life Without Me, Adapting for Distortion/Haptic, Mortality, Opening Night, Northern Trax, Vertical Road, Epi-Thet, Jack Charles V the Crown, An Anthology of Optimism, Nyah-Bunyar, Carnival of Mysteries and Seven Songs to Leave Behind, at least. Some people weren't fully satisfied with some entries on this list, but very few would complain that any weren't worthy of inclusion in the festival. And the only show I'd definitely send to the wreckers – Tomorrow, in a Year – earned a decent number of fans and quite a few devotees. What that work did - bring in hundreds upon hundreds of people who'd never stepped into the State Theatre (fact) and have many heaving with ecstasy - is much bigger than what that work was (kinda rubbish).

So what's the problem? It doesn't seem that anyone is finding great fault in the general mass of works included in this year's festival. What's left people feeling short-changed is what was perceived to be missing, and I want to address two of the common laments because I think they're very interesting and I have a few minutes to spare and am feeling not quite belligerent, a head-shake short of a contrarian, but would like to be the devil's avocado or whatever that thing is.

First complaint: nothing had the wow factor a festival needs. This was pretty much Robin Usher's summation of the festival, and it echoes what a lot of people have said to me. I agree, to a degree, but I think there's a dangerous edge to the statement. The looseness of definition behind a phrase like 'wow factor' conceals the fact that it often refers to a very specific kind of experience, and it's not one that a festival should require in order to be successful. I had approximate 'wow' moments in Intimacy, in Haptic, in Stifters, and others. But wow factor is about scale. It's about an event big enough, in every sense, to make witnesses feel as if they're sharing some common astonishment that will never be forgotten. Astonishment – wow – poses some serious aesthetic problems.

The roots of the word astonishment stem from words suggesting a violent 'striking' but also a turning to stone: something that freezes the mind's ability to respond, that stills the tongue that speaks back. That's why the only reaction can be the meaningless 'wow'. What else can you say? But is that the height of art? One that silences all objection? Of course, there have been Melbourne Festival events with a power-punch wow factor that certainly warranted inclusion – Theatre du Soleil's Le Dernier Caravanserail changed my understanding of what theatre is even capable of. But emphasising 'wow' diminishes the achievement of works that aim for another kind of encounter.

I don't know that the Melbourne Festival needs an event that seems to stop the city in its tracks, because in a way that's not possible. When people refer to wow factor shows of the past, they're operas with overwhelming sets or plays with a multi-million dollar budget. That's fine. I love that stuff. But why is that the pinnacle of a festival's achievements? Take the recent Hayloft/Malthouse Thyestes – if it had appeared in the Melb Fest, it would have been received with the same raves it drew from Fringe audiences. There's a show with wow written all over it. But in the intimate confines of the Tower, it's not one of Mr Usher's 'wow factor' shows at all. It can't be. It's of a completely different order. The kind of event supposedly missing from this year's festival isn't one that you engage with in a small theatre, or your average gallery, or on a screen somewhere. It's one that you share en masse, and the strangers with which you share it confirm that something has just taken place worthy of astonishment (hence the spare critical comment given to Northern Trax, easily the 'biggest' show of the festival but lacking the aura of heritage claimed by works such as Tomorrow, in a Year).

Second complaint: there was nowhere to share the experience. This kind of boils down to 'there was no good bar'. Which is true. Seventh Heaven invoked the same pitiful wince you'd get watching a mosquito on a mummy. There was no venue which acted as a locus for conversation, debate, criticism, snarky comments, unqualified praise, drunken overstatement or quiet observation of the above. Except there was. This year's festival saw an unprecedented level of online activity. Every day there were tweets and facebook comments of a number that made it seem as if something was going on, and people were desperate to talk about it. Perhaps this volume was partly due to the fact that there was no real-life space in which people could spend all day saying the same stuff to actual, meaty humans. But it was there.

What seems to unite both of these complaints is a larger question not about what a festival is, but what a festival does. Or, rather, how the two can't be meaningfully distinguished. It's sort of the same with reviews and commentary - what a review says is just a subset of what it does, and even the most descriptive and non-analytic of responses, even a 140 character tweet, can do much more than you'd expect. So while I disagree with some of the more basic forms the above complaints have taken - not enough wow, not a great bar - they speak to something more fundamental that needs desperate address.

Should the Melbourne Festival galvanise a broad public into a molten, fused mass? Should it offer platforms in which we can each take a turn speaking our mind, if we wish to do so? Should it offer a panoply of encounters that don't add up to more than their own sum, don't (necessarily) have anything in common or any hierarchy of wow-ness? Dunno.

But thanks for asking, everybody.

Meeting Edward Albee

2010-10-16T20:01:00.000+11:00

Edward Albee is appearing as part of the MTC's 2010 Sumner Lecture tomorrow at 3pm. Last week I was fortunate enough to spend a few days with him in Sydney and wrote the following as a result. The piece first appeared in The Sunday Age.

Image copyright nytimes.com - it's the one that best captures the Albee I met.

“Any play that doesn't hurt you in some way has something wrong with it.” - Edward Albee

THE SCENE: Afternoon. An esteemed Australian actor's home in Bondi, Sydney. A small, diverse group of artists and professionals are scattered around a large table; outside a tropical storm rages. Front, a journalist, JOHN BAILEY, sits with 83-year-old American playwright EDWARD ALBEE. The younger man has just called Albee's cat a c-nt.

ALBEE (squinting askance): What did you say?

BAILEY (less confidently): I... you have a cat named C-nt?

ALBEE: I'm going deaf. Say that again.

BAILEY: (loudly) Your cat is named C-nt.

(Silence)

ALBEE: I had a cat named Cunegonde, many years ago. Perhaps... that's what you are referring to.

This wasn't how I'd planned things would unfold out during my first meeting with the man regularly described as the “greatest living playwright.” It's just that I'd heard that his cat was so named and after his surprisingly firm handshake reminded me of a recent wrist mauling I'd received from a feline, it sort of blurted out. And there I was, having just said – yelled, really – a word I'd normally never use, in a roomful of strangers.

Albee played me. The next morning I recall that “Cunegonde,” from Voltaire's Candide, was a pun on the French slang for female genitalia. As for his requests that I repeat the question more loudly: when he later pleads deaf to another member of our gathering, he turns and gives me a small grin. “Selectively deaf,” he says.

I shouldn't be surprised if Albee set me up during our first meeting. I'm soon to learn that this is his method: constant quips, contrariness and, usually, that conspiratorial smile as punctuation. As he points out over lunch the following day, “I'm observing you right now.” By that point I'm well aware of it.

Albee has long had a reputation as fiercely belligerent. In the 1960s he was became known for his “barbed, poised and elegantly guarded public press style”; of his last play, Me, Myself and I, he tells me that “the intelligent people received it very well, the imbeciles very badly. There's lots of things that people don't like in it. Too bad.”

Albee in 1962

He shot to attention with 1962's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, an uncompromising vivisection of contemporary mores. The play's Pulitzer Prize was rescinded by the award's board, who found the play obscene. More recently, in Australia, his The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia? dramatised the sexual and emotional relationship between an architect and the titular bovid.

Albee says that mere shock has never been his intention. “Did I sit down and think 'I must now write a play about something so outrageous that it will make people reconsider all their values blah blah blah'? Of course not. No. I may have been aware while I was writing it that this may shake some people up, but that's fine. Bring it on.”

But the Edward Albee I meet the day after our Scene One is a distinct counterpoint. I'm sitting outside the Bondi Pavilion, where he's spending the next two weeks mentoring a hand-picked group of Australian playwrights. “Have you been sitting here all night?” he asks, shaking my hand again.

In the morning session he makes jokes, sometimes at his own expense, and appears anything but threatening. When we take lunch nearby, he opts for a tuna wrap and Pepsi – sugar-free, on account of diabetes, but he does decide to indulge in a blueberry muffin. Every time he sees a dog he becomes animated and rushes to pat it.

He seems anything but a hellraiser out to milk the teat of notoriety; if that were the case, why spend so much time teaching younger playwrights? This is Albee's third visit to Australia under the auspices of Inscription, a Sydney-based company advocating the development of local scriptwriters; the trip has resulted in Inscription's new Albee Scholar program, which will provide one local writer a six-week residency at the playwright's Montauk artist's retreat in 2011.

The firebrand Albee is still in there, though. “The two most important phrases a playwright can learn,” he tells his charges on their first morning, “are 'No' and 'Go fuck yourself'.”

In one of Albee's earliest plays, the 12-minute “The Sandbox”, there appears the character of a grandma in her 80s. She is the only figure in the piece not obsessed with appearing proper; the wizened old imp showing up the foolishness of the inane and vainglorious. “The Sandbox” was dedicated to Albee's own grandmother: “She was very lively. I liked her a lot. I suppose in some ways I tried to emulate her and stay alive. Not close down. Be an outsider. It always helps to be an outsider.”

This sense of being on the outside has been a constant throughout Albee's life. His biological parents gave him up for adoption at birth, and he suspects that his mother never knew his father (though “obviously they must have known each other for a few hours.”). Under US laws of the time, adopting families were forbidden any knowledge of a child's original parentage – apart from two rules aimed at social segregation. Babies could only be brought into families of the same ethnic and religious background as those giving up the “little bundle of child.”

“How you would manage to have a faith at two weeks old I do not know,” he says. “What preposterous rules that kept so many kids from being adopted.”

From the outset he was a stranger to his new family. The Albees were a wealthy clan who owned a highly successful vaudeville company. They were also committed racists and possessed by outrageous notions of class: the Irish, for example, were only fit to work as servants. Edward spent most of his youth in boarding schools or with nannies, while the rest of the family was “busy being social, busy being rich.”

“I'm the only one left of the entire brood who survived,” he says. “Because I'm evil.”

Albee was told early on that he was adopted – another way his parents hoped to distance themselves from him – and was delighted to learn it. “'My god,'” he thought, “'I'm not like these people.' One of the virtues of being adopted is that you create your own identity. You're not subject to the blood of other people.”

In contrast – indeed in opposition – to his family, he developed a highly liberal political sense from a young age. His rebellious streak carried through his teens, resulting in numerous school expulsions. He was never terribly good at running away from home, though not for want of trying. At thirteen he tried to buy passage to London but was returned to the family home. Neither party was particularly pleased with the outcome, and his mother couldn't wait until he was old enough to be kicked out.

The moment he came of age, he legged it to New York's Greenwich Village, at the time a hotbed of contemporary art in every form. For some time he attempted to write poetry (“we all begin by writing poetry, don't we?”), even confronting W. H. Auden on his doorstep with a bundle of his verse. “We got over a very difficult problem at the very beginning, because he wanted to get me to bed,” says Albee. “I didn't. But he was very gracious about that and we stayed friends until he died.”

He worked odd jobs, including a long stint with telegram company Western Union. This often saw him delivering death notices which required signatures from their recipients, and the real people he met as a result later came to populate his early plays. To this day, Albee takes the subway whenever he can, since it allows him to observe the actual characters he writes. “One day I'm going to get hit by someone,” he says. “'Why you staring at me?' 'Because you're so fucking fascinating!'”

Albee denies that he has ever written himself into his work: “I don't put myself in my plays. How can I be objective about me?” But his childhood has been replayed throughout his career – the family so excoriatingly satirised in “The Sandbox” reappeared in a longer play soon after (“The American Dream”). His mother was the focus on his acclaimed Three Tall Women in 1990, and was reconfigured once more in Me, Myself and I.

The way Albee recounts his own life is equally rife with repetition and variation. Some anecdotes, even particular ways of phrasing them, recur in different interviews. The two apocryphal novels he wrote as a kid (“the worst two novels that any American teenager could have written”) he now describes as 1500 and 3000 pages long. In 1966, the same works were 700 and “a couple hundred” pages.

Is it possible that the “Edward Albee” in the public eye is not just the author but the result of his writing? A fiction that has been built up over five decades of revision? Or even a ruse? Those dogs he appears so humanly fond of – before we'd even spoken, he had seen me patting a pooch that had appeared on the scene of our first encounter.

Contradiction has perhaps been the one constant in this life – challenging his parents, his critics, himself. The echoes that connect the rebellious child, the enfant terrible of theatre and the still-fighting Albee of today are a challenge to time as much as anything else. At 30 he was writing of 80-year-olds; now, he says, “half the time I still think I'm about 15. 80 is a fact. It's not an attitude. Whatever age you are, you're a different age really.”

Review: Us

2010-10-07T17:35:00.000+11:00

By Grit Theatre

It's always the same – just as the Fringe hits the home stretch some new horse comes flying out of nowhere to tear up the turf. This is that show, for me. Totally unexpected, completely irresistible. I loved it.

It's billed as an exploration of what it means to be in your early twenties but – WAIT, COME BACK! I know, I know, that makes it sound like another student production of He Died with a Felafel in his Hand, but it's nothing of the sort. It's a play, but only if you try really really hard to make it one. Rather, it's better understood through the logic of music (or perhaps even visual art). The 'story' is less essential than the rhythm, the harmonies and the sudden key changes that occur, or the relationships between elements and their gestalt production of a whole – its effects arise quite independently of any notion of character or drama or any o' that guff.

There's a lot of split focus and overlapping dialogue which is as skilfully deployed as anything I can recall seeing – we're guided from conversation to conversation imperceptibly, through minute changes in the volume of speakers' voices or subtle visual cues that grab our attention. At the same time, there's a sense of real anarchy and spontaneity throughout, and a great deal of humour.

Humour's not really the word though – it's closer to joy, and that's the lifeblood of this production. The closest relative I can think of is Ontreorend Goed's Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen; where that show drove home the incredible richness of teenage life, Us does a similar thing to twentysomething-dom. It also bears close relations to Ranters Theatre in the casual, conversational style that conceals the sophistication undergirding all. There are a few 'theatrical' moments that come from nowhere, and they knocked me through the back wall.

It can be relatively easy to wow audiences with dark themes and watered-down versions of tragedy, but it's rare that a work can make magic out of sheer, unconditional celebration. This is ecstatic theatre and I would see it again and again and again.

Review: These Are The Isolate

2010-10-01T18:02:00.000+10:00

THESE ARE THE ISOLATE

By Mutation Theatre.

See this show and snap to it.

Another entry from Mutation Theatre, it's been my biggest surprise of the festival so far. Hunting around, it turns out that every review or mention of this piece has been hugely encouraging, but last night I was one of only seven or eight people in attendance and it deserves much better than that. It really is one helluva piece of work.

I won't write much about it now since much of what makes it worth seeing is the experience of discovering it for yourself. The writing is outstanding, with a kind of Schroedinger's Cat quality – you know the experiment where a cat in a box is both alive and dead at the same time until the moment the box is opened and uncertainty is reduced to reality? There are elements of uncertainty at play here, but unlike your standard narrative mystery which involves the withholding of vital facts, this one presents incommensurate realities simultaneously so the mind is forced to switch back and forth between possibilities that can't be reconciled. It's a bit like those pictures that are both a lamp and a pair of faces but the brain can't register both at once.

The performances initially came across as a bit mannered and over-blown but grew on me steadily – I'd say they're heightened rather than exaggerated. Certainly there are moments that really illustrate how the two actors have gone into great detail in their preparation, and it's a rare sight. Make this one a priority, folks. We'll talk more after.

Review: ATROCITY

2010-10-01T17:59:00.000+10:00

ATROCITY

By Paul Moder and Natalia Ristovska. Until October 7.

It must take a special kind of bravery to attempt to tackle the worst of humanity's capacity for evil through the medium of strip-tease, but that's what this show tries to do. There's a scene in which an audience member is invited to participate in a lap-dance, and when he does so is met by a women playing a little girl who is ordered to undress for him. She's clearly unwilling and finding the experience traumatic. Much of the audience has been in a similar state for an hour or so by now. After all, we've had plenty of rape, shootings and guttings already, so we're repressing in advance the paedophilic imagery we're about to be offered. Thankfully on the night I attended the poor soul plucked from the crowd had given up being offended at this point, and issued a jovial “righto – arms up!” to his victim.

And how else are we to respond when the top-hatted and waist-coated M.C. solemnly instructs us to “lift your eyes from the girl in budding form, and free that which you can never possess...” With laughter, mostly.

Atrocity attempts to resuscitate the Grand Guignol, the Parisian theatre of graphic horror that aimed to aimed to shock the living daylights out of punters. And there's plenty to shock here, though it's a shocking show in several senses. Some sequences are genuinely accomplished, such as one involving a woman appearing to tear off her own flesh. Others, not so much.

I really didn't need to be subjected to real photos of the dismembered and brutalised victim of the infamous Black Dahlia case – if the aim of this production is to have it's audience look away in disgust, mission accomplished. But these real atrocities were matched by moments of almost deliberately awful hilarity: a woman in Muslim headscarf and dress does a strip-tease dance before an American soldier shoots her and bludgeons her to death. We ponder this, and the choices that led us here (to be sitting in this audience, specifically).

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this production is its seriousness. Why are we supposed to feel complicit in these scenes of torture and terror? Why is this more important than the 'horrors' reproduced at your average theatre restaurant? Why is the M.C. singing a low-rent imitation of a 90s Nine Inch Nails song?

It's entirely possible that the grim, po-faced delivery of everything here is a put-on and that we're supposed to laugh. In a way this would be a pity, because the three female performers all show considerable talent despite the miseries they're asked to endure.

But in the end this is nasty, wrong-headed stuff inconsiderate of its audience and unclear of its intentions. I loved it for this and laughed uncontrollably, and I'm sure there's an audience looking for just that.

Review: Madeleine Tucker's Unfashionable Windcheater Factory

2010-10-01T17:50:00.001+10:00

MADELEINE TUCKER'S UNFASHIONABLE WINDCHEATER FACTORY

By Madeleine Tucker. Season ended.

I went along to this one after its producer mentioned that I had seen two of Madeleine Tucker's previous shows and had liked them. It turned out that I had and I had. I'm glad I went to this because I liked it too.

The earlier shows featured Madeleine Tucker as one third of the trio A Lot of Bread, who made hyper-whimsical comedies with cardboard sets and naff props and often lollies – almost unbearably twee but in a way I found very enjoyable. I thought this might be Madeleine Tucker's solo show but it turns out to that she just enlisted three different people to work with and has inexplicably put her name in the title. I don't know what happened to the rest of A Lot of Bread. Maybe they maintained a refusal to include Madeleine Tucker's name in the show titles and she wasn't having any of it.

See, what I love here is that anybody who doesn't know Madeleine Tucker isn't going to see the show just because her name is in the title, but it's in there anyway! And nothing else in the title actually appears in the show! And if you're offended by excessive use of exclamation marks, look out buster! This show is one big exclamation mark!

Madeleine Tucker plays Rodney the goblin. Rodney meets a fridge and a zucchini and a bunch of other characters. They do stuff and sometimes don't do other stuff. When Rodney goes to bed he cheers “Come on, sleep!” I laughed at that. Late in the show a very funny video is played based around the toy dinosaur paralympics. I laughed at that too. And the fridge's child (and child and child's child) were inspired, but obviously none of this is going to translate as particularly funny if you weren't at the show.

There's a particular genre of whimsical comedy that had an upsurge a few years ago, with comics like Josie Long at the forefront, but A Lot of Bread (and this show) seem to occupy a slightly different niche. It's a bit like a children's show turned up to a manic level – it occupies the same dayglo surreal-lite world and the performances are similarly exaggerated, even patronising of their audience, as if we're all a bit underdeveloped, but with no qualms introducing more adult jokes into the mix (and the bloody murder of a surgeon in this show was laugh-out-loud because of the surprising inventiveness of the way it was staged.)

Anyway, that's all! Good job, Madeleine Tucker!

Review: TPAN (the play about nothing)

2010-10-01T17:45:00.001+10:00

THE PLAY ABOUT NOTHING

By & All the King's Men. Until October 9.

This is an odd little show that's both ambitious and understated – ambitious in that it employs a cut-up, audience-participation method that means every show will be radically different, and understated in that the world it produces is just the very ordinary one of a couple of teenaged boys on a night on the town.

I suppose the title is a nod to Seinfeld, the show about nothing, but like Seinfeld that descriptor's a bit misleading. This isn't a show about nothing, just about nothing grand. It's honestly a world I've never seen recreated in a theatre before – I suppose I still haven't, since this was a long way from a 'theatre'. In a grimy, graffitoed room above a pub, the audience sat in the round wearing assigned costume items and clutching their props. We'd been issued a page of character instructions including commands as to how we were to respond at key plot points, but any fears that this would be an all-out bit of audience interaction were quickly allayed when the show began. It's a two-hander that occasionally calls on each audience member for a moment of involvement, simply to flesh out the other characters these dudes meet in their misadventures.

These included angry shopkeepers, petty drug dealers, bums and pot-heads and a range of dodgy mates. The audience-performers aren't required to be great actors or even particularly enthusiastic – the real actors are themselves so full of energy and so damn real in their roles that they carry the thing along briskly nonetheless. And it's to their huge credit that they manage to improvise so well, since other characters will come and go depending on the number of audience members on any given night. I only realised afterwards that entire sequences must have been omitted on the fly for this reason.

It's not something that deals with great themes but it's a surprisingly fun night that seems to have provoked similar reactions from other reviews I've read. And given that at least four of the six audience members were professional critics or writers on the night I attended, and there didn't seem an ounce of nervousness on the part of the performers, that's gotta be worth an extra tick.

Review: Thyestes

2010-09-27T16:38:00.001+10:00

THYESTES

By The Hayloft Project/Malthouse Theatre. CUB Malthouse until October 9.

Everyone bangs on about the Greeks inventing democracy, but they also tried some other pretty nifty methods of governance too. After Thyestes and his brother Atreus kill their half-brother Chrysippus they end up taking the throne and decide to take turns being king. I don't know about you, but I reckon going swapsies on leading the country is an idea we never really gave a full go.

Thyestes decides he's really into the king thing and one day goes “nuh-uh, it's mine forever now dude” and steals Atreus' wife to boot. What a rotten skunk. Atreus eventually does some stuff that gets him back in power, but this is where the tale really gets nasty. Now that he's back in power and everything is pretty much restored to its proper equilibrium, you'd think the story would end with Atreus and Thyestes looking at the audience and giving one of those “whuddyagonnado?” shrugs. Instead, Atreus cooks Thyestes' little boys and makes him unwittingly eat them.

I'm pleased to report that I was offended by this production. There were a few points where I honestly found myself curling up and thinking “geez, that's a bit much, fellas.” Which helped me realise that I can't remember the last time I had such a reaction. It's probably partly because we've seen most things before and it's very difficult to really shock an audience with something genuinely new. Equally, admitting to being offended can seem like a failing, as prudish or conservative or naïve. We might call something offensive, but making the offence a quality of the thing at hand rather than a personal response distances us from our own involvement in the process.

Anyway, Thyestes is, for me, genuinely transgressive stuff. Not just in the sense that it traverses boundaries of taste, since that (again) is a pretty inconstant qualifier. Rather, it makes void those distinctions. I don't think this is a show that can be categorised as good or bad. That's its genius.

The terrible question that always haunts a critic and, I suppose, most members of an audience is: “Is this good or bad?” It makes as much sense to ask whether a work is good or evil. But it's a question that almost always asserts itself and I'd say the critic's job is to stifle that inner voice and remain constantly vigilant to its intrusions. There are other questions, lots of 'em, that are far more interesting.

And then there are works that strangle that voice for you. If someone offers you a free jet-pack, you don't ask what colour. Thyestes simply can't be understood as a good or bad production. It's brilliant and horrible and clever and brutish and pointless and necessary. There aren't that many words that don't, in some way, connote 'good' or 'bad' in the final account – but this production deserves most of them, from both sides of the fence. (And I've just noticed David Mence has had a similar reaction over at Theatre Notes).

I've found that violent abolition of quality judgements in some of the Black Lung's previous work – it's tempting to say that the contributions of a few Black Lung members to Thyestes have nudged it in the same direction but I think that would be to underestimate director Simon Stone's own accomplishments here. This isn't a Black Lung show at all – it's a Hayloft piece, with distinct connections to Stone's earlier work, which also suggests new directions he's interested in taking.

Enough of my squawking, though. Don't bother reading about this show. Just go see it.

Review: The Lounge Room Confabulators

2010-09-27T16:35:00.002+10:00

THE LOUNGE ROOM CONFABULATORS: UNVERIFIED STORIES FROM A TRAVELLING SUITCASE

So these two guys come into your living room and tell stories and sing songs and play with toys and stuff. That's the basic set-up here. It's also one of the most enjoyable works I've seen in ages.

It's greatest strength is in the writing, which maintains a literary complexity that's often lacking in theatre. It at first appears a series of short, unconnected stories, but quickly reveals itself as one long story told partially from countless different angles. The tale itself is a masterful mix of the gothic and the comic, developing a rich world based around the monstrous childhood of the two storytellers. Their skills as performers are wonderful, too, with just enough levity required to make the more brutal moments of the narrative almost touching.

I think the season's sold out, and given the conditions of its showing – you book them into your lounge room and invite your friends – that's not hard to believe. If you do get a chance to visit a performance, or if the season is extended, jump on it hard with both feet.

Review: Home?

2010-09-27T16:34:00.001+10:00

HOME?

By Jono Burns. North Melbourne Town Hall until October 1.

So far this Fringe the number of shows I've seen in which I've been given a piece of fruit to take home equals two. The number of shows I've seen with a title ending in a question mark also equals two. Home? makes both lists. But don't think that healthy-snack bribery or interrogative punctuation are the real selling points here – there's much more to this one.

It's a solo performance by Jono Burns (accompanied by two quite clever musicians). It's based around Burns' years in New York at The Actors Studio, but while theatre about theatre can be painfully self-indulgent this is more of a satirical look at the profession and the hopefuls it attracts.

Burns is a fantastic character actor – he takes on at least a dozen incarnations here and most are realised with great skill. The tale itself is full of hilarious moments, often no more than imitations of the people who populate New York. As a narrative it doesn't really amount to much more than a string of anecdotes; the insertion of some more tender mentions of his family and upbringing don't gel that well with the NY material. This doesn't detract much from the overall experience, however, and I'd love to see this reworked with a tighter editorial eye.

Review: Paradise?

2010-09-27T16:32:00.000+10:00

PARADISE?

By City of Voices. South Melbourne Commons. Season ended.

Any diet of theatre should include regular inclusions of community development shows, kids' theatre, high school plays, drama school presentations, stand-up nights, readings and other staples that remind you that not all theatre aspires to the same thing. They also keep you regular and make your hair more glossy.

Paradise? is firmly in the community camp – it's an ensemble work by South Melbourne's City of Voices, who don't seem to have any particular brief beyond making work that involves everyone who wants to be a part. The group features members with and without disabilities as well as spanning a broad range of age and ethnicity.

The piece itself began as audiences were ushered through an outdoor installation where the performers were stationed as witches and sprites and toys and clowns. Once seated inside a hall, these actors played out a series of scenes apparently inspired by Paradise Lost, though the narrative thread wasn't particularly obvious. In fact, I was never really sure why anything that occurred did so, but that's a minor quibble.

It wasn't an instant classic, though I only say that because I've seen a lot of similar community stuff that has embedded itself in my memory forever (in a good way). But I don't think that Paradise? was intended to be anything more than it was, so it's meaningless to compare it to what it wasn't.

Review: A Study in Scarlet (A Study Of)

2010-09-27T16:31:00.001+10:00

A STUDY IN SCARLET (A STUDY OF)

By Robert Lloyd and Scott Gooding. Son of Loft, Lithuanian Club until October 1.

Robert Lloyd has been obsessed with Sherlock Holmes since he was a child; here he plays out the entire story that introduced Arthur Conan Doyle's character to the world while offering commentary asides and dipping into the reasons that the superhero detective made such an impression on the skinny kid growing up in Dubbo. These latter sequences are the most appealing aspect of the show, and I wished there was more of this material than we ended up getting. The performance of the story itself is well done but probably not enough to hang 90% of the actual show on. It's still a satisfying bit of storytelling, though, and certainly worth a cursory inspection.

Review: I Love That You Forgot

2010-09-27T16:28:00.001+10:00

I LOVE THAT YOU FORGOT

By Sarah Hillman-Stolz and Emma Fisher. At Yah Yah's. Season ended.

This is a very sweet and likeable show that left me totally stumped. I can't for the life of me work out what was common to all of the sequences it presented, which featured dance, storytelling, spoken word, projection, physical theatre and lots of other bits and pieces. Many were fine on their own terms, but there was no indication why any one thing was selected for inclusion over anything else that could have been. It was like a language without a grammar.

What I did get from the piece was that the two performers seem like very nice people who would be kind and generous friends. That's a pretty good thing to get from a show. But I'm not sure exactly what else I was supposed to take away from it (apart from a banana and a cupcake).

Review: The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum

2010-09-27T16:26:00.000+10:00

THE LOST STORY OF THE MAGDALEN ASYLUM

By Peepshow Inc. Abbotsford Convent until October 2.

Peepshow Inc's previous production at the stunning Abbotsford Convent was a gorgeous spectacle of puppetry and live performance; this one doesn't meet the same high standard. The earlier work offered both a grander scale and a more affecting intimacy, whereas this one is often too literal in the way it conveys its melancholy story of the real history of the venue as a haven for girls who fell from grace (or at least respectability) in 19th century Melbourne. There are a handful of sublime images and original theatrical manoeuvres, but they don't quite add up to the moving experience that this might well be.

"I know some really stupid old people"

2010-08-05T15:33:00.001+10:00

A few weeks ago I sat down with director Julian Meyrick and some of the cast of Do Not Go Gentle..., opening tomorrow at fortyfivedownstairs. At the table were:

Rhys McConnochie, 73

Malcolm Robertson, 77

Terry Norris, 80

And Mr. Meyrick.

Those ages might give it away. The characters of Do Not Go Gentle... are all in their 80s, apart from two (relative babies) in their 50s. It's been more than half a decade since the play won a swag of awards and it still hasn't been produced anywhere, and I think that age must have something to do with it. Does anyone want to watch a play about people in their twilight years? David Williamson's MTC newie is about folks in their 60s, but then his program notes quote surveys that find people are at their happiest in their 60s, so he's not exactly waving the spectre of mortality in anyone's face.

Do Not Go Gentle... isn't a feel-good portrait of loveable, doddering old folk. The script, at least, is a bracing drama full of fantastical elements and dark comedy, tracing Scott's race to the South Pole as a gentle metaphor for our own search for something of lasting importance. It's wonderfully layered and full of wit, which makes it even stranger that main stage companies around Australia have all passed up opportunities to include the work in their calendars.

BAILEY: I would think that MTC subscribers would get a lot from Do Not Go Gentle..., given that a lot are middle-aged or older.

ROBERTSON: Once they're in there. But the trick is to get them in there. If you put this in the [MTC] brochure it wouldn't be the most favoured play.

MEYRICK: That always assumes that like attracts like. That old people want to watch plays about old people and young people want to watch plays about young people.

ROBERTSON: I don't think old people do want to watch plays about old people.

NORRIS: I think they do.

ROBERTSON: I think there's a buyer resistance. If you look at television there are very few shows about old people.

NORRIS: Hence a lot of old people are bored to tears by television. The aged have become more alienated by shows than ever, because the younger demographic is changing so quickly. Their music, their style of behaviour, their style of dress. The whole thing is so alien to old people. They move away. That's my theory, because they've changed so dramatically. They're no longer polite, they don't dress politely, there's the dreadful music they play. Knives. I'm very alienated by it.

[Norris suggests that a certain attitude in some older audiences might also be to blame.]

NORRIS: 'I like to go to the theatre for a good laugh. There's so much sadness in the world.'

ROBERTSON: Exactly.

NORRIS: If they want a good laugh, go to the cinema.

ROBERTSON: It's like the Australian Opera last year with Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. I went to a performance and at the interval they left in droves. This was a well-heeled audience.

MEYRICK: What did they think a play called Macbeth was going to be about?

NORRIS: It's like the MTC subscribers. They'll come along [to anything in the MTC program].

ROBERTSON: But we always knew in the old days that they'd all be asleep in the front row!

NORRIS: I'll bet this transfers.

MEYRICK: Maybe. I'm glad I don't have that pressure.

NORRIS: It's a challenging play for an audience but a very rewarding one. There are fascinating scenes. Love scenes between older people, that sort of thing.

MCCONNOCHIE: Absolutely.

NORRIS: We've been lucky with the sponsorship in that regard. Viagra's one and at the other end are Le Pine funeral directors.

BAILEY: There's quite a bit of action in the script. Fight scenes. One scene where you're carrying another actor the whole time.

ROBERTSON: My daughter keeps saying 'Don't you do it, dad!'

NORRIS: You are going to carry him? Good on you. You're never too old for a challenge, I tell you.

MCCONNOCHIE: It's very unsentimental which is great. Most plays concerning old people are terribly sentimental. Cosy views of what's a rather cruel world, really.

MEYRICK: To be unsentimental and uplifting is very difficult. I remember saying to [playwright Patricia Cornelius] that it's a play about aging and I thought she was going to clock me. For her it's not about aging. It's a play about loss. And the way that loss is freighted at a certain time of your life and how it's dealt with. These are characters who've reached a certain point in their life where they are able to look back and take stock.

MCCONNOCHIE: It defies some of the myths about aging, really. People talk about getting wisdom when you're older. But I know some really stupid old people. I think if they were stupid young people they'll be stupid old people. There's a certain air of knowledge people get as they get older but it doesn't necessarily come with the territory at all. The play avoids any of those generalities.

I came quite late to it. I nudged my way in really. I had heard about this play and met Julian schmoozing in a foyer. I was really struck when I read the play. Because Scott's reality is so strong and he imposes it on other people. Most of our discussions now are about at what point he communicates with other people or if he's in his own world.

NORRIS: If I say my character's on a journey towards death, I wouldn't want to put the audience off. 'Oh shit, it's going to be a play about people dying'. It's not as bald as that. But for me it is. Unrequited ideals. A life that's basically wasted.

ROBERTSON: In a way it's the same thing that we face, as actors growing older. When do you give up?

NORRIS: Except that we haven't got that idealism. We haven't spent our life pursuing that ideal, that philosophy.

ROBERTSON: Well I have.

NORRIS: But an ideology that has proved to be made of bloody quicksand. I've spent my entire fucking life and it's come to nothing, and was in a way a con-job. I think a lot of older people feel that, very often. Like the Peggy Lee song: “Is That All There Is?” I'm at the end of my life and it's gone very quickly, and for what?

MEYRICK: I find it a very frightening question and I'm not even that old.

NORRIS: You've got it coming, baby.

ROBERTSON: It's wonderful to be with actors who know what they're doing.

NORRIS: I've noticed with older performers they might make suggestions or contribute more to a director's ideas than a younger person. I don't know whether Julian would agree with that.

MEYRICK: This cast are fairly truculent.

MCCONNOCHIE: Difficult.

MEYRICK: Many of the things you might need to suggest to a younger actor, they just don't require.

NORRIS: I think it's respect for each other.

MCCONNOCHIE: But you go on learning. Because acting is such an indefinable thing, every experience is one where you hope you'll learn something about yourself and the craft that you've been practising for some time. I'm finding this extremely difficult as a role, so it's not a complacent situation at all. The fact that I'm surrounded by people of even greater experience than me is fantastic. It's reassuring.

NORRIS: As one gets older, a lot of one's competitors die off. If you reach our age and can still remember lines and try not to bump into the furniture, you can keep going.

MCCONNOCHIE: It is a stayer's game. If you can survive the first 30 odd years you can keep going. I like to think that actors never stop and just keep going until they drop, and the image of the actor dying on stage is a traditional one. But I have to say I've gotten to the stage where I don't know if I really want to do it as much as I used to. I have to work, I can't afford not to, but playing small roles is something I'll probably do in the future.

NORRIS: It's much easier at our age to act in film and television. The challenge is acting on stage where you begin at the beginning and end at the end two hours later. Film and television is a bloody breeze. Short scenes. A lot of older actors lose confidence in acting on the stage. So here you have a very brave group of geriatrics. I might be a bit slower getting up but the audience when you're older is with you. They're on your side.

MEYRICK: We were working a scene on Saturday where somebody has to get up off the floor, and it just takes a certain amount of time. You can't hurry. Knees at a certain point take a certain amount of time to do their stuff.

NORRIS: There's a great audience empathy with the older performer. America is the classic example: as soon as an older performer comes on stage, standing ovation. There's a great affection for them.

It's a young person's game. On television they've gotten younger and younger and younger. If you're casting a chief inspector of police: 33? In days gone by they would be 68.

MEYRICK: But in other ways it's not a young person's game. It really does take 30 years on stage to get 30 years of experience. You can tell that straight off. So I think it's weird what we've done to the theatre.

NORRIS: It's the year of youth isn't it?

MEYRICK: Well it's the year of paranoid obsession about it and denying anything to do with getting older. Which is also a bit weird because that's the direction that all people are travelling in.

NORRIS: There'll be a lot more of you when you're our age.

THIS BLOG IS NO MORE!

2010-06-11T18:15:00.000+10:00

Just kidding. Going overseas for a week and a bit so don't bother dropping by in the meantime. I've had plenty of reviews I haven't been able to get up here recently as well, but, you know. Of them I'd most recommend Gary Abrahams Something Natural but Very Childish on at La Mama right now - it's utterly charming. Otherwise, make your own fun for a little while. My next fortnight will probably be a bit more like this:

Intelligence Can Be Eaten

2010-06-02T17:17:00.000+10:00

People often write about particular artists 'evolving' – I'm pretty sure I've done it myself – but a while back I read a nice comment by a science-wise person arcing up against this term usage. Species evolve. Individuals don't. An individual can 'develop' or 'grow' or whatever, but evolution is the process of change across massive populations of lifeforms.

I think that probably holds true for the arts, too. Unless you subscribe to some form of aesthetic creationism that upholds genius as the result of divine intervention. Surprising how much criticism does.

Reviews: Next Wave Festival

2010-06-02T12:12:00.000+10:00

Dudes, I'm really sorry I didn't write about the Next Wave festival here. I was really busy, for real. Along with seeing Next Wave stuff almost every night I was cramming in Emerging Writers Fest events as well as normal, non-festival shows and keeping down a regular job. I even managed to squeeze in a film! A film! Films are a luxury I just don't get! It's like saying I found time to go to a four-hour, three-course dinner and show at a theatre restaurant! Which I also did! Twice!

And now the festival is over; but seeing as I've found myself with about three minutes to kill I'm going to post some notes on some highlights, just for posterity or some such.

FUN RUN

And it was fun. What fun. One guy running 42 kms on a treadmill in the city square surrounded by a large lighting rig, massive LED screen blazing, booming DJ-fuelled soundtrack, silky-voiced DJ and hundreds of performers ranging from dancers to cheerleaders to athletes. You could hear it from blocks away. But what made this event so curiously subversive was the lack of cues that clued us in that it was Art. Countless passersby wondered what they were watching – a charity event? A corporate stunt? A sporting spectacle? It was all of these things, kind of, or parodies of each. It definitely involved the city in a truly remarkable way, and as the sun set and the runner entered the final leg of the race the atmosphere was electric among onlookers still none the wiser as to why they were even there. A gold medal affair.

DACHSHUND UN

I would venture to say that any intelligent discussion of this work will be drowned out by most of Melbourne screaming "DOGGIES! DOGGIES! CUTE LITTLE SAUSAGE DOGGIES!!!" Which is what you get, really. There's more to it on a conceptual level but let's face it. You come for the dogs. You stay for the dogs.

My biggest concern was that beyond the cuteness was a bunch of animals who weren't particularly enjoying their experience of art, but when I visited last weekend those fears were mostly allayed. Behind the structure are a lot of people patting the dogs and checking that they're ok and I didn't notice any distressed weiners. There is a broader issue surrounding the use of animals for entertainment that I'm very interested in, but as I say, that debate is hard to mount in the face of “DOOOOOOGGIES!!!”

SUNSET OVER CARDBOARD MOUNTAINS

Sit in a cardboard box in a darkened tent, listen to a massive live band, watch obscured performers do creepy things in the shadows and projected animation play out on the walls. I didn't connect with this show that much but I know people who were wiping away tears. I guess it's that kind of piece: everything that takes place seems there purely because it's beautiful to someone or provokes some kind of affective response – this is art that appeals to the senses rather than the cognitive mind. So, for me the experience didn't push the right buttons, even though I did spend a lot of my youth sitting in cardboard boxes. I'd certainly recommend it to others, though.

AND THEN SOMETHING FELL ON MY HEAD

I started the day off by dropping an empty coffee mug on my foot, which really hurt (and had the same waking effect I'd been looking for in the coffee). When I ended my day by watching thousands and thousands of objects raining down from a great height, it felt appropriate. I mean 'feel' in a thick sense: this performance engaged me on a level that was neither rational nor emotional but was based on physical memory – the embodied recollections of physical pain which we all have. Of course, since memories are unique to individuals, each viewer is going to experience this show differently.

I heard that it's unlikely And Then Something Fell on my Head will get a remount as it's pretty costly. I hope that's not the case, as it was absolutely my Next Wave festival highlight and I'd love to see it again. I know a lot of other people share the sentiment; it's also why I'm not giving away the specifics of the show which are all the more effective when unexpected. If you do get a chance to catch it one day, my advice would be to drop everything.

THOUSANDS

This is the other show everyone spoke about as their favourite. It's harder to explain why. It's a high concept dance solo that really doesn't sound like much: the performer spends 50 minutes moving incrementally, almost invisibly, to a fantastic repetitive soundtrack. It's like disco butoh in a gold wash. That's about the best I can describe it.

AND THAT WAS THE SUMMER THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

There's been one moment in Zoe Coombs-Marr's life so perfect that everything else that follows will always be compared to it and fall short: the day in Year 7 when she got to perform the entire flute solo from West Side Story on her own. It doesn't sound that special, but from it she's developed an entire show based on the unrealistic expectations a childhood memory can establish and the disappointment that can result. Well, the entire show isn't really based on the incident – it brings in all kinds of stuff from her youth to have shaped the person she is – but it seems the strongest thread to run throughout the piece.

If there's a problem with this mostly entertaining number its that these things don't always seem to hang together that well. Coombs-Marr is a sharp comic and never lets things get dull or didactic, but structurally this feels like two or three shows jammed into one. Which is fine. It's still the funniest Next Wave show I saw this year and the raw material is more thought-provoking than much of what I've seen, even if it isn't always fashioned into the needle-sharp thing this show could possibly be.

JOY

Fiona Bryant and Kate Stanley make some of the most exciting new dance in Melbourne. I caught their short piece MAX a while back after hearing about Bryant's work with Deborah Hay. It was, for me, a more concise illustration of Hay's philosophy than the actual Deborah Hay show I saw around the same time at MIAF.

JOY sees the two extending their collaboration and expanding their scope. It's less abstracted and takes as the subject of its investigation something that doesn't get a lot of play: the Aging Woman. It consists of sequences that gently draw out and amplify recognisable images and movements, from the clomping of sensible shoes to the angry, inarticulate rage of the mind that must witness its own decay. The title's apt, however, as this is a work that hunts out the fragile joy of our twilight years without becoming overly sentimental towards the elderly. Exhilarating stuff.

A MYSTERY OF LITTLE IMPORT ABOUT AN IMPORT OF SOME MYSTERY (WITH A LITTLE HISTORY)

2010-05-20T14:50:00.001+10:00

The Sydney Biennale opened last week and came to my attention via a strange bit of correspondence I had with someone involved.

Mieskuoro Huutajat (The Shouting Men Choir) is a Finnish ensemble that formed in 1987. They've gained an international reputation for their performances, which usually involve traditional or national songs made strange by being shouted and howled by a gang of several dozen guys in suits. It's an interesting project – firstly in the way the harsh chanting strips away melody while foregrounding the affective potential of pure rhythm, and secondly in the choice of songs, which take on new aspects when delivered in an almost militaristic, aggressively masculine fashion.

Huutajat were set to appear at the Biennale this year and I'd been invited to catch them live by one of its members. A few weeks back he let me know that the choir would no longer be able to make it, however, as the institution which had granted them 50% of their travel funding had suddenly been disbanded by the Finnish Ministry of Culture. No one knows where that money has gone.

Here's the organisation in question, FRAME.

The website is a bit misleading – as the text in the bottom right indicates, the government is reassessing the ways in which it will distribute cultural funding in the future and so FRAME has effectively been suspended if not outright done away with.

The group was still determined to have a presence at the Biennale and so its director videotaped each member individually and assembled the results into an installation piece. When I discovered the subject matter my interest was piqued a little more. The piece will involve the choir shouting excerpts from Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations.

What's interesting to me here isn't just how this departs from the choir's usual brief – though reinterpreting the apology through a medium of almost violent, macho yelling will probably lend an very weird air to the politics of the speech. What's equally intriguing is how this kind of appropriation will be met. There are massive issues when it comes to other cultures 'quoting' Indigenous Australia – remember the Russian ice skaters debacle? The market for fake 'Aboriginal' art? And even the sensitivity required when presenting the names or images of deceased Indigenous Australians?

This is why the Huutajat project may be treading on thorny territory: it doesn't re-present Indigenous Australia but does focus on one of the most important moments in non-Indigenous Australia's encounter with its first inhabitants. Can a bunch of Nordic blokes really speak to the relationships between people of this country, or is it a sensationalist stunt? Would a performance of the apology by an Australian group present different questions or challenges? Or will situating the thing in a Biennale make any response purely academic?

And what the hell is a Ministry of Culture?

Review: Private Dances

2010-05-19T13:50:00.000+10:00

PRIVATE DANCES

So, last week I was in a small room in North Melbourne sitting astride an oversized rocking horse while wearing a red crushed-velvet robe and being urged to spank “the mind worm” – a giant white phallic thing dangling in front of my face – by a trio of near-naked cultists writhing in front of a bank of bright flashing video screens to a soundtrack of soft-porn moaning and the kind of music usually accompanied by album art featuring men with broadswords and ladies cuddling up to dragons, and I thought: “Oh right, I see.” This mightn't have been the kind of enlightenment sought after by the experience but I'd heard a lot about it already and was pleased to finally understand why everyone was urging me to try it on myself.

“The happy Pony Club come in” was one of more than a dozen dance works that made up Next Wave's Private Dances. Choreographer Natalie Cursio invited a swag of emerging artists to create intimate pieces for audiences of one (or sometimes two or three) and the range of dance styles represented was broad – traditional Indian dance, krumping, contortionism, live art and lots of film. In one moment I was slow dancing with a gorilla to Bob Marley, in the next I was sitting in a van while three headbangers rocked out to Alice Cooper's “Poison”. One of the most satisfying numbers was a tiny number named “The Mint Thief” which created a complete experience akin to a movie trailer, cutting together a story of crime and pursuit at an astonishingly rapid pace (and complemented by a heady aroma of mint). And most of the works took place in camping tents barely tall enough to stand up in.

I got along to Private Dances twice – first for a preview and later during the actual season. It was a radically different experience each night. At the test run the performances were all top-notch but the night was beset by logistical difficulties. Put simply, the audience was too eager. One attendee told me that she finally understood the appeal of Boxing Day sales: she was ready to step over heads to get to that next piece of art. The result was a bottleneck, and while a more aggressive approach could see you getting in a good ten or more viewings some people weren't so forward.

This is why you have previews, right? By the following night Cursio had restructured the thing so that these troubles vanished – extra ushers, increased access, more audience capacity for a couple of works. And the other half of the experience, the anticipation, was enhanced too. Now there was great catering, a more comfortable waiting area (decked out as a glittery nightclub) and the introduction of the Conversationalists. Of which I was one.

Why anyone would want a grumpy misanthrope like myself to act as social facilitator is beyond me, but my spidey senses picked up the potential for canapes so I assented. Along with a bunch of others who'd been at the preview, it was our job to chat to strangers about the things they'd seen. We weren't exactly audience plants but it's surprising how infrequently the matter of our appointment actually came up (I even found myself in conversation with someone for about five minutes before either of us pegged that we were both Conversationalists). Really, it only took a couple of us to start talking with a random person nearby before a ripple effect started and the whole room seemed to be excitedly talking at once. We weren't just in a replica of a nightclub – we were in a great nightclub, the kind everyone's desperate to get into.

By the time, then, that I got around to whacking the mind-worm, which I'd missed during the preview, it wasn't the encounter you might expect from my description above. It was a tiny part of a much bigger project that was never alienating or discomforting or self-indulgent or wanky. Most of the individual performances were great on their own terms but the broader context in which they arose was exactly what so many in the world of the arts call for but almost never produce: conversation. There's plenty of talk about the need for more talk but when someone really makes it happen, they should be heaped with praise. If Private Dances is anything to go by, at least. So if you get a chance to catch a remount, take it.

Review-ish: 24 Hours

2010-05-13T15:49:00.001+10:00

24 HRS

At Dancehouse.

I don't think I could be accused of sensationalism for suggesting that 24 HRS may spell the end of art as we know it. The brief is simple: four choreographers and some dancers have 24 hours to create a new dance work from scratch. But like most catalysts of the apocalypse (germs, asteroids, Hey Hey) it is this apparent simplicity that masks the real threat. Because really: if this godless experiment results in something truly dazzling, where will that leave all of the dance works that take weeks, months, years to gestate? And more importantly, where will it leave all the funding that goes towards those lengthy development periods that we all know involve staring moodily out of gabled windows while keeping a roaring fire fuelled by the wads of cash handed out by government bodies? (I don't mean that literally – plastic Australian money doesn't burn at all well and most artists are forced to spend it on easily-flammable first editions of rare books to throw in the hearth).

The first two instalments of 24 HRS have already been released upon the public and they haven't proven the end of art at all. They've both been provocative experiments, though, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the season. Taken as a whole, the project is turning out to be most rewarding as an insight into the creative process itself or, more accurately, into the differing processes employed by a range of artists and the way that our reception of these doesn't necessarily reflect the intentions of their makers.

Natalie Cursio was up first and went at it with vigour: a wasteland of recycled refuse was the staging ground for a series of intimate scenes between three dancers (with occasional solos and duets). It was clear that the choreographer hadn't tried to create a strict sequence of steps for the dancers to follow but had set up situations instead, and this gave the performers some interpretative space within which to play. What made it most effective for me was that Cursio's work appeared to have focused on particular dynamics or relationships between the dancers, so there were palpable moments of connection, rejection, interruption and release. It wasn't expressive dance, per se, but there was a level of humanism involved that allowed a really strong entry point into the work.

For me, anyway. In fact, I got it wrong in some respects. Early on in the piece there was a moment where I thought “hang on a bit, this is all about babies!” Not babies as such, but infancy and reliance and the particular ways that dependency can actually be a source of destructive power. But I don't think that was there in the piece at all. Not speaking with some of the cast afterwards, anyway. Others found more of interest in the notion of waste embodied by the work, which I hadn't paid much attention to. It all drove home the fact that you can't say a piece of contemporary dance is necessarily 'about' anything; or, perhaps, it's like saying a beach is about swimming or a hat is about a head.

Week two was Shelley Lasica's turn and I didn't find this as enjoyable a piece: it was probably more sophisticated, technically, but cooler, too; I was more distant. Another three-hander (or footer – is there a term in dance?), the work offered no sense of connection between the performers on stage who could have been in separate rooms for all I could see. The set and costumes seemed arbitrary, the progression of phrases equally so, and I wonder if there were chance elements involved in the work (it did seem a bit reminiscent of Merce Cunningham). The soundtrack was quite ace – like a stormy early 80s track by Tangerine Dream – but this to me felt like dance for dancemakers, and it's obvious that I'm not one. I didn't get to stick around for the post-show discussions, so I remain unenlightened.

The lab atmosphere surrounding the whole project is really its biggest plus: you can watch snippets of the development process online during the 24 hours and there's a twitter feed discussing what you see along the way. Tonight Philip Adams will be setting the timer and next week it's Luke George; I've heard great (and sometimes scary) things about both of their plans.

Performances at Dancehouse tomorrow and next Friday.

Review: The Persistence of Dreams: The Sandman

2010-05-08T13:57:00.000+10:00

THE PERSISTENCE OF DREAMS: THE SANDMAN

By IRAA Theatre.

If we'd seen that show in a theatre, notes a fellow audience member, we wouldn't still be sitting here talking about it. This is an hour after Roberta Bosetti and Renato Cuocolo have left the building and the building in question is the home of a friend. We'd had a big meal and some wine and talked a bunch of crap while waiting the arrival of The Italians who, at the appointed hour, knocked on the door and took over the house. Nobody knew much about what to expect of the pair and since the piece will undoubtedly have a future life I won't go into too much detail about exactly what they pull off here. It becomes clear early on, however, that to invite strangers into your home means giving up a certain amount of power which we take for granted in the safety of our living spaces and, indeed, our theatre.

Like any dream, this one weaves in countless references that can't always be traced to their source. Sometimes these are in the form of dialogue – I spotted a line from David Lynch's Blue Velvet, and another guest picked up a section from Cormac McCarthy's The Road (embarrassing for me since I'd re-read that novel less than a week before). At one point Cuocolo scolds Bosetti for going off-script and reciting a bit of Emily Dickinson; at their most unsettling the quotations are situational rather verbal, as when a scene from Haneke's sadistic Funny Games begins to insert itself, or when mention of the Tate-LaBianca murders comes to seem horribly relevant.

The most prominent intertext is indicated by the show's title: E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" which formed the basis for Freud's theories of The Uncanny. The Uncanny pops up pretty literally in the conception of this piece; in the German it's das unheimlich, or “the unhomely,” and Freud and later thinkers have examined how the sensation of the uncanny relies on the experience of strangeness within the familiar. Strangers in your home is about as straightforward a rendition of this as you could get, really.

One of the figures of Hoffmann's story which Freud effectively wrote out of his interpretation is Olimpia, the animated doll-woman who becomes the protagonist's obsessive love interest. The revelation that she is an automaton created by the monstrous figure he perceives as the Sandman precipitates his insanity, but Freud does all sorts of backflips to prove that Olimpia is just a distraction from the real Oedipal drama of disavowal and repression.

This is a shitty interpretation: that Freud should have found little interest in a love object who literally becomes an object is almost inexplicable, though his own writing often accomplished the same task when it came to female subjects (in fact psychoanalysis at its worst makes of the mind itself a clockwork mechanism).

Bosetti and Cuocolo don't explicitly invoke Olimpia either – the long reworking of "Der Sandmann" which is at the heart of The Persistence of Dreams focuses instead on the version told to Bosetti as a child, in which the villainous bogeyman comes at night to steal the eyes of unruly children to feed to his own. Vision and blindness and submission and the forbidden are all woven into the way this story is presented and (again without revealing too much) by this point the audience is as much grappling with the situation they've found themselves in as the narrative being conveyed.

And this is where I think Olimpia makes herself known: the audience of this work becomes the puppet, in the end, and is left questioning its own autonomy in the theatrical experience. At the mercy of the performers and removed from the safety of the theatre, the passivity of spectatorship becomes a problem rather than a comfort. When it's over there's no chance for that reassuring punctuation mark that is applause, and I think that's exactly why it was so necessary to talk about the show afterwards (at such length, too). It was still going on and we had to make sense of it, to explain away the dream or, rather, to banish the ghosts who had left the building but still seem to hover somewhere just out of sight. The moment when one of us realised that these intruders had in fact left behind real traces of their presence in other rooms only made that more real.

Review: Cageling

2010-05-07T14:27:00.001+10:00

CAGELING

By The Rabble.

The Rabble's production of Cageling at fortyfivedownstairs has sold out which is great news for independent theatre in Melbourne (is it me or has there been an unusual number of similar sellout seasons in 2010?) It's a reimagining of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba with some pretty bold imagery and directorial choices, but for me it was marred for a few reasons I'll get to eventually.

The great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca's most enduring contribution to the arts must surely be his concept of duende, an idea with all the precision and grace you'd expect from a guy known to his friends as Flamenco Feddy. You could say duende is the quality of doing things in italics, Sometimes With Initial Caps, but I had to go back to the books to find a more precise explanation of duende. To save you the same trouble I'll reprint here an extract from Lorca's own writings on the subject in “Tears of a Horny Bullfighter”:

“The toreador will not sleep tonight. The blood has long been rinsed from his short pants but his soul is still awash with a violent gore no amount of scrubbing can remove. Not this night, at least. Why must he walk the restless midnight streets like a revenant? Why does rest elude him like a word I cannot think of? Is it because he is horny? Yes. But also no.

It is because of duende, my friends. Duende.

Duende translates as “the vibe” but it is so much more than that. We know this because there is no way of truly putting duende in words. Easier to put a horse in a muffin. Both are the fool's game.

But it is in the fool's game that duende is found, for it is only the fool who dares lift the skirts of the muse or make inappropriate comments about the angel's new haircut. In this foolish game played by the foolish fool we can hear the mournful cry of the Spanish balladeer as he plucks the guitar of passion with the dirty fingernails of mortality while singing his song of lies and olives. This game which is also a song and also also a bullfight is a game of terror and love. A little like gin rummy.

But the impish spirit that is duende cannot be pinned down by the impoverished language of the moderns; I can only dream of the day when the rest of humanity will do as I do and append labels to every instance of it with tags such as “What's This, Federico?” or “Look Out, Lorca!” Yes, yes, perhaps someday the masses will join my celebration of the WTF? and LOL, which is the heart of duende. And by duende, of course, I mean... duende. Look, you know what I mean.”

Cageling isn't a production of Bernarda Alba but a devised work that treats the play as an “undercurrent”. We've seen this process produce some terrific work – you can see it in stuff by Four Larks Theatre, Ignite, a lot of Malthouse work, and most especially in the recent output of Daniel Schlusser (who also stars in Cageling).

I was thinking about Schlusser's production of Life is a Dream after seeing this and the comparison helps me to frame my response. In Dream, Schlusser and his cast tore apart a classic and reassembled something new and unique from the fragments – you didn't need to know the original because the thing presented stood on its own feet as something remarkable in every respect. I even know some people who were angered by the work because it was such a thorough reimagining of Calderon's play that it shouldn't even lay claim to the title – I disagree, since I think that Dream was also deeply respectful of its source and stayed true to its themes. But in any case, you could view that production with no knowledge of its 17th century origins.

I can't say the same for Cageling: it felt as if I was witnessing a dialogue but was party to only one end of it. Some images were striking but seemed responses to a question I hadn't heard asked. I guess it was like stumbling upon the shed skin of a snake as you round a bend in the country – at first startling until you realise that the living thing is somewhere else. The husk itself might be beautiful in texture and hue but its most immediate significance is as a warning that the real serpent is still on the loose.

In short, what I'm saying is that I don't know The House of Bernarda Alba well and this severely impaired my reception of Cageling. Almost everyone else I've spoken to got a lot from the piece and most are familiar with Lorca's play; the only other person I know who didn't get into it hasn't seen or read Bernarda Alba (although he was more put off by the disjointedness of the whole thing, which isn't a problem for me).

Does this put into relief one of the most challenging aspects of devised adaptations – must the response itself contain enough of the original statement to be intelligible to newcomers? Or does this weaken the intensity of that response? I don't know. Maybe there is no answer worth pondering. Or maybe the answer is... duende.

(On a related note, remember the Argentinian "creepy gnome" that was all over the web a few years ago? I'd forgotten about him.)