Dance Massive: random rants #1

Thirteen shows in eight days. My favourites so far...



Black Project 2. Rampant, scintillating, precise, alien. You know, just Antony Hamilton at his awesome best. I would have very happily shelled out to see it again. Had I world enough and time.


Byron Perry, Stephanie Lake and Alisdair Macindoe

Conversation Piece. An insanely likable bit of theatre with equally likable dance. Half of this particular cast is new to the piece, and the ‘outs’ include Alison Bell and Harriet Richie... who are about as close to irreplaceable as you’re gonna get in any show. So kudos to Lucy Guerin for lining up the wonderfully versatile Katherine Tonkin and Stephanie Lake as their replacements.

Byron Perry is the other ‘in’, for Rennie McDougall, so there’s a heap of on-stage charisma to go round. (And I feel sick not devoting a few hundred words to Megan Holloway’s hair, Matthew Whittet’s pure and applied geekiness and Alisdair Macindoe’s conversation with himself!)

Southern Exposure, another miraculous instalment of Russell Dumas’s dance for the time being. One steps into a Dumas work, like a river. It feels like a vast loop. Not repeated, exactly, more curved. Like space and time. If one travels far enough in one direction, the starting point will be reached again. It’s a loop in the same way that an eco system is looped. Water flowing, evaporating, raining down again, flowing again.

This time around, I noticed the restfulness (if that’s the word) of the movement. The exertion is almost completely hidden. Minimised, certainly. It’s stealthy. This style of dance is as different to everything else that passes as contemporary as a fretless instrument is to a fretted one. It has the accuracy of ‘digital’ and the artistry of ‘analogue’. It’s performed with freshly scrubbed feet on freshly polished floorboards in a naturally-lit space. The only external sound comes from the dull roar of overhead fans. The audience silence is entirely unselfconscious.

Tonight (that’s Tuesday night, when I saw both Conversation Piece and Southern Exposure) perfection is on my mind, thanks to Ivan Vasiliev and Natalia Osipova, guest leads in the Australian Ballet’s Don Quixote on Monday evening. Not because they were perfect, no. But because a couple of reviews called them perfect which seems, rather, to be missing the point.


Natalia Osipova as Kitri in Don Quixote (Photograph: Jeff Busby)

They did to the Australian Ballet what the Australian Ballet has been doing to the rest of the world for a great proportion of the last fifty years. Vasiliev and Osipova shamed us with their passion and daring. They’re remarkable because of their willingness to break line and lose centre in pursuit of something more valuable than plastic perfection. (And on this occasion I use ‘plastic’ in its modern synthetic sense rather than its original pliable/malleable sense.)

I’m hoping that David McAllister’s choice of guests for the company’s signature ballet (this is the one Nureyev created on the national company and which has been performed 420-odd times) is intended to show the young dancers of the company that technical perfection is not an end point but, rather, a starting point.

Which brings me back to Russell Dumas. The ‘perfection’ in his work has a certain joyfulness, I think. It’s hard won -- there’s no doubt about that -- and comes from grueling repetition which turns an analogue movement into something exactly repeatable. But it would be as wrong to call it ‘painstaking’ as it would be to call a religious practice painstaking. It is, rather, a kind of worship.

Though I’m impressed by it -- awed by it -- I don’t really see the point of hiding the exertion. It’s reminiscent of the footbinding excesses of classical ballet. (Sorry, Russell, if I’ve just given you apoplexy!) I live for the day that I see some feat on the ballet stage, some impossible lift or leap, and hear the grunt of exertion like a noisy tennis player. Yeah, yeah, it’ll be the beginning of the end. But it’ll make me smile inside.


Coming up:

Don’t miss the return season of Jo Lloyd’s Future Perfect. I saw this at “Tirade’s Hall” the year before last and rated it the highlight of the year in Dance Australia’s 2011 Critics’ Survey. It opens tonight at the Meat Market.


dance for the time being (Southern Exposure) by Russell Dumas. Performed by Linda Sastradipradja, Jonathan Sinatra, Nicole Jenvey, Rachel Doust, David Huggins, Sarah Cartwright, Eric Fon and Molly McMenamin. Presented by Dance Exchange. At Dancehouse, North Carlton, March 19-21. Around fifty minutes.

Conversation Piece. Choreographed and directed by Lucy Guerin. Set and costume design by Robert Cousins. Lighting design by Damien Cooper. Sound design and composition by Robin Fox. Performed by Megan Holloway, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Byron Perry, Katherine Tonkin and Matthew Whittet. Presented by Arts House, Belvoir and Lucy Guerin Inc. At Arts House, Meat Market, March 19-24. Seventy minutes.

Black Project 2 by Antony Hamilton. Set construction and production management by Matthew Scott, Megafun. Costume design by Paula Levis. Sound design by Alisdair Macindoe. Video design by Kit Webster. Performed by James Batchelor, Jake Kuzma, Talitha Maslin, Jessie Oshodi, Marnie Palomares and Jess Wong. Presented by Arts House and Antony Hamilton Projects. At Arts House, Meat Market, March 12-16.

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Generations: Zero Zero and The Recording

Thanks to Zero Zero, the most recent and arguably the finest collaboration between Tony Yap and Yumi Umiumare to date, generations have been on my mind. Umiumare first came to Melbourne with Butoh company Dai Rakuda Kan in 1991 -- I still can’t get the dead goldfish in the clear heels of their shoes out of my head -- and moved here not long after. So we’ve been watching her for more than 20 years. Ditto Tony Yap, though he first came to prominence in Renato Cuocolo’s theatre company IRAA. I vividly remember his androgynous long-haired Medea in Cuocolo’s ‘Vision of the Void’ adaptation. I reckon that was also 1991. (Yap had been in some short dance works by Lynne Santos in 1989 and 1990 as well.)

Ignoring this history -- this physical ballast -- is difficult. And, perhaps, pointless. These collaborations between Yap and Umiumare utilise time. The history of the bodies involved in the performance is integral to the performance. I’m not sure if that’s a cultural thing, if it’s just specific to these particular bodies, or if it’s just these individual projects.

The paradox is that these bodies -- bodies that I’ve been watching for literally decades -- seem to have defied time. They haven’t thickened or visibly aged whatsoever. They’re amazingly lithe, more muscular and toned than ever. In the unairconditioned lower space at fortyfivedownstairs on a hot February Sunday afternoon, sweat ran down Tony Yap’s back in silvery rivulets. The trails caught the light like glycerine tears on an actor’s face.


Watching Sandra Parker’s The Recording at Dancehouse, yesterday evening, it suddenly became clear that Fiona Cameron has swapped generations since last I saw her perform. She’s not quite ‘elder statesman’ or anything like that. Nor is she on the back nine, in golfing terms. But she has a new found gravity, if that’s the word. Her fingers and hands are as captivating as her dark expressions.

As an aside... it’s easy enough to invest complete stillness with weight. Likewise, it’s easy to make a dramatic thrust or a big gesture look weighty. But tiny moves, thrumming fingertips or delicate lines are far harder. The opening moments of The Recording are a fine (and rare) example of investing small moves with weight.

Perhaps even more shockingly, to me, Phoebe Robinson is also at one of those generational gear change moments. Weirdly enough, in writing about one of Robinson’s shows Only Leone five years ago, I mused that Robinson might benefit from some mentoring by Sandy Parker. It won’t be long before Robinson is doing the mentoring. (Lucky youngies.)

Speaking of generations, the other performer in The Recording is Trevor Patrick who made his pro debut a couple of years before I started reviewing. So, for me, he has always been there. Like an older brother. There’s a remarkable moment in this show in which Patrick face-syncs his performance with a pre-recorded video, shot in tight close-up. Now, the camera is supposed to add ten pounds, but not with the lean and hungry Patrick. Weirdly, it seems to add ten years to his face. The screen image is slightly overexposed and exaggerates the lines in his face. The video is time-stamped 1982, I think. It’s as if Patrick is playing his father.

For me, with all of the accreted knowledge of these performers (Sandra Parker and her collaborators Rhian Hinkley and Jennifer Hector included) ideas fired through my head from go to whoa. But I can’t imagine what it meant, if anything, to the young audience members around me. I can’t imagine how they would read it or, indeed, if they would find anything to read in it at all.


Zero Zero. Created and performed by Tony Yap and Yumi Umiumare. Media, sound and lighting by co-creator Matthew Gingold. Additional design and production realisation by Paula van Beek. At fortyfivedownstairs, February 24.

The Recording. Directed and choreographed by Sandra Parker. Projections by Rhian Hinkley. Music by Steven Heather. Lighting by Jennifer Hector. Performed by Fiona Cameron, Trevor Patrick and Phoebe Robinson. Part of Dance Massive. At Dancehouse, North Carlton, March 13-16. About an hour.

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Dance Massive: Physical Fractals by Natalie Abbott

I’m always torn when it comes to seasons like Pieces for Small Spaces and, more recently, the First Run program -- both Lucy Guerin initiatives -- after which comments and feedback are invited. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing works in development. I first saw Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals in zygote form (to use an Ani diFranco expression) at Pieces for Small Spaces the year before last. And I’m very glad I did.


Sarah Aiken and creator Natalie Abbott

But I don’t like ‘interfering’ in the creative ecology. I’d hate to reduce the scope of the invention.

At Pieces for Small Spaces in 2011, Abbott’s piece was an elegant and most impressive one-woman show called Circles for Squares. And a tiny piece it most certainly was. Tiny in the detail sense. It drew us into the micro world so quickly, and so effectively, we were convinced that the downturned eyes -- the very movement of Abbott’s eyelashes -- were an integral part of the choreography.

Since then, I’ve seen the macro piece, now called Physical Fractals, twice. Different seasons. Different co-stars. Different venues. And I reckon I’m further away, now, from fathoming the piece than I was in 2011. That’s an observation, not a criticism by the way.

Watching Abbott and Sarah Aiken at the North Melbourne Town Hall this week, I was reminded of something Chris Kohn (I think) said about directing theatre. If he understands the work he’s directing, what’s the point of directing it? It has to be a challenge. An exploration. It has to involve navigating. Trial and error.

I think -- repeat think -- that Physical Fractals needs to be approached like a piece of percussive music. Minimal music. In its contemporary sense. There are atoms of movement, really simple gestures and phrases, from which the whole is assembled: the backstroke, the hair sweep, the palm thrusts, the barefoot stomping.



Think Philip Glass with its repetitions and variations and recapitulations. Some people (some critics even) have called his music brutal. But is a Glass opus so different from a Handel opera? In both -- and in Physical Fractals -- one must reboot the body’s clock. We’re in a different time zone. And the clocks tick differently here. One must sync with the dancers just as one has to enter Handel time to cope with the conventions of opera seria, the da capo aria, the ornamentation, the ‘dry’ recitative and so on.

One must breathe with the dancers. The sound of the piece, ambient noise processed through floor mounted microphones, is breathy. It reminded me of the rhythm and rasp of an artificial respirator. But the miracle is in the counting. How on earth a replacement performer could be brought up to speed without a click track is totally beyond me.

I loved the spectral figures, wraith-like in the gloom, but I thought the initial lighting state should have been lower or the decline into gloom slower. It might have been easier on our pupils after a bright day.

Physical Fractals. Choreographed by Natalie Abbott. Rebecca Jensen, collaborator. Performed by Natalie Abbott and Sarah Aiken. Live sound by Daniel Arnott. Dramaturgy by Matthew Day. Lighting design by Goven Ruben. Arts House, North Melbourne, March 12 to 16. Fifty minutes.

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Dance Massive: P.O.V. by Lee Serle

Tis the era of the coda, the recapitulation, of book-ending. It was kinda cool when the era began. But now, you know, it’s become all too predictable. So, when you see a show that has a trajectory, a vector, an arc -- and it’s all one way -- it’s exciting. No knowing what’s coming. If you haven’t seen Lee Serle’s P.O.V. before, you’re in for a surprise. Guaranteed.



Weirdly though, it ends with a bloom of dance. Not an explosion, a bloom. A blossom. And it’s so exquisite, so unexpected, so wonderfully delicate and beautiful... I couldn’t help but wish Serle had opened the show with this five minute (or less) section. Cos one viewing was nowhere near enough.

It reminded me, for a second, of Lucinda Childs, all detachment and cool style, then morphed into some dance that David Byrne could have made up. Think the wrist chopping in the video for the Talking Heads song ‘Once In A Lifetime’.

The angular forearms and hands were one part Vogue, one part Frances D’Ath. But I might’ve been thinking of D’Ath cos of the Paskas connection. Bonnie in the earlier show, Lily in this one.

Anyway, Serle shows such easy invention in that closing section of P.O.V. it deserves to be cut, like a plant, and propagated. Turned into a striking, beautiful, fragrant piece in its own right.


Lee Serle and Lily Paskas intruding on Tony Yap’s personal space

P.O.V. choreographed, directed and performed by Lee Serle with James Andrews, Kristy Ayre and Lily Paskas. Lighting by Ben Cisterne. Composition and sound design by Luke Smiles. Set design by Lee Serle. Costume design by Lee Serle and Shio Otani in collaboration with the performers. At Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 12 to March 16. 50 minutes.

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Malthouse Theatre: Hate by Stephen Sewell

“Although the dialogue of this play may appear in some respects naturalistic, the production should never make the mistake of setting it naturalistally.”

So writes Stephen Sewell in the Currency Press edition of Hate, published to coincide with the premiere production in 1988.

I guess the most important point made in my review of Marion Potts’ new production -- an edited version of which is published in today’s Australian -- is that this is not a play about a family, it’s a play about a nation. What Sewell did in Hate was show us what a family would look like if it behaved like a fanatical, dry, right-wing political party led by an ambitious and amoral bully.


John for PM, William Zappa in Hate (Photograph: Jeff Busby)

So, there’s no point criticising the writer for creating ciphers, or glove puppets. Cos, derr, that’s what they’re supposed to be. But it might have been better if Potts had cranked up the camp dial a bit, made William Zappa’s character a bit more like Richard III. Or at least Francis Urquhart. And, well, as much as I disliked Ben Geurens as Michael Gleason, I could at least see the point of his character, cue ‘The End’ by The Doors.

Anyway, here’s the director’s cut of my review.


While most political playwrights are content to examine society’s entrails and tell us what went wrong, and who to blame, Stephen Sewell has an unerring knack of forecasting the ugliest of futures. And he’s right more often than the Bureau of Meteorology. Actually, he’s right more often than Barry O Jones.

He’s predicted recessions to within a year (The Blind Giant is Dancing), the suspension of habeas corpus in the West post-9/11 (Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America) and the death of ‘wet’ politics (pretty much from his first play The Father We Loved on a Beach by the Sea on). To date, the most serious complaint that can be levelled at Sewell is that his prophecies haven’t actually helped avert any of those imagined outcomes.

After the great early “personal is political” plays -- Traitors (1979) through to Dreams In An Empty City (1986) -- Hate is an oddity. A transitional play at the very least. Co-commissioned by the Australian Bicentennial Authority, and premiered at the end of 1988, Hate is a discordant chamber piece in which the political gets very personal indeed.

Not only does Sewell imagine a political climate in which “hate is the only constructive emotion,” he conjures up a gruesome nuclear family driven by the same imperative. The patriarch, John Gleason (William Zappa), is a businessman and four decade politician hell-bent on splitting his conservative coalition -- currently in opposition -- to have a tilt at the Prime Ministership. But his greatest obstacle might prove to be his own family.

The play is grand guignol; superheated, lithe and blackly funny. Or, at least, it can be. Marion Potts’ new production is overly reverent and seals the story in time. It plays out as an inexorable (and sporadically leaden) Joh-for-PM period piece. There’s little of the mercurial lightness and zing that Neil Armfield brought to the debut Belvoir/Playbox production.

As Raymond, the middle child who fancies himself the obvious successor, Grant Piro plays the stock-broking dandy, big on threats but small on menace. Ben Geurens looks like he’s modelled his performance as younger son Michael on Jim Morrison, wrapped up in himself and his own limbs.

Ben Geurens and Sara Wiseman in Hate (Photograph: Jeff Busby)

Celia, Brünnhilde to her father’s Wotan, is the most complex and intriguing character in the play, and Sara Wiseman’s high-torque performance is far and away the best of the ensemble. There’s a nuance in her acting that’s lacking from the rest of the production.


Hate by Stephen Sewell. Directed by Marion Potts. Set and costume design by Dayna Morrissey. Lighting design by Paul Jackson. Sound design by Russell Goldsmith. A Malthouse Theatre production. Merlyn Theatre until March 8, 2013.

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You always remember the first time...

I used to bemoan the fact that the people we critics write for, i.e. you, think about what we have written for about as long as it takes to read it. Perhaps you’re wondering if a show is worth 99 bucks and a few hours of your time. Or perhaps you’re checking to see if I liked something you hated... and if I can be relied upon to give advice that’s useful to you.

But, hey, reviewing’s part of journalism. Utterly disposable. I get that. I don’t mind that. (I’m kinda glad, incidentally, that my first 400-odd reviews were for the Melbourne Times. I don’t think they’ll be on Google reader anytime soon!)

A great majority of the people who do remember you want to knee-cap you. Mostly because they can’t read... and think you called their mum trailer trash. [D’oh!] But there’s a very special group of people who will remember you for the rest of their sentient lives. Prima ballerinas in London and Leningrad who can quote 25 year-old reviews verbatim cos you were the first... when they were in the back row of the corps de ballet or debuting or whatever. And you wrote that they deserved a big shiny star on their dressing room door. (Rachael Beck quoted that line back to me recently from a 1987 review! Bless.)

After last night’s performance of Love Me Tender (Mutation Theatre, Theatre Works) Sarah Ogden told me I’d reviewed her pro debut, in The Secret Garden, when she was 11. Actually, she had me worried. She said the review looked like I wasn’t sure if it was actually her I was praising. (Three tweens were alternating in the key juvie role and PR folks rarely tell you who’s ‘on’ in a show that night. Grr!) But I looked up what I’d written. It looks mercifully unambiguous. I wrote:

But the real find is Sarah Ogden, who alternates in the role of Mary with Samantha and Jaclyn Fiddes. In addition to being a very passable actor, Ogden handles the huge range of her singing part with skill and ease. She fairly belts out her end of ‘Wick’, a duet with Dickon.

Sarah’s comment prompted Kirsten von Bibra to tell me that I’d reviewed one of her very first shows as director. The Wood Box she said. Now, given the vagaries of memory, it’s often easier for me to remember twenty years ago than twenty minutes ago. Primacy and recency and all that jazz. And The Wood Box was December 1989, when I’d only written 200-odd reviews. (I’ve written 20 times that number now.)

But it’s an easy one for me for other reasons. One of the debutantes in that play was a promising 20 year-old uni student by the name of Cate Blanchett. (Verdict: not bad. “Great vocal control” and “a fine voice” apparently! I do remember liking Caroline Lee better though. Heh!)

I had some words of praise for Kirsten’s direction in there as well. (Turns out it was just one. Specifically: ‘beautifully’.) (And that reminds me of a night I was shirt-fronted by a bloke whose show I had dismissed in two words. I’m wincing as I type this. They were “Pretty naff.” Yowza!)

So, yes, von Bibra had fond memories of that review, almost half a lifetime ago. Fond, but maybe not all that vivid. I was sure that my Wood Box review was the one in which I wrote about my mother’s menopause. And in the spirit of over-sharing I paraphrased the story, mostly for Sarah’s benefit. But Kirsten had no recollection of that bit. And I wondered if, after all these years, it was a false memory of mine.

Into the archives, Batman.

I found my TMT reviews from 1989. (Back in the day, I used to do ‘clippings’ as well as keeping a copy of what I’d written -- on a Hewlett Packard mainframe -- and faxed in.)

Here are the first two paragraphs of my review of The Wood Box, as printed.

When her first-born son made his journey to Europe, her soul went with him. Her thoughts were drawn to him like oceans drawn to a distant moon. She was distracted; her life suspended. My brother and I looked on, helpless.

Even the tides of her fertility ceased. “At last,” she thought, “menopause.” She was wrong. When her son returned, so too did the ebb and flow she had endured for 40 years, her heart came out of hibernation.

Then I mention the play! Ahem! (In my defence, my little story was really quite relevant to the content and style of the play.)

I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to recall the last time I read a review in which the menstrual cycle of the critic’s mother was mentioned...

The only consolation is that neither can Kirsten von Bibra... proving that you do always remember the first time. But not always that well.

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Robin Grove

I learned yesterday afternoon of the death of Robin Grove, a much loved teacher and scholar. He was also a dancer, in his day, and something of a composer. Years before I met the man and his equally generous and warm family, I followed his reviews of dance -- mostly ballet -- in the Australian. At a time (in the mid 1980s) when dance reviews were either apologetic and sycophantic (ballet) or just plain vicious (anything vaguely experimental), Robin’s reviews were a revelation. He looked at ballet with cool, analytical appreciation. He saw this established art form though structuralist eyes. He never actually came out and said “pointe work is footbinding” but the idea hovered.


Robin Marshall Grove (2/2/1941-25/12/2012)


Whether he knew it or not, Robin’s writing prompted me to give reviewing a crack. (I looked at the dance reviews in my local paper and thought: I can do better! The editor, apparently, agreed.)

I believe it was 1991 when I met Robin and Lee Christofis, another great voice in dance criticism. ‘Criticism’ in its most creative and positive sense. But I didn’t really get to know the depths of Robin’s CV until I had to introduce him at a Green Mill forum at the Melbourne Town Hall in January 1994. (The other panelists were the equally eminent Michelle Potter, Jill Sykes and Graeme Murphy.)

In later years, I came to know Robin and his wife Elisabeth socially, and spent many evenings in their Williamstown home when the Melbourne Dance Critics Circle (as we half-jokingly styled ourselves) gathered for regular debriefs. Shirley McKechnie, Vicki Fairfax and Blazenka Brysha were also regulars.

Many know Robin as an academic (a “lovely man” writes Cameron Woodhead, who “clung to his Shakespeare courses like a limpet” to get him “through Dark Times at the Melbourne University English department in the 90s”) and supervisor (Jordan Beth Vincent’s PhD, for one).

Robin was the most gentle, tactful and thoughtful man I have encountered in my adult life. No doubt his family -- Lis and the children -- are feeling his loss keenly. Robin died on Christmas day. He was 71.

His funeral is at 2pm Thursday January 3 at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Nelson Place Williamstown.

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The Artisan Collective: If it bleeds by Brendan McCallum

It’s worth trying to conjure up the scenario in your mind. A morning TV show on a local channel in a small coastal town in Florida. The show, Suncoast Digest, is devoted to local news. Not trivia exactly, but it is unashamedly parochial in focus. On a Monday morning in summer, not quite two weeks after the fourth of July in 1974, the revamped WXLT-TV show begins with a brief news bulletin from the news desk instead of the host’s usual armchair.

A report doesn’t quite go to plan -- video doesn’t begin on cue -- and the camera stays on the 29 year-old “attractive dark-haired anchorwoman” -- as she was described in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune the following day. According to the news report, Christine Chubbuck looked down the barrel of the lens and said: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color, you are going to see another first -- an attempted suicide.”

And there, fully two years before Peter Finch threatened to blow his brains out in the film Network, Chubbuck shot herself in the head. Live to air. Living colour indeed.

Playwright Brendan McCallum and the estimable Artisan Collective tackle the story in McCallum’s economical and superbly crafted play which opened at Gasworks on Wednesday. My short but sweet review is in today’s Australian. (It’s not on-line, so no link.) The play takes its name from the newsroom maxim: if it bleeds, it leads.

McCallum’s play is almost Ibsen-like in its swift and efficient introduction of key characters. This particular slice of time gives us an insight into what has gone on prior to the opening scene.

Indeed, the play is notable for what it leaves out. Chubbuck, for example, scripted the news item about her own suicide attempt. She guessed, correctly, that she would be in a critical condition on her arrival at hospital. (She died before midnight that same day.)



Even more intriguing is the fact that -- at Chubbuck’s insistence -- the suicide attempt was recorded onto 2” video tape. One has to assume that Chubbuck intended the footage to be widely seen. (Domestic VCRs were not widely available until the latter half of the 1970s in the USA.) Thanks to a successful injunction, the tape has never been aired. According to Wikipedia, the tape was eventually handed over to the Chubbuck family.

So, the short version... if you have time to kill between Festival shows -- or you’re looking for something tight, professional and slightly less experimental than typical Festival fare -- you could do a helluva lot worse than this.

If It Bleeds rates as conservative next to previous Artisan Collective productions but it is, in its way, every bit as exciting.

If It Bleeds by Brendan McCallum. The Artisan Collective. Directed and designed (set, sound and AV design) by Ben Pfeiffer. At Gasworks, Studio Theatre, October 17. Tickets: $28. Bookings: 03 9660 9666. Season ends October 27.

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Orlando by The Rabble (Melbourne Festival)

If you want the executive summary of what I thought about Orlando, it’s shoe-horned into 400 words on-line, here. (The review was printed in yesterday’s edition of The Australian.) Below, surprise surprise, I digress a bit.

As many of you will know, and be bored to death hearing about, I’ve been re-reading À la recherche du temps perdu. Again. On finishing it, the urge to begin again is overwhelming. In a sense one is always re-reading Proust. I was half way through the set first time around when I started re-reading Swann’s Way. I’ve read about Marcel and Albertine while reading about Swann and Odette a generation earlier, about Saint-Loup and Rachel and Charlus and Morel... This time I decided I needed some literary methadone to break the addiction. Wisely I chose Orlando. It’s an upper. Definitely. The first chapters in particular are delicious. Dry and ingenious. Like Proust, Woolf is quite the scientist. And, most definitely, a philosopher.

Reading Orlando is also practical. An Orlando addiction is an addiction one can recover from. You realise, one morning, you can break the reading habit. (The Swiftean middle chapters get a bit dull... apart from the bit where a black cat is thrown on the fire cos it looks like coal in dingy old England.) Anyway...

Immediately after Saturday’s performance of Orlando by THE RABBLE (and, yes, they trade in shouty small caps, which I think I’ll abandon immediately... for HTML coding reasons) I was asked if Virginia would have approved. I waved the question off with an “it doesn’t matter” when I was really thinking: “shit no!!” She hated indecency with a passion.

In fact, while watching The Rabble’s staging I recalled the verdict Woolf passed on James Joyce in the mid 1920s. “Mr Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses,” she wrote, “seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy!” Also in that essay (‘Character in Fiction’, published in the summer of 1925) Woolf chides Tom Eliot for his ‘obscurity’.

I thought I knew that article -- and the May 1924 lecture on which it was based -- pretty well. But when I came to check the quotation, I found that Woolf went on: “And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the determined and public spirited act of a man who needs fresh air!”

There. Could you find a better description of what The Rabble do than “the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery”? I’d be hard pressed to come up with a better zinger than that.

Though it follows the plot line of Woolf’s novel fairly diligently, at least to begin with, and quotes it verbatim here and there, The Rabble’s version diverges pretty radically when Orlando wakes up a woman.

In the Woolf, Orlando wakes up from a very big night (an Ambassadorial party he threw) married to some woman of low birth or other... and missing key bits of his anatomy. And finding perky new bits. But he -- or rather she -- is entirely unphased. Almost unsurprised. Orlando may have lost his family jewels, but she takes up the ducal jewels, rustles up a few horses and flees an insurrection to hide out with the gypsies.

In The Rabble’s version -- and you might choose to skip the rest of this paragraph and all of the next for its violation of good taste and, um, cos it contains spoilers. Okay? Still with me? Anyway, Orlando frisks her new bride -- though she might be Sasha, the treacherous ‘ex’ -- finds an anatomically correct zucchini and rapes her (orally) with it. The lighting is so tenebrous, so well judged, that it looks like Orlando has drawn a short sword from the girl’s drawers.

Clearly The Rabble hasn’t just veered away from the narrative of Woolf’s Orlando, it has used it as a springboard and done a triple somersault with pike. In the novel, Orlando catches his beloved Sasha sitting on the knee of a Russian sailor. In the stage play, Sasha blows the sailors’ milk bottle. And doesn’t swallow. So, yeah, I’m fairly confident Woolf would withhold her tick of approval.

Another point of difference is that Orlando is her own man, as it were, in the novel. (Woolf, as Orlando’s ‘biographer’, always refers to her role with a masculine pronoun. You know: “the biographer must always use his discretion...” rah rah rah.) Orlando is in control of her fate, if not her sex. But the Orlando that Dana Miltins plays is not. She is a wide-eyed victim of events. Woolf’s protagonist is entirely comfortable with the sex change. The Rabble’s protagonist is freaked out, to the max.

But these points of difference are observations, not criticisms. What The Rabble does is absolutely bloody remarkable. It’s like watching an old Saturn V rocket dumping the section that has got it off the ground before blasting off, one more time, towards the stratosphere. And then doing it again.

What follows the transition is a David Lynch fantasia in white. Instead of the shrieking of trumpets, we have the looped and ear-splitting screaming of Mary Helen Sassman and some much less ear-splitting death metal.

In my printed review, I talk about the production breaking the theatrical equivalent of the sound barrier. What happens then is magnificent. It’s an aesthetic and theatrical -- perhaps even sexual -- plateau.

Rather brilliantly, Orlando is rescued from victimhood -- and Miltins rescued from objectification -- in a single scene. She’s clothed and given a gentle kiss on the cheek by Sassman and the wonderful Syd Brisbane. Miltins lights up a fag and uses the rose water bowl the young Orlando once offered to Queen Elizabeth I as an ashtray. Perfect. It’s a humanising moment.

An upright piano fires up, gently, and the show concludes with a lovely speech (one of Rhoda’s) from The Waves. It reminded me of something Patti Smith might do.

I learned from one of the cast members after the show that Smith had indeed ‘done’ The Waves. (I found a clip of it on YouTube. It’s not so much a performance of The Waves as an original sung-poem to ‘Virginia’ using some of Woolf’s own writing. Smith does to Woolf what she did to Van Morrison in ‘Gloria’, say, or to Sprinsteen in ‘Because the Night’.)

After a couple of days, I still don’t know what I think about this new Orlando. I won’t be forgetting it in a hurry, if ever. But I still can’t answer the question “is it any good” with much conviction. It’s gorgeous. (Really stunning to look at.) High impact. Spectacular. But it needs work. The opening scene (in which the young Orlando has his hair tousled by the Queen, who fancies him) is so jarringly off, it almost derails the production.

Happily the next scene, a brilliant cartoon-encapsulation of Orlando’s affair with the Russian Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch -- Sasha for short -- is a miracle of economy. It’s dumbed down a lot -- like a petty and immature infatuation rather than an earth shattering love affair -- but it’s still scintillating.

The closest the adaptation gets to Woolf, temperamentally, is an invention of The Rabble’s. In it, Orlando, newly female, experiences the joys of saying yes after having said no. (In the novel, it’s over a tiny piece of fat cut from some corned beef by a ship’s captain, I think.) In the play it’s a close encounter of the romantic kind. “Go,” she tells a man. Then: “Stay. Go. Stay.”

I confess, I haven’t yet fathomed the point of the project... beyond the smashing of windows that is, and the breathing in of magnificent, hallowed air. If that’s not enough for you...

And, bloody hell, you’d have to be an idiot not to see a show -- any show -- with Dana Miltins in it. The Australian’s not a big fan of intensifiers. So when it is published that Miltins performs with assurance and grace you should read “utter assurance and exceptional grace.” Cos that’s what I was thinkin’.


Postscript. (Or should I call it peroration?)

Apart from a (positive) mention of James Joyce in a letter to Quentin Bell, Woolf didn’t again write about Joyce until she learned of his death, and learned that he was a fortnight younger than her. The following quotation is from her diary entry for January 15, 1941:

“I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in typescript to our tea table at Hogarth House. Roger [Fry] I think sent her. Would we devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incongruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, & I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But there’s something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature. He was about the place, but I never saw him. Then I remember Tom [Eliot] in Ottoline’s room at Garsington saying -- it was published then -- how could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter? He was for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book, & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of immense boredom.” [my emphasis]


From Woolf’s 125 essay Character in Fiction:

Thus, if you read Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other. Mr Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the determined and public spirited act of a man who needs fresh air! Again, with the obscurity of Mr. Eliot. I think that Mr. Eliot has written some of the loveliest lines in modern poetry. But how intolerant he is of the old usages and politenesses of society - respect for the weak, consideration for the dull! I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book.


Rhoda’s speech, from The Waves:

“If I look back over that bald head, I can see silence already closing and the shadows of clouds chasing each other over the empty moor; silence closes over our transient passage. This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.”


Orlando by THE RABBLE after Virginia Woolf. Co-created by Kate Davis and Emma Valente. Directed by Emma Valente. Set and costume design by Kate Davis. Lighting, sound design and composition by Kate Davis. Presented by THE RABBLE and Malthouse Theatre in association with Melbourne Festival. Tower Theatre, October 13. Season ends October 27.

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‘Swanlights’ concert, review and set list (Antony and the Johnsons with the Melbourne Symphony and Boy George)

Guess who -- or rather what -- isn’t credited in the Swanlights program? A sound engineer. Funny that. I only looked to see who to ‘credit’.

In the first handful of songs, Antony’s voice and the orchestra were eviscerated. Correction. Only the viscera was left behind. There was little top end and no bottom end at all. Just mushy, strident, overamplified mid-range. It sounded less impressive -- less spacious, less dynamic, less defined -- than this year’s live CD, Cut the World, made by Antony and the Danish National Chamber Orchestra.

Singing behind an opaque scrim, Antony was in excellent voice, fresh and strong. As comfortable and confident as we’ve seen and heard him, live. He didn’t take as many risks, vocally, as usual, until the final song in the main set (Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground), but he was so gloriously ‘on’ from the first words (“Eyes are falling...”) that it didn’t actually matter. It’s as if the new arrangements allowed him to encounter the songs anew.

Whoever was on the mixing desk pulled things together towards the end of the second song, Cripple and the Starfish -- there was a bit of a sound image perceptible at last -- but the sound was nothing to write letters to Australia about. The orchestral midrange was still claggy (“shit claggy” according to my scrawled notes).

After the dullness of the opening laser-green projections, Another World lived up to its lyrics. Exceeded them. The lasers, shone from the circle level, made the air glitter. They made webby galaxies, not merely worlds. Then, while Antony playfully sang Beyonce’s Crazy in Love, a wide shaft of laser light swept a slow and menacing line back and forward in front of him. The strings generated a sonic aurora to match.

Time after time, the lyrics were pre-empted by the lighting effects. Antony sang “I cry glitter” and “cut me in quadrants” (from ‘Epilepsy is Dancing’) then “It’s a golden thing” (‘Swanlights’) as if he’d pulled the ideas from the aether... or the clarinets. In Ghost, he sang upwards, to the prompt side, bathed in lemony light.

I was a bit surprised to read in the program notes, just now, that Swanlights is “set in the dark heart of a crystal mountain.” I took the (hollow) crystal shards above the stage as box kites, which makes sense when you notice the backdrop between Antony and the mostly hidden orchestra is parachute fabric. This concert was all about air, sky, light and the vaulted heavens, not about being holed up in a dank and icy crystal palace. Even in the wondrous, enigmatic ‘Crying Light’, the orchestra turned tears into bird song and feathery down.

Antony -- through his extraordinary, evocative, changeling, transgender songs -- looks like he might be the Rosetta Stone, our means to decode Brett Sheehy’s fourth and final Melbourne Festival. How strange to have Antony singing “today I am a boy” while The Rabble’s take on Orlando opens a few blocks down St Kilda Road at the Malthouse.

I’ve already quoted ‘Hope There’s Someone’ in my review of Michel van der Aa’s After Life... I could well have quoted ‘You Are My Sister’ in the same review: “So many memories, but there’s nothing to gain from remembering.”

The heart-stopping moment of the concert -- which silenced the audiences for what felt like an age... half a minute, more, close to a whole minute -- came in ‘I Fell In Love With a Dead Boy’ when this secular preacher in his robes, this holy man with no agenda, with no aching need for disciples, raised his arms and raised the backdrop of the airy temple.

It was as remarkable a moment as the one in his very first visit to Melbourne when he divided his Hamer Hall audience into groups and asked us to hum, something he didn’t attempt in his earlier Sydney concerts. It was church, man. Church.

Er, church in a good way!

That particular moment was trumped by the second song in the encore when Antony, without ceremony, introduced Boy George. His contribution to ‘You Are My Sister’ was luscious. Unforgettable.

When the house lights came up and the orchestra broke up, the audience was still standing, cheering, clapping. Not hungry for more, but hungry to show its appreciation some more. A rare experience at any concert.


For all my fellow trainspotters, here’s a list of the songs Antony sang with the Melbourne Symphony last night. The second (and final) concert is tonight.

Main set:

01. Rapture (from Antony and the Johnsons, 2000)
02. Cripple and the Starfish (Antony and the Johnsons)
03. For Today I Am a Boy (I am a bird now, 2005)
04. Another World (Another World EP, 2008)
05. Crazy In Love (Aeon/Crazy In Love double A-side single, 2009)
06. Epilepsy Is Dancing (The Crying Light, 2009)
07. Swanlights (Swanlights, 2010)
08. Ghost (Swanlights)
09. I Fell In Love With a Dead Boy (I Fell In Love With a Dead Boy EP, 2001)
10. Dust and Water (The Crying Light)
11. Cut the World (Cut the World, 2012)
12. The Crying Light (The Crying Light)
13. Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground (The Crying Light)

Encore:

14. Salt Silver Oxygen (Swanlights)
15. You Are My Sister with Boy George (I am a bird now)

Swanlights. Antony and the Johnsons with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Anthony Weeden, conductor. Gael Rakotondrabe, piano. Lighting by Chris Levine. Set by Carl Robertshaw. Hamer Hall, Melbourne, October 12. Also tonight.

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Michel van der Aa’s After Life: Hell is (for) other people

It’s time to name (sorta) and shame.

Regent Theatre, Thursday October 11.

Stalls Row C, Seat 31. This bloke used his iPhone for upwards of fifty minutes during the premiere performance of After Life. The opera runs for ninety minutes. He was bangin’ away for well over half that time.

Stalls Row D, Seat 29. Man with an ancient Nokia. (I won one in a raffle in 2005 or early 2006, so we’re talkin’ 2G here. Tops.) Set to silent at least. No annoying vibrations. But... there were at least six sent and/or received messages during the show. And he took or initiated at least one call during the performance. (I think he was clearing a voice mail message.)

The barbarians aren’t at the gate, dear reader. They’re pissing on it.

I’m all for draconian (and possibly unenforceable) laws that impose strict penalties on those who leave their communication devices on, let alone use them, in theatres and cinemas. But surely there are alternatives. It can’t be all that hard -- or prohibitively expensive -- for venues to install short range 3G/4G/5G signal jammers can it?

Either that or it’s stop-and-search powers on entry to a theatre or cinema. Just like press previews of Hollywood blockbusters.

At Hamer Hall recently, I saw a woman hold up a massive tablet device to record some video of the performer.

I know, it’s such a 21st century cliché, but we’re not there unless there’s proof. But the live event -- the live act -- is, by definition, unmediated. Live it, people. Participate in it. Dare to just let it live in your memory. Until it fades... Which brings me to After Life.

The short version: After Life is like an operatic version of David Eagleman’s slim-but-fabulous book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. It’s nowhere near as precise as any of Eagleman’s tiny visions of heaven, hell and purgatory -- Michel van der Aa’s vision of what Antony calls “the middle place between life and nowhere” is woolly to say the least -- but the concept will have you mulling over the critical and most memorable times of your life.

In van der Aa’s vision, there is a week-long period between the moment of death and the actual ‘afterlife’... which is why van der Aa’s After Life is two words not one. In that week, one must choose a single memory -- forsaking all others -- to take with you for eternity.

So far so good. The shimmering, unresolved, pantonal music -- reminiscent of Britten, Webern and the late string quartets of Beethoven -- is perfect for purgatory. (And, no, I am not being snide!) Perfect for a recapitulation of an entire life. Entire lives.

And the score is magnificently played. The low brass is exceptionally well rendered. The singing in English is clear and one rarely searches for surtitles. (Lucky, cos this production doesn’t come with any.)

But the basic conceptual problem in van der Aa’s opera is that the take-out memories are 16mm filmed reconstructions. The team of assistants -- the angelic bureaucrats who crack the proverbial whips and impose the deadlines -- also re-stage and film your chosen memory. So -- God, how horrible -- instead of the actual, eidetic, intense memory, you get to keep a stagey film version of it. (I’d want Ken Russell or David Lynch to direct mine, thank-you very much!)

Call me old fashioned, but memory -- to me -- never involves picturing myself. I’m viewer, not viewed. I’m seer, not seen. So, to take away images of your (old) self, mooning over travesties of an earlier time seems like a pretty good vision of hell to me!

I enjoyed the staging, very much, particularly the use of video and filmed interviews. I enjoyed it musically, too. The wonderfully coiled vocal lines sometimes catch the turbulence, the swell and crash of the music, like a dumped surfer tumbled in a wave.

I’d cut the piece a little. A lame attempt at imposing some kind of drama, a catastrophe, is a dismal and distracting failure. But that is a forgivably short scene. I have to say that my positive response to the work was not shared my many -- perhaps not any -- of the people I spoke to after the show. I reckon the Barbarians weren’t having an especially memorable time either. Life... it’s happening elsewhere. Damn them all to some kind of Sartrean telco hell! Other people. Bah! 


After Life by Michel van der Aa. Libretto by Michel van der Aa, after Hirokazu Kore-eda. Technical Production Development Frank van der Weij. Costume Design by Robby Duiveman. Conductor Wouter Padberg. Melbourne Festival, Regent Theatre, October 11. Season ends Saturday.

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Inkblots anyone? The Forsythe Company’s I Don’t Believe In Outer Space.

Name a work of art that’s changed the world. A poem or a painting. Guernica? Blue Poles? Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’? They’re not like manifestos hammered on the door of the church are they? Not at the coalface of our intellectual culture are they?

How about a choreographer or a work of dance. Harder that one. It’s more likely to be by Mats Ek than Matthew Bourne you reckon. Or not. Who’s to say that Bourne’s Swan Lake isn’t more life altering than Ek’s travesty of Giselle? That Bourne’s beefy swans weren’t every bit as profound -- as alien and mystical and shockingly new -- as the very first swans in tutus?

If, like me, you’re starting to rebel at the idiocy of these questions -- questions I’m only posing because of William Forsythe’s I Don’t Believe In Outer Space, which had its Australian premiere last night -- you’ve probably got a short list happening already.

Off the top of my head, I’d fire off the following names: Raimund Hoghe, that gorgeous freak of a man. Bill T Jones circa Still/Here. Meg Stuart and the scintillating works she and Damaged Goods produced in the mid 1990s. Anything by Lloyd Newson. Perhaps all good art makes micro-changes in the world. God. Of course it does.

But even totally abstract works -- works without an obvious agenda -- are impactful. Valuable. In its premiere season -- in its premiere week! -- I saw Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929 four or five times. I reckon I could sit through it every day for a year without tiring of it.

But spare a thought for poor Billy Forsythe. He wants to be Sontag. Wants to be Hitchens. Wants to be Dworkin. He wants to be a player. If he can’t rule the world, he wants to be a thorn in the side of those who do. Pity him. He is a genius agitator stuck inside the body of a choreographer. But it’s even worse than that.

I’m sure, on this blog, I’ve mentioned philosopher and academic Arran Gare who argues most persuasively that postmodernism is responsible for the increase in the suicide rate. After long meditation on this I believe he is only partly correct. Postmodernism only kills academics and artists. To the rest of us, PoMo is the bar Moe Szyslak opens in The Simpsons, where Moe helpfully defines postmodernism as “weird for the sake of weird.”

To Billy Forsythe, it would appear, postmodernism guts art. It makes ‘meaningful’ art a futile and barren pursuit. It makes the gesture -- or any other attempt to create or communicate -- futile. In PoMo Land, beauty’s pretty suspect too.

Imagine that... having 17 of the world’s most accomplished and most insanely talented dancers and having nothing to bang on about except the pointlessness of banging on! Well, that’s what I Don’t Believe In Outer Space is like. It’s a treatise on entropy. It’s atomised and atomised again. Instead of having an arc, a trajectory, or even 17 individual trajectories, it has 17 times 17. Life is happening off-stage, somewhere beyond the O.P. flats.

It’s not even a Girl Talk mash-up. It’s a scrappy mess. Not so much a kaleidoscope as the smashed up bits of coloured glass from the kaleidoscope... without the tube.  Or mirrors.  Or lens.

I’m tempted to say that Forsythe uses songs like blue poles, as a half-arsed attempt to tie up the twigs into a bundle, but that would be to insult Jack-the-Dripper. One can find patterns: is that Jack Nicholson-style voice meant to be Screaming Jay Hawkins? (‘I Put a Spell On You’ is one of the polar songs.) Or is Jack Nicholson really Clint Eastwood, Walt from Gran Torino, as the good neighbour? But, hey, one can find patterns in anything if you stare at them long enough and hard enough and gullibly enough.

“Welcome to what you think you see” -- indeed.

I Don’t Believe In Outer Space will test your powers of observation, concentration and discrimination to the very limit... and won’t reward them in the least bit.

For a recent example of Forsythe nailing it, check out my review of the silent-but-deadly Three Atmospheric Studies.

I Don’t Believe In Outer Space. A work by William Forsythe with music composed and performed by Thom Willems. Staging William Forsythe. Sound design by Niels Lanz. Graphics by Dietrich Krüger. Costumes by Dorothee Merg. Lighting by Tanja Rühl and Ulf Naumann. Dramaturgical assistance by Dr. Freya Vass-Rhee. 

The Forsythe Company. Melbourne Festival. At the Playhouse, the Arts Centre, October 10. Season ends October 16. Then Kampnagel, Hamburg (November/December 2012) and Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin (July 2013).

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2012 Melbourne Festival: Prelude or Overture? Force Majeure’s Never Did Me Any Harm

A couple of weeks ago on Facebook, Brian Lucas posed a challenge:

I’d love responses to the following statement.......

“The most interesting/engaging/exciting ‘dance’ being made at the moment is happening within the ‘theatre’ sphere, and the most interesting/engaging/exciting ‘theatre’ is happening within the ‘dance’ sphere.....

My favourite response came from Amanda McErlean: Sorry, my head just exploded.

I know the feeling. I reckon I see as much dance and theatre as just about anyone. More than any sane person would. But I’d be very reluctant to generalise. It’s easier to focus on individual works that work -- or not -- and ask why.

My hunch is that theatre has more to gain from dance than dance has to gain from theatre. Mainstage theatre, I reckon, has largely forgotten the essential force of the body in space, to its detriment. I can’t overstate that. That force is sine qua non. Without it, theatre is baggy TV.

By contrast -- and paradoxically -- dance has more to lose from theatrical pretensions. Let’s be blunt. It’s easier for a trained actor to dance competently than it is for a trained dancer to act adequately. But what I’m describing here -- dancers speaking -- is probably not what Lucas had in mind. And good theatre, of course, is so much more than the spoken word.

Lucas himself would have made a scintillating actor in the silent era. Such a freakishly expressive face and physique. Lucas has been in some of the very best and the very worst examples of that weird and temporary emulsion we call dance theatre: the sinister miniature Disagreeable Object (with Michelle Heaven) rates as one of the best, KAGE’s Appetite rates as one of the less best. (I can’t bring myself to knife it one more time. Go here and follow the links to the less-kind-than-mine reviews.)

The 2012 Melbourne Festival got away to a premature start last night with one of the most polished and accessible examples of mainstage dance theatre as you are likely to see. It’s the apotheosis of Kate Champion’s long, long quest to achieve a stable fusion of dance and theatre. Shrewdly, it’s being staged in the MTC’s Southbank Theatre and should find an appreciative audience there.

It won’t disappoint a dance audience either. Sarah Jayne Howard’s in it. (Enough said!)

Never Did Me Any Harm is an open-ended response to The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. It’s about parenting and conflict over parenting; about the nanny state mentality which rewards all children equally and prevents them from climbing trees; it’s about parents treating their children like puppies, wanting them to be friends rather than disciplining them. It’s also about choosing to be childless. (Tracy Mann’s monologue about that is a blinder.)

The balance between words and gestures is finely tuned and close to perfect. One rarely detracts, or distracts, from the other. Opening voice-overs are illustrated by the gestural dance. It’s as if we are watching a speech simultaneously translated into the most elegant sign language by Sarah Jayne Howard and the equally remarkable Josh Mu.

Champion’s casting is excellent: dancers at one end and actors the other, with a few cross-over artists. Actor Alan Fowler is a natural mime and comic -- watching him play a chimp and a nose-picking toddler is a joy -- dancer Vincent Crowley has a strong dramatic presence and a good voice.

Marlo Benjamin is such an expressive dancer, I left believing I had seen her act. (Her lipsync’d speech was quite perfect.) She plays the insistent, exuberant, narcissistic, demanding, aggravating child. She reveals the scalpel edge dividing play from tantrum. Catherine McClements does much the same, a moment later, as an annoying, teasing, tickling girlfriend... a slayer of solitude.

The overall polish extends to the lighting and excellent sound design. Geoff Cobham’s lighting, however, is way too literal. It’s too intrusive, hell-bent on declaring and manifesting the tortured inner feelings of the protagonists: an agitated, epileptic grid one minute, words crawling down a tree trunk the next.

I also thought the dramaturgy was a little too slick. It’s not glib exactly, nor is it reductive, but it felt overworked. Perhaps that was part of the deal/arrangement with the Sydney Theatre Company, with whom Force Majeure has collaborated on this production.

Still, this is a thought-provoking, engrossing, entertaining and impressive production. A very satisfying hour and ten minutes in the dark. There are six more performances. See it if you can. It might not be the future of dance, but it’s most definitely a future for theatre.


 Never Did Me Any Harm. Devised by Force Majeure. Presented by Melbourne Festival, Sydney Festival, Adelaide Festival and Sydney Theatre Company. Choreographed by the company. Directed by Kate Champion. Dramaturgy by Andrew Upton. Set and lighting design by Geoff Cobham. AV design by Chris Petridis. Composition and sound design by Max Lyandvert with an additional song by Jason Sweeney. Sumner Theatre, Melbourne, October 9. Season ends Saturday.

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Puberty Blues: moles, molls, slags and slackers

mole 1. a spy. Originally US slang of the 1970s. 2. a variant spelling of moll q.v.

moll 1. a promiscuous woman; a prostitute. A very harsh word equivalent to slut. Something egregiously out of place is said to be like a moll at a christening. 2. the girlfriend or mistress of a gangster, crook, bikie, etc.

moll patrol a scathing term for a group of schoolgirls as viewed by a rival group.

mollydooker a left-handed person. Aussie slang since the 1930s. Probably from the British dialect molly 'an effeminate man' and dook 'the hand'.

[...]

slack 1. unkind, cruel, unfair or mean. If a big kid bullies a smaller one, then he is being slack. 2. outstandingly lazy. Why don't you ever come and visit, you slack bastard? 3. no good, hopeless, pathetic, dodgy. What a slack haircut. 4. of a woman, promiscuous, of easy virtue. Commonly in the phrase slack moll -- one of the vilest insults that can be directed at a woman.

slack arse an incurably lazy person. Aussie slang since the 1970s. Hence the adjective slack-arsed.

[...]

slag 1. to spit. Hence, a gob of phlegm spat out. Aussie slang since the 1960s. 2. a highly derogatory word for a promiscuous or otherwise contemptible woman.


from the estimable Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Slang -- James Lambert, General Editor, 2004.

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Helicopter by Angela Betzien (Melbourne Theatre Company & Real TV)

“Childhood is the sleep of reason.” -- Rousseau

“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” -- Goya [Okay, he didn’t say it... it was the title of a painting.]


Helicopter -- mostly the script, but also the production -- set off my bullshit detectors early and often. From the get go, I suspected its motives and I suspected its methods. This isn’t just a matter of tone. MKA routinely mixes up lightness and seriousness without compromising either.

It’s a ‘straw man’ argument made 3D. And “the stuffed men” are a wealthy white family who singularly fail to cope with the pain they’ve caused their next-door neighbours, a family which has fled Uganda. Trouble is, the particular story Thomas tells about his flight from wild animals and warlords (on horseback and in helicopters) happened in Sudan.

I’m sure plenty of research was done, but I couldn’t help but feel the play was inspired less by the facts than by a viewing of A Constant Gardener. Kenya, Sudan, Uganda... hell. They’re all the same aren’t they? Well, no. Damn it.

And if Thomas had stopped to tell us one more parable about baby elephants in some generic Africa I reckon I would have puked.

Here’s my review of Helicopter. It was printed in Monday’s Australian and was on-line last Friday.

IT’S a terrible irony that the “long childhood” of our species originated in continental Africa where childhood in so many war-wracked countries is now so brutally short.

In theory, the delaying of maturity in humans allows for greater learning and socialisation, but in the West we’re taking immaturity to new extremes. Just like King Lear - chided by his fool: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” - some of the most affluent manage to prolong childhood indefinitely, taking everything that’s theirs (and quite a bit that’s not) while taking responsibility for nothing.

Angela Betzien’s new play Helicopter - which ticks the topicality boxes faster than a donkey voter fills in a ballot paper - presents us with a truly contemptible family. They’re an unevolved and unenlightened lot. Head of the house is a bloke who works for a pharmaceutical company and lives on a diet of Xanax and horror films; his slacktivist wife’s idea of supporting the third world is buying a thousand dollar’s worth of soft toys for her infant daughter because a dollar per toy goes to UNICEF; their contemptibly pathetic teen son Jack recreationally tries anorexia.

They’re a “five star ANCAP safety rating” family where everyone inside the capsule is valuable and protected, and everyone outside can clog-up the tread pattern of the family’s all-terrain tyres. Which is, incidentally, how the contemptibles meet their Ugandan next door neighbour Thomas; they run over his pre-schooler niece in the BMW X5 all-terrain vehicle while backing out of the driveway.

Like well-drilled drivers who have carefully read their insurance policies, liability isn’t admitted and “sorry” isn’t said. And that's the one word that might placate Thomas and his distraught sister.

Unlike the X5, this play gets little power or weight to the road. It’s fluffy and fun, apparently ashamed of its serious themes and unashamed of its icky essentialist stereotyping. Thomas (Terry Yeboah) tells long-winded parables about monkeys and baby elephants, the unnamed wife (Daniela Farinacci) describes feeling “colonised” by her fetus and does capoeira blithely unaware that it came to Brazil with the African slaves, husband (Paul Denny at his most endearing and goofy) expresses his total ignorance of Joseph Kony, and son Jack (Charles Grounds) moans about being treated like a child while fiercely avoiding any act that might rate as grown-up.

One couldn’t ask for a more professional (or more delightful) squad of actors than Denny, Farinacci, Yeboah and Grounds. They’re like a team of competition cocktail waiters twirling and juggling brightly coloured bottles before our eyes. Regrettably, what they are serving up is sickly sweet and insubstantial.

Helicopter by Angela Betzien. Directed by Leticia Cáceres. Set and costume designer by Tanja Beer. Lighting design by Lisa Mibus. Music and sound design by Pete Goodwin of The Sweats. Presented by Melbourne Theatre Company and RealTV. Lawler Studio. August 2. Season ends August 17.

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In which I go “GRRR!”

It’s 35 years, give or take a month, since I had my first photograph published. It was a shot of the Harbour Bridge at night, taken from what is now the MLC Centre in Martin Place, which opened that year. (It was the nation’s tallest building until 1985.)

Given the millions of pics taken of the coat hanger in any given year, I was pretty bloody proud of myself. I also received the princely publication fee (from a national glossy) of four bucks. (Don’t forget, they were notes in those days, Virginia. Paper, not polymer! They went a long way... well, for a teen. Okay, it sucked. But it was the first step on the road to becoming a pro. And the buck it cost to get to the building’s ‘skywalk’ was a deduction, right?)

Later the same year, two of my photographs appeared in a lavish year book with a print run in the thousands, used without permission, credit or payment. Only the sportsmen in the photographs were credited.

I drive some of my friends spare with my ‘quaint’ ideas about intellectual property and, gasp, copyright. How second millennium of me. But the count of my photographs that have been knocked off -- and we’re not just talking web sites, here, we’re talking reputable newspapers and magazines -- now exceeds the number that I’ve been credited for, let alone paid for.

Incredibly, the last culprit was The Age which ran a unique portrait of mine without permission, credit or payment. That’s especially galling cos I’ve had photographs published in the Aged -- and been handsomely paid for them -- as far back as 1994. I’ve also had a couple in the Financial Review, also in the Fairfax stable. So, they can’t say they don’t know me.

These days, I embed clear copyright messages like “All rights reserved” and include my name and contact information in EXIF data so that images that have done the rounds on-line, for example, can still be tracked back to me. (Nowadays, thanks to the new “drag and drop” Google image search, it’s massively easier to track down the provenance of a photograph... and, indeed, to see who is using one.) (My pic of French actress Romaine Bohringer is popular.)

This week, a photograph of mine of a “notoriously unphotographable” subject appears on the Wheeler Centre’s web site next to an article of his. (And, no, he wouldn’t nick a photograph of mine without asking; in fact, he likes to keep a low profile and would prefer the secret of his true identity -- his face, at the very least -- be hidden. He writes: “there’s only ever about three photos taken of me a year and I always look crap in them. Hang on, that probably explains why there’s only three photos of me a year...”)

It’s a great shot if I say so myself. I wouldn’t call it a unique shot. But it’s one of the few around A.M. can stomach. It’s made absolutely clear in a Wheeler Centre tweet [July 31, 11:23AM] that they know I took the photograph, which they purloined from Facebook. So why the hell wasn’t I asked?

I’ve gotta say, I’m just tempted to send in a nasty-ass invoice. Grrr.

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The Pleasure Principle by Alfie Scalia. Ignite The Dark Jazz Dance Theatre Company.

Before the lights finally dimmed in the main space at Gasworks last night, twenty minutes late, I mumbled something like “even bad dance is tolerable” -- i.e. in a way that bad theatre isn’t. Funny, I really should have heard a cock crowing. Because, Virginia, there is bad dance. Just as there is bad pizza and bad sex.

Exhibit A: Ignite the Dark’s The Pleasure Principle. If you’re going, brace yourselves. It is the most appallingly sexist, unreconstructed, teen boy masturbatory fantasy I've ever had the misfortune to endure. (Well, until interval.)

Seriously, it makes the video for Hot For Teacher look like a work of great sophistication and irony. It makes most booty-shaking rapper videos look vaguely feminist.

Despite the fact that every single woman on the stage is absolutely gagging for it -- in a nine girls for every boy kinda way -- the show still begins with a rape. Macho, bare-chested, smoking guy’s attitude? Hell, I don't want consent. What a guy.

A couple of minutes later, a man shops for a bride. You can guess, I imagine, what parts of the female anatomy were used as a card swipe. (She licks the card provocatively first.) There’s also stylised fucking on an office desk while Madonna asks us to justify our love. And another naff fantasy in which a male teacher fronts an all-girl class.

Another high point is the use of Paula Cole’s song Feelin’ Love. You know the one: “You make me feel like a candy apple all red and horny. You make me feel like I want to be dumb blonde.”

Jordan Vincent assures me that an inflatable doll appears in the second half. I believe she was suffering more than me. (And committed to stay to the end. Looking forward to her review in tomorrow’s Age.)

I tried really hard to focus on the dance (disciplined, committed, occasionally dynamic) and the choreography (banal, repetitive, dinky, with an emphasis on hair lashing) and the quality of the costume design (rather than its all-round sluttiness) but I was too busy plotting an exit route from the auditorium.

Alfie Scalia, the choreographer, and her director Daniel Ryan, use a quotation from The Picture of Dorian Gray as an epigraph: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”

Me? I’d quote Blake instead of the fictional Lord Henry: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

And this show is one infant I would have murdered, not nursed.

You have until Saturday to miss it.

The Pleasure Principle by Alfie Scalia. Directed by Daniel Ryan. Ignite The Dark Jazz Dance Theatre Company. Gasworks Theatre.

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Melbourne Theatre Company: Queen Lear, adapted and directed by Rachel McDonald

For the record, here are my two reviews of Queen Lear. One was a "first response" piece for the news pages, which was on-line a little after 1:30 on Friday morning, a few hours after the curtain, the second (after the jump) is a more considered review published in yesterday's print edition of The Australian. They're not very bloggy, but there has been a fair bit of interest in the play and these particular reviews...


It’s difficult to find a kind word for this “cheerless, dark and deadly” production of Lear. Many of its individual assets turn out to be liabilities when combined. The stylish set, with chains spilling from the flies like plaited metal vines, is so spacious that cast members need to be amplified to be heard, even in a modern mid-sized theatre.

The decision to make The Fool into a manifestation of Lear’s own madness -- voices in the monarch’s head -- is an appealing one, but the chipmunk execution is amateurish.

With a couple of notable exceptions -- Robyn Nevin, Robert Menzies and Greg Stone head a short list -- the verse and meaning of the play are massacred. If you’re unfamiliar with Lear, you might have a tough time keeping up, especially with the deletion of Cordelia’s suitors: the King of France and Duke of Burgundy.

Beyond heightening our consciousness of Lear’s poor judgement and lack of wisdom, surprisingly little is made of the key decision to turn King Lear into Queen Lear. Adelaide and Melbourne audiences have seen Nevin play Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, in the 1990s, we know she is skilled enough to play any role, including Lear as a man. The textual changes to accommodate the sex change of the monarch are slight, but the replacement of each and every ‘nuncle’ with ‘auntie’ is jarring.

Nevin plays Lear as a carousing tyrant in a rose red dress with a crown of Cruella de Vil hair. She inspires little sympathy -- the loyalty shown to her, if anything, is a cause for puzzlement -- and her descent into madness is more bathetic than pathetic. Lear’s slurring and mumbling might be justified, in context, but poetry is the loser in this rendering. Her voice, and the drama, are lost in the void.


Heaven’s vault should crack in a production of Lear, be it a traditional King Lear, a gender-reassigned Queen Lear or a plain old Mister Lear as Laurence Olivier styled Peter Brook’s great 1962 production at Stratford.

Lear is a cranky play with a vain and ridiculous old goat of a monarch and a trio of daughters who wouldn’t look out of place in a fairy tale. Cordelia is a dowryless Cinderella who marries well, Goneril and Regan are the wicked and manipulative step-sisters. They only fail because, finally, they turn their venomous fangs on themselves.

Lear is not a robust, point-and-shoot play. Great acting alone doesn’t guarantee success. (Its absence, however, is a deal-breaker.) A director needs a sure grip on the material and a vision, a strategy, a way of selling this grotesque tale to audiences.

Inevitably, by changing the patriarch to a matriarch, director and dramaturg Rachel McDonald heightens our awareness of gender roles in Lear. We note that temporal power is destined to flow to the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall, the husbands of Lear’s elder daughters, rather than the daughters themselves, but that Goneril and Regan are powerful players and strategists in their own rights.

Regan is a co-conspirator with her husband Cornwall. Goneril, however, works solo. This production seeks to justify, or excuse, Goneril’s ‘unnatural’ power by placing her husband Albany in a wheelchair.

A traditional production of Lear can play out as a seizure of power from a dangerously foolish -- perhaps already senile -- king by his disenfranchised daughters. Here, though, it reads as payback on a bitchy, manipulative and prodigal mother by two daughters whose resentment is overripe. Something to offend every feminist.

It’s fair to say that this MTC production has a way to go before it hits its stride -- the first performance was one I would have happily abandoned at interval -- but this Lear has potentially fatal flaws in conception, direction, aspects of the design and in its acting. Its strengths are few and not significant enough to compensate for the flaws.

Robert Menzies, as the suicidally loyal Kent, is so good -- so passionate -- that he almost manages to persuade us that Lear is worthy of his love. Greg Stone is a persuasive as Albany, a little less so as the oily Oswald. Robyn Nevin’s performance in the title role is technically very good, and might work brilliantly on film or in a more intimate staging, but her coiled and centripetal energy rarely travels as far as the front row.

Instead of breaking our hearts, Queen Lear merely breaks our spirits.


Queen Lear. Direction and dramaturgy by Rachel McDonald. Set and costume design by Tracy Grant Lord. Lighting by Niklas Pajanti. Composition and sound design by Iain Grandage. Melbourne Theatre Company. At the Sumner Theatre. July 12. Season ends August 18.

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Big name, big blanket. Bangarra’s Terrain by Frances Rings.

My first glimpse of Lake Eyre (or Kati Thanda as the Arabana know it) was from 38,000 feet, as a youngie. It had been in flood for the better part of two years in the mid 70s -- supposedly the biggest flood in the last century or more -- and had been topped up by a spring downpour... enough rain to cut the road to Alice Springs.

Ella Havelka in Terrain (Photograph: Greg Barrett)

I didn’t know then that it was the lowest part of the continent. (15 metres below sea level, apparently. Who knew?!) But I sure as hell knew that the search for an inland sea (which had obsessed European explorers for decades) was well-and-truly on the money. This inland sea was even salty!

Now, I know to mistrust Wikipedia when it comes to some things Australian -- it took years to persuade a few ignorant and intractable editors that Brisbane is not in fact the nation’s biggest city, just the biggest city council -- so you should take the following factoid as salt-encrusted... Anyway, the ’pedia reckons that Lake Eyre, when full, is the 18th largest on the planet. I assume they’re calculating by area (almost 10,000 square km) rather than volume, but that’s not stated in the article. Let’s put it this way, it’s not the kind of lake you build a grand prix circuit around. It’s roughly five times larger than Port Phillip Bay. Again, in area. (Not that Port Phillip is all that deep, mind!)

The timing of Bangarra’s new show, Terrain, which is inspired by the lake, is uncanny. It coincided, to the week, with a Federal Court ruling giving the Arabana non-exclusive Native Title to Lake Eyre and its surrounds -- approximately 69,000 square kilometers -- ending an action begun 14 years ago.

Just days before the first performance of Terrain in Melbourne, around 300 Arabana people gathered under a marquee at Finniss Springs Mission not far from the lake to hear Federal Court judge Paul Finn’s ruling.

Frances Rings’ mob, the Kokatha, hail from South Australia. Roxby Downs territory, south of Lake Eyre, so near neighbours to the Arabana. While Rings is certainly responding to the look of the land, its plants and animals, her new work for Bangarra, Terrain, uses the boom and bust cycle of the lake as a metaphor for the connection to land that indigenous peoples have. It’s never broken, she says. It can lie dormant for years then spring back to life.

But that’s just one axis in a multidimensional work that, like a lot of dance, is hugely reduced, and simplified, when translated into words.

My official review of Terrain was published in Monday’s Australian. It’s on-line, here.

Terrain by Frances Rings. Bangarra Dance Theatre. Playhouse, the Arts Centre, Melbourne, June 29 & 30. Tickets: $70 & $85. Family: $160. Bookings artscentremelbourne.com.au and 1300 182 183. Season ends July 7.

Also Sydney Opera House, July 18-August 18; IPAC, Wollongong, August 24-25; Adelaide Festival Centre, August 29-September 1; Canberra Theatre Centre, September 13-15 and QPAC, Brisbane, October 3-7.

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Einstein on the rubbish dump: Keep Everything by Antony Hamilton

Last week Sally Bennett tweeted this:

Me: “Why dance?” Antony Hamilton: “Two words. Michael Jackson.”

Had she asked me, I would have said three words.  “Safe from harm.” 

Actually, I wouldn’t have said a single word.  Just rummaged around for my Pod (or, gasp, an actual purchased CD if I were at home!) and played her some Massive Attack.  Loud.  Resistance is useless... or futile depending on your choice of sci-fi/sci-fantasy.  Dance is in your DNA.  (And let’s not forget Douglas Adams’ middle name was Noel!) 

In the longer Q&A, printed in the Herald Sun on June 11, Sally’s exchange with Antony is recorded thus:

Why did you choose dance?

Two words: Michael Jackson. 

Funny really.  Watching Keep Everything (a concept I can relate to as a life-long hoarder, diarist, photographer, archivist, yada yada yada) I could imagine that Hamilton’s impetus was oratorical, a desire to comunicate.  His dance is a kind of oration.  Not fancy rhetoric, mind.  It’s more a vomit of unrefined things.  Ideas, words, half-formed, half-understood things.  His avatars (they’re so much more than dancers!) seem to be talking in tongues.  Glossolalia is the word.  [= “the fluid vocalizing (or less commonly, the writing) of speech-like syllables which lack any readily comprehended meaning, in some cases, as part of religious practice.”]  It’s as if they have no idea of what they need to say.

Lauren Langlois, Benjamin Hancock & Alisdair Macindoe in Keep Everything (Photo: Jeff Busby)

 Language has infected them.  Possessed them.  Think of the epiphany at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Instead of the gift of tools? weapons? violence? the ‘gift’ is vocal. 

In the beginning was the word. But before the word could be spoken there was the intake of breath, the flex of the diaphragm and the raw physical act of speaking it aloud. Before those, there was the beat of the heart and the throb of hot blood through arteries to power the muscles.  Before those, again, there were biochemical processes.  Sodium and potassium needed to fire the nerves, glucose for energy. And before the word itself was the metaphor.

More than any of Antony Hamilton’s recent works, the origins of Keep Everything are in language. Language and the physical act of speaking. Much of the dance in Keep Everything comes from the thoracic diaphragm -- from below the chest -- and radiates out in rhythmic and sonic waves.

And the diaphragm -- the idea of the acoustic diaphragm and its capacity to convert mechanical energy into sound and sound back into mechanical energy -- is the metaphor which powers this particular work.

The transducer. 

In my review, published in yesterday’s Australian, I wrote about the synaesthetic quality of the sound design and lighting, that the sounds glow and the lights roar, mostly in sync with one another. But, really, they’re just two of the more obvious dimensions in an infinitely complex -- yet elegantly simple -- equation.  Keep Everything is a demonstration of Antony Hamilton’s theory of relativity. Light, sound, movement, gesture, speech, song, fighting, tickling... they’re all... what?  Interchangeable? Sorta.  Translatable? They can be converted from one form to the other. 

Funnily enough, there’s an equal and opposite power to match glossolalia.  One can listen in tongues!  And, those of you who have followed me for a while, will know what I’m going to write next.  Talking in tongues is sometimes referred to as ‘talking to god’.  Yep, only god gets ya!

But, here, I reckon meaning isn’t important.  It’s not what Hamilton is trying to convey.  He just wants us to be infected too.  Or -- for those of us who already have it, full-blown -- to get a booster shot. 

On Facebook, Saturday morning, Hamilton told a friend that Lauren Langlois is  “devastatingly good in this work.”  She is.  But you’ll have to stop for a moment and reinflate that word.  Think: to overwhelm, confound, stun.  And you’re getting close.  I use the word ‘fearless’ an awful lot to express my admiration for dancers.  To express my awe.  But here that word is oddly off.  NQR.  Langlois comes from some bizarro universe where fear is not known, so there’s no need for the word to even exist.  Like some Swiftean utopia where there is no need for the verb “to lie”. 

Not screaming, scatting. (Photograph: Jeff Busby) 

She performs like an immortal might.  For fun.  To extend herself.  To scoff at the boundaries of physics.  You could hardly imagine a performer more committed to the task at hand... were it not for the proximity of Alisdair Macindoe and Benjamin Hancock! 

Again, if I may quote myself, they’re avatars in Hamilton’s evil twin universe. 

Hamilton’s recent preoccupations with evolution and entropy -- and the universe’s push-me pull-you jog-shuffling between the two -- are here, too, like an ever-present but subliminal fourth dimension. The world of Keep Everything is simultaneously primordial and apocalyptic. It’s a double helix: Einstein on the Beach and 2001: A Space Odyssey entwined.

In his program notes, Hamilton writes of his “conscious attempt to avoid neatly organising events into a logical and well crafted dramaturgical narrative.” Well, he has achieved his aim at every level. Not just structurally -- no bookending here -- but atomically. There’s hardly a repeated phrase in this dense, hour-long work, unless it is one that has been repeated in reverse. The dance alphabet itself morphs and evolves before our eyes.

[...]

Keep Everything begins with an aural bonfire. It could be volcanic creation or nuclear catastrophe.

As Hancock frees himself from a mound of downstage rubbish, chattering away like one of Beckett’s happiest hobos, Langlois and Macindoe stretch their biomechanical limbs behind him like fast-evolving android apes. As they rise to full height, their movements become refined and smooth. The three bodies then collide and ricochet off one another like figures in a video game.

What follows is an extraordinary mash up of Pilobolus and Mummenschanz, of recombinant bodies and what can only be described as physical solfège, of comic biz and scat singing, of manga martial arts and Terry Gilliam-style fantasia.

Keep Everything may not have the broad appeal of Hamilton’s last work Black Project 1 (on its way to Spring Dance at the Sydney Opera House) but it will be adored by the contemporary dance and performance art cognoscenti. 
 

Keep Everything. Directed and choreographed by Antony Hamilton. Lighting by Benjamin Cisterne. Sound by Julian Hamilton & Kim Moyes. AV design by Robin Fox. System design & operation Nick Roux. Design consultant Paula Levis. Costume construction Naomi Van Dyck. Production manager Michael Carr. Stage management Blair Hart.

Performed by Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois and Alisdair Macindoe.

At Chunky Move Studios, until June 23.

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