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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.