It’s been a long time comin’ — Seal in Australia

Okay, the guy’s married to Heidi Klum -- they had a baby (their third) four weeks ago today -- so he’s not that easy to impress... but Seal looked blown away by the dress code of Melburnians at the date on his very first tour of Australia.

Dancing in the aisles were blokes dressed-to-the-nines and women in fascinators. Actually, many of the women there looked like they had spent more on their hairdo than their concert tickets. All up, we made him look pretty shabby! (Not easy!)

Okay, there were no morning suits and top hats, but you wouldn’t find a better dressed (or more fabulous looking) audience this side of a thousand buck-a-head charity fund-raiser in New York or Paris.

I reckon his opinion of Melbourne, and quite possibly all of Australia, will be ridiculously high. Why? Cos he kicked off his tour on Oaks Day... Ladies day in the Spring Carnival.

The concert was a last-minute assignment for me. (And one I could have turned down.) Seal’s always been a bit too close to M.O.R. for me, though I have liked some of his clubbier songs... easy dance music with an R’n’B flavour. You know the ones: Killer and Amazing and others.

But I haven’t much liked the mix on his studio releases, especially the most recent, Soul, which has sold millions. (Reportedly, Seal’s fave CD, which preceded it, hasn't sold a lot more than 1/20th that number.)

Anyway, the short version: his live sound is AMAZING. The arrangements of old and new songs, ballad and raver stuff alike -- and the soul covers in particular -- are far far better than the studio-engineered stuff.

So, consider me converted.

My (rave) review is comin’ up in the Herald Sun next week.

The first concert (November 5, 2009) set list and tour dates...

Papa Was A Rolling Stone
Killer
It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World
I Can’t Stand The Rain
A Change Is Gonna Come
Don’t Cry
I’ve Been Loving You Too Long
Waiting For You
Love’s Divine
It’s Alright
Here I Am (Come And Take Me)
Knock On Wood
Get It Together
My Vision
The Right Life
Kiss From A Rose
Crazy

Encores:

Amazing
Bring It On
People Get Ready



Seal's 2009 Australian Tour Dates

MELBOURNE

Thursday 5 November @ the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall
Friday 6 November @ the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall
Friday 13 November @ Palais Theatre


BRISBANE

Sunday 8 November @ Brisbane Convention Centre


SYDNEY

Tuesday 10 November @ State Theatre
Wednesday 11 November @ State Theatre
Monday 16 November @ State Theatre
Tuesday 17 November @ State Theatre


ADELAIDE

Saturday 14 November @ Adelaide Entertainment Centre ‘Theatre Mode’


PERTH

Friday 20 November @ Kings Park and Botanic Garden, Perth



UPDATE:

Band members:

Steve Sidelnyk - Drums
Mark Summerlin - MD/Guitar/Backing Vocals
Marcus Brown - Bass/Keys/Backing Vocals

Carol Jarvis - Trombone/Backing Vocals
Sarah Field - Sax/Trumpet/Backing Vocals
Katie Samways - Baritone Saxophone/Backing Vocals
Annette Brown - Trumpet/Backing Vocals

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Mike Mills and the Beautiful Losers

To be an artist at twenty, is to be an artist. To be an artist at forty is to be a sell-out, right? Unless you’re living in a cave -- or a bungalow out the back of your wealthy parents’ place -- the imperatives of making a living will tend to turn the most maverick of artists into a mini mogul. Eventually.

Which is what makes the loose collective of artists known as the ‘beautiful losers’ so fascinating. These scruffy, non-conformist, never-grown-up, skater-boy and punk artists from the east and west coast of the USA haven’t just bent that rule, they’ve tied it into a balloon animal, like a clown at a birthday party. Rather than sell out, they’ve been sought out.

They’re graffiti artists turned muralists, a skateboarder-turned-photographer, doodlers turned pro doodlers and “regular freaks” turned “cool freaks.”

From a commercial point of view, Mike Mills is the most interesting of the group. The 43 year-old speaks of the mainstream as if it were his first love: a high-school cheerleader that jilted him as a boy. His life since has been a quest to prove to her she made a huge mistake. And, yes, the mainstream is now courting him.

“...I don’t really find any corner of the world safe. To me the art world is at least as complicated and duplicitous -- and actually more about money than the ad world. Or can be...”

The small time graphic artist and sometime musician still makes album covers, poster art and music videos for friends, from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth to former band mates Cibo Matto, but his bread and butter nowadays comes from shooting big budget commercials for international campaigns. His clients include Volkswagen, Apple, Mastercard, GAP and DuPont.

Interestingly enough, Mills doesn’t just shoot commercials to pay for his own film-making projects -- his fourth feature-length film is cast and ready to commence shooting in the northern autumn -- he also does it as a creative outlet. And for sheer pleasure.

He explained by phone from Los Angeles that he had “tried to quit” in 2005 but “started up again” last year. While admitting that advertising is “a complicated problem of consumer society” and that advertising, by definition, is ‘specious’, it is, he says, “the best and only way” he can make money as a director, and one of the few ways he gets to use his skills.

Rather than ask Mills to adapt his style for their campaigns, his clients want what he does. And does uniquely. Even his purely commercial work (see www.humans.jp) is indistinguishable from, well, art!

“Early on, I got to do [some] very creative ads for Nike. They were very successful -- deemed successful in the ad world. So, weirdly, when I do ads, I get treated like a king. I get treated like an artist. [Everyone is] deferential to my opinion and respects me and all that. When I was doing my feature film, no-one deferred to me at all!”

Asked if there’s any meaningful distinction to be made between commercial and fine art, he responds: “I don’t really find any corner of the world safe, or a safe haven. To me the art world is at least as complicated and duplicitous -- and actually more about money than the ad world. Or can be. So whatever world you’re operating in is fraught with complications and ways to be untrue to yourself. It’s a constant negotiation.”

“Again, it’s not like all fine art is commercial art, but it’s just as [easy for it] to be commercial... Our world is actually quite good at pretending -- at hiding -- that money and competition and consumerism is what drives it, or is a big part of it. For years, it’s mastered the art of disguising its financial basis, you know what I mean?”

Asked if it will be easier for the next generation of street artists, coming from x-box and gamer culture, to be swallowed up by the commercial world than his generation, Mills is thoughtful.

After a disclaimer that he has “no idea about big general cultural things” and “what’s making what happen” he continues: “in any scene, any generation, there’s gonna be people that just don’t fit in. That have whatever it is... the self-absorption, or the self-strength, or maybe just they’re so wildly insecure and desperate that they don’t follow the rules, whatever the rules are [at] that time.”

His own quest is to keep “hope and fluidity and flexibility alive.” To do that, he says, “you have to keep your eyes open, no matter where you’re working.”


Aaron Rose’s documentary Beautiful Losers has a couple of screenings at the new Speakeasy Cinema tonight and next Friday, November 6. (And wot a bloody fascinating idea that is... get a film and a feed -- burger and beverage -- for twenty-odd bucks. It sounds quite the hangout too.) There are some Sydney screenings coming up. The first is at Paddington Town Hall on November 21 at 6pm. Watch this space (and this one) for details.

Mike Mills’ web site is www.mikemillsweb.com

Beautiful Losers is also be available on DVD through Madman Entertainment.

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For the record, a couple more Melbourne Festival reviews

Le Salon by Peeping Tom. Playhouse, the Arts Centre.

It’s a shame to bring this Belgian company all the way to Melbourne and then present just the centre section of its celebrated Garden/Lounge/Basement trilogy.

The first piece (Le Jardin) is about hitting forty. This one, Le Salon, is about incontinence and death. The final section (Le Sous Sol) is posthumous. It’s set underground, where all the players are now buried. The trilogy is also about different body sizes and weights and capabilities. Sounds like a barrel of laughs, no?

Le Salon is a meaty eighty minutes, dazzlingly physical and sometimes riotously funny. But without the equally eccentric outer acts it floats unanchored and dimensionless. This brilliant centrepiece is reduced to an apparently over-resourced and overproduced curio.

Like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Le Salon has an ageing and failing patriarch (played by actor Simon Versnel) whose wealth and influence has gone the way of his bladder control. The family’s attention is firmly on smaller nappies. Which belong to the new grandchild.

Good as the staging is -- the set, the singing and the sleight of hand -- stripped of context, all that audiences have to hold onto is the physical work. Luckily these are amazing. Unforgettable even.

A body is ridden like a skateboard. The same body rocks as if made of curved steel then twists, kicks and rolls, again and again, in a brilliant impersonation of a hip-hopping, freshly-landed fish.

This vivid, joyful and exhilarating performance leaves us baffled, but strangely content.

This review was published in Monday's Herald Sun.


Pornography. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Playhouse, the Arts Centre.

The seven separate sections of Simon Stephens’ play hang in space like a constellation. It’s up to us to join the dots.

The action takes place in and around London in the first week of July 2005, a week which had the Live 8 concert (Madonna, Pink Floyd, Coldplay), the G8 conference on third world debt, the announcement that London would host the 2012 Olympics and, the following morning, the 7/7 suicide bomber attack.

In the spooky central scene -- entitled The Soldier -- a man rises before dawn, kisses his wife and children goodbye and boards a bus. For a minute or two we imagine he’s fighting the good fight: the clean-cut white guy with wife and kids. But he’s the home-grown terrorist. One of the four self-proclaimed soldiers on their way to the City.

Though it’s framed by specific historical events, Pornography is a composite portrait of a people; of a culture; maybe, even, of Western culture. It’s not a flattering likeness! It’s riddled with corruption of the flesh and of the soul; it’s shot through with acts of violence, sabotage and incest. The pornography of the title, incidentally, is downloaded by an 82 year-old woman who has become addicted to it.

It’s an elegant and haunting script (written in English, performed in German) given a chaotic and highly physical production. It’s a provocative and thought-provoking piece of theatre which seizes our attention and doesn’t release its grip for 130 minutes.

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Siren by Ray Lee

Sirens? Don’t give me sirens. I’ve been spoilt. Rotten. On a Sunday in June 2005, I woke to the sound of a massive chromatic symphony. From my hotel room in North Sydney -- Milsons Point really, where the harbour bridge touches down -- the sound seemed to be coming from the harbour. Ship horns, I thought. The sound had mass, it had movement. It was too beautiful, surely, to be accidental. I imagined that some crazy composer had engineered this.

But, no.

Guess what? It was a protest. 630 truckies were jamming up the CBD and the Harbour and Anzac bridges. It was a go-slow. With horns honking. It was fucking magnificent. Instead of cacophony, which you might expect, there was extraordinary harmony. Amazing tessitura. Rising and falling tones. Rising and falling volume.

The whole thing reminded me of the story of Richard Wagner smuggling a string orchestra into his home to serenade his sleeping wife, Cosima, on the morning of her birthday, not long after the birth of their son Siegfried. (The Triebschen Idyll it was called. Later the Siegfried Idyll.)

Ray Lee’s Siren is a little like the Truckies Symphony on a puny scale. It’s endearingly retro -- like a musical happening from Germany in the 1960s -- and calculatedly unambitious. It’s a Noah’s Ark of tweeters, little Dalek-like speakers at each end of short poles which spin on stands of varying heights in tight little orbits.

Audience members are encouraged to wander the space.. and sternly asked not to speak to anyone for the duration of the event. About 45 minutes.

Pursuing the Noah’s Ark metaphor... there’s a small clutch of unloved (and unlovely) mid-range speakers making coarse honking noises. No-one wants to loiter around them, like ugly critters at the zoo.



I wanted to limbo dance under one of the taller towers, but the space is roped off. (Lying down is discouraged too. Shame. A travelator would be kick arse.)

At its best, Siren is reminiscent of the closing moments of Supertramp’s song Fools Overture, where the orchestra tunes up. I was also reminded of the watery synth keyboards (maybe a mellotron?) used in the (very) early New Order single Procession. (Hell, I was also reminded of Henry Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary... so best not to read too much into any of this!)

Spoiler alert. Skip this paragraph if you’re booked in but haven’t yet seen the show. When the lights go off, maybe ten minutes before the end of the installation, the orbiting LEDs are like fireflies or retarded electrons! The flicker of the closer lights leaves a trail of dots in space.



Like the show, the moment is memorable. But a long way short of magical.


Siren, a sound installation created by Ray Lee. With Harry Dawes. Produced by Simon Chatterton. Stavroula Kounadea, technician. At the Meat Market, 5 Blackwood Street North Melbourne, until October 25. A part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

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Pornography by Simon Stephens (Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg)

Wow, I have a new role model: an eccentric, crotchety, unnamed 82 year-old porn-addicted misanthrope. Did I mention she’s a she? This, from Simon Stephens’ play Pornography:

In town everybody’s talking about the possibility that the Olympic Games might be coming to London. I’m struck by the irony of this. Because the people of London, palpably to me, are universally obese and under exercised. Fat fuckers. Gibbering about athletes. The lot of them. London in summer is a horror story. The underground is a cauldron. The shopping centres are brutalised. There is no such thing as air conditioning.

[...]

And then on Wednesday lunchtime the news comes in that London’s bid to host the Olympics in 2012 has been successful. And now people smile. Transistor radios broadcast the events over and over. We go live to Trafalgar Square. We go live to Tokyo where Lord Coe is speaking. We go live to the derelict battered crack dens of Stratford where residents there can barely contain their glee at the prospect of Kelly Holmes racing madly around the peripheries of their houses. Cars do little dances. Drivers toot their horns at one another with idiot inane grins on their faces. Shocked by their own daring. Epileptic with thoughts of how old they’ll be in 2012.

The Crotchety One (played by Juliane Koren, I think) is just one ‘tile’ in Stephens’ ‘tapestry’. The mixed metaphor is the playwright’s own. [Why not tile in the mosaic or thread in the tapestry? Or dish in the tapas bar fer fux sake?]



Set in London in the first week of July 2005, and taking us from the Live 8 concert to the 7/7 London bombings, Pornography consists of six scenes and a coda (in English) which reduces the lives of the 52 victims of the bombings to Twitterable proportions... the shortest of these is just 7 words.

The first scene is narrated by a professional woman troubled by her son’s physical vulnerability and by the possibility that her husband is having an affair.

Written in English and performed in German, Pornography is a fairly wordy play. And the opening monologue in particular is an avalanche of inessential detail, most of which is faithfully reproduced on surtitle displays either side of the Playhouse stage.

Happily, the reading demands are lighter in later scenes, and the 130 minute play turns out to be a fairly easy if not always comfortable sit. (And it is, incidentally, recommended!)

Translation, it seems to me, is a sustaining theme of this year’s festival. Translating page to stage, verse to drama, a Heiner Müller script to an opera and then on to a ballet, memoir to monodrama, and so on. The translation is more literal here.

Stephens’ play is spare and beautiful. It’s so at home on the page, it’s hard to read it as a play. Likewise, it’s so fixed in time and place, one wonders what’s in it for Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg producing it.

On a more literal level, I was a little distracted by the translation. Words missing and altered. Some quite innocuous. (Like ‘yoghurt’!) One character -- a half-Italian Aryan -- bitches about Madonna bringing a black man on stage with her at the Live 8 concert. I heard him say nigger, though it hit the surtitles as coon. It’s “coon” incidentally in the original play.

The surtitle system -- by design or otherwise -- lost the proverbial plot at the start of a section. We lost a few minutes of dialogue and the scene number and title. The scenes are numbered in the play, seven-to-one, but aren’t given titles... so the black-out was costly.



In DSH’s production, the woman in the opening scene (#7) contemplates (or actually commits) an act of industrial sabotage -- faxing a highly sensitive report to a rival company -- which is not mentioned in the script.

Likewise, an otherwise innocuous scene -- in which a teacher and his former student confess to having been obsessed with one another many years earlier -- is turned into something rather sleazier. In the script, the man says to the young woman: “Dance with me.” Here, he says: dance for me. She climbs onto a table and begins to undress. He masturbates. (Mercifully with his back to us! LOL)

But let me skip to the executive summary, otherwise this will never be posted... It’s an interesting production, more intriguing than engrossing. Chaotic but not lacking a trajectory.


Pornography by Simon Stephens. Directed by Sebastian Nübling. Set design by Muriel Gerstner, assisted by Jean-Marc Desbonnets. Costumes by Marion Münch. Music by Lars Wittershagen. Lighting by Roland Edrich. Dramaturgy by Nicola Bramkamp and Regina Guhl. Cast: Marion Breckwoldt, Katja Danowski, Juliane Koren, Hanns Jörg Krumpholz, Jana Schulz, Daniel Wahl, Samuel Weiss & Martin Wißner.

A Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg production for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Playhouse, the Arts Centre, until October 18.

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Look Mummy, I’m Acting! No, wait a minute...

Multi-media rules the 2009 Festival: the plays have musicians and video projections, the opera has twice as many dancers as singers, even the visual art gets a technological and musical make-over. These are the “gesamtkunstwerks” that German composer Richard Wagner dreamed of, where several art forms ganged up for a common cause. To make total artworks.

And then there’s Look Mummy, I’m Dancing! A dimensionless speck. No length, no depth, no apparent aspiration. As I moan in today’s Herald Sun, “it’s as plain a piece of theatre as you could possibly get.” I was being kind. It’s not -- in any sense -- dramatic. It doesn’t deserve to be called theatre.

It’s woefully undernourished: misshapen and badly pitched. It’s an unillustrated lecture (adapted from a published memoir) pretending to be a monodrama.


Deliver us... Vanessa Van Durme.

Look Mummy, I’m Dancing by Vanessa Van Durme. Directed [allegedly] by Frank Van Laecke. Lighting design [!! Oh, look! A dimmer control!] by Jaak Van de Velde. Melbourne International Arts Festival. At the Fairfax Studio, the Arts Centre, until October 17.

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A car-full of motherfuckers: Apocalypse Bear Trilogy by Lally Katz

This is a mind fuck. A Möbius strip tied in time. A hypercube. A giant 3D perceptual illusion. It's a three-pronged play with two prongs at the other end. It dares you to stare, to see if the illusion holds. And, like a drawing by M.C. Escher, or a wireframe image of a cube, you can turn this play inside-out with an act of the mind.


(I believe this is a Walter Wick image.)

The first part of the trilogy, performed without break, is The Fag From Zagreb. (It was first presented as part of Melburnalia at fortyfivedownstairs in 2007.)

A schoolboy just home (Luke Mullins in short pants) finds a bear in his kitchen instead of his mother. The bear -- who politely introduces himself as The Apocalypse Bear -- makes Jeremy a peanut butter and cheese sandwich (pickles on the side) while the boy talks about his day (“I raped a faggot up the arse”) and messages a suicidal man in Zagreb from his laptop.

According to the bear (Brian Lipson in a slack-jawed bear suit), Jeremy’s mother is out shopping and his sister has been raped and murdered by “a car load of motherfuckers.” That said, she might be upstairs quietly doing her homework.

At this point, I’m thinking: Little Red Riding Hood, Gerald the Gorilla from Not The Nine O’Clock News (“When I caught Gerald, he was completely wild.” “Wild? I was absolutely livid!”) as well as the obvious bunnies: Donny Darko and Bat For Lashes (‘What’s A Girl To Do’).

The David Lynch twist happens in the centre section. (The rest of this paragraph might be considered a spoiler... take it or skip it. Your choice!) In it, a schoolgirl (Katherine Tonkin) in America reminisces about the husband she couldn’t satisfy, way back in her future. She chats away to the increasingly creepy and sinister bear, reminiscent of Robert Blake’s Mystery Man character in Lost Highway.

But enough of the plot and its fascinating resolution. The third section is the clincher for a number of reasons. Not least because it reveals a previously unexplored side of the playwright. It’s a touching domestic scene, far less surreal than those that have preceded it.

If David Lynch is the predominant influence in the writing, then Brian Eno rules the rest. The settings in the first two plays recall Eno’s “video paintings” of the 1980s, most famously Thursday Afternoon. Martyn Coutts slow-moving, phase shifting projections are of a domestic kitchen (Fag From Zag) and a school cafeteria in the second play.

The excellent original music also brings Eno to mind, though Jethro Woodward’s music is more focussed and urgent than most (certainly not all) of Eno’s compositions.

One way or another, Apocalypse Bear is a great step for both Katz and the Melbourne Theatre Company. It’s also an unexpectedly apt overture for Brett Sheehy’s first Melbourne Festival in which video paintings are everywhere (from Peter Greenaway’s video described Last Supper to the animated frieze in Sasha Waltz’s Medea) and music/sound design is an essential and overwhelming presence in just about every single art form.



Apocalypse Bear Trilogy by Lally Katz. Directed by Luke Mullins and Brian Lipson. Chris Kohn, artistic adviser. Sound design and original music by Jethro Woodward. Lighting by Richard Vabre. Set and costume design by Mel Page. Video by Martyn Coutts.

A Stuck Pigs Squealing production presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Melbourne International Arts Festival. At the MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio, until October 24.



Look out for my review of the trilogy in the Herald Sun, this week. See also On Stage (And Walls) review.

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Just a coupla reviews: One Night the Moon and The Year of Magical Thinking

One Night The Moon, adapted from the film by John Romeril. Directed by Wesley Enoch. Set and costume design by Anna Cordingley. Lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. Sound design by Kelly Ryall. Presented by Malthouse Theatre. At the Merlyn until October 3.

This stage adaptation of Rachel Perkins’ terrific short film One Night The Moon has excellent ‘provenance’. The adaptation is penned by Perkins’ original writing collaborator John Romeril and the music is played by (among others) one of the film score’s composers, Mairead Hannan.

The beautiful and effective music -- by Hannan, Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly -- is driving, Celtic-infused folk. It powers the piece, from the reverent beginning to the catastrophic conclusion. And director Wesley Enoch makes a fair fist of turning cinema magic into stage magic.

But the transition from one medium to the other stumbles and staggers quite badly. You wouldn’t guess that the stump-jump plough had been invented fifty-five years before the action of the play. The spoken word sections trip up the flow of the narrative time after time after time, bringing it to a crunching halt.

Bizarrely, the country and folk voices of the film have been replaced by raspy rock and roll (Mark Seymour in Paul Kelly’s role) and classic music theatre voices in roles previously sung by actors. Good as she is -- and, really, she is the best of the actors -- Natalie O’Donnell sounded like she was understudying Debra Byrne in Les Misérables. As the white woman, and grieving mother of the missing six year-old girl, this was perfectly apt. But for the black tracker (Kirk Page) to sing like the romantic tenor lead from a musical comedy was more than a little off-putting.

Missing entirely from this production is the little girl. She’s a disembodied voice and a wraithlike projection.

Compared to the short film, this stage adaptation of One Night The Moon is incredibly heavy-handed. Lines like “beyond the known, we’re not alone” are left hanging in space. Mystery, which can be established in a single shot in a film, is infinitely harder to pull-off in a theatre. The comparison between a maggot-ridden lost lamb and the little girl seems mawkish and obvious.

Enoch and Romeril do better in illustrating the tension between the world having its way with us and us having our way with the world. But, overall, the parable-like simplicity of the original story -- while carried brilliantly in the music -- now seems simpleminded.


The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Directed by Cate Blanchett. (Jennifer Flowers, associate.) Set Design by Alice Babidge. Costume design by Giorgio Armani. Sound design by Natasha Anderson. Lighting design by Nick Schlieper. At the Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane, until October 17.

On Christmas Day 2003, Joan Didion’s daughter Quintana was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at Beth Israel North in New York. A winter cold had spiralled into pneumonia and then complete septic shock.

Five days later, after visiting their comatose daughter, Didion and her writer husband John Gregory Dunne lit a fire at home and sat down to eat. John ended up face down on his dinner plate, dead of a massive coronary.

Though outwardly accepting of her husband’s death, the rational and intelligent Joan refuses to part with John’s shoes. He will need them if he came back, she thinks.

Thus began Didion’s “year of magical thinking,” a year in which the writer turned her life into a kind of fiction, a year in which she simply refused to accept that the outcome of her life with her husband was fixed, that it couldn’t be revised or rewritten like a screenplay.

Didion’s cool-headed account of that year sold hundreds of thousands of copies in hardback. This stage version, also by Didion, is a kind of sequel. (Tragically, Quintana died as the book was about to hit the stores in 2005.)

In this STC production -- presented by the QTC -- Cate Blanchett directs Robyn Nevin. Yes, the Sydney Theatre Company’s new artistic director directs the recently-retired boss. Just as BC (Before Cate) turned to AD with this production, the calendar of Didion’s life restarted with the death of the man she lived with -- and worked alongside -- for forty joyful years.

Didion trawls through their memories and re-dates them: their final trip to Paris becomes 32 days BC. Her last birthday, 25 days BC. Their daughter’s wedding, eight months BC. And so on.

A visit to LA where Quintana is again hospitalised -- this time with a life threatening brain injury -- becomes a desperate quest to avoid familiar places, from the days when the three lived in Malibu. Unguarded memories suck Didion into a vortex in which she has no control over fate. These memories are like improvised explosive devices on the roadside in Iraq.

The stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking -- like the book -- is anything but maudlin. It’s analytical. And very blunt. There are no euphemisms here. Didion likes her truth neat. And it takes your breath away like over-proof liquor.

Nevin, one of our greatest actors, is a joy to watch. Even at her quietest, her voice carries easily and clearly to the back of the theatre. She’s a definition of control, even here, portraying a wife and mother almost paralysed with grief.

It’s a good looking production, though like Cate Blanchett’s other recent productions, the sound is overdone and overly literal.

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Review: The Colours by Peter Houghton

In his novel Popcorn, Ben Elton playfully uses the fact that we begin each chapter not knowing a thing. Not even where and when we are. He uses it and abuses it. Peter Houghton does something similar to the monodrama, where one actor plays multiple characters.

A third of the way through The Colours, we’re still asking ourselves: are we watching a skilled actor doing lots of roles -- principally that of a Colour Sergeant Atkins barking orders at his infantrymen -- or just the one man, who has gone barking mad?

And just as Elton used comedy and satire to tackle very serious issues -- the media’s complicity in killing sprees -- Houghton uses his extraordinary comic skills to tell a sad and troubled tale of loyalty abused and an empire in decline. It’s an Apocalypse Now-style story related sitcom style, like a dark episode of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

Actually, Atkins has plenty in common with Battery Sergeant Major Williams from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. He’s a regimental thug in a far-flung outpost of a bankrupt and overextended empire. And, yes, the natives are restless. It’s time for a changing of the colours.

The Colours, we eventually establish, is set just after the Second World War in a fictional African colony, Batundi. (I immediately thought Burundi, but that terribly poor country was never part of the British Empire. It was German then Belgian.)

The 98th, of which Atkins is a part, is a regiment that has fought for King and country since the Napoleonic Wars; a regiment that has distinguished itself on no fewer than eighty battlefields. Atkins principal duty is to guard the regiment’s ensign, the flag under which the infantrymen rally. He literally flies the colours. With a bolt-action Lee-Enfield rifle in hand.

Houghton and his director Anne Browning -- the team that brought us The Pitch -- quite brilliantly balance sympathy and contempt for Atkins: admiration for his determination and loyalty on the one hand and disdain for his brutal methods on the other. The real heroes are the volunteers and conscripts who have fought and died under the blood red ensign: the Irishman determined to feed his extended family, the Marxist-sympathiser, the artist and so on.

It’s neither a black armband nor a white blindfold view of Empire. It manages to be nostalgic without ever romanticising a bloody past. It’s comedy with bayonet fixed. It’ll gut you.


The Colours, written and performed by Peter Houghton. Directed by Anne Browning. Set and costume design by Shaun Gurton. Lighting by Richard Vabre. Music by David Chesworth. Melbourne Theatre Company. At the MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio, until September 12.

A slightly shortened version of this review was published in the September 9 edition of the Herald Sun.

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The Man In Black, the Johnny Cash story. Set list.

Yes, I am a trainspotter. Here’s the set list from The Man In Black, in which Tex Perkins stars as Johnny Cash. It opened last night.

Act 1

1. I Walk The Line
2. Hey Porter
3. Get Rhythm
4. Big River
5. Five Feet High And Rising
6. Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)
7. Don’t Take Your Guns To Town
8. Sunday Morning Coming Down
9. Help Me Make It Through The Night (duet with Rachael Tidd)
10. It Ain’t Me Babe (duet)
11. Jackson (duet)

Act 2

1. Folsom Prison Blues
2. Busted
3. Cocaine Blues
4. Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog
5. A Boy Named Sue
6. 25 Minutes To Go
7. Greystone Chapel
8. Starkville City Jail
9. Man In Black
10. Bird On A Wire (Leonard Cohen cover)
11. If I Were A Carpenter (duet)
12. Hurt (NIN cover)
13. Ring Of Fire



Encore

1. Darlin’ Companion
2. Folsom Prison Blues (this time sung by Tidd) and medley


The Man In Black, the Johnny Cash story. Starring Tex Perkins, Rachael Tidd and “the Tennessee Four” (Peter Luscombe, James Black, Steve Hadley and Ashley Naylor). Athenaeum Theatre until September 12.

UPDATE: my review...

After a thundering version of ‘I Walk The Line’ -- so deep it would make a sub-woofer quake -- the black-suited singer steps up and delivers the trademark opening line: “Hello, I’m...”

It’s a shock and a relief when he says: “... Tex Perkins.”

As rich and deep as the voice is, as impressive as the figure-eight gee-tar strumming is, Tex is smart enough to know that a little modesty goes a long way. This man in black has a white shirt on. For now.

The first half of the show sketches Johnny Cash’s childhood and early career. It’s clumsy, but informative and often fun. And it takes us from the first number one hit (‘I Walk The Line’) to Johnny’s first number two with June Carter: ‘Jackson’. (They never quite hit the top together, though they made it back to number 2 a few years later with ‘If I Were A Carpenter’... which features in the second half.)

Interestingly enough, the selection of songs in this half (‘Hey Porter’, ‘Get Rhythm’, ‘Big River’, ‘Five Feet High And Rising’) is smarter than the banter. The renditions are conservative and rock solid. And the focus is firmly on Perkins.

After interval, the show kicks up several notches. This time, Tex opens with a “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” his white shirt replaced with a black one. And the band fires off the opening songs from the legendary 1968 Folsom Prison concerts: ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘Busted’ which they follow with another four songs that featured in the Folsom concerts.

Just when the show is barrelling along like an express train, the narration brings the show to a crunching halt. But not for long.

Covers of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird On A Wire’ and Trent Reznor’s ‘Hurt’ (which Cash released on two of his ‘American’ recordings, in 1994 and 2002 respectively) lend the show an unexpected complexity. For a moment, we hear how Cash might have sounded if he had sung these songs as a young man, in rude health, not an ailing man in his 60s.

Perkins is as close as we’re likely to get to Johnny Cash in Australia. He makes Walk The Line star Joaquin Phoenix sound like an anaemic karaoke singer. His speaking voice is uncannily like Cash’s. More could be done in the sound mix to thicken up the mid-range of his voice to match it with Cash’s unique timbre, and Perkins needs to concentrate less on mimicry and more on character.

Still, Tex is Tex. Captivating and entertaining. And so is the show.

It will satisfy hardcore fans of both men. And that’s no mean feat.

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Por vos muero casts, Australian Ballet, Melbourne season

The Australian Ballet is very good when it comes to posting casting information on-line and keeping it up-to-date during the season if there are last-minute substitutions or injuries. The Melbourne casts for the current triple bill Concord are here.


Kevin Jackson and Halaina Hills in Por vos muero
(click on the image to enlarge)

Well, all except for the first piece, Por vos muero, which is listed simply as Cast 1 and Cast 2. For the record, the casts are:

Cast 1.

Vivienne Wong, Tzu-Chao Chou
Gina Brescianini, Daniel Gaudiello
Rachel Rawlins, Rudy Hawkes
Lucinda Dunn, Andrew Killian
Stephanie Williams, Damien Welch
Jane Casson, Robert Curran

Cast 2.

Robyn Hendricks, Brett Chynoweth
Halaina Hills, Luke Marchant
Laura Tong, Andrew Wright
Lana Jones, Luke Ingham
Dimity Azoury, Ty King-Wall
Amy Harris, Kevin Jackson

Each cast has its attractions, of course. You'd queue up to see Robert Curran in a walkathon I reckon. And, interestingly, the stars of the show vary from performance to performance. On first night, Vivienne Wong was in killer form. Suddenly, that cool upper-body sophistication of hers -- so rare in a young dancer -- was eclipsed by something else. An acrobatic attack, hot and committed. It's hard to pin down.


Lucinda Dunn, Vivienne Wong, Gina Brescianini, Rachel Rawlins
Por vos muero cast 1 (click on the image to enlarge)

Rachel Rawlins' wrists (believe it or not!) ran a close second to Wong's -- er -- thighs. (You'll understand when you see them!)

But the second performance by the first cast was dominated by Gina Brescianini.

In the second cast, Halaina Hills did the same. (In Brescianini's role, interestingly enough.) Dimity Azouri -- always impressive in the modern repertoire -- also went for it.

Por vos muero and the final piece on the bill, Dyad 1929 by the justifiably overrated Wayne McGregor, are miraculously well performed and very fine pieces. You'd be an absolute idiot to miss them! Seriously.

The Melbourne season ends on September 1. The Sydney season is November 11-30.


Rehearsal photographs by Jim McFarlane, used with permission.

UPDATE: Michelle Potter's excellent review is on-line, here. Other reviews, including my own (rave) review for the Herald Sun, are quoted at length, here.

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Slava’s Snowshow, “a sadistic show for a masochistic world.” Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne.

The executive summary: If you don’t have “clown issues” comin’ in, you’ll sure as hell have them comin’ out.

The obligatory gag: What, a show about snow with a character called Yellow, and not a single joke about Frank Zappa or Coldplay?!


First impressions:

Variety reckons Slava’s Snowshow is to clowning what Cirque du Soleil is to the circus. Clearly, Variety is to good judgement what I am to good manners. Cos, in two words, their observation is Bull Shit.

If they’d said “what Archaos is to the circus” they’d be fifty degrees warmer. Like the French circus outfit, Slava’s Snowshow is grungy, Euro-style, raucous and menacing.

The main character ‘Yellow’ is a grotesque Semitic stereotype. He’s just a hook-nose short of a class action from the Anti-Defamation League.

...every trace of the old Slava -- the “thoughtful, gentle, poetic” clown -- has been blackened and killed off like a wart after cryotherapy...

Now, the Snowshow had a wildly successful season in New York and, apparently, didn’t cause any riots there. So perhaps I’m being a touch sensitive. (Then again, New York’s Jewish community is one of the most self-flagellating in the world. Maybe, like Seinfeld, they thought the Snowshow was a documentary. You know... life really is this bitter.)

Yellow is more like the creation of Samuel Beckett than, say, Charlie Chaplin. Not so much sad and funny as morbidly depressed and vengeful. Like something out of Godot, Yellow has a love-hate -- or, rather, need-loathe -- relationship with his companions, the green clowns. (Equally stereotypical and every bit as contemptible... in an oddly adorable way.)

Yellow’s relationship with the audience is a bit like Eva Peron’s reputedly was to hers. He’ll take your adulation... and steal your wallet. Actually, he demands both.

The performers are skilled, and their craft is so well-honed it’s almost undetectable. But it will leave you not so much transported as traumatised. It’s a sadistic show for a masochistic world.


My official review, published in the Herald Sun last week:

In the years since Slava’s Snowshow’s pre-9/11 debut, its heart has iced over. The white powdery snow has been packed down and turned into treacherous black ice.

It’s still extraordinarily spectacular, with its brilliantly realistic indoor blizzard, but every trace of the old Slava -- the “thoughtful, gentle, poetic” clown [I’m quoting an essay on Slava Polunin by Natasha Tabachnikova here] -- has been blackened and killed off like a wart after cryotherapy.

This is no show for young children... or grown-ups with clown issues! Think commedia dell’Arte in combat boots or Krusty the Clown dolls with their switches set to ‘Evil’.

Like Krusty, the Slava character in the Snowshow ‘Yellow’ (played by Canadian Derek Scott on opening night) has wild tufts of unruly hair and a seriously mean streak. He torments the Green Clowns... who eventually shoot him full of arrows.

It’s the stuff of fevered nightmares.

The show looks cramped in the Athenaeum Theatre, the stage is bursting at the seams, but there is good access to the audience and the clowns make repeated and effective use of that. Believe me, nowhere is safe from them... or safe from the elements!

Sound quality is not good -- it made my ear holes itch -- and the music is dinky and brutal. But like an Angelo Badalamenti score, it bores its way into your heart.

The performers are exceptionally skilled. They play the audience like a conductor plays an orchestra. But Slava’s Snowshow leaves its audiences not so much transported as traumatised. It’s a sadistic show for a masochistic world.

Slava’s Snowshow. Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne, until August 30.

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I beg to differ... David Harrower’s Knives In Hens (Malthouse Theatre/STCSA)

Geordie Brookman’s production of Knives In Hens has copped a bit of a spray, around town, for its pacing, design, concept... you name it. But I kinda liked it. Now, I didn't see the production until it had been running for almost a week, so there’s a good chance it hit its proverbial stride in that time.

That said, one of the recurrent complaints about the production was that it was too fast. And I have to say that a good five minutes has been shaved off the running time since it opened.

Executive summary: I liked it. Don't be put off.

After the jump, the director’s cut of my Herald Sun review.

Good art is a revelation. It alters the way we see the world. Great art, I reckon, changes the way we see ourselves. David Harrower’s early play Knives In Hens succeeds on the first count several times over. It casts language and history -- as well as the natural world -- in a surprising new light.

Harrower takes us to a time in history when the written word -- once the exclusive preserve of priests and law-makers -- was starting to appear in villages, to be used by farmers and tradespeople; when the practicality of chalk was challenged by the permanence of pen and ink.

The power of words -- of naming things -- was like witchcraft to the peasants.

The playwright, remarkably, makes these abstract ideas as exciting as sex and death... which are also on the menu in this Chauceresque pot-boiler about a blunt-but-loving ploughman, his capable young wife and the miller, a widower.

The irony of the play is that the ploughman (Robert Menzies) -- who is deeply suspicious of the written word and creative use of language -- inadvertently plants the seed of metaphor in the mind of his wife (played by Kate Box) where it bursts into bloom.

She’s fascinated by the idea of a tree “standing”; she’s keen to name the shiver a tree gives in certain winds, even if she has to invent a word; and she feels embarrassed looking up at the canopy of leaves, as if she were looking up a skirt.

The miller (Dan Spielman) -- hated by all of the hard-working villagers -- reads books and writes in ink. Initially, this is cause for more contempt and frustration from the young woman, but she is vulnerable to his revolutionary ideas about recording events and translating thoughts into written words.

Music in the production is overused and sometimes tactless, and the lighting design doesn’t take into account the brightness of the theatre’s exit signs, but it’s hard to imagine the play better presented than it is here in Geordie Brookman’s measured and touching production. Acting is quite beautifully weighted, too. It’s a great credit to Kate Box that she more than holds her own alongside old sparring partners Menzies and Spielman.

Knives In Hens by David Harrower. A co-production between Malthouse Theatre and the State Theatre Company of SA. At the Beckett Theatre until August 22.


This review ran in the August 11 edition of the Herald Sun

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Testing, testing... 1. 2. 3.

I've been warned: if I request a Beargarden song, I'll be beaten up. But, fuck, I'll be listening to All that Fall on the way there. [Sings under breath: "I write the news... I write the news..."]



More information at Sam's excellent blog, Sails of Oblivion. Sam's also twittering bout the gig, rehearsals &c. here.

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Here's one I prepared earlier: Red Sky Morning

Red Sky Morning might not be the best show Melbourne's upstart theatre company Red Stitch staged last year -- that gong probably belongs to Pool (No Water) -- but it's right up there, and well worth a return season. It gets one, here, courtesy of the Arts Centre's Full Tilt programme.

Tom Holloway's script picked up the 2008 Green Room "New Writing for the Australian Stage" award.

Here's my review of the premiere, last August.


If ever the state government decides that Melbourne needs a full-time ensemble of actors to rival the Sydney Theatre Company's Actors Company, it has a ready-made in Red Stitch. It's an efficient and highly professional company. It's prolific, too, without sacrificing quality. But money is tight.

Red Stitch fills up its little theatre at the eastern end of St Kilda for weeks at a time. But most of Melbourne still doesn't know what it's missing.

The company's latest venture -- called Red Stitch Writers -- is to develop new plays. (Local plays haven't been much of a priority for Red Stitch, to date.)

This one, Red Sky Morning, is the product of a year of readings, workshops and rewrites. And it shows. It hits the stage sprinting. It's fully formed, impressively set and finely tuned.

It's a modest yarn about a day in the life of a family: store manager father, boozy mother and shy teen daughter. They're loving, but they're deeply and tragically bottled up. Heartbreakingly inarticulate.

What they can't say to one another they think aloud to us: their idle thoughts, their secrets, their fears, their black dog depressions... Sometimes all three chatter at once. (The script is written in columns.) So, the director has to conduct the play like a score for three voices.

Sam Strong (who directed Shedding, brilliantly, at La Mama earlier this year[2008]) does a fine job keeping it all comprehensible. But, all due respect to Strong, with actors of the calibre of David Whiteley, Sarah Sutherland and Erin Dewar, a drover's dog could have steered this one home. All three are chameleons. And all three are at their brilliant best.

The combination of lighting (Danny Pettingill) and set (Peter Mumford) is another highlight.

Red Sky Morning by Tom Holloway. Directed by Sam Strong. Designed by Peter Mumford. Lighting by Danny Pettingill. A Red Stitch Actors Theatre production. At the Fairfax Studio, the Arts Centre, Melbourne, until June 13.

This review was published in the September 15 2008 edition of the Herald Sun.

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Laughing Clowns concert set list

Corrections and comments invited.

The short version: the band took a while to warm up — half the main set really — but peaked when it counted.

01. Everything Is Not The Fault Of Minorities
02. Laughing Clowns
03. Come One, Come All
04. Theme From 'Mad Flies, Mad Flies'
05. Knife In The Head
06. Everything That Flies
07. Clown Town
08. Crying Dance
09. Collapse Board
10. Eternally Yours

Encores:

11. That's The Way It Goes
12. Song Of Joy ["We haven't played this for 28 years." — Ed]
13. New Bully In The Town




The line-up, as expected, was Ed Kuepper (guitars and vocals), the inscrutable Jeffery Wegener (drums), Louise Elliott (a co-starring role on saxophone, then flute in 'New Bully In Town'), Biff Miller (electric upright bass plugged into a smoke-billowing pre-amp) and Alister Spence (piano and other keyboards).



Laughing Clowns, live at the Forum, Melbourne, May 1. Part of the 2009 Melbourne International Jazz Festival. (Also May 2 & 3 at The Basement, Sydney.)

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Saint, Clown, Bad Seed — an interview with Ed Kuepper

Thirty-two years after posting a few dozen dodgy-looking 7” singles to the music press -- which led to the international success of the proto-punk anthem (I’m) Stranded and a three-record deal with EMI in the UK -- Saints’ guitarist and songwriter Ed Kuepper is still pressing his own music. Nowadays though, he hawks CDs to fans for ten bucks a pop.

Like folkies around the world -- from the grizzled Richard Thompson to “righteous babe” Ani DiFranco -- Kuepper is a bootlegger. He sells his own live recordings, made direct from the mixing desk. The seventh in the so-called Prince Melon bootleg series is a recording of the reformed Laughing Clowns made at Brisbane’s GoMA in January. You’ll be able to pick it up tonight, at the door, when Kuepper and the Clowns play the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (yes, the Jazz Festival) or at the Basement, in Sydney, on Saturday or Sunday night.

The Laughing Clowns were formed by Kuepper (and drummer Jeffrey Wegener) in the wake of the break-up of The Saints. The Saints, of course, were the dazzling harbingers of punk in the mid 1970s. They even beat the Sex Pistols to the draw. It’s taken the music world considerably longer to catch up with the Laughing Clowns...

Nowadays, Clowns music might be labelled free jazz, neo-jazz, avant-garde, experimental, post-rock, math rock or even post-metal. Hell, make up your own moniker for it! It’s brassy, dark and still scarily fresh. [Check out ‘Collapse Board’ or ‘I Don’t Know What I Want’ on iTunes.]

I last saw The Laughing Clowns early in 1982, sandwiched between The Go-Betweens (Kuepper’s singing voice is not unlike Robert Forster’s, I guess) and Nick Cave’s pre-Bad Seeds band, The Birthday Party. It comes as a bit of a shock to me to discover that I was enjoying jazz, however ‘free’ or ‘neo’ it might have been.


B.Y.O. (No Glass)?! What a concept!

Kuepper (I’ve since discovered) vehemently disputed claims by critics at the time that The Laughing Clowns were playing and recording jazz. Today, he’s rather mellower and happily lists Coleman and Coltrane -- that’s Ornette and John, incidentally -- among the band’s influences.

And speaking of mellowing, there was enough of a rapprochement between Kuepper and Saints singer Chris Bailey for that band to regroup for a couple of concerts on the east coast, starting at Pig City and culminating with the All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) gigs early this year.

Given that Laughing Clowns vinyl and CDs are next-to-impossible to find, my first question to Kuepper was how -- and why -- did that particular reformation happen?

“It’s kind of a surprise to me in some ways. It wasn’t something that we actively pursued. The Clowns, as a band, are in an odd situation in as much as we don’t have any current material to promote, we don’t have any affiliation with a label [or] anything. And everybody also has a number of other things with which they’re occupied.”

The invitation, in fact, came from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who curated this year’s ATP. Kuepper had toured with the Bad Seeds on their last European round as support act. And, indeed, he’s been invited to join the Bad Seeds on the 2009 Summer tour of Europe... as a member of the band. He will be replacing guitarist Mick Harvey, one of Cave’s oldest collaborators and a founding member of the Bad Seeds... not to mention The Birthday Party and Cave’s first major band, The Boys Next Door, before that.

Kuepper stresses that the arrangement with the Bad Seeds is flexible and not necessarily long-term.

“There’s not an aesthetic problem from my perspective at all... I like what they do. I like what they do a lot. And I’ve liked what they’ve done for a long time... Whether it washes with their long-term fans or not is another question!”

Stylistically, what Kuepper does is very different from Harvey. Still, he says, he’s sure it will work out well. “I feel quite optimistic about it,” he adds with an unexpectedly hearty laugh.

Kuepper is so used to being outside of the musical mainstream that success and fame cause much the same bemusement as failure and obscurity. He accepts both with slightly puzzled grace. Still, he admits to being “pleasantly surprised” by the reception of the Clowns this year and the mixed of old and young in the crowds.

“I always searched out older music, myself, so I can identify with that... It’s a different thing to nostalgia, you know?”

“There’s nothing wrong with feeling a glimmer of nostalgia when you’re listening to something, but I think if it’s something that’s new to you, it works both in your current life and also opens up a -- this is what used to happen to me -- it opened up this mysterious world which was really fascinating. I used to listen to a lot of old blues and rock ’n’ roll stuff. And just the sound of it -- the difference between it and things that were on radio at the time -- there was something magical about it.”


Joining Kuepper for these three concerts are Jeffery Wegener, "long-time saxophonist" Louise Elliott, bassist Biff Miller and keyboardist Alister Spence. Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, playing solo, is supporting act at the Forum, tonight. The Lighthouse Keepers' Juliet Ward and and Greg Appel are the supporting act at both Basement performances.


link: Melbourne International Jazz Festival
link: The Basement

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Rufus Wainwright Prima Donna is a Melbourne Festival co-commission...

According to an article last month in Canada's Globe and Mail, Rufus Wainwright's first opera is now a Toronto/Manchester/Melbourne Festival co-production. Prima Donna's premiere is scheduled for July 2009 in Manchester. The North American debut is slated for 2010's Luminato, Toronto's Festival Of Arts And Creativity, a recent addition to the calendar each June.

According to a correspondent at the Rufus Wainwright message board, the Melbourne International Arts Festival is playing dumb, neither confirming nor denying MIAF's involvement. (Always a good sign when the response is "you'll have to wait for the official release of the program...")

And this from Radio Canada:

Prima Donna prendra également l'affiche du festival de Melbourne, en Australie, cet automne. D'ici là, Rufus Wainwright travaille sur une adaptation musicale des sonnets de Shakespeare, qui sera présentée en première à Berlin, en avril.

Got that? En Australie, cet automne! (Northern 'automne' of course!)

After the jump, the Globe and Mail article...

The debut opera from Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright will have its North American premiere in 2010 at Toronto's Luminato Festival.

Wainwright wrote the score and a French-language libretto for Prima Donna, his new work set in Paris in 1970, in which aging opera singer Régine Saint Laurent struggles to regain her status as a top-flight soprano on the world stage. In a statement released yesterday, Wainwright described composing an opera as a “daring and risky” endeavour and thanked Toronto “for having the guts to make it happen.”

Co-commissioned by Luminato, the Manchester International Festival and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the opera will have its world premiere in Manchester in July. Wainwright had reportedly been in talks with New York's Metropolitan Opera for a Big Apple premiere, but negotiations broke down after the Met insisted Prima Donna be sung in English and made it clear they wouldn't mount it before 2014.

The Montreal-groomed Grammy nominee and self-described opera aficionado is also on the verge of premiering his musical adaptation of the sonnets of William Shakespeare, composed in collaboration with the Berliner Ensemble, next month in Berlin.

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Of Moles and Molls: Spooks, Series 6

For the record, the series of Spooks that starts screening on the ABC tonight -- which hasn't previously been broadcast on free-to-air -- is Series 6 (made and screened in the UK two years ago) not the latest, Series 7, which was recently released in Australia on DVD.

Here's a spoiler-free review of the DVD release of Series 6 and, for the record, of series five and four. The short version: 6 is a considerable comedown after the spiky adrenal heights of 5.


Spooks, Series 6

The Home Office takes a leaf from The Dummy's Guide to World Domination in Series 6 of Spooks. Defence of the realm turns to offence. And it proves not to be the best defence after all.

Mistakes are made -- both by ministers and MI5 operatives -- resulting in the deaths of countless civilians and, gasp, even the odd CIA field agent.

Unusually for Spooks, the sixth series has a narrative through-line -- so it's well worth watching on DVD -- it concerns Iran's nuclear and biological weapons, and America's eagerness to wage war. (Inexcusably, that plotline peeters out in the penultimate episode.)

While the stakes are impressively and increasingly high, the plotting gets farther and farther fetched. The scripts have some ludicrous mistakes and unbelievable twists. If series five was about killing agents off, six is about their miraculous (and sometimes laughable) resurrections.

With its combination of moles and molls, Spooks is an oil and vinegar blend of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the Profumo affair. It's absorbing and exasperating. Finally, it is the extraordinary ensemble acting that keep us watching.

After the jump, reviews of series five and four.


Spooks, Series 5

In the course of the first few episodes of this still unscreened [at the time of writing, in May 2008] on free-to-air series, MI5 officers will be hanged, stabbed and poisoned... as well as beaten up, locked up and liberally doused with petrol. All (pretty much) at the hands of their colleagues at MI6. Indeed, a great deal of the terrorist activity happening in London in now initiated by the powers that be. Powers that envy the US Homeland Security Act. And by MOSSAD. At least the team get to whack a few in retaliation!

The few old-fashioned Le Carre-style operatives -- assassins and traitors -- turn out to be the Good Guys. And the fifth column at 5 turn a blind eye. Rather like Melbourne's gangland, only the guilty need look over shoulders.

If you're looking for a thoughtful and absorbing Ace of Spies-style spy yarn, Spooks -- increasingly -- is not for you. But what it lacks in fine detail, it makes up for in sheer adrenaline. Right up to the heart-stopping climax.

WARNING: There are MAJOR SPOILERS in the extras on disks 1 and 5. Do not watch them -- or listen to audio commentaries -- until you've watched the ENTIRE series.



Spooks, Series 4

"We're not philosophers, Harry, we're spooks." Adam's wrong. They're both.

Pre-9/11, before the battle waged between the US Department of Justice and the combined forces of the White House and Pentagon, a series like Spooks would be incomprehensible. Who would believe in a security organisation fighting against flat-earth conservatism?

But, here, a British counter-terrorism unit repeatedly finds itself on the cusp of treason. And MI5 acts as a fifth column for anti-CIA thinking. (On the one occasion in series four where Habeas Corpus is denied, the wrong man is imprisoned for two years... where he is radicalised.)

Episode 1 begins with Danny's funeral. Like Henry VIII's first three wives, the core agents have fallen: divorced (the dour main man, Tom, who departs after a big dummy spit), beheaded (Danny, executed), died (Zoe, faked death to avoid life imprisonment).

The newbies are good, especially Raza Jaffrey as Zafar. But the soul of this good-looking and well-written series is Peter Firth as unit boss Harry Pearce. Something of an equivocal character in the past, Pearce has emerged as a powerful -- if lonely -- voice for what Agent 86 would call goodness and niceness.

Extras: an hour's worth of fluffy promo interviews with cast and crew.





These reviews were published in The Big Issue: editions 282 (July 2007), 305 (June 2008) and 311 (August 2008).

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I'm...

reading...




Bad news and good news...

Incomprehensibly, the Pan Macmillan edition (left) of Gail's excellent debut novel Black Mirror is now out of print.

The good news is that it will be back on the streets on June 1 thanks to Random House Australia. It will be a Vintage Books imprint, cover image above. More here.





listening to...



The newie from the lush and likable School of Seven Bells. It's called Alpinisms. For a limited time you can (freely and legally) download 'Half Asleep'. The song, which reminds me a bit of The Other Two circa Super Highways, has been getting a beating, rather belatedly, on Rage.

If right-clicking (or alt-clicking for you Garden of Edeners) (or should that be Gardeners of Eden?) (nah) on this link doesn't work, go to Triple J's newfreemusic and scroll down the list and DIY. It's a site worth bookmarking. The updates are sporadic, but the music is varied and often bloody brilliant.


watching...



Back to the heart-stopping days of Series 5 here. In case it isn't legible, that's "[MI5 are back]" on the cover, not MIB... though you could be forgiven...


And, last but not least, I'm...

twittering...

The experiment begins.

Just as this blog is about as unbloggy as it's possible to get -- this post and my very occasional mogblogging excepted! -- my twittering will be news/reviews/recommendations rather than "I'm on the bog"... more ticker-tape than parade. [As you can see, I'm a natural at pithy little aphorisms!]

It's pitched at Melbourne readers, for now. You'll find me at: MelbourneArts.

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Fear, favour and fervor. Graeme Murphy's Firebird.

Three of this country's best dance critics of the last 20-odd years have all worked for The Australian. Alan Brissenden in Adelaide, Robin Grove and then Lee Christofis in Melbourne. Grove went to The Age, but lost his mojo. (Editing, no doubt.) Christofis recently replaced Michelle Potter as curator of dance at the National Library in Canberra. Their gain, our loss. (The New York Public Library's gain, too. Michelle is now heading the Dance Division there.)

Of the three, the one I most admire -- I guess -- is Grove. His ballet reviews in the late 80s and early 90s were a revelation to me. I'm sure they frustrated the living crap out of the Australian Ballet. With scrupulous care and tact, he would pen these mini masterpieces of post-structural criticism.

He was never so coarse as to liken pointe work to foot binding... but you could just tell he was thinking it.

Grove was a part of the English Department (now Culture and Communication?) at the University of Melbourne, but his background is in music, as a composer.

I thought of Robin -- and how he might review Graeme Murphy's new take on Firebird -- while I was watching it on Friday night. (Firebird had its premiere in Adelaide, last month, so I'm hoping that Alan's review will be on-line. Haven't looked yet. I always finish my own before thinking about checking out anyone else's opinion.) [UPDATE: It's here.]

Some dance, of course, is easier to review than others. Ballet, theatre dance, story ballets. "Hammering out porridge" says Alison, bravely tackling the harder stuff in the repertoire.

As a general rule, reviewing dance is a bit like using a computer to translate English to Russian and back. Remember the ancient jokes? Input: "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" and you get back "the vodka is good but the meat is rotten." (Puzzlingly, this [doubtless apocryphal] story was always used as proof that machines were stupid, not that programmers were! Or that translation was, on the whole, a pretty bloody futile exercise!)

Sometimes, though, the effort of translating what you see on stage -- or hear in the concert hall -- into words, cracks the code. Betrays the origins. I say this a lot, privately. It's very easy to look smart as a critic. The very effort of moving something from one lobe to another, from the parts of the cortex devoted to sensing to the bits devoted to conceptualising and expressing in words, helps you learn about the thing you've been passively watching. [Well, it helps me at least. Other people need to do, to learn. Me, I just need to write.]

Graeme Murphy has a knack of reworking classics in a way that gives young dancers a way into the story. He gives them an emotional scaffolding. He turned Swan Lake from a musty piece about doppelgangers and an evil genius who 'forces' the Prince to hook up with the 'ho' into a realistic story of betrayal. A love triangle.

In my Herald Sun review, published Tuesday, I claimed that Murphy had turned the Firebird story into one of coercion and date rape rather than mere capture.


Lana Jones and Kevin Jackson in Graeme Murphy's Firebird
(production photographs ⓒ Alex Makayev, used with permission)

In the first cast, Lana Jones takes the title role; it's a career-defining performance. Jones is not an obvious choice for this role. And, indeed, her body -- her training -- resists the jerky choreography. Her flighty behaviour, her mad pecking, is betrayed by the flow and grace of her extending leg. And Murphy, I feel certain, capitalises on the tension created by putting his spiky choreography on her Balanchine body and her refined classical technique.

Semiotically, and narratively, this is dead wrong. Misleading at the very least. The firebird is captive, yes, but she's not trapped in a different form, unlike "the enslaved" souls around her. (Interestingly, Murphy and his collaborators Janet Vernon and Leon Krasenstein have made this ballet's evil genius Kostchei a reptile, a kind of lizard with a rattesnake tail. Egg shells are a recurrent design motif in this and many other productions of Firebird. This Kostchei is just another kind of hatchling.) Having said that, Jones's performance liminally establishes the changeling theme of the ballet. And, in that sense, it is highly effective.

The other part of Friday's performance that fascinated me -- made me wish Robin was still writing, or that I was better at this game -- was Kevin Jackson's performance as Ivan Tsarevich, the dude who captures the bird, falls for a trapped girl and frees the enslaved... with a little help from the bird, his Ariel.

Jackson's/Tsarevich's treatment of the firebird -- on Friday night -- was shocking. He swaggered on with the assurance of ruler, of a hunter, of a man. I daresay that Peter Singer would add to that list "of a human." Jackson's/Tsarevich's abuse of the firebird was, simultaneously, speciesist, sexist and classist. The firebird was his for the taking. For the plucking.

Now, you might very well wonder if I'm overreading here. (Or overreaching!) But, two things... Firstly, when Jackson/Tsarevich meets seven of the enslaved, immediately after he has manhandled the quivering bird, he's suddenly all boyish smiles... like a shearer in a Big Brother household. Cock of the proverbial walk. Yeah, sure, they flirt their frocks off, competing for his attention/attentions, but -- rather suddenly -- he's no longer the Royal hunter.

Secondly, I saw this cast again, last night, and Jackson's performance has been pulled right back. Maybe it was considered a wee bit too shocking. Shame, really. It was one of those rare moments in which ballet deconstructed itself. This Firebird brought its own butterball basting.

That's enough for one posting I reckon. Except to say that Petrouchka, on the same billing, is a mighty piece of theatre, it will be appreciated and adored by young and old, balletomane and first-timer, any kind of theatre- or concert-goer.


Leanne Stojmenov, Luke Ingham and Marc Cassidy
in Petrouchka (click on the image to see full size)

The Australian Ballet hasn't done a Petrouchka since the 1970s. They've borrowed the sets and costumes from Birmingham Royal Ballet for this season. It's a knock-out performance, dazzling at every level. Marc Cassidy (in cast 1) and Daniel Gaudiello (cast 3) are bloody remarkable in the title role. As is Amber Scott as The Ballerina in the third cast. Scott, by the way, turned in a superb performance in the first cast (of five!) in Les Sylphides.


Australian Ballet's Firebird and other legends triple bill (Les Sylphides, Petrouchka and Firebird) is at the State Theatre, the Arts Centre, Melbourne, until March 24 with Orchestra Victoria. Then Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House, from April 2-22 with the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra.

Firebird. Concept and choreography by Graeme Murphy. Creative associate: Janet Vernon. Set and costume design by Leon Krasenstein. Lighting design by Damien Cooper. [Firebird uses the 1945 version of Stravinsky's The Firebird Suite.]

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Write-only memory

You all know about random-access memory (RAM) and read-only memory (ROM)... well it's time to talk about WOM: write-only memory. That's what I've got. It all goes in. Nothin' comes out. Well, nothing legible.

Dancers, especially, like to talk about body memory. Let me rephrase that. They don't like to talk about it. They just refer to it. You either get it, and nod sagely, or you don't.

It's like getting on a bike, right? Mmmm, sorta. It's more like picking up a guitar -- which I used to do -- and bangin' out the opening riff of 'Over the Hills and Far Away' as proof.

Or, nowadays, typing in a computer password I've used on and off for about 30 years. I swear, I couldn't spell it out to you. It's gibberish. But my fingers can bang it out scarily/blurily quickly.

I suspect that body memory is the purest -- by that I mean least corruptible -- kind of memory. The least susceptible to falsification. The most anchored.

In the Boyd family, I'm the scribe. The one who documents. Who remembers. My brother Martin used to diss me for having a crap memory. He now concedes that I just remember stuff that he doesn't. But head memories become detached from the whole. They lose certain details. So, I can remember a line from an opera I saw once, a decade and a half ago, sing it to you confident that I've got the key and note right, but... I can't remember if it was sung by a mezzo or a bass baritone. I know the note, just can't remember the octave. Bummer, hey?

I saw the STC production of Julius Caesar at the Wharf a couple of years ago, maybe four but I haven't checked. Paula Arundell played Portia. (Pretty certain it was her, not so certain about the 'll' in her surname but determined not to check!) Benedict Andrews directed it. So... it was unconscionably long and slow, but memorable! Especially JC's epileptic fits! Anyway, one of Paula/Portia's speeches was absurdly and disconcertingly familiar to me. It felt like I had played the role. (I haven't!) It felt... like running into an ex and not being able to remember her name. (I haven't!)

I'm sure actors will know this feeling well: a period of intense concentration on a text that is hermetically sealed in the days/weeks/months they worked on it. Especially if that role has never been revisited.

Another example. The day I moved to Korweinguboora (still, mercifully, up-wind of the fires) was the day I got From the Choirgirl Hotel by Tori Amos. May 1998. It's absolutely anchored in time and place. Dark. Cold. Late at night. Maximum volume. (The house is 1.4 km from the letterbox... it's not as inconsiderate as it might look!)

Smell is just as evocative, but fuzzier. Like throwing open the door and sniffing the plump summer air.

So, why the hell am I bangin' on about memory? Er... I forget.

I think I was mulling over these ideas for a week or so before seeing Sandra Parker's outstanding new work, Out of Light, which opened last Thursday at the Gasworks -- so why the bloody hell was I at the State Theatre seeing Complexions... a company I can't wait to forget -- and runs through to March 7. (Tuesday to Saturday, 8 pm.)

The piece is about performance: the magic of theatre and the experience of performing on stage. It's also, apparently, about body memory. Now, it's unlikely to teach you anything about body memory or even to make the concept more solid. But, in harnessing the body memory of three experienced, brilliant and utterly unique dancers, Parker (ironically?) makes a piece that is remarkable and -- dare I say it -- unforgettable.


A scene from Sandra Parker's Out of Light

It's about to be swamped by (the excellent, unexpected and comprehensive) Dance Massive, but for godsake don't miss it. It's one of those rare creations that works as a piece of pure dance yet still speaks to a theatre or visual arts audience. Its craft is so sure, so deeply rooted, that it can risk being entirely organic.

It's also a piece that demands to be reviewed -- not just acknowledged or praised -- but defies words. Neutralises words. Nullifies them. Help me out here? It denies their currency. It takes you to a place where words are of no use whatsoever. They're not legal tender here.

Welcome to the realm of the body.

Watch Carlee Mellow flick her foot with vocab-denying grace. The movement isn't liquid so much as airy. Watch her, Clair Peters and Mia Hollingworth make flesh the idea that light is both particle and wave. Both and neither.

Marvel at the skilled use of lighting and projection. It's one thing for a scrim/screen to be made opaque, it's quite another to make it a solid entity... but that's what Parker's collaborators Rhian Hinkley (projection design) and Jenny Hector (lighting design) do.

But the real success of the show is the way it took me from a distant onlooker -- even in the front row I felt detached and oh-so-far-away from the action -- to an engrossed witness and then to a selfless participant in some magical, alchemical, transubstantial manifestation of the power of the mute body in space. In space, yet out of time. Simultaneously "in body" and "out of body".

Eternity in an hour.


Out of Light directed and choreographed by Sandra Parker. Designed by Rhian Hinkley (projections), Jenny Hector (lighting) and Zohie Castellano (costumes). Music by Steven Heather. Performed by Mia Hollingworth, Carlee Mellow and Clair Peters. Gasworks Theatre, Albert Park, until March 7.

UPDATE: See also Stephanie Glickman's review, here.

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From the inside out: Melbourne Recital Centre

The Hamer Quartet under the MRC's tapestry

First performances in new theatres and concert halls are very special occasions. This time last week I could have counted the number I'd been at on my fingers... with a whole hand to spare.

The official openings of The Sydney Theatre (who dreamed that name up? Bloody useless!) and Iwaki Auditorium were real occasions, for one reason or another. (The presence of Paul John Keating made for some excitement at the latter.) The the two Malthouse spaces -- the Beckett and Merlyn -- in 1990, of course. But, before that? [scratches head]

I wasn't at the opening of the Concert Hall (now Hamer Hall) in Melbourne but, thanks to my father [hereafter "TAB"], a "Red Series" MSO subscriber, I was at the second or third public concert there in the autumn of 1982. I was a little bit more leisurely in catching up with the three spaces in the theatres building (see here) when it opened in 1984.

Refurbishings and major restorations of disused, derelict and/or just plain dowdy theatres have been significant in Melbourne. I'm sure I've still got my Federici badge (somewhere) issued for the first performance at the re-opened Princess Theatre. The Regent was another stunner. Even The Maj scraped up well.



I hope the opening of the MTC's home base (and the Sumner Theatre) proves to be as important for the company as the Malthouse redevelopment was for Playbox. But I rather doubt that this latest milestone will be all that crucial to the state of the arts in Melbourne let alone "of significance" to the rest of the world.

On Wednesday night, I was delighted to be part of first "first night" at the Sumner Theatre -- at the premiere of Matt Cameron's "play with songs" Poor Boy. But, by interval, I was even happier to be off duty. I could be gracious... sit back and enjoy the way Tim Finn was grooving along to his songs as sung by Guy Pearce, Sara Gleeson, Matt Dyktynski, Abi Tucker et al. (Finn and his dad were in the seats next to me.)

Sure enough, when I cleared my messages at half time, there were a couple from my "other self". My Herald Sun colleague and music theatre reviewer "K8" couldn't get a park in the increasingly crowded Arts Precinct. So, I was on duty after all. (Much gnashing of teeth.)

The venue itself? Comfortable, modern, state-of-the-art... A good size for the company. (It really needed a 500-seater like this.) I'm not all that impressed by the rowdy, undampened, sharp-edged foyers and the strangely-fitted nautical-antique dunnies. Meh.

As I'm sure I've protested on many prior occasions, I tend to love buildings from the inside out. I didn't much care for Fed Square until I saw the vision of ACMI and the NGV-A. And saw the way the masses took to it in a way they never took to the so-called city square.

So, I was always going to be more excited about the Melbourne Recital Centre (in the same development as the Sumner -- I keep typing Slumber!! Stupid Freudian Fingers!!) than the MTC's new home. Take a look at the line-up for the opening three months. At last... the 20th century (musically speaking) is stopping off in Melbourne. All those "illegal harmonies" I've never heard played live before. Pieces by Nono, Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Ligeti, Scelsi, Birtwistle, Xenakis... The word 'stoked' doesn't even begin to capture my excitement. And things really kick off with a new work by Peter Sculthorpe.

But the main space -- the 1000-seat Elisabeth Murdoch Hall -- is, in itself, equally thrilling. As great a fan as I am of Sydney's Angel Place, as envious as I've been that they've had a concert hall where the musicians don't have to play to fill a cavern built for 2,500 or more, I've always found the acoustic too severe. Pornographically severe.

If only there was a way to combine the lush sound of, say, the Adelaide Town Hall with a chamber-sized auditorium. Well, the MRC does that. And more. It's as live -- and as "stick your head between the monitors" loud -- as Angel Place, but the sound is not at all prickly or severe. Hell, at Angel Place, listening to a cellist plucking an open C string reminded me of Angry Anderson talking about his ears bleeding!


City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney
(Photograph: Chris Boyd, click to enlarge)

On the strength of this afternoon's debut performance (of Mozart's K 581 Clarinet Quintet) in front of a seriously heavyweight invited audience... plus your just plain overweight correspondent -- it's clear that the Recital Centre's acoustic is, indeed, "uncompromised." (Premier John Brumby's word, quoting the original brief.)

The sound is remarkably even across the chamber music spectrum. It's especially sympathetic to cello and clarinet. It's not, I hasten to add, weighted to the lower sounds and harmonics, it's just that it is rare to hear that particular register given equal ranking to the mid-to-top end of things.

The hall demands excellent musicianship. Nothing is hidden here. Let me rephrase that. All is revealed here. I heard interplays in the K 581 that I've never detected before. And it's a piece I've heard literally dozens of times.

This is a serious hall for serious music. And serious music lovers. It will be a mecca for musicians -- trust me they will flock to it and return as often as they can, it's that good -- and will draw new audiences as well as capitalising on the sophisticated tastes developed by organisations like Musica Viva.

Though I have repeatedly compared the Recital Centre to Angel Place, there are some fundamental differences in management styles. Though the MRC has no fewer than 18 "presenting partners", there is a bold curatorial style that is more akin to Wigmore Hall than anything we have locally. It's entirely feasible -- even probable -- that the MRC will have the same kind of impact on contemporary chamber music in the 21st century that Wigmore had on it in the 20th.

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Don's party... no, not that one.

Hard to believe, but February 6 this year is the tenth anniversary of the death of Don Dunstan, the single greatest social reformer in modern Australian history IMRHO. [I paused ever so long after typing that... letting my hyperbole/bullshit detectors work on it. But, no. I reckon he is.]

To mark the occasion, the Don Dunstan Foundation (not so much a think tank as a think barrel... made out of oak) is chucking a party. And even they're calling it Don's Party. (I don't think the long thin streak of pelican shit [1] will mind the Foundation purloining the title of his play.)

So, if you're gonna be in Adelaide on the 6th, 'don' your pink shorts (or shortie pyjamas) and support the cause. It's at the Norwood Concert Hall and starts at 6 pm. Details and bookings at the Foundation web site.

The Foundation has recently posted a couple of speeches and lectures. (The full list is here.) Michael Kirby's speech at the NSW launch of the Foundation is a ripper. There's a great story about Clyde Cameron's advice to Dunstan about broadening those shoulders of his and losing that accent.

I have two favourite Don Dunstan memories: one of a press conference by his hospital bed wearing those shortie PJs, in which he called Phillip Lynch a "Rotten. Bloody. Liar." Emphatically. Precisely. In that wonderfully plummy voice.

The other is sitting down to a meal with Don at, of all places, the Dick Whittington Tavern in St Kilda. I took my (very chuffed) mother along and we ended up having the man to ourselves for a cosy little Tête à Tête à Tête over dinner at the Dick Wit.

Might have to break out the Pewsey Vale to honour his memory.



On Wednesday 22nd November 1972, South Australian Premier Don Dunstan wore pink shorts to work. ‘Dazzling Don Dunstan has done it again’ reported The News in a page three story featuring this photograph. ‘Wearing deep pink tight flannel shorts, a white T-shirt, long socks, and brown shoes, South Australia’s swinging Premier stood out like a beacon in the grey conservative decor of Parliament House.’ [More here.]



[1] Though I'm talking about David Williamson, I'm quoting Alex Buzo who used the phrase yonks before it appeared in Gallipoli. See the streak of misery entry in James Lambert's Additions and Corrections to The Australian National Dictionary, here.

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Old, new, borrowed... and very very blue: Grace Jones at the Enmore Theatre

Grace Jones at the Enmore Theatre, 130 Enmore Road, Newtown. Sunday January 11, 2009. Part of the Sydney Festival. Also January 13 & 14 at 9 pm sharp.

On Saturday night, Grace Jones performed in the Domain to a massive audience in a free concert, part of the first night of the 2009 Sydney Festival which reportedly attracted 300,000 people to the CBD. It was her first concert in Sydney for 20-odd years.

Tonight, though, was an indoor show in front of the faithful. The adoring. The curious. And the set was twice as long as her performance in the Domain. (There are two more dates at the Enmore, Tuesday and Wednesday, then she's back to London.)

Jones promised plenty of emotion when I spoke to her a couple of weeks ago. She even expected some tears, singing her new and very personal songs about her family. (These are the first time she has performed the songs since her father died.)

What we got was hard core, brilliant, powercamp. Great fun. The show proved beyond reasonable doubt that 'Pull Up To My Bumper' is not about driving. Unless you mean driving home. Through back streets...

Grace, incidentally, looks amazing. Thong, corset, outrageous hats... and a mirrorball bowler hat... Man!

Aside from some pre-recorded or sampled backing vocals, she sang live and sang well. Her voice is deep and clear with that ambiguous accent of hers. But she's not the menacing presence of old. (That's an observation, not a criticism!) She's no longer a strange visitor from another planet. She's human, substantial, even (dare I say it) warm!

Between songs (she changed hats and/or outfits after each) she kept the banter going including, memorably, a cracking "Bring me my fucking whip!"

Her backing band had a drummer, a percussionist (her son Paulo), two keyboard players, bass and guitar. An accordionist materialised for 'La Vie en rose'.

The set began with Grace perched atop a cherry picker (heh!) growling "Night clubbing, night clubbing..." Before lowering herself down to our level. More or less.

She backed up with the first song on the new album. It begins: "This is my voice, my weapon of choice." And we were indeed smitten. Six of the fourteen songs came from Hurricane, the newie, and they sat seamlessly with the greatest hits. Actually, a couple of them were highlights of the concert.

'Love is the Drug' -- with the mirrorball bowler hat and two slashing sprays of green laser light -- was (literally) the most dazzling set piece of the night. It had the floor of the theatre rippling with the thunder of the bass and the dancing.

After the jump, the set list and European tour dates...

01. Nightclubbing
02. This Is
03. My Jamaican Guy
04. I'm Crying (Mother's Tears)
05. Libertango
06. Love You To Life
07. La Vie en rose
08. Well Well Well
09. Williams Blood
10. Love Is The Drug
11. Slave to the Rhythm

Encores:

01. Warm Leatherette
02. Pull Up To My Bumper
03. Hurricane


Grace Jones: 2009 Tour Dates

Monday January 19, Symphony Hall, Birmingham

Wednesday January 21, The Sage, Gateshead

Thursday January 22, Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow

Saturday January 24 Manchester Apollo

Sunday January 25, Colston Hall, Bristol

Tuesday January 27, The Roundhouse, London

Wednesday January 28, The Roundhouse, London

Friday January 30, The Roundhouse, London



Monday March 16, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels

Tuesday March 17, Tempodrom, Berlin

Thursday March 19, Paradiso, Amsterdam

Sunday March 22, Le Grand Rex, Paris

Wednesday March 25, Jahrhunderthalle, Frankfurt am Main

Thursday March 26, Philipshalle, Düsseldorf

Saturday March 28, Cirkus, Stockholm

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Australian soprano Deborah Riedel, dead at 50.

More melancholy news. Deborah Riedel, the Australian soprano, died today of cancer at The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. She was fifty.


Deborah Riedel as Tosca (Pic: Jeff Busby, click on it to enlarge)
(Image courtesy of Opera Australia, used with permission.)

I first encountered Riedel in 1986, when she made her company debut with the Victoria State Opera as Enrichetta in I Puritani. (She traded as a mezzo until 1988. One of her earliest pro solo roles -- maybe even her first -- was Hansel in WA.)

She was soon a darling of the VSO and the combination of Riedel and Patrick Power was a surefire way to fill the State Theatre. She was an excellent Marguerite in Gounod's Faust and memorable as Leïla in Les pêcheurs de perles. She reprised both roles with the company.

She studied music and piano at The Con in Sydney, sang in the chorus with the Australian Opera from 1983, had a few minor roles with the national company then won the 1986 Sydney Sun Aria Award.

In the next decade, she was a regular guest with the West Australian Opera (singing the roles of Meg in Falstaff, the title role in Countess Maritza and Mimi in La Bohème) as well as the State Opera of South Australia (notably the title role in Kalman's The Czardas Princess) and the Lyric Opera of Queensland as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni.

It was only a matter of time before the rest of the world took note... In 1993, she made her debut with the San Diego Opera Company (Amina, the heroine in La Sonnambula). She went on to perform at The Met, in Vienna and Paris.

The last time I saw her perform was in the all-Australian production of The Ring in Adelaide in 2004, as Sieglinde. She was ravishing as ever.

Her last appearance with Opera Australia was in the title role of Turandot, in the Domain, in 2007.

It's a terribly sad and unexpected loss.


UPDATE: For information on Riedel's ambassadorship to The Cancer Council Australia, see here.

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Link to Dorothy Porter tribute site

Check out the tribute site to Dorothy Porter.

Lots of links to articles, interviews, audio and video.

This is my favourite pic of Dot:

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XMAS Wrapping (2) -- Dance Australia Critics' Survey (2008)

The thing I really like about Dance Australia's annual survey of critics is that our comments are printed in alphabetical order... so my response gets read before fatigue sets in. So, I take it pretty seriously.

The other good bit is that I don't get paid for it... so I have no guilt about sharing my thoughts with my devoted blog readers months before it hits the presses.

It's not really a wrap, but it's comin', k?


Highlight of the year

Construct, Sydney Festival [UPDATE: it's touring in 2009, woo bloody hoo!]

If there's space for a second...

The dancers in Shout: The Musical were blindingly good. Fast, tight, utterly energised. They drove the show.


Most significant dance event

The dance school at the Victorian College of the Arts celebrated its 30th birthday. The school has made an inestimable contribution to dance nationally.


Most interesting Australian group or artist

Rogue (The Counting & Ocular Proof) (for the Next Wave Festival)
Chrissie Parrott (Metadance - In Resonant Light [especially the third section], PICA)
rawcus & Restless Dance Theatre (The Heart of Another Is A Dark Forest)


Most interesting overseas group or artist

DV8 (To Be Straight With You, Adelaide)
Deborah Hay Company (If I Sing To You, Melbourne)



Most outstanding choreography (this does not have to be new choreography)

Ohad Naharin's Max for Batsheva


Best new work (can be local or international)

Gideon Obarzanek's Mortal Engine (Chunky Move) [continuing to tour in 2009]


Most outstanding dancer [we have to limit ourselves to four names here..]

Harriet Ritchie in Corridor (Lucy Guerin Inc) & other companies/projects
Adam Bull (Australian Ballet)
Patrick Thaiday (Bangarra)
Annabel Knight (Sydney Dance)


Dancer to watch

Actually three creative, disciplined and imaginative dance makers to watch:

Alisdair Macindoe (Pay No Attention To The Man Behind the Curtain, Next Wave), Kelly Alexander (Falling For Frank, Adelaide and Melbourne) and Tim Harbour (Wa for the Australian Ballet's bodytorque, in Sydney, & several other commissions around the country).

Plus, if there's space, one dancer to watch!

Dana Stephensen (Australian Ballet) for La Bayadere and The Possibility Space.


Critic's gripe

The Australia Council's withdrawal of triennial funding from Dancehouse -- effectively putting it "on notice" -- is illogical and/or short-sighted. (It's hard to tell which!)

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XMAS Wrapping (1) -- Opera & Music Theatre

Enigmatic? Moody? Evocative? Mm, no... Tripe, actually.

Stalling for time -- staring down a deadline -- I decided to rummage through my 2008 appointment diary and tally up just how much I've see this year. (I blame Jana and Alison for this obsession with counting!) [Fooling nobody, I know.] I got to 207. That's one show for each bone in my body! (I've got one more vertebra than you... seriously!)

That's a fairly rubbery figure. I've counted one film -- it was a festival event -- and I've counted one double bill as two pieces. So 200-plus is about right.

I'm getting choosy in my middle age! I used to average five a week, year-in, year-out.

It's been a fine year I reckon, particularly in dance and theatre. But I'll have a lot more to say about those forms later. Elsewhere, too. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on opera and music theatre...


Best new opera production:

Chris Kohn's spacious, elegant and dramatic production of The Children's Bach for Chambermade Theatre. Great team, great cast. Proof that opera has a life out of its trad ghetto.


The Children's Bach: Naturalism 1, Verismo Nil


Worst new opera production:

Graeme Murphy's sugary, glib, dinky, multi-media reading of Ainadamar for the Adelaide Festival. Tripe. Just tripe.


Best musical:

Wicked. It more than lived up to the hype.

Honorable mention to John & Jen, the off-broadway musical (about a loving, protective sister who grows up to become clutchy, protective mother) which had a brief season at Chapel off Chapel. If music is a knife without a hilt, then John & Jen is a (very) bloody javelin.

I preferred the first half to the second, but Lisa-Marie Charalambous (Jen) and Chris Durling (John) were so far in the artistic black by interval, we would have conga-lined to Adelaide behind them.




Another honorable mention to Rocky Horror cos of its mostly stellar casting. Derryn Hinch excepted. He was more "black holer" in galactic terms.

I can't really comment on Shane Warne the Musical. I attended the world premiere (and it seems destined to live up to that billing) but can't really claim to have seen the performance. I was in the nose bleeds, at the end of a row and had to peer between two rails... I haven't had seats this bad in 20 years. 21 years, actually. And those tickets, bought at the TKTS booth in Times Square, were damn cheap and were clearly stamped "PARTIAL VIEW". (It was the Martin Beck and the show was Into The Woods if you must know!)

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Can't see the wood for the tease

It's fifty years since a rooky writer with the pen name of Woody Allen won a Sylvania Award for the year's best television comedy with Larry Gelbart, who was as great in his day as Mel Brooks. (Until his death, Brooks referred to Woody as "that rotten little kid.") By 1960, Woody was pulling a handsome weekly income of $1700 as a back-room boy for the Garry Moore show.

It's 45 years since Woody divorced Harlene, his first wife. She had to take him to court, years later, to staunch his tirade of cruel (and, it must be said, cruelly funny) jokes about her. Bizarrely, a condition of the settlement -- one she has graciously observed -- is that she not talk about their life together.

It's forty years since Woody made his first movie.

And, god, it's 35 years since I saw my first Woody Allen film. Sleeper. You know the one. Woody finds a VW Beetle in a cave, where it has sat, undisturbed, for 200 years... and it starts first time.



Bizarrely, I saw Sleeper with another new short feature, Brian De Palma's sicko slasher Sisters. Talk about an odd coupling! And I remember both vividly though I haven't seen either film since.

Woody [I initially typed Weedy!! What are the odds?!!] reckons he hasn't see it either!

"That's right. I've never seen any of my films after I've finished them. As soon as the process of opening the film is over, that's it. I did my first film in 1968, I think, and I've not seen it since."

At the risk of being a terrible tease, that's pretty much where my article on Woody Allen (in this weekend's Financial Review) begins.


Speaking of tease... here's Woody and his Scarlett woman!

And spare a thought for me later today... I'll be wrestling the black panther herself. Yep, I'll be speaking with Hurricane Grace Jones. OMFG!

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Before time could change her: Dorothy Porter (1954-2008)

"My lyrics are almost like [the] skeleton of the building."

At Sarsaparilla, the team has been tactfully eulogising (if that's the right word) Dorothy Porter and her work, praising the intensity and power of her readings and wondering, idly, if she'd have been a good dinner guest.

I regret to say I've never heard or seen Porter read. Nor have I had dinner with her... But we did breakfast once or twice. And, best of all, had a late lunch, one on one, near her home in Clifton Hill.

With those alert, agile, shrewd eyes -- those unruly eyebrows -- she sizes me up like a boxer might. She's animated, opinionated, articulate, breathtakingly honest and open.

Before you get any ideas, the breakfasting happened at a B&B in Castlemaine, where we were both guests of the Castlemaine State Festival.

Serendipity.

But it was an opportunity for my professional admiration-from-afar to morph into something much warmer and much stronger.

A few years after I met Dot and Andy, around the time the Paul Grabowsky/Katie Noonan recording of Porter's song cycle Before Time Could Change Us came out, I persuaded my editor at the Financial Review that it was a unique opportunity to talk to Porter about poetry, love and sex. (The Financial Review is far-and-away the least press-release-driven media outlet I've ever worked for. But the availability of talent is, all too often, determined by what's about to tour or open or be released!)

Grabowsky and Noonan were getting all the press and Porter's name, inexplicably, didn't even crack the cover of the digipack. Here's a chunk of what was published and, after the jump, plenty that wasn't published.

As a lyricist, Dorothy Porter belongs to the Joan Armatrading school of plausible deniability. "I want to stress that this isn't some kind of diary," she says, early in our conversation, about the 16 songs she wrote for Paul Grabowsky and Katie Noonan's new double CD release Before Time Could Change Us. "I'm telling a story."

Asked for a suite of 12 love songs, with the original brief that each might correspond to a sign of the Zodiac, Porter came back with an arc of 16 songs... the ultimate concept album of adult love.

It begins with warbling, bird-song, stratospherically-high denial ("love is tripe... trust me, you're not my type") and a heady lack of caution, and ends with a very adult realisation that the break-up actually kept the intensity intact. Preserved it in amber.

Instead of the usual break-up/break-down stuff which runs the gamut of emotions from 'ex' to 'why?', Porter's lyrics make a sly nod to the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy's knowing, transgressive, urbane poems from the early 20th century -- intimate and realistic -- made famous in English by Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

Indeed, Porter adapts the set's title from one of Cavafy's poems about two young men serendipitously separated by fate. (Porter changes "them" to "us".)

She calls it the "we'll always have Paris" effect. The fond afterglow. Then adds another caveat: "Again, I stress that this is not some kind of confessional album. This is something I was commissioned to do. And it's a story."

Despite setting clear and uncrossable lines about what I'm not to write about -- "that's my private life" -- Porter is, in many ways, the ideal interviewee. With those alert, agile, shrewd eyes -- those unruly eyebrows -- she sizes me up like a boxer might. She's animated, opinionated, articulate, breathtakingly honest and open.

Porter was a great listener, a quick thinker and a robust conversationalist. I never once feared putting words in her mouth. She chose her words carefully. Near enough wasn't anywhere near good enough.

It's a hard thing to explain, but once you have confidence in the interviewee, that they're not going to take on your ideas or phrasing or world view out of courtesy... or laziness... you can speak as you would to a trusted friend. They will tell you what they really think. So, instead of boring old Q&A, you get real exchanges. Ricocheting exchanges.


Here, Porter is talking about Cavafy's poem and the sentiment within it.

[Dorothy Porter:] It's about two young blokes who meet and then, as he said, life acted like an artist and separated them... And the poem suggested that their feelings for each other, the intensity, is already waning.

[CHRIS BOYD:] SO IT'S CAPTURED IN GLASS...

In amber. A "we'll always have Paris" effect, I call it.

I WAS THINKING ON THE WAY HERE THAT PASSION IS SUPPOSED TO LAST FOR 30 MONTHS. AND I'M JUST HITTING THE 28 MONTH MARK WITH MY PARTNER!

[SOUNDING VERY MUCH LIKE CLIVE JAMES:] I'M NOT GOING TO ASK YOU ANYTHING I WOULDN'T ANSWER MYSELF!!

SEX STILL AMAZES ME. I'M 45 AND IT STILL AMAZES ME. SEX, PASSION, LOVE, ...

I'm 51, Chris, and it still amazes me. Sex, romance, passion... Still amazes me. I think, though, the other side of this coin is... the other side of the Before Time Could Change Us coin is the love that does endure.

I think where love is most heroic is where love endures, is where love goes beyond the "we'll always have Paris" stage.

THE BIG QUEST OF MY LIFE HAS BEEN TO EROTICISE FAMILIARITY...

Mm, mm. Exactly.

TO FIND SOMEONE WHO STILL WANTS ME AFTER THEY'VE GOT OVER THEIR NEED FOR ME...

Or their delusion of you. I mean, a lot of these songs are about epiphany moments, moments of delirium, moments of joy, erotic limerance, that sort of thing. But it's also disillusion and bitterness as well. And that crash. And I think the hard part -- cos these songs are an odyssey, they're a journey, almost in a medieval sense... Almost a lover's pilgrimage...

MORE LIKE A GRIM PILLAGE...

Exactly! But it's... What is tough... the bleaker songs... is this absence, is that sense of being haunted, when -- at the end of a love affair -- absence is stronger than presence.

I think this is where -- why people can become stalkers. There's a sense that you cannot believe that it's over. You cannot believe that this glorious, almost sublime, presence of another person -- who ravishes you from head to toe -- in your heart body and soul, is gone. Or doesn't love you any more, or whatever.

I ENVY THE WIDOWED...

Well. Exactly. I think in some ways... In a way it's a cleaner break!

A PURER BREAK

You can visit someone's grave but the grave of someone's love for you -- because you visit it on your own -- if they've moved on, they don't love you anymore.

I wanted a sense that there was a mutual experience in this cycle. A mutual love. An absolutely mutual love.

Things go wrong, but there's a sense that -- it's not that dreadful sense that it's just a complete waste of time, scorched earth, because some people -- I think some serial romantics leave behind this scorched earth

The lyrics are gender non-specific. I wanted this not to be something about "a girl done wrong by a boy" --

I DID LIKE THE "PRICK OF THE KNIFE" LINE...

I didn't want the Tammy Wynette thing! I wanted this to be something that a Frank Sinatra could sing as much as Katie Noonan or whoever... or a kd lang. It could be about girls. It could have a gay male context or it could be about a man and a woman. It doesn't matter.

That's why I just wanted to open up have a really really fluid -- and gender fluid as well -- so in other words it's not saying this is about a woman who's been absolutely done over by a dickhead bloke. I didn't want that. Or this is a girl who's met another girl. I didn't want it to have a ghetto flavour either. I wanted it to be, really be as crystalised as lyrics that anyone who's been through this experience would recognise.

But at the same time I wanted it to have this stoical finish, hence the last song is Before Time Could Change Us. Maybe it's a secret lesson.

[...]

MY RULE OF THUMB IS THAT IT TAKES ABOUT A YEAR TO GET OVER EACH MONTH OF A REALLY INTENSE RELATIONSHIP! SO I'M GONNA BE 70 BY THE TIME I GET OVER "THE SPEECH IMPEDIMENT". ALTHOUGH I CAN SAY HER NAME, NOW, WITHOUT STUTTERING!

[Excited] Yeah, I know, I know. I think... I was reading in New Scientist people can actually die of heartbreak. It's not just the whole hype of having a broken heart, people can actually become ill.

Often in Victorian novels people die of broken hearts. Apparently people can become physically... not just psychologically depressed or distraught, but physically ill.

ONE WORD I LOATHE IS 'CLOSURE'.

I hate that.

I'M LOOKING FOR APERTURE. [LAUGHS]

[Laughs, too, most musically, pauses, then:] I'm looking for harvest.

WHOA! LET ME THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A SEC...

I think the whole point about... It's a rich experience. It's something that you draw on. In a way my lyrics are a bit anti-therapy.

IN WHAT WAY?

I suppose I'm saying there isn't closure. This is a living thing. Memories are living things.

THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU DON'T GET OVER?

Some things you don't want to get over. Everybody's wanting you to get over it... Do this, do that, get closure... In terms of experiences, there are rhythms. In some ways you don't get over it.


[From there we got onto Gore Vidal...]

Porter's career, as a poet, and more recently as a verse novelist, is built on her fascination with the pathology of emotion and love. The pathology of the erotic, too.

Excited, she tells me she had read in New Scientist that people can actually die of heartbreak. "It's not just the whole hype of having a broken heart, people can actually become ill!"

And she's morbidly interested, today, in Gore Vidal's autobiography and, in particular, with his schoolboy romance with "a straight boy", an American Marine who died as a teen. Vidal, Porter explains, idolised his dead lover and refused to free up the emotional space that he occupied so decisively. "He [Vidal] has made a conscious decision to spend the rest of his life in mourning."

She laughs, blackly, that "this bloke will never let him down by marrying some woman that Gore doesn't like. It's safe." Vidal's a "wound that never closes" artist.

Inevitably, too, Porter is a great admirer of the greatest poet from Lesbos: Sappho... the first Western poet to describe love's delirium; its physical symptoms. Porter shares Sappho's vernacular phrasing and her directness. Her economy and force. Cop this, from Porter's song 'Haunted':

Your ghost is still driving
my four a.m. insomnia
night train

Your ghost is still ruffling
my hair
in the solitary shower

Your ghost is still driving
a hard bargain
with my haunted heart

Now read it again, aloud. Whisper it. See what I mean?

Porter has always struck me -- from near and far -- as a bright, joyful, delighted person. That provokes a cool, twinkling, gap-toothed smile. "In some respects..." She's lost for words momentarily, and uncharacteristically, then says: "I'll put it this way. I get a kick out of things. I get a kick out of life."

And, yes, Cole Porter is a spectral presence in some of the songs, especially Taking You On. Porter rates Cole Porter's Night and Day as one of the great love songs of all time. But points out that it was a song for a character -- a woman character -- in a stage musical.

"A lot of the [greatest] love songs are in fact dramatic monologues. I think lyrics will be richer if they're not just autobiographical cris de couer but that they are fictionalised, that they are crafted like any other work of art."

Porter has two other projects on the go at the moment. She is adapting her libretto for the Jonathan Mills opera Eternity Man for Channel Four in the UK, and she has just finished the first draft of a new verse novel, a "police procedural thriller" about a serial child killer set in Melbourne.

Funny, no-one's asking her if that's autobiographical.

Next stop, Sappho:

[Dorothy Porter:] She's the first Western poet to describe the physical symptoms of love: that fainting, sweating delirium... The Greeks regarded love -- well, romantic passion -- as a form of madness.

[CHRIS BOYD:] GUILTY AS CHARGED!

Exactly. So that's, basically, my take on all of this

MY IMPRESSION OF YOU -- FROM AFAR, AND WHEN I FINALLY DID MEET YOU -- IS OF A REALLY HAPPY, JOYFUL PERSON... JOYFUL'S NOT THE RIGHT WORD. IT'S MORE OF A SLOW-BURN.

In some respects... I'll put it this way. I get a kick out of things. I get a kick out of life.

[THE SONG] 'IN THE RIP' REMINDED OF COLE PORTER!

Absolutely. Cole Porter is a huge influence on the lyrics... On much that's going on in this.

YOU COULD DO A LOT WORSE! HAVE YOU ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THAT?

[...] I've been really lucky in that I can -- I've made a living doing what I love. Not a huge living, but a living. I think that's been a great blessing.

THE OTHER WORD I WAS GOING TO USE WAS ACTUALISED...

Yeah.

TRYING TO AVOID USING 'CONTENT'. DIGGING WHAT YOU DO.

Yeah. I've had my... My life's had huge ups and downs. I love the natural world, and I can to an extent live in the present. I get joy out of things, and people too. But, yeah. Cut me and I bleed!

PUNCH ME AND I PUNCH BACK.

[...]

A lot of the great -- like Cole Porter songs -- a lot of the great love songs and so forth are in fact dramatic monologues. They're not songs from the heart from the... well, obviously the heart of the lyricist-slash-composer is engaged.

But, for example, 'Night and Day', Cole Porter's 'Night and Day', which is probably one of the great -- probably one of my favourite love songs of all time -- and I think one of his best, is a song for a character from the stage musical The Gay Divorcee. And it's a woman character.

I think particularly, Cole Porter as a gay man, probably gave him... writing for a female character probably gave him a little more scope.

But I think lyrics will be richer if they're not just autobiographical cris de couer but that they are in fact fictionalised, that they are crafted as if -- like any other work of art --

[Then I bang on about Ute Lemper and Nick Cave, and Porter bangs on about Joni Mitchell (especially Blue -- from 'All I Want' to 'The Last Time I Saw Richard' -- "I was thinking of that when I was writing this as well") and Machine Gun Fellatio! Yes, she was a big fan.]


[Pressed, on who she would love to write songs for...]

I'm very happy with actually who I've got. But, let's say I had all of... the quick and the dead to choose from. Let me stress I'm very happy with Paul and Katie, and very blessed with Paul and Katie too. But I'd love to write... I'd love to have written for Sinatra. And I'd love to write, I'd love to have written some songs -- music -- lyrics for him.

BARBARA COOK?

Not familiar enough. Or kd lang. I think kd lang some covers on her last album of other people's songs. I don't think kd lang's own songs are crash hot, particularly lyrically. And I thought "I'd love to have a crack at writing you a song!" Amazing voice.

From the dead, Frank Sinatra, from the living kd lang.

[...]

DO YOU ADMIRE [FAMOUS AUSTRALIAN SONGWRITER] AS A POET?

Bits and pieces. Not particularly... Song lyrics are not the same as poetry. I mean they... And I think sometimes with a song, for me, that [has] too much of a literary flavour or is too complex lyrically, doesn't work as a song. You get smothered with words.

I suppose what I wanted to write were words that breathed, that let the music soak through them. And that are very... that are bullets and go to their mark very quickly rather than people going "what's this fuckin' about?" I didn't want a thicket, I wanted something much more translucent.

That's what I was after.




BEFORE TIME COULD CHANGE US

We could say
we left each other
with nothing but heartache
we could shrug the memory
of our love away
as just sex, tears and play

We could mourn
We'll never grow old together
but perhaps we'll learn
that parting
was a blessing

Before time could change us
we loved each other
like crazy tigers
before time could blunt us
we treasured every wild
and fleeting moment
in each other's hungry
arms
Before time could age us
we had boredom passionately
foxed
and stopped oh so briefly
the clocks
of our lonely drifting lives

We could say
we left each other
with nothing but heartache
we could shrug the memory
of our love away
as just sex, tears and play

But parting was a secret blessing
darling
parting did us a lovely
favour
before time could change us
before time took our love's savour
right away.

Dorothy Porter


That's how I feel about Dorothy Porter's death. This woman, who had a 54 year love affair with life, broke up with her "life partner" while the feelings were still strong. Before they tired of one another. Before time could change her.

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Seeing stars... well, planets actually... and a fingernail moon... let's just say heavenly bodies then...

(Photo: Chris "Astro" Boyd, click on the image to 'embiggen')



Oops, forgot to hit the publish button.

Anyone else see this?

Venus, high in the sky, ignoring the attentions of Jupiter... (The 'dish' ran away with the moon!)

Jupiter looked a bit like Mars, reddish. Unusually close. It reminded me of the recent close encounter Mars made with the Earth... it was so close, it was as if you could just reach up and pluck it from the firmament.

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That's when good friends become good neighbours: André Rieu (2)

According to Monday's Herald Sun, André Rieu will make a guest appearance on Neighbours "in the near future." (He's also returning to Australia in 2009 for some smaller concerts. (Rieu mentioned Rod Laver arena during Thursday's concert.)

Rieu performed to a crowd of 38,605 on Saturday night -- a record for the violinist and more than double the number present at his first concert.

80 people were treated by paramedics for chest pains and injuries sustained while dancin' in the aisles.

Rieu has also set a new record in the Australian DVD charts. He has 11 -- count 'em -- in the Top 40. "Tens of thousands" paid to watch the concert on Foxtel. Only the Mundine-Green bout in May 2006 pulled more viewers to Foxtel's Main Event.

This footage probably won't make it into the YouTube record books, but it certainly captures a moment. A part of a moment then. Yes, it's fifteen seconds of the Neighbours theme song as played by Maestro Rieu... and sung by a few thousand groupies.

My apologies for the swirly-cam. I've been watching too much West Wing.


UPDATE: Eamonn Kelly makes some cool-headed observations in his review for The Oz, here. (One thing... we agree on the rendition of Nessun dorma which Kelly describes -- by way of an introduction to his specific criticisms -- as "appalling".)

And the debate rages on, here. (Yeah, yeah, our ears are burning.)

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Tie Me Kanga-Rieu Down, Sport: André Rieu's World Domination Tour

Maestro Rieu: Putting the -al(e) in Australia

In a world where The Wiggles cover U2 songs and Rolf Harris breaks out the wobble board to massacre Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, nothing is sacred.

Even to -- or perhaps especially to -- a man whose per-concert outlay is reputed to be around the three million Euro mark and whose Strad has a bodyguard. (Like the President's attendant who carries the "football" -- the briefcase with the nuclear codes in it -- I picture a secret service type with very dark glasses and a violin case cuffed to his cuffs.) [Yeah, yeah, yeah... I know the football carrier is a uniform, not a Secret Service agent!]

André Rieu is a phenomenon. He's Pavarotti, the Boston Pops, Nigel Kennedy, Liberace and PT Barnum rolled into one. He's a heart-throbbing chart-topping star of the Morning Melodies set. His popularity puts the Three Tenors to shame. (Indeed, the low point of his first Australian concert on Thursday night was a Three Tenors-style rendition of Nessun dorma. It was an abomination. And it scored a mid-set standing ovation... which prompted me to scribble the neologism "abominovation" in my notepad!) [© Chris Boyd, 2008]


While I am inclined to attribute this gent's failure to stand to superior
taste, I must in fairness point out that he arrived in a wheel chair!

Rieu's appeal, surprisingly, extends deep into the serious music listening public. (My father turns out to be a closet fan.) I can't really comment on Rieu's playing; apart from a clean and lyrical solo in Waltzing Matilda, Rieu's principal duty seemed to be blarney and delegation... not unlike Goran Bregovic. But, also like Bregovic, Rieu surrounds himself with extraordinary (and extraordinarily enthusiastic) artists.

Unless you're of a certain age or listen to the midnight-to-dawn shift on talk radio, you might be blithely unaware of Rieu. Well, you might have been until news broke of his plans to bring Austria to Australia... a full-scale replica of the Schönbrunn Palace in fact. Nowadays, you'd have to be a pinball wizard (deaf, dumb and blind) not to know of his existence. Not to know that 100 grand was spent reinforcing the underground carpark at Telstra Dome to make sure that the palace didn't sink into the mud. Not to know that the maestro demands more than a grand for a meet and greet with cashed up fans, post performance.


Note the youthful demographic...

But why see him live? Even from up-close -- I had about ten rows in front of me and close to ten times that number behind me -- you still have to watch the screens to get an idea of the scale of the event. Actually, it's cutely democratic. From the bleachers, in the 99-buck seats, you can see the ballet dancers and 'debutantes'. From the $286 seats, you're below the action and can only see the footwork via the big screens.

When an ostentatious horse-drawn carriage thundered into the stadium, we were torn. Do we watch The Real Thing in the middle distance -- catching the odd glimpse of feathers over heads -- or watch the close-ups on screen?



This photograph captures one of those countless indecisive moments. Do you go for the experience and wait for the DVD release? (Saturday night's performance is a live pay-per-view broadcast with a DVD to follow.)

There were fountains, a roadtrainload of flowers, squads of dancers and skaters, an angel, a princess, Krispy Kreme donuts, you name it...


The Lockett-end Fountain

Finally, the stunt that worked -- the one thing that needed to be experienced live -- was the late entry of as many as 100 bagpipers. (I know, it's unusual of me not to have counted... I can tell you there were 22 chandeliers in The Hypocrite and a line of 24 lights in Batsheva's Max...)

Their long march through the audience was spine-tingling. 3D. You had to be there.

I was there -- at Thursday night's concert -- kinda by accident. I had one of those "what are you doing tonight, Chris?" conversations with Miss Moneypenny, my Editrix. The Herald Sun's music critic is close to full-term, so a marathon concert in a plastic and concrete stadium on a stinking hot night might not be such a good idea! So... three hours later, I was part of the masses flowing over the bridges towards Docklands.

An hour after that -- cop this -- I had the Maestro [MaestRieu?] himself high-fiving me as he stormed his way up the non-VIP aisle. All I could think of was that vintage cartoon violinist line: "Not the hands!" (At least I got his bow hand... so no need to, er, fret!)

I've gotta say, the reception on Thursday night was less than ecstatic. I reckon attendance might have something to do with that. Attendance and the fact that the extra concerts were scheduled before the first concert to go on sale. So... Rieu's Australian debut concert was barely half full. (18,000 out of a possible 30,000.)

The first Melbourne concert to go on sale, tonight's show, promptly sold out. The second, last night's show, all but sold out. When a third Melbourne concert went on sale, it was scheduled for the night before that. Unfortunately, that was nowhere near capacity.

Shame, really. All of Rieu's most rabid fans will be out tonight!

Highlights of Thursday's concert:

The brilliant first song (in German) sung by Rieu's Three Tenors. (It's in the set list as Winckler's Chianti Song, but that doesn't look right to me. Any fans out there? Help me out here!)

A sugar-shock sweet rendition of O mio babbino caro.

Aussie soprano Mirusia's Botany Bay (sans wobble board) and a song from Phantom of the Opera.

Granada, Strauss's Emperor Waltz and Blue Danube, Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary and the Bolero.


Lowlights of Thursday's concert:

Nessun Dorma

All except the ravishing last note of 'I belong to me.'

The Australian medley in its entirety. (We got everything except Hey True Blue... I'm talking theme songs from Bananas in Pyjamas, Burke's Backyard and Neighbours, plus Advance Australia Fair -- one way to get a crowd to its feet I guess -- and 'The Road to Gundagai'. We also got 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport'. Sigh...) (No offence, Rolf, but there's a time and a place!)


My review is scheduled to run in Monday's Herald Sun.


André Rieu's World Stadium Tour. Telstra Dome, Melbourne, Thursday November 13, 2008. Final Melbourne performance tonight. [Also available on pay-per-view through Main Event at 8pm for $24.95. Bookings: 1300 783 833 or www.mainevent.com.au]

Then AAMI Stadium, Adelaide, November 18-19. Subiaco Oval, Perth, November 22. ANZ Stadium, Sydney, November 27-29. Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, December 3-4.

USA & Canada in 2009. Dates and cities TBA. ["We are currently planning concert dates. As soon as the concert tickets are officially on sale, it will be announced here."]

UPDATE: Thanks to Sally at André Rieu Fans we now have 2009 North America tour dates.

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MIAF 2008: Questions with notice (and a flagon of rhenish)

One of the advantages in hanging out with fiercely intelligent blogger types like Matt and Jana is that they'll often see great wisdom in what I say, no matter how dull! (The less I say, obviously, the better.) (I'm weirdly tempted to liken myself to Helene in War & Peace!!)

So, last year, when Matt asked me what I thought the theme of the 2007 Festival was, and I replied 'retribution', he imagined that I meant Kristy Edmunds was wreaking vengeance on the curmudgeons at the local 'bored-sheet' by staging a bitchin' (popular, successful, critically unimpeachable) festival. But, at that stage, all of the shows I'd seen had a common crime/guilt/payback narrative element! I didn't have the heart to disabuse him! (Never is too late, mate!)

Anyway, when he asked this year, again quite early in the festival, I think my one word answer was 'capitulation'. The 2008 Festival was extraordinarily deep and of a high standard off-the-plan, I thought, but it was also -- in my mind -- way too safe.

One day, in the middle-distance future, I want to sit down with K.E. and a "flagon of rhenish" and pull the wings off the curatorial process.

I would ask, for example, if Kristy had seen Book of Longing before it came to Melbourne. (I drove to Adelaide, in March, to catch it. My verdict, then, phoned into my Sydney editor was, and I quote: "I wouldn't fucken steal the music... even if I had broadband!") (I bought the CD before the show. I still haven't played the second disc.) (Grrr!)

There's no way in the world I would have brought it to Melbourne.

The Adelaide Festival co-commissioned the piece. So they could hardly bail on it. And, yes, I realise, no Book of Longing would mean no Dedication to Allen Ginsberg. (Well, that just wiped out two of my deadliest-of-the-fest shows!)

I'd ask: is it enough that people will want to see a show? That tickets will sell out? That people will be captivated with the idea, the promise? Is that reason enough to program an event?

For me the answer is an unequivocal "shit no!"

Big name inclusions are a mixed blessing. Only the Philip Glass/Patti Smith Dedication was exclusive to Melbourne. In Australia, that is. The Ginsberg thing is something that the two belt out from time to time when their schedules permit. (Patti's other party trick is to play recitals with son Jackson on guitar and daughter Jesse on pianna. And, yes, I'd love to see that.)

'Book of Lounge-ing' also made it to Sydney earlier this year. Smith and her band, likewise, played the Opera House after their gigs in Melbourne.

Patti Smith's headline status in the Melbourne festival, however, was warranted for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was a kind of residency. She stayed for a week, worked her butt off, there were exhibitions, concerts, recitals and the local premiere of the Sebring film Dream of Life. Compared, say, to Bjork outside the Opera House for a recent Sydney Festival, Smith's inclusion was serious, and vital. Bjork's was puzzling. Or maybe just perfunctory. (Hell, why not include Peaches?) (I can't believe I missed her again.)

Alison muses that we're harsher on our local failures than we are of the imports. My hunch is that's not quite true. Though my angle is slightly different, inevitably. I wrote about cultural cringe turning to cultural sneer in the early 90s -- our artistic inferiority morphing into a superiority complex -- but then the gap was far more noticeable in opera, ballet and physical theatre than it was in legit. theatre. (Barrie Kosky's Gilgul company and Company B Belvoir excepted.)

One other thing I've wanted to comment on, but haven't had the headspace... and it didn't seem appropriate to bang on about it in the comments thread at TN. I've been delighted -- and a bit amused -- to read how La Croggon has been digging under one artistic rock after another and finding -- oh how delightful -- poetry! The logocentric one is finding it everywhere! (I call this WYSIWYP: what you see is what you project.)

I hate to disappoint, ma'am, but dance has been in poetry about a million years longer than poetry has been in dance! That said, I've found the record of your exploration quite, quite fascinating. Ditto your poetic raves about shows I've been unmoved by. Your writing has been so passionate, I've imagined that I've liked the shows too. (I have a vivid imagination.)

At the risk of pissing Jana off, I'll say it again. My absolute favourite review of the Festival was penned by the Mattster. Like Alison, he was reviewing dance from first principles. His review of Batsheva's Three is quite scarily good. (It's not anywhere near as daring, polemical, overwhelming as anything you've written, m'dear... but -- hell -- this ain't about you.) (Sorry.)

Instead of the word, the abstraction, Matt approaches dance as a concrete art -- imagine I've said it in French! -- rather than a plastic art.

At Green Mill one year -- I'm too spent to spend the half hour necessary to tell you precisely when -- Robert Dessaix delivered a paper at Mietta's. There he told a room full of dancers, choreographers, dance writers and teachers that we were all wasting our time. The word had pride of place in the intellectual life of the world. We were all primates, basically. If we wanted to be part of the 'discourse' -- artistic and intellectual -- we had better brush up on our Sontag.

Polemical? Sheeeeet. [Imagine Chris Rock saying "shit" and you're getting warm.] His audience was hyperventilating. Apoplectic. But, finally, silent. Politely inarticulate.

Nowadays, I reckon, the dance community would shrug off such an attack. Or Prof. McKechnie would get to her feet, lean on her ashplant sword, and smile sweetly: "Fiddlesticks."

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Getting my appetite back, Melbourne Festival diary 2

My wrap of the 2008 Festival is in today's Herald Sun.


WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 22, 2008

Scaife had just one request for her birthday. "Make 'the whore' for me."

She might be a slacker in the kitchen, but she always has great kitchens -- granny kitchens with lots of character -- and is a most appreciative eater. We've both been having an affair with The Whore, my version of spaghetti alla puttanesca.

Now, Scaife's birthday fell in the last week of the festival, so if she wanted The Whore, I told her, she'd have to see a show first. "I've decided I don't like plays," she said, firmly. (Been taken to too many mainstage shows... thank you very much Kay!)

By good fortune, it seemed, her birthday coincided with KAGE's Appetite -- "physical theatre, not a play" I assured her -- coincidentally about a woman having a dinner party and existential crisis on her birthday. It was perfect.

KAGE. A great local company. Never seen anything by them I haven't liked, and I reckon I've seen every single show they've done in Melbourne, from the early days when -- a la Pilobolus -- KAte Denborough and GErard Van Dyck [KA+GE, get it?] would do acrobatic things, silly, magical, dangerous things... with their heads in big pots upside down.

For this particular show, Denborough was wrangling some of the finest dancers you will see (Carlee Mellow and Michelle Heaven head the list) and a brilliant team.

Scaife's also a fan of Sally Seltmann, who trades as New Buffalo. And Seltmann was to play live in Appetite. What could go wrong?

What went wrong has been fairly well documented: here, there and everywhere.

I have to say that the audience clapped appreciatively -- even violently -- after the show. Those that were still awake and/or not fuming.

We fled. A cool twenty minutes after the lights went up, this was the scene...


I got a standing ovation for this. Seriously!
Click on the image and drool. (Pic by Scaife.)

Your celeb chef is posing with olive oil, olives, baby capers, garlic, chilli, some big fat anchovies and some finely sliced Spanish onions. 12 and a half minutes after that, with a few late-added segments of vine-ripened tomatoes, we were in Whore Heaven.

And the birthday girl didn't have to think about theatre ever again.

Me? I had to spend the next half dozen hours telling the truth about the show with as little malice as possible.


What's that expression about screwing the pooch?

I was actually looking for an image of the Ben Casey lookalike vet that the Simpsons visit in the Dog of Death ep. The only ones I can find have him giving mouth to mouth to Santa's Little Helper.



But I really wanted a pic of our hero vet disposing of a dead hamster -- the patient he has just lost. Cos all night, while I wrote, I was thinking of his immortal words -- "This is the part of the job I hate the most" -- as he casually lobs the carcass over his shoulder... It lands in a basketball hoop and plops into a bin. Nice.

"I love animals. I spend my life saving them and they can't thank me. Well, the parrots can."

Ah, criticism!

Since the company was founded 11 years ago, I think I've had he opportunity to review just the one KAGE show, Gerard's solo show, The Collapsible Man, in one of its return seasons. Maybe five years ago. A dazzling show.

Boy did I draw the short straw this time...

And god I hate bagging friends.

The only favour I've ever done a friend was to not review her show. [To boldly split infinitives, where no infinitives have been split before.] It was in the grey area -- student or not-quite-pro theatre -- so I could legitimately make that call.

Another time, when I wrote a review which singled out one of my closest friends for particular criticism, I contacted her before the review was published so that she'd hear it from me rather than read it after it hit the streets.

And, guess what? The review was never published. So we went through all that agony cos I had to go and say the critical equivalent of your arse looks really big in that.

But who gives a rats about my agony in the garden? They're the one who are feeling beaten up at the moment.



N.B. This was written before my close encounter with Ross Mueller at the closing night, er, 'bash'. Serves me right for being gentle.

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Seen and not heard... unlike me. A Melbourne Festival diary.

On the 19th night, he will rest... and might take in some trash TV! Have I missed much Californicating?

30 shows in 18 days. (The festival's only 17 days long, sharp-eyed reader, but Kitten jumped the starter's gun on the eve of the festival.) One of the 30 was a film, but a ticketed festival event nevertheless.

To make up for the long gap between my last post and this -- my apologies if your expectations were raised by my ten posts in ten days at the start of the fest -- here's something of a festival diary. Working backwards...


SATURDAY OCTOBER 25

That Night Follows Day

Kristy Edmunds has done it again. Again she's thrown us a show at the end of her festival which is like the decoder ring.

Remember the year when George Orwell's 1984 was the opener? Shockin' show -- as sickly and impotent as its tortured hero Winston Smith -- but it served as an overture to the festival. Within it were several motifs that would be sounded out over the following few weeks. That festival closed with Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun's show, which served as a kind of glossary. A back-announcement. A perfect recapitulation.

This festival (That Night Follows Day appeared to reveal) has been about giving voice to the normally voiceless. To those who, traditionally, are seen and not heard: children, blacks, the disabled... and dancers. [Sorry, can't help myself.]


FRIDAY OCTOBER 24

Watching Camille standing between the stage and the audience, barefoot save for her fishnets, watching her dark eyes glitter with diamond tears, I recalled a line about Meryl Street penned by a New York Times critic. It's possible, he wrote, to enjoy her performance at two levels. Firstly in character. The other pleasure is in watching the act. Watching Streep acting the role: the pleasure in watching an actor exercising talent when reaching for -- and hitting -- the high notes.

So too in Camille's performance. There are many characters. Many personae. But we are equally fascinated by the donning of those roles... like a mid-set change of shoes or the shimmy out of a long dark dress into something less disciplined.

Before hitting the road tonight, I deleted a couple of Scott Walker songs from my full-as-a-goog iPod to make room for some new stuff. I can't listen to the "30th Century Man" anymore... and it's all Bob Downe's fault! I hesitated for a moment before deleting My Death.

Sure enough, Camille opened with a Bowie-esque version of Brel's song. She also sang a couple of blinders from Ziggy Stardust. Rather perversely, she sang the album's closing song 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide' early in the set and closed out with the album opener, 'Five Years'.

I was vaguely hoping Camille might sing Nick Cave's '(Are You) The One I've Been Waiting For', but I was well compensated. Her dry version of 'People Ain't No Good' was wrenching. And her final encore was Cave's 'Ship Song'. Other highlights were Brel's 'Marieke' and a delightful take on Tom Waits' 'Misery is the river of the world'.

Now, I know I've bored readers of George Hunka's blog with this anecdote, but you can have it fresh. Three years ago -- was it really only three years ago? -- I went to the premiere performance of La Clique at the Spiegeltent with TCB. She and I were ushered up to one of the tables on the platform where the stage normally is.

Just before the second half of the show began, some vamp type approached TCB and asked her to vacate her seat for ten minutes. Lights went down, spot light came up... and the vamp sang 'In These Shoes?' to yours-truly. (And before you jump to the conclusion that I was targeted, I have to tell you I was off-duty.) (More to the point, I'm not important enough to seduce!)

Now, I'm no drooly, stalker, groupie type -- I find it more effective being the cool-headed accurate-in-my-feedback non-gibbering-idiot type -- but I know a star when I see one. Especially when she's leaving lippy smears on my glass o' red.

Anyway, after this evening's show, I gave Camille some notes. [Relax, relax, I'm just kidding!] I asked her if she knew Melanie Safka's song 'Some Say (I Got Devil)'. A minute later a piece of paper with the scribbled details was stuffed down her decolletage and she gave me a copy of her EP. Which just happens to have studio recordings of 'In These Shoes?' and '(Are You) The One'. Nice trade, I thought!

So, I just want the record to show... if Camille O'Sullivan starts covering Melanie, it's all my fault. K?

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A recommendation (STO Union) and an interview (Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky that subliminal kid)

If you're sick to death of reading rave reviews of shows that are closed or sold out, here's your big break.

STO Union's 7 Important Things opened last night and runs through to Sunday. It hasn't sold out -- the Fairfax was half empty last night -- it works just fine from the back row of the theatre (take it from me!) so... if it goes close to selling out after the stampede from word of mouth, that shouldn't be too much of a problem!

It's the kind of show you can take anyone to: young or old, straight or bent, dope fiend or wowser, father or son (in the Cat Stevens sense). I reckon it will be adored by MTC and Malthouse subscriber alike. But best of all, it's a blinder of a piece of theatre, utterly simple and utterly authentic. It's a spectacularly good example of STO's "unspectacular intimacy" concept.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The day I speak to Paul D Miller, aka DJ Spooky that subliminal kid, he's gearing up to present a lecture at Google's corporate headquarters. "We're doing a kind of conversation about contemporary issues in law. And, I guess, sampling."

Miller, in fact, is returning a favour. One of the principal figures from Google's legal department contributed an essay to his just-published volume on sound art: Sound Unbound (MIT Press).

You've probably guessed already that Miller is not your average deck-jock. Raised in Washington DC -- the son of a law professor and a businesswoman -- Miller started out as a macro economics student and imagined he'd be a diplomat. He ended up with degrees in philosophy and French literature.

In a way, he hasn't abandoned diplomacy. Art, he says, can build bridges between cultures. It has a "moral responsibility" to do just that.

Principally, Miller is a philosopher of language and a collagist. He once referred to his DJ-ing as a conceptual art project. It's a project that has taken on many lives over many years.


Miller in his more familiar guise: DJ Spooky

Increasingly, he's mixing images, not just words and music. Early in 2005, Miller presented his deconstruction of DW Griffith's hugely influential silent film Birth of a Nation in Sydney. (At the Roxy in Parramatta, believe it or not!) The film tells the story of the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. Through skillful mixing of sound and images, the machinery underlying the film's white supremacist message was revealed.


[CHRIS BOYD:] YOU TALK A LOT ABOUT LITERACY. I REALISE THAT THE PROGRESSION OF YOUR CAREER AS A DJ IS HEADING TOWARDS MULTIMEDIA AND FILM AND THE TOTAL ART EVENT. BUT IT SEEMS TO ME -- AS FAR AS LITERACY GOES -- MORE PEOPLE ARE MORE EQUIPPED TO READ FILM THAN THEY ARE TO READ LITERATURE OR ART OR CONTEMPORARY "CLASSICAL" MUSIC --

[Paul D Miller:] It's the global vocabulary --

LIKE "THE FUTURE IS HERE BUT IT'S UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED." WHEREAS I THINK LITERACY IN FILM IS MORE EVENLY DISTRIBUTED...

That's why I'm evolving from the whole notion [of] DJ to the VJ. Video playforms like YouTube [are] decentering; democratising what we think about creative film-making in general. Digital implies economies of scale. People [realise] "Hey, I can do something." They don't have to be passive.

When I was in Antarctica, I [took] a mini studio with hi definition cameras that could fit in a backpack! Ten years ago I wouldn't have been able to do that. I would've had to bring a roomful of equipment.


"It's the coldest place I've ever been." Paul D Miller, rugged up.


WHY ANTARCTICA?

Antarctica is edge of the map. "Here be dragons!" Old school, end of the world, edge of the world. Werner Herzog just did a film called Conversations at the End of the World. He went to Antarctica as well. He went to McMurdo Base which is like a mining town or something. I wanted to go to the ice fields.

The idea was to apply DJ technique to the environment itself and sampling [it]. Looking at the world, looking at the ice itself as a kind of text.

Antarctica represents a lot of things. One, very few people on the planet have been there. At any given time there's only about 2000 people on the entire continent. Quite apart from the degree of difficulty getting there, [Antarctica is] a kind of metaphor for End of Empire. There's no nation state there. It's a blank space, not only geopolitically but also when you look at the economics and so on...

Isn't it amazing that we haven't messed it up!

The environment is in a really fragile and twisted state at the moment. And it's probably gonna get more turbulent over the next couple of years.

My thing is that I really feel that art should be able to tell people that another world is possible. It doesn't need to be this way. So I'm always looking at -- and trying to support -- processes, projects, poets, writers and contemporary aesthetics that say: this is not the only way things can be done.


[I'm keen to ask Miller if language itself is a kind of collage. And he is more than obliging. He begins his response by quoting Afro French theoretician Edouard Glissant on the Creolisation of language and the way globalisation and multiculturalism have changed the way we think about distinct regional dialects. We ricochet onto the relative size of the English language and how it eats up other languages.]


[Paul D Miller:] That's what collage and evolution is about. The Normans invaded England, or when the English went into other countries, or when the French went into Africa... It's like when you hear arigatō in Japan, that's actually a Portuguese word. The same with Greek and English. Or Greek or Latin.

Language itself is a kind of a sampling machine. And the way people play those component parts and bits and pieces is... You can connect innovation in language and creativity in general.

My Antarctic project and Sound Unbound are both trying to get out of this idea of art as divorced from the evolutionary processes of culture. Everything is changing and that's okay.

A lot of people -- for one reason or another -- really cling to stability or consistency or normalcy.

THAT IT'S SOMEHOW THE NATURAL STATE...

Right. It's not.

And that's where you get this idea of the religious right or the conservative block that wants to make you [feel] a nostalgia for another era which was safer or less complex...

They find a comfortable middle ground for both the religious right of Islam or the religious right of the Christians scene. They're all looking at ways of stopping time, or stopping change.

The main emphasis [of Sound Unbound] contemporary art and digital media, but looking at composition. My nickname for it is compositional strategy.

For me, being from downtown New York, and talking about literary theory and digital conceptualism, there's always some kinks in the way people respond to things. In hip hop, and in America in general, there's a kind of anti-intellectualism that I've have to navigate over the years. But luckily it hasn't slowed things down.

Sound Unbound is 36 essays by 36 ego-maniacs!

Brian Eno contributed an essay on the history of Bells in Europe which is really fascinating. Steve Reich wrote the introduction. I also got a gentleman by the name of Cory Doctorow whose actually a really interesting digital conceptualist he's also a major up-and-coming writer.

So, the book's not normal American anti-intellectual stuff! It celebrates intellectualism, it celebrates discourse, dialogue...

Each of the essays could be stand-alone. Jonathan Lethem's essay on plagiarism is really fun because the whole essay is appropriated from people writing about plagiarism.

The audio companion [CD] has really rare material from Aphex Twin, Sonic Youth, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Antonin Artaud. Even people like Iggy Pop. We got him to give his voice as well.


Terra Nova Sinfonia Antarctica is at the Arts Centre, Playhouse, until Sunday. DJ Spooky has a more 'traditional' set at Becks' Bar on Saturday at 11pm.

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Melbourne Festival: Sunstruck by Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham

I know, I know. I've said this before... But I imagine a festival not based on a theme or programmatic intent, not divvied up into sections to appease the factional groups, not calculated to fill the available theatres or to placate the hairy-knuckled flat-earthers who run the arts pages of the broadsheets, but based solely on the works of Ben Cobham. There are enough of them, certainly, and the spread of the performing arts he has worked in would cover several of the bases typically covered in an arts festival.

It's a ludicrous idea, of course. We would need to clone the man. Or at least set up a finishing school for the countless technicians and artists and magicians and disciples required to replicate his work. Ah, but I can dream...


That's Trevor Patrick daydreaming, by the way. Not me.

Cobham and Helen Herbertson have done it again, with Sunstruck. Created a cosmos in a shed at Docklands. The waiting area is like a boxing ring, elevated, squarish, sprung. We're served good warm sake and green tea while we wait for everyone to arrive. (It takes great self assurance, believe me, to find the place.)

Then the reveal. A dimly lit disc. A circle of chairs in the misty distance. It seems to float towards us. (Having been a crash test dummy in one of their shows, I wouldn't put it past 'em!)

What happens in the next few minutes is a remarkable example of what Cobham, Herbertson and the Bluebottle team know about human behaviour. We're wrangled -- gently but surely -- by "Bluebottle Frog" (as Philip Peck is credited nowadays) with his massive amp on wheels.

Within minutes, we're inside this artistic particle accelerator. Waiting for the atoms to smash. Light and sound whirl around us. The sun gains pace as it loops around us... we might be in the recent remake of The Time Machine.

In this vast creaky barn of a metal shed, light and sound leak in. The ridges of light bothered me a little. I'm guessing that Cobham might have had a couple of acres of black draping if he had an extra zero on the budget. But the sound of the squabbling gulls was so surreal, so perfectly timed, I wondered if it was real or not. Whatever "real" means.

In the Cobham/Herbertson/Livia Ruzic universe, in the ring, are dancers Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville. But are we watching two men or the same one at two points in his life? Or is it boy and mother? Patrick takes armfuls of light and clasps them to his bosom. (Exactly unlike Tim Crouch's oak tree.) It becomes a swaddled babe. It's a tragic, joyful moment. At once empty and overflowing.

Like Back to Back's Food Court, vision and sound are ends in themselves. They are the content. They have the starring parts. The words, the moves, the text are merely walls for the real art to shadowplay on. And they fade into insignificance in the last ten minutes.

This is the Cobham universe. One in which the ancients were right... in which the sun doth circle the earth.

And like the candle in the poem, burned at both the ends... it gives a lovely light.


My review is scheduled to run in tomorrow's Herald Sun.


Sunstruck: a premonition of events from memory, fantasy and the imagination. By Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham. Directed by Helen Herbertson. Design and lighting by Bluebottle/Ben. Physical realisation by Helen Herbertson, Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville. Set realised by Alan Robertson. Soundscape by Livia Ruzic. Music by Tamil Rogeon (violin) and Tim Blake (cello). Production by Bluebottle/Frog.

Part of the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival. At Shed 4, North Wharf Road, Docklands. Two shows nightly. Until Saturday.

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2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival: Hey, buddy, you got the time?

Being a critic during a festival is a lot like having the correct time on New Year's Eve. Everyone has an opinion and you finish up going with the loudest voice... usually some deadshit FM-Radio DJ. Right?

Thank-you Kristy Edmunds for -- at last -- scheduling shows so we can double (or triple) up in a night. That said, after five days and ten shows, I still haven't yet crossed paths with La Croggon. Perhaps she's finally sloughed her consumptive skin and emerged as the intellectual wraith that burns (with a gem like flame) within.

Anyway... I know you're all reading her words of wisdom, but you might not be following a few of the outer blogs. I thoroughly recommend the reviews at Long Sentence No Suggestions. Start with An Oak Tree if you want a good purge!

Stephanie Glickman's review of Batsheva's Max is excellent as is Jana's more discursive response.

Hey, if you've read any ripper reviews on-line -- good, bad, ugly -- please link to it/them in a comment. Ta.

BTW, my review of Patti Smith's Melbourne concert is in today's Herald Sun. So too is my review of Max.

I should warn you, if you click on "read more...", below, you're gonna be disappointed (or relieved!) -- cos there's nothing there.

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Footnote to Howler... I'm sorry, I'll read that again. Patti Smith and Philip Glass do (over) Ginsberg.

Hey, Patti, the word is holy. Don't fuck it up. Get an auto-cue or use a larger font on your printer. Rehearse! Do a sound check. Whatever it takes. To do a dedication, you have to be dedicated.

As I mentioned elsewhere, Patti Smith talks like a Jersey Girl. Piano becomes piana, yellow yella, that kinda thing. It gets her into trouble when she's talking about Allen Ginsberg's blue Volvo... as Melbourne audiences discovered to their consternation tonight!

Somehow I can't seen Allen climbing into a vulva to go to temple. (For so many reasons!) The last time he was in a vulva, I'm guessing was around 1950 in one of his rare pre-Peter Orlovsky forays into the hetero-sex.

At least vulva was, in a way, the right word. As were ab-dome-n and sensate, as crazily as they were pronounced... And we've come to love Patti's word plays: static for ecstatic is a classic, circa Radio Ethiopia.

The bits where Patti just got the fucking words wrong were soul destroying. Catch-up became ketchup, myriad mirrored, midwinter became midSUMMER... though this might rate as "local content." (It was midsummer here, under the Southern Cross, when it midwinter for Allen, right?)

But where to begin? The people of Ninevah calling out to their good [sic] in Notes to the Future? Luckily, God heard. The furnace in Tiger Tiger mysteriously became a forest. [In what forest [sic] was thy brain, Patti?]

The hemispherical season swap was in Wichita Vortex Sutra, which was the very first collaboration between Glass and Ginsberg, later included in the chamber opera Hydrogen Jukebox. (Ginsberg's poems featured... as did Allen himself, as narrator.)

Before I find some things to appreciate, I've gotta rail about one more thing: the amplification of Glass's piano. It was fucking disgraceful. It hurt to listen to his etudes. It was so jangly and disgusting, the harmonics so jumbled, I wondered if the Steinway hadn't been tuned properly. Or that Glass was bangin' the wrong keys.

Actually, I might just give you the set list and take a cold shower.


1. Notes to the Future (performed by Smith & Glass)

2. Wichita Vortex Sutra (Smith & Glass)

"William Blake... invisible father of English visions..."

3. The Blue Thangka (Smith & Glass)

"Rise old man, walk up on the water.
Heaven is a daughter who dreams of you."

4. Wing (from the CD Gone Again) (Smith & Lenny Kaye on acoustic guitar)

5. Helpless by Neil Young (Smith & Kaye)

6. The Tiger by William Blake (Smith, a cappella)

7. My Blakean Year (from Trampin') (Smith & Kaye both with acoustic guitars)

8. Etude #2 (Glass, piano solo)

9. Etude #10 (Glass, piano solo)

10. Beneath the Southern Cross (from Gone Again) (Smith, Glass & Kaye)

11. On the cremation of Chogyam Thungpa Vidyadhara (Smith & Glass)

12. Magic Psalm (Smith & Glass)

Encore: Footnote to Howl (released as 'Spell' on Peace and Noise) (Smith & Glass)


Dedication to Allen Ginsberg. Patti Smith and Philip Glass in recital, with Lenny Kaye. Playhouse, the Arts Centre, Melbourne. Monday October 13, 8pm. Part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

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Batsheva Dance Company: Max

Death is a dance a ballroom a glove...

Don't imagine that I have Patti Smith on my mind (just) because she's here in Melbourne. I really must point out that I quoted this very line of hers in a review of the Batsheva Dance Company last time they were in Australia, in January last year, when they performed Mamootot for the Sydney Festival. So... I'm no more obsessed than usual. Agreed.

Just as there's an unheard click track that the dancers are moving to, in Max, there is an unseen dance partner. The glove. And I reckon it's mortality. Not quite The Grim Reaper, but the usual things that young, beautiful, athletic, extraordinary dancers might (quite reasonably) fear. Death, decay, age, unbalance, unbeauty, disability...


"Bang, bang, I hit the ground..."


The solos in Max reminded me, weirdly, of contact improvisation. But instead of the weighty, mute, physical contact with another corporeal body, reacting to one another in real time, the invisible partner, here, is... is what? Momentum? Balance? The outer limits?

The ten dancers in Max (actually all of the dancers in the Batsheva company) have an uncanny ability to find their centre. To hold it. To whirl with it. To trust the purification process of their body's centrifuge. To give into the forces operating with and against them. To harness their vulnerability to those forces.

To my eye, Max is a superior work to Three, performed on Friday and Saturday. It has an unseen but steely through-line. There are only two performances however. The season -- and Batsheva's stay in Australia -- ends tonight.


UPDATE, OCTOBER 15: My review (see what can be crammed into 150 words!) is in today's Herald Sun. See also Stephanie Glickman's review. She concludes: "It’s only the first week of MIAF, but I am fairly certain this is my pick of the fest!"

See also my interview with Batsheva director Ohad Naharin.


Max, choreographed by Ohad Naharin. Music by Maxim Waratt. Costume design by Rakefet Levy. Lighting design by Avi Yona Bueno ("Bambi"). Music production and mix by Ohad Fishof. Sound design by Moshe Shasho [try saying that rapidly! Might explain the snuffly soundtrack]. Batsheva Dance Company. State Theatre, the Arts Centre, Melbourne, Sunday October 12, 2008. For the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

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Patti Smith concert, set list...

A bit of a family and friends concert, this one. Apart from a song from Gone Again (1996) and one from Gung Ho (2000), all of the original songs date from the latter half of the 1970s.

Kimberly (Horses)
Frederick (Wave)
Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix
Ghost Dance (Easter)
Within You Without You by George Harrison
Grateful "written for Jerry Garcia" (Gung Ho)
Beneath the Southern Cross (Gone Again)
Free Money (Horses)
We Three "dedicated to Tom Verlaine" (Easter)
Dancing Barefoot (Wave) [Can't believe she left her boots on...]
Because the Night (Easter)
Smells Like Teen Spirit by Cobain, Grohl & Novoselic
Horses (Horses) segued into Gloria (Horses)

Encore: Rock 'n' Roll Nigger (Easter)

All of the covers (was there some Cream in the extended version of 'Are You Experienced'? Help me out here!) have been recorded by Patti and released on last year's Twelve.


My review will be in the Herald Sun in a coupla days.

In the meantime, here's a flashback (from my D.I.Y.) to the Palais, St Kilda; to Patti's first visit to Australia:


FRIDAY JANUARY 24, 1997

[...]

Patti Smith was twenty years too late. But so good. Once her voice warmed up and her PA started working reliably, she was overwhelmingly good. I've never heard her sing this well live, and I've heard plenty of official and bootleg recordings of her.

There was a moment though, just after she walked on, when anything could've happened. The audience freaked when her mike fucked out. She came on chanting Piss Factory. She didn't know what we were freaking about. The first song fucked out too. It looked like she was going to abandon the concert. We would have destroyed the place!!

The new stuff was brilliant, especially a song for Robert Mapplethorpe about falling leaves and another about cities. People Have The Power finally made sense. She performed it as a poem. A stupid song became the shining poem that spawned it again.

The songs I played to E. this afternoon, all featured. Apart from Piss Factory, Smith played Ghost Dance and Because the Night. Even Ain't it Strange and Radio Ethiopia, with a rave about Uluru grafted in. What else? Free Money and Kimberly from Horses, with Gloria as the final song of the night. Rock 'n' Roll Nigger was an encore too. She peeled off her shoes and one sock during Dancin' Barefoot without it looking contrived or just plain stupid.


Rock 'n' Rimbaud. Patti Smith and her band. [Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Tony Shanahan and Jackson Smith.] At Hamer Hall, the Arts Centre, Melbourne. Saturday October 11, 2008, 9pm.


UPDATE: Here's the October 12 set list:

Redondo Beach (Horses)
Birdland (Horses)
Dancing Barefoot (Wave)
Ghost Dance (Easter)
My Blakean Year (Trampin')
Beneath the Southern Cross (Gone Again)
Ain’t It Strange (Radio Ethiopia)
Peaceable Kingdom (Trampin')
People Have the Power (Dream of Life)
Because the Night (Easter)
Smells Like Teen Spirit by Cobain, Grohl & Novoselic
Gloria (Horses)

Encore: Helpless by Neil Young/Rock 'n' Roll Nigger (Easter)/Machine Gun


October 2008 Tour Dates:

October 18, Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles
October 20, The Warfield, San Francisco
October 30-31, Hammerstein Ballroom, New York (with The Black Crowes)

Also November 1, The Metropolitan Museum, New York (Patti, Jackson and Jesse Smith)

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Dedicated to the future, Patti Smith. Interview.

I'm guessing I won't be alone in being able to say this. Because of Patti Smith, I wrote poetry. Because of Patti Smith, I played the electric guitar. Because of Patti Smith, I sang. Sorta.

Yet it was kinda shocking to hear one of my oldest friends say, last night, that his recollection of me, at 16, was of someone obsessed... with Patti Smith.

My recollection is that she was just one of the pantheon. That Horses and Radio Ethiopia were no more important to me than, say, Springsteen's The Wild, The Innocent or Born to Run, or Desire by Bob Dylan, or even Nightbirds by Labelle.

It's that thing about emotional and musical puberty. The intensity of the connection -- the potential of it -- is dialled up to ten. We find the artists nearest in phase to us.

But, and maybe this is the point, you also fall out of phase with artists. After Desire, Dylan came over all Christian. (I never bought another Dylan album.) Labelle, divided, were never the same. And Springsteen came over all bossy. (Bought one, regretted it. Don't mind the very latest stuff tho, especially 'Radio Nowhere'.) Suddenly "the future of Rock & Roll" became its past. Became its old testament. And I was moving on to the Au Pairs and the post punk thing.



But I stayed in phase with Smith. Not just for those first four releases: Horses, Radio Ethiopia, Easter, Wave. But even after she became Mrs Fred 'Sonic' Smith. When Dream of Life appeared -- out of nowhere -- after seven or eight years or silence, there she was again. All grown up. Having the first mature relationship of her life... at exactly the same time as me. Imagine that.

Then another long break. Another seven or eight years of dead air. Apart from Beethoven, she's the longest musical affair of my life! LOL. I think I have every single album. Some out of courtesy (Trampin') some belatedly (Twelve) to complete the catalog. But just when I think our phase is irretrievably outa whack, she does something extraordinary... like the new Coral Sea set with Kevin "My Bloody Valentine" Shields. Her words, her booming voice, teamed with his improvised musical raves. Two separate live recordings based on the same poetry, about her friend Robert Mapplethorpe.

Thanks to the persistence of Claire Vince at the Opera House, and latterly the Melbourne Festival team, the tedious jockeying to have a chat with Smith paid off, in August.

After months of niggling, suddenly the opportunity materialised: "Can you do it tonight? After midnight?" And then, suddenly, The Boss (that's my boss, not Bruce!) decides to hold the proverbial presses. We have first crack at her, and he's determined to press home the advantage.

Interview in the wee hours, file copy by start of trade, it's in the newsagents barely 24 hours after we ring off. People have the power an' all that jazz.

Patti & I spoke a few days after Steven Sebring's film, Dream of Life, had its U.S. premiere. It's a late summer morning in New York, and cold, dark late-winter night in Melbourne.

It feels like I've been pacing around 30 years wondering what to ask. Or, more to the point, how to ask it.

I really want to wonder aloud with her. Chat about what Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix might have been doing, if they hadn't died the year before Patti's stage debut in New York City.

But she's known too much of death. Her dear friend Robert, her husband Fred, her brother Todd, collaborators, musicians, you name it. One woe doth tread upon another's heels... And I'm far too respectful of privacy to be a good journalist.

An hour or two before the call is made, I rummage through some boxes to find my copy of Witt and other slim volumes of her poetry. I find Babel, an early anthology I guess you'd call it. I open it. And there it is. The dedication. The book is dedicated to the future. That's my hook.


[CHRIS BOYD:] I FOUND MY COPY OF BABEL: "THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE FUTURE." IT LIT UP MY MIND. I'VE BEEN WANTING TO ASK YOU ABOUT THE BALANCE BETWEEN LOOKING FORWARD AND LOOKING BACKWARD IN YOUR LIFE. HAS THAT CHANGED? I'M REALLY INTERESTED IN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REMEMBRANCE AND NOSTALGIA.

[Patti Smith:] I'm not a nostalgic person. I just honour our past. I love history and I don't think having a love of history waxes nostalgic.

I just am fascinated with history. With the work that people do. I'm fascinated with what Giotto did. What the Renaissance painters did. With what Picasso did. I'm interested in art... As some people are interested in their roots, their own blood ancestry, I'm interested in our cultural ancestry.

And I'm also interested in, as an artist, the next thing. For my own self, I'm not a kind of person that sits around listening to my old records and looking at my old books. I'm always thinking of a new song or new poem or taking another photograph. People say to me, well what's your favourite poem or what's your favourite photograph? And I always say: the next one! The one I haven't done yet. It reaffirms that I'm still working, that I still am motivated that I still have an imagination.


[It looked, here, that Smith has pinched the bait from my hook and plunged into the cold dark waters beneath us... that the most I'd get from her would be rote answers. Then, suddenly, she surfaces again. Nibbles. Or, rather, offers some bait of her own.]

"self imposed and happy exile"

ARE YOU SLOWING DOWN? I DON'T MEAN THIS AS AN AGE THING. I MEAN THIS MORE AS A TIME-OUT THING, OF LINGERING AND ENJOYING THAT LYRICISM OF SOLITUDE. OR IS THIS SOMETHING YOU'VE HAD --

For 16 years I was out of the public eye and I lived very reclusively with my husband raising our children and studying, so I have a long period of self-imposed and happy exile. I had.

You know, I spend a lot of time, even now, by myself. I certainly have enough opportunity for solitude. But I like to work. Even if I went on a vacation I would take at least a notebook and a camera and a couple of books to read. I love to be engaged in new ideas and creating things and in a way it's the artist's curse. I love the sea. But it's very hard for me to just go by the sea. I go by the sea and then I wanna write by the sea. It's just -- it's what I do.

YOUR WORK IS PLAY, REALLY, ISN'T IT?

It's what I -- it's as familar to me as eating or sleeping, and it would be as strange and difficult for me as not eating for a day.

TELL ME THEN ABOUT THAT 16 YEARS. THAT TURNING INWARD. WHAT DID YOU DO IN THAT TIME?

My husband and I studied. We did a lot of studying. My husband was highly intelligent. He taught me a lot of things. I learned everying from politics to sports -- especially Detroit sports teams -- I learned about golf, I learned --

THE CLARINET!

I learned to play clarinet. And my own private studies. I was studying Japanese literature. I was studying Russian film. I was studying -- there was no end of things. Reading... there was an excellent new Genet biography by Edmund White and I studied that. I restudied Genet. Hundreds of things.

I wrote my first novel, which I've never published, and my second novel, which I've never published. I raised two children. So I was certainly busy...

WAS THAT LIKE PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT WAVE OF CREATION?

No, it was creation. I don't think you have to put your work into the world to validate its existence. I finished a lot of work. I wrote songs with my husband. We recorded Dream of Life. And I learned about taking care of my roses. I learned about tree diseases! I learned about all kinds of things.

I consider that one of my most productive periods because not only that, I evolved as a human being. I was still -- even at 30 -- like a late blooming adolescent. And I learned that I wasn't the centre of the universe. I learned that -- to take care of children, to wash diapers, to cook.

I was well busy.

I LIKE TO TELL PEOPLE I LEARNED HOW TO SEE AT THE AGE OF 39. I LIVED IN THE BUSH FOR 18 MONTHS. ONCE YOU GET AWAY FROM THE CITY AND ALLOW YOUR SHIELDS TO COME DOWN, YOUR SENSES SHARPEN.

And also your sense of your place in the world because -- it was as simple as this -- I suddenly was living in a more remote area outside of Detroit. And I had trees in a yard. And one day I looked up and I realised I had a pear tree. And one of these pears fell on the ground and my child picked it up and handed it to me. And as she did that, I had just seen a National Geographic special, I believe, on Somalia and they had a terrible famine. And children my daughter's age were dying for want of a pear. And living like that, having children, and having time to consider our place in the world and what other people experience as their place in the world... it was enlightening.

[...]

IS JACKSON COMING TO AUSTRALIA WITH YOUR BAND?

Yes. Absolutely. He is. He's a great guitar player. I really look forward to people seeing him because he's just er... He magnifies his father.


[By now, you're probably hearing -- in your mind's ear -- the slow, dark, authoritative voice of Patti Smith the performer. Stop. Re-read the above and imagine the little girl voice at the end of the song Wave. When Smith speaks about her daughter Jesse, she sounds like a young 'mom' from Jersey... proud of her wise young daughter who "plays the piana". Yep, she says piana, not piano. It's endearing. Smith is relaxed. She's at home. Sitting at the desk where she writes. If she resents the intrusion into her private space, her private time, her creative time, she hides it well. She's gracious and generous with her time. She might be playing hard to get, but at least she's playing...]

"Music is the genre I choose when I want to communicate with the most people...

TELL ME ABOUT THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN YOUR LIFE, AND WHEN YOU CHOOSE SPOKEN WORD OVER MUSIC?

I've always loved music. I've always loved opera. My father exposed me to Jazz. My mother really liked popular music like Bennie Goodman and Artie Shaw. I grew up in the era where rock'n'roll was born. So I loved rock'n'roll and R&B music but I always loved opera, since I was a child. So I have a diverse relationship with music.

But in terms of me as a worker, I'm not really a musician. I'm really more of a performer. I don't think of my role as an artist as really being a musician. I think that my role as a communicator is obviously within the realm of music. But I really consider myself more of a performer.

[Music] is the genre I choose when I want to communicate with the most people. If I want solitude, I might write a poem. If I want just a moment with myself to create, I'll take a photograph. But if I really want to communicate with a large number of people about any subject -- whether it's love or politics or a human rights issues -- writing and performing songs is one of the great vehicles to communicate with a lot of people.

I REMEMBER SEEING YOU PERFORM 'PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER', YOU CHANTED IT. AND IT JUST MADE SO MUCH MORE SENSE TO ME AS A SPOKEN PIECE RATHER THAN A SUNG PIECE.

Well, 'People Have The Power' was written as both a poem and a song. The line "people have the power" was my husband's. And my husband wanted me to write a song using that phrase. And I wrote the lyrics more as a poem. So it has -- I think it crosses over either way.

I wanted to write something that could be used in any situation from a stadium... or in the most intimate of circumstances. It's a prime example of when I'm trying to find the right words to communicate with as many people as possible.

[...]

I feel like I can write my whole life. And so if my writing takes a little longer to get out into the world, it's better to do the things that are more physical, or things it would serve better to be done now.

I can always write, I can always edit, I can always work on my poetry. So, right now, I'm doing the things that I think are... more a propos to our times and the needs of the people and what I'm physically strong to do. I am 61 years old, so I'm trying to use my time wisely.

I'm very very sturdy and I'm in very good health, but I still would like to do the things -- make the statements that I want to make in the rock 'n' roll arena at this time of my life, so that's what I'm concentrating on now.


Patti Smith (and her Polaroid Land camera) are in Melbourne this week. Her first concert is tonight. She and Philip Glass -- who performed at Allen Ginsberg's memorial in New York City (just to give you some idea of how long ago that was, it was the night that the final ep. of Seinfeld went to air in the US) -- get together for a celebration of Ginsberg's work on Monday night.

Steven Sebring's film Dream of Life -- which had it's Australian premiere on Thursday -- has a couple more screenings at ACMI this weekend. There are also a couple of exhibitions of Smith memorabilia and art work.

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In the Moshé-pit with Batsheva boss Ohad Naharin...

A proportion of every major interview I do nowadays is spent asking inane, obvious questions. I've learned that the so-called truth isn't out there at all. Fact check or else. Rely on Wikipedia at your peril. Sad to say, the arts are not what you would call hotly contested... unless there is kiddie porn involved.


You're gonna get a whole lotta Bat-crack in Batsheva's Three, trust me...

Free information is, all too often, worthless information. The stuff that ends up near the top of a Google search is the story that will catch on. It's the version of the truth deemed most likely to succeed... by a search algorithm.

But in sitting down to write about Patti Smith, just now, a few ancient memories popped up. I remember a scathing review of Wave, Smith's fourth studio album [unchecked fact] when it came out in 1979 [unchecked memory]. The reviewer thundered about Smith's obsession with her father and made all kinds of grossly insulting Oedipal/Elektral claims. Why? Cos Smith uses the word Papa in the title track. It was pretty obvious to me -- and anyone with half a brain and an eye for detail -- that she was singing about the Pope... who also answers to the moniker "papa". Hell, she even croons "Oh Albino" in the same song... about the short-lived papacy of the [then] recently deceased John Paul 1, Albino Luciani [an unverified but confident memory]. Actually, the whole song is about a man waving at a crowd from a balcony and Patti feeling like he was waving to her! Kinda Popish, no?

Another review of Wave -- a high profile review in a major international magazine -- damned Smith's cover of the Byrds' song 'So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star'. It was dark and ugly, it was a travesty, Smith got it wrong. Bless em, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman -- who wrote the thing -- spoke out in her defence. They loved it. She got it.

Another "straw man" review that caught my eye recently damned a recent programme of works by Batsheva Dance Company for not including any works by Wim Vandekeybus, Billy Forsythe et al.

It's an interesting piece for a couple of reasons. Firstly, and weirdly, it's an interview/profile piece that editorialises even more than I do! But don't take my word for it. Here's a chunk, verbatim.

"There are no new concepts", he said. "Everything has already been done. What is left is reorganisation. I re-work my ballets constantly, and questions on my work are best answered by simply watching my dancers, eighteen of them, chosen from all over the world for their musicality, virtuosity, and sheer love of dance".

Be that as it may, answers were not that obvious in Deca Dance, the programme presented recently at the Theatre of Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines. Although the company possesses works by Kylian, Vandekeybus, Preljocaj and Forsythe in the repertoire, a range of Naharin's works from the past ten years were shown, extracts from eight of his best pieces being adroitly crafted into a coherent whole. Classical, contemporary and rock, for the most part easy on the eye despite the underlying violence of the second half, entertained for two hours. However, works of distinction rubbed shoulders with the inexplicable. Too obviously theatrical, it was a little difficult to grasp the significance of the aggressively made-up woman on stilts striding around or the monks washing themselves with mud.

Huffing and puffing about Batsheva's failure to include works by Kylian & co. is absurd. The company -- under Ohad Naharin's direction -- hasn't performed works by guest choreographers for more than a decade. Maybe even a decade and a half. [Ohad Naharin's unverified memory, this one!]

The above inter/review (by Patricia Boccadoro) and its subtle inaccuracies have dogged Naharin. I think he was actually grateful that I gave him the opportunity to scotch them. "True, but old," he explained, exasperated. "Where does this information come from?"

An Israeli cultural organisation links to the article, adding to its authority.

Another widely disseminated and oft-repeated half-truth is that Naharin's movement system Gaga was created as a response to a serious back injury he suffered. It was not, in fact, the result of his back injury, but that injury was "a very important station" in the development of Gaga.

Obviously factual errors are on the mind of the local dance community at the moment. A colleague of mine was shocked to learn, last night, that getting a name wrong -- even a piss-spelling -- is a sackable offence at the Herald Sun. Yep, even at a Murdoch tabloid. [I wonder how they rate at The Aged?] And, as many of you will know, I'm kinda proud of the fact that I normally find my own errors before they're pointed out. [Repeat: normally!] [People in glass houses shouldn't get stoned.]

Anyway, more about Patti very soon, including some juicy bits from our conversation in August.

But first, a bit more about Mr Naharin, who sounds like a gentle version of Henry Kissinger. Speaking to him over the mobile network -- he was in Tel Aviv -- it sounded as if someone had Pro-Tooled his voice down an octave or two. He'd make a great Dalek.

We spent the last few minutes of the conversation talking about Gaga. (And, yes, before you make any silly cracks... allow me! When I rang off, the tape still running, you can just hear me singing "do do, do doop, just dance." Yep, that musical virus... by the lip-synchin' lass herself: Lady GaGa. How deliciously apt!) (Actually, I wish she had lip-synched on Rove! Dear God!)

Gaga, Naharin explained, has been a part of his life for as long as he can remember. Even as a curious kid. Before he knew he wanted to be a dancer. Gaga is Naharin's way of connecting to movement, to the world, to himself, to the elements.


Another still from Ohad Naharin's Three.

[Ohad Naharin:] An important station [in the development of Gaga] was this injury, because then I was already choreographing. Then I was already [needing] to communicate movement to dancers and [needing] to stay in shape. I was still performing.

And the injury... created a lot of irreversible damage in my back. And it was almost a blessing because I've learned a lot of new things about efficiency of movement, about the connection of pain and pleasure, about the instinctual movement, about physiology, about effort and explosive power. I became a little bit like the clean slate for learning new things.

[CHRIS BOYD:] IS IT SIMILAR TO YOGA OR -- I FORGET WHAT IT'S CALLED -- AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT... WHAT'S THAT ONE? OR ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE? IS IT AT ALL SIMILAR TO ANY OF THOSE?

Well, for me, in Gaga, it's not about inventing, it's about discovering. And I think a lot of people discover the same things all over the world.

IT WAS FELDENKRAIS, THE ONE I WAS TRYING TO REMEMBER...

It was Feldenkrais? [pause] Well, my mother was a Feldenkrais specialist.

I was lucky. I was even lucky to see him [i.e. Moshé Feldenkrais] teaching. Because when I was five years old she took me to one of his classes. Did that transmit without [me] knowing? I believe very much in this technique.

So there are elements/
Not movement elements/
But there are rules and/
The philosophy/
I don't like to use this word/
I feel I share things with those methods.

The thing that in Gaga it's/
Maybe the difference between what you mention/
Yoga is very physical too, but it's very static...

With Gaga, it's really important to remain very active, very physical, connected to your passion to move. It connects to the multidimensional movement... In Gaga we speak a lot about a lot of things that are not discussed so much in those methods, but help people to become very virtuosic.


[Naharin explained that there is now a venue where non-dancers can learn and use Gaga. Open classes are conducted at the company's HQ in Tel Aviv.]


WHEN I READ ABOUT GAGA, I WONDERED IF THE PERFECT EXAMPLE OF IT MIGHT BE THE FIRST SECTION OF MAMOOTOT WITH THE GIRL BOUNCING AND MOVING TO ONE SIDE... INCREDIBLY CONTROLLED. SHE MADE IT LOOK SO EASY. BUT I ALSO REALISED IT WAS AN INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT THING TO DO WELL. IS THAT A GOOD EXAMPLE OF IT?

Yeah. I think it is a good example. It's true, it looks difficult, but it becomes not difficult.

Because when you connect to your physiology, and your animal quality and strength, with the knowledge of someone who [doesn't] just react but create... you can constantly go beyond your familiar limits.

You live happily with your limitations... But you also realise that you can constantly go beyond. It's a small thing, but it happens daily. And eventually things that are difficult today, you know, in three months are not [difficult] anymore. And that happens constantly to the dancers in Gaga.


[We spoke a little more about the bouncing move from Mamootot.]


Actually, it's really not so hard. It's more a matter of co-ordination.

AND RELAXATION?

It has a lot to do with what I call falling into movement. You use the success of falling in order to actually lift you. It has a lot to do with recognising where you're blocking yourself. So it's not about power but it's about efficiency of movement, this particular one.



Batsheva Dance Company's Melbourne Festival season opens tonight with Three (also tomorrow afternoon and evening) and continues with Max (reviewed here) Sunday and Monday.

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Of Kitten and the Cats... oh, and CATs too.

"...in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within..."

Watching Kitten was alarmingly like watching the Cats lose the grand final. Excitement and optimism to start with, a quiet and sustaining confidence in the tried-and-tested team when things weren't quite going to plan, a sinking feeling as time ticked by and the players still hadn't hit their stride, the disastrous slump after half time, and a catch-up quarter where the team does little more than dig its claws in.



The Kitten team, on paper, is unbeatable. Count the all-Australians... Captain-coach Kemp. Tregloan, Verhagen, Pajanti, Herbertson. With on-ballers Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills and Kate Kendall. A star team. A team of stars. How could it possibly fail?

Like football, theatre doesn't always follow the script. And three top players can't win by themselves.

My expectations, I reckon, were to blame. Just because the characters are named Jonah (is he in the whale or not?), Kitten (Jonah's wife) and Manfred (J's best friend, and rival) doesn't mean that this is gonna be another of Kemp's dreamy archetypal meditations. Alas. This is no Call of the Wild or Black Sequin Dress.

Jonah is missing believed drowned. (No surprise there!) I even deduced, from his best friend's Byronic name that the J-man has probably topped himself. (One thing Byron's Manfred [etext available at The Literary Gothic] rather bravely failed to do!!)

Kitten -- ha! -- goes troppo and needs a C.A.T. team! (God. Is "CAT team" one of those awful redundancies? Like ATM machine? Ick! If so, sorry... I've never had to call one.) (Or had one called for me... [hard to believe, I know!]) [Apparently it's not - Ed.]

But there are no archetypes here. Little of Kemp's usual schtick . Little of her extraordinary womanly fascinations... More's the pity. It's a brilliant study of mania, true. But it's just a play. A little play.

AKH exclaimed "too many songs" after the show. I retorted: "The songs saved it for me." Actually, Natasha Herbert's voice (and her mad African booty-shaking) kept me awake. My eyes open wide.

The opening scene (on the cliff top, again, how Byronic) is pretty strong. I liked the feeling that the scrim between the audience and the players was aurally translucent as well as visually translucent. It seemed to strip frequencies from the sound of the voices just as it blurred the visual. The voices seemed dislocated and disembodied... as if amplified. Some of the sound remained on the far side of the cloth. Then the lights came up a bit more. And, guess what, the actors actually were amplified a little.

The festival's about to begin. It officially kicks off tonight. I'm glad the Malthouse jumped the gun. I like being at the Australian content up front.

One year, not that long ago, at La Mama, Lloyd Jones greeted me with an emphatic: "You're a fucking snob." Cos I was seeing more of the international stuff than the local, I guess. (Either that or I'd missed another of his sadistic theatrical extravaganzas.) Mate, I shot back, it's the first night of the festival and I chose to be here, at Headquarters, instead of at the Arts Centre watching the Steppenwolf company make its local debut.

He pulled his head in.

Well, you know... If you're the Artistic Director's spouse, you probably shouldn't be dissing the critics in any case. Or, at least, not the friendly ones. The "work experience" are easier game. (Go easy, David!)


N.B. My review will be published in Friday's Herald Sun. (The October 10 edition.) See also Michael Magnusson's review.


Kitten by Jenny Kemp (writer and director). Set and costume design by Anna Tregloan. Sound design and original music by Darrin Verhagen. Lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. Choreographed by Helen Herbertson. Dramaturgy by Richard Murphett, Maryanne Lynch and Francesca Smith. Performed by Chris Connelly, Natasha Herbert, Kate Kendall and Margaret Mills.

Kitten was jointly commissioned by Melbourne International Arts Festival, Malthouse Theatre and Black Sequin Productions.

At the Beckett Theatre, Wednesday October 8. Season ends October 25.

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Backyard & Melbourne Spawned a Monster

If you're an indie dance artist, you had better choose your venue carefully. In the last ten days, I've been to two shows at Dancehouse -- one Fringe Festival show, one not -- which were full to the roof, and two at Gasworks -- both Fringe Festival -- at which the audience barely outnumbered the cast.

Stephanie Glickman tells me that she had a command performance on Wednesday night at Paper on Water. One dancer, one critic. That same night, Jo Lloyd, up town, had a waiting list. (I know... I was on it!)

Now, Fringe Festival PR is pretty much non-existent. (I received a guide in the post. That was it.) But is Gasworks in Port Melbourne any more off-the-beaten-track than Dancehouse in North Carlton? Or is it that Dancehouse has reached a critical mass after 15 years of consistent activity?

Certainly it's not about calibre of artist. The one-on-one 'command' performer was Delia Silvan, a star-with-a-capital-S. Jo Lloyd is a star too, but she from the wave that broke after Silvan.

There are even attendance vagaries when it comes to venues in the same suburb, even those that share management. Arts House at the Meat Market, it seems to me, pulls bigger crowds than Arts House at the nearby North Melbourne Town Hall.

So much of Fringe (for critics and punters alike) is about opportunism. So I went to a matinee of Backyard on Wednesday cos I had a window of opportunity. I didn't recognise the names of the dancers or choreographers, but that's what Fringe is for, right? (And, Ming-Zhu, to be tired of theatre is to be tired of bad/dead/anti theatre. To be tired of dance is... well... unimaginable.) (Or is to be just plain tired!)


Jo Lloyd -- on fire in Melbourne Spawned a Monster.

Backyard's dancers and crew (and their BYO usher!) were about to forfeit when I arrived, but were persuaded not to. I'm so glad they didn't. Their show turned out to be as detailed and sophisticated, in its way, as Jo Lloyd's Melbourne Spawned a Monster.

Perhaps not in choreographic terms, or imagination... but in sheer theatricality and attention to detail, this trio of young dance-makers were as on-the-money as Lloyd and her team.

Lloyd again had the advantage of Duane Morrison's brilliant, driving, groindy music. It reminded me of early Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream... though there was a moment of vertigo when it could easily have plunged into sexy dance floor trance. I'm thinking Kris Menace or even, dare I say it, Eric Prydz!

Backyard used existing music (a ripper lo-fi song from Psuche -- a.k.a. Oscar's Psuche -- and a neat little loop of Lisa Mitchell's 'Neopolitan Dreams') but the soundscape was as carefully constructed and precisely executed -- and as indispensible -- as Morrison's.


playtime at Gasworks... click on the image to enlarge.

Lloyd used spills of coloured bud lights and a simple but delightful cityscape by Rob McCredie. (The design concept was Lloyd's.) Backyard used astroturf, a clothes line and part of a picket fence in a stylised -- or should that be romanticised? -- naturalism.

Lloyd began her solo in the dark with the sound of tennis balls being thrown against a wall. (Live, not recorded.) Lloyd is a commanding presence -- think Tilda Swinton only far far more corporeal -- and she began her show with a lateral hip-swing manoeuvre, one arm out straight to the side, the other arm hooked over her head, parallel to the lower arm. (Anyone remember Jimmy Page playing the theremin in The Song Remains The Same?) Lemon coloured dress. Barefoot. Three little pig tails.

Throughout the piece, her dance seems to be in service of the throbbing, pulsing music. Not enslaved by it, but delighting in it. Late in the piece, there's a moment when Lloyd throws her arms out like wings, in a low swoop, maybe a foot above the stage, and it's the most utterly musical -- utterly right -- gesture I seen in ages; she does this ostrich think with her arm, wrist and hand, making an impossibly tight triangle; she headbangs like Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's over in half an hour, but it's complete. Dizzying. Satisfying.



It's not the biggest or most ambitious thing she's done; that would have to be Apparently That's What Happened, performed at the Meat Market in June. (Apart from the final third of that piece, danced in thrilling unison, Duane Morrison's anxious, inventive, buzzing, brilliant music completely eclipsed the dance and the zombie choreography.) But, I reckon, Melbourne Spawned a Monster is far and away the best original work we've seen from Lloyd. I'm guessing it might have something to do with the fact that it's one of the purest dance pieces we've seen from her. Head switched off, body switched on.


Backyard makes an interesting contrast. (Not just because I saw it the same day!) It's representational, not abstract. It's dance theatre, not pure dance. It's conventionally feminine -- girlish, really -- while Lloyd is weib. It has a mission, I think, while Monster just squatted there, poised and primal.

In Backyard, co-creators Megan Inglese and Melanie Trojkovic try to coax memories out of their bodies. Some of the movement, inevitably, is banal. Ipsy-wipsy spider stuff and bug catching, sewing gestures and mime. Hanging out clothes and folding them. But, unexpectedly, the play of fingertips on a throat or a knee-bounce or the gate-swing of an arm with an oscillating hand will detonate something deep within us.

More impressive than the choreography is the control Inglese and Trojkovic exert over the production elements. It takes skill to pull an audience in, to focus on a tiny move.

I wanted something more substantial, I guess. And the actual dance was a bit too constrained, on the whole, for my liking. But it held its audience for an hour, easily.


L-R: Megan Inglese, Sarah Cooper, Melanie Trojkovic

Intriguingly, the third dancer, Sarah Cooper, who isn't billed as a creator of the work, did best with the choreography. So, it'll be interesting to see what Inglese and Trojkovic can do on other dancers.

Backyard has a couple more performances in the next week, so too does Paper on Water. You shouldn't have any trouble picking up tickets... more's the pity.


Backyard by Megan Inglese and Melanie Trojkovic. Film editing by Melia Rayner. Music editing by Hayden Annable. Perfect Flaw Productions. Studio Theatre, Gasworks Arts Park, until October 11.

Melbourne Spawned a Monster, choreographed and performed by Jo Lloyd. Music by Duane Morrison. Costume by Tim Jomartz. Set and lighting concept by Jo Lloyd. Cityscape by Rob McCredie. Lighting realisation by Tristan Bourke. Dancehouse, until October 5.

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Yinka Shonibare 1: MAD world

Imagine, if you will, a blind date with a British artist...

Tracey Emin would take you straight to her bedroom, open up her diary and photo album for a few tortured hours of show and tell. Damien Hurst might take you to the aquarium... or to the morgue. If you're lucky, only your senses will be assaulted. But with Yinka Shonibare, you'll probably end up rummaging through bolts of fabric at the Brixton markets.

Shonibare is the Lenny Henry of the art world. More savvy than savage. Not so much a political agitator as a polite one. With him, you'll nod and smile your way to enlightenment.



An exhibition of Shonibare's work in a variety of media -- billed as the most comprehensive showing of the artist's work to date -- has just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. It's there until February 1, 2009.

The MCA then tours this exhibition to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian in DC.

I spoke to Shonibare in July.


[CHRIS BOYD:] I REALLY APPRECIATE THAT YOUR BALLERINAS HAVE HEADS!

[Yinka Shonibare:] They're real people! I think I should be in a little bit of trouble if I did it to real people.


white swan and black swan

IS CREATING ART A SUBSTITUTE FOR THERAPY FOR YOU? SHOOTING HEADS OFF?

Oh yes. You're talking about How to blow up two heads at once. The ladies, huh?

A lot of my work relates to do with identity issues and also takes in current affairs as well and so when a lot of the global conflict was happening, there's also humour in my work, and when the Iraq war happened and then of course Afghanistan you had -- literally every day -- there was conflict in the news every day.

As an artist, how can I explore those issues? Is there an absurd side to this? Is there a funny side to it? There's also this sense of gallows humour if you like.

I'm thinking, okay, two sides are fighting. Each side thinks their P.O.V. is the better point of view. And the other people are the baddies and [that] they're good.

Actually, at the end of the day, nobody really wins a war because you're both inflicting maximum damage.

SO IT'S YOUR TAKE ON MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION?

Exactly. Exactly. Trying to find, also, a humorous angle to the absurdity of it as well. Also do something to engage people without being too heavy handed.

SO, HOW IMPORTANT IS IT THAT YOUR ART BE LIKABLE?

I think that you have to engage people. You have to make people interested in the art. One of the ways of doing that is to produce something -- even if it's a horrible subject matter -- you have to find a way of getting people's attention. One of the ways of doing that is the beauty of the work. Under that beauty is also the dark as well.

SO THE BEAUTY & GALLOWS HUMOUR IS AN INVITATION TO LOOK CLOSER.

Yes. And then hopefully -- once you've managed to get people's attention -- hopefully they might want to go further and ask further questions about why is he doing that, what's he doing that for?

I'm not a politician so my work is never about trying to preach a fixed point of view at people. It's more about highlighting things and let people think for themselves. And also, I'm an artist. And what I do... The entertainment angle is also an important part of my work.

I know that a lot of conceptual artists don't want to acknowledge that or talk about the aspects or decoration or the aspects of beauty because there's a lot of snobbery in the art world. But I don't really work that way. I want to use common, everyday materials that people can relate to -- and talk about important issues with.

I get my fabric from Brixton market and the fabrics I use are Indonesian influenced batik fabrics that the Dutch produced around the turn of the century for sale to the Indonesian market. But in Indonesia, they wanted to protect their own trade so the fabrics were rejected. So the Dutch versions of batik were tried in West Africa where they were very successful.

THEY WERE ADOPTED BY THE LOCALS.

Yes, exactly. And I'm very -- the fabrics are associated with Africa. When the people see them they think Africa. African fabric. But at the same time, I'm keen to highlight that what you might see as being fixed can also have other aspects to it.

And the fabrics are not -- they're international in a way. They're kind of trade routes... Dutch, Holland, and then Indonesia and then Africa. All of the identity can be quite complicated.

BECAUSE OF OUR PROXIMITY TO INDONESIA, WE'RE QUITE FAMILAR WITH THESE FABRICS... WE ASSOCIATE BATIK WITH HIPPIES AND DRUG-SMOKING!

I like the fact that you said that. Because what I'm doing -- what I'm doing there is that paradox of... on the one hand, I take something from popular culture, and then I take it into stiff Victoriana. Stiff upper class Victoriana. And of course that stiff upper class Victoriana is almost a metaphor for the establishment. And hippies [are] in opposition to establishment.

AND TO AUTHORITY --

Exactly.

AND TO REGIMENTATION.

Exactly. So what you have there is a contradiction. You have a contradiction of the batik from pop culture against the establishment Victoriana.

And the idea for me using Victoriana as a metaphor came from Margaret Thatcher in the 80s was talking about returning to Victorian values.

SCARY!! I DON'T REMEMBER HER SAYING THAT. VICTORIAN VALUES?!

I was thinking: Okay, so where do I stand? I live in England. I'm from Nigeria. Nigeria was colonised by the British. The Victorian era was the height of colonialism in Africa. How do I relate to the repressive Victorian regime?

So Victoriana for me actually means conquest and imperialism. And so, in a sense, it is actually my fear. So what I then decided to do was actually confront my fear and face my fear. And the way to confront my fear, to actually parody that fear. A lot of the work that came out of my desire to face my fear and to turn it into parody.

The irony of all of this is that -- since my work has actually been about what imperialism means and how that relates to my own identity -- it's quite ironic that I was then made a member of the order of the British Empire.

[LOL] I BELIEVE YOU MAKE A POINT OF USING YOUR MBE AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY. IS THAT TRUE?

Absolutely! I use it everywhere. So my actual artist's name is Yinka Shonibare MBE.

EXCELLENT! MY [RELATIONSHIP DELETED] WAS AN MBE... AND SHE WAS A LESBIAN!!

I don't think that the queen knew that she was a lesbian!

I VERY MUCH DOUBT IT! [...] NICE TO BE INVISIBLE SOMETIMES.

Perhaps it might be slightly easier for them... persecuted gay men... good that the world has changed a bit.

I WAS REMINDED WHILE YOU WERE TALKING OF LANGUAGE, OF ENGLISH THE LINGUA FRANCA IN THE COLONIES. I REALISE IT'S PROBABLY STILL THE NUMBER ONE LANGUAGE IN NIGERIA --

Absolutely. If you want to get on in the world... If you don't know English, you're going to find that quite difficult.

HAS AN INFLUENCE ON THE LANGUAGE. "POLLUTES" IT, GIVES IT COLOUR, GIVES IT SLANG AND BROKEN ENGLISH. I UNDERSTAND THERE'S QUITE A BIG RAP CULTURE IN NIGERIA --

Oh yeah. Absolutely. There [are] local versions of English. The language has changed. A lot of people who win the Booker prize don't have English as their first language. People like Salman Rushdie. The English language has been taken on in the the third world, if you like, or the other world. Has been reappropriated...

A number of Indian writers have also won the Booker. English is something that develops according to the local language. For example in Australia, Australian English is also very different from the English here. It sort of evolves.

People are not passively colonised. Yes, they may have English, but they do make it their own. And they do develop their own identity after that.

SO WHEN I LOOK AT THOSE BEAUTIFUL PHOTOGRAPHS OF TUTUS MADE OF THIS LUSH MULTICOLOURED FABRIC, IT GIVES ME MUCH JOY BECAUSE -- I'VE BEEN A BALLET CRITIC FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS. I KNOW HOW RIGID AND STARCHY -- AND HOSTILE TO FREE THINKING AND IMAGINATION -- THE BALLET WORLD CAN BE...

Absolutely. As was my experience when... It's a short film in collaboration with the Royal Ballet in London. It's from Swan Lake. It's my version. The film is called Odile and Odette. Odile being the bad character and Odette being the good swan. So what I've done... I've made two characters, one black, one white. And they dance opposite each another with a hollow frame in between them, so you get the illusion that one is a reflection of the other.


Heads or tails? A still from Shonibare's film Odile and Odette.

TELL ME WHICH IS WHICH IS THE GOOD?

You don't know.

EXCELLENT.

That's the point of the film, cos it's constantly switching. The viewpoint is constantly switching all the time. The film actually will be in the show.

WHAT ELSE WILL YOU BE BRINGING TO SYDNEY? IS THERE ANY SITE-SPECIFIC MATERIAL OR ANY NEW MATERIAL?

A piece that might be outside... It's a white flag at half mast. This is a piece I did for the Southbank Centre in London. They have a flagpole outside. And this, again, was during the conflict. So that's one piece that will be outside.

And it's the first time, actually... In relation to the rest of my work it's quite dramatic. Cos it's the first time I've actually taken the pattern away.

YEAH, I WAS WONDERING IF IT WAS THE FIRST TIME YOU'VE USED PLAIN WHITE...

It was almost like a halt or a break. When the horrible things were happening in Iraq... It was more about the frustration of peace and the fact that... When a flag is at half mast, it's always about mourning the loss of something...

AND YET, OF COURSE, THE WHITE FLAG IS THE FLAG OF SURRENDER, ISN'T IT?

In this case, it's actually not surrender. It's indeterminate because it's actually half-mast. It's not fully flown. It's at half mast. So that's one that's gonna be outside.

In the actual exhibition, there will be major pieces of mine. There's a piece called Scramble for Africa. I don't know if you've see an image of this.

I DON'T THINK I HAVE. DESCRIBE IT TO ME?

It's a recreation of the Berlin conference in the 19th century...

OH, OKAY. IS IT A RECTANGULAR TABLE AND THERE ARE PEOPLE WITH HANDS ON EACH OTHER'S ARMS? IT'S LIKE --

Yeah, yeah.

IT'S LIKE A CARTIER-BRESSON PHOTOGRAPH.



It was when Africa was being divided up. It was in Europe. They had this conference in Berlin. And the conference was called Scramble for Africa. So on the table there's a map of Africa drawn. So it's merely capturing a moment when all these brainless people got around the table -- headless, brainless -- to actually divide up the spoils amongst themselves. See if they have original entitlements to it.

The other major piece that's going to be in the show is a piece called Gallantry and Criminal Conversation.

THAT'S THE ONE WITH THE CARRIAGE SUSPENDED IN AIR, IS IT?

Exactly.

AND A LOT OF SEXUAL ACTIVITY!

Exactly! It's a huge installation. I was actually looking at power and sex tourism. And during the "grand tour" in Europe in the 18th and 19th century people travelled to places like Venice. And the idea was to go and learn more about culture. But actually it was a great opportunity for people to be sexually liberated as well. So they couldn't be gay at home, they could do this in Italy. It's also about sex tourism and power. Of course, as you know because of your proximity to Thailand... It's always a power relationship. The powerful have the money to explore their sexual fantasies in far-flung places of the world. So that piece is more like a playful way of exploring that.

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"Hinch? Shame. The rest was horrorshow." (In Nadsat, that means 'good', okay?)

There was an inordinate amount of interest in my notes, tonight. Maybe cos -- technically at least -- I was off-duty. Pity the lap-top packin' critics sittin' around me. K8 from the Herald Sun and Gamer Boy from The Aged. Both had to file copy within an hour of the scheduled end time. Being an opening night, an' all, the curtain was late. (A creditable 15 minutes, but still!)

I've only had to do that once. To file for the next morning's edition. I had to phone a review in, parked in the bourge mobile. Once that was out of the way, I went out dancin'. I heard my review quoted by Neil Mitchell on the way home. (It was a big night!) Anyway, neither of tonight's 'crickets' made an appearance at the after-show party. (Pussies! You missed out badly!)

Anyway, by request, here is the first page of my almost legible notes... and an exegesis of sorts!

"...if you can get a nine week suspension for gobbing in the general vicinity of a member of an opposing team, what do you suppose a bloke should get for spraying all over his leading lady?"

Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt reckons the key to note taking is 'impression' words. I don't entirely agree with her, legibility is my first priority!

"Karaoke music" (the top line) reminds me that the musical accompaniment to Tamsin Carroll's singing in the opener was too too perfect. It didn't sound live.

The second line reads: "Brad's a spitter." (Yes, I even punctuate in the dark. Without looking down. Weird, huh?) So he deserves a bit of a spray, right?

If you can get a nine week suspension for gobbing in the general vicinity of a member of an opposing team, what do you suppose a bloke should get for spraying all over his leading lady? His character's new fiancee no less? How about Hepatitis?! (How dare he spit on Kellie Rode!!) (And, yeah, Kel's playin' a virgin AGAIN!) [I just googled Kellie Rode virgin to locate that last link -- I'm a bit disappointed to discover that this blog ranks 4 -- wot, so low? -- out of three and a bit million.)

The next line? "Hinch -- Shame." The best I can say about Derryn's narration is that he had his lines down, pat. He didn't miss a cue or an entrance. He only lacked a pulse. Any animation at all would have been welcome.

Next line: "Tap - clicktrack." When Columbia (Sharon Millerchip) went tappa tappa tappa across the stage, the audio didn't match up with her footsteps.

The next bit, ahem, is a zygote of a blog post that will probably be thrown out with the embryos for stem cell research and general cloning. I was off on one of my time-warping reminiscences... Thinking back to the first time I saw the Rocky Horror Show at the Johnston Street Teletheatre in the '70s. I wondered how we heard performers, way back when, before integrated circuits and radio microphones... Anyway, the line reads: "Bulge in the pants from cordless mic battery pack."

See, all I really needed to write was bulge in the pants, yeah? But what if I'd lost my notes! Or someone read them. Sometimes you've gotta spell stuff out!

Rocky (Simon Farrow, a stuntman no less!) used his utility belt in the first act. Janet (Kellie Rode) had some bizarro pouch thing hangin' from her bra strap, rear.

Suspension of disbelief in contemporary music theatre (now that's an especially ridiculous concept!!) demands that one ignore cables snaking down spines, bud microphones in headgear, five thousand pieces of clear sticky tape on faces, shoulders, et cetera... Oh, and being able to ignore those goddam bulges.

Idle/Idol thought... the better the performance, the less visible/noticeable the pack. (Rode excepted... there was nowhere to hide!) I don't think I once noticed iOTA's, for example. But before I begin my raving about iO [staggeringly good] and Paul Capsis [as Riff Raff, talk about luxury casting!], a quick line or two from the last page of my notes.

Overheard at the par-tay:

Said (by a woman) to Ouzo-swigging, 26 year-old, mother-of-three dancer with happy teeth [I couldn't make this shit up!]:

"You look sexy. [Pause. Then, matter of factly:] What happened?"

Same mob, later:

Don't party too hard!
As fucken if!

The short version? Great show. (I mean, really, I can't tell you how relieved I am that it was worth a few hours of my time! I missed Criminal Intent for this! LOL) OUT STANDING party. My compliments to the caterers at Comme. I haven't been there since it was Mietta's... Sigh. More ghosts. More stories to tell...


Rocky Horror Show is at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, until the proverbial cows come home.

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Philip Glass on Samuel Beckett

Anecdote time.

Chamber Made Opera and Ariel New Music did a ripper production of The Fall of the House of Usher in 1990, in the newly opened Merlyn Theatre.

In the Melbourne Times, I gushed about the "neo-romantic score... full of drenching melancholy" and reckoned that the overture to the second act was the most "accessible and attractive" music Philip Glass had written since Company.

Many years later one of the production team (who shall remain nameless) who harboured a very special contempt for critics -- or, perhaps, just me -- sneered that Company was written by Sondheim and that, therefore, I was a fucking cretin.

In all that time, the thought never occurred that there might be a piece of music called Company that was not a musical written by Stephen Sondheim.

I confess, the thought that ran through my mind when confronted by this utter ignorance was a line Jacob Bronowski attributes to Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." [Yeah, even my thought bubbles are pretentious!]

Now answering to the rather grander moniker String Quartet #2, Company is Glass at his most -- dare I say -- minimal. Compared to the 747 Jumbo Jet of Einstein on the Beach, Company is a paper plane... a remarkably fine origami paper plane.

Company gets its name from the Samuel Beckett piece it was composed for, as incidental music, in the 1980s.

It's about eight and a half minutes long, as first recorded by Kronos. About half a minute less in the rerecording. (Kronos released a CD which has four of the five numbered quartets. I'm unsure if the music for the film Dracula yet rates as String Quartet #6 or not.)

Along with Einstein, Company is my favourite piece of Glass. (Piece of Glassware?) I used to play it on repeat for hours at a time. The snake chases its tail ever-so-nicely.

Anyway, when I was doing my homework for my interview with Glass -- homework that began at the end of February I might add -- I was delighted to discover that Glass had recently composed music (also recorded by Kronos, so far unreleased I think) for an off-Broadway production of some short plays by Samuel Beckett.

In response to my opening salvo that there was a "desire for desirelessness" throughout his music, Glass brought up the Beckett Shorts production. You Thesps should find this very interesting and controversial!


The reason for that/
In poetry is that/
We can say that/
The origin of/

The inspiration for music is not the language of music itself but the interaction of music with another medium.

Now/
It depends on/
For example, now/
If I were working on a piece of Beckett/
Which I just recently did/
A piece of/
Beckett Shorts/
That was done/
And Misha Baryshnikov was one of the actors/
It was in an off-Broadway set-up in New York/
But it was actually a very nice show/

[It] Was very much as you describe it/
It was very cool/
It was very detached/
But it was Beckett

So/
In other words/
The music came out of that context/
This/
A particular aesthetic which I admire/
Which I've always loved.

And I was looking for a musical -- not analog exactly -- but a kind of a musical response and setting for what was in the play[s].


[There followed a series of machinegun asides in which Glass made reference to movie score after movie score -- the more obscure ones -- to one of his operas, one of his symphonies... and with each mention he'd ask if I had seen or heard the thing. After saying no about five or six times, I finished up interrupting and excusing myself by explaining that my background was performing arts, that I'd seen Twyla Tharp's Company perform In The Upper Room and seen Robert Wilson's production of Einstein on the Beach (TWICE!) and a handful of the operas, seen Bang On A Can do Two Pages [torture!], seen Kronos do Mishima, driven thousands of kilometres to see his own ensemble... then I pleaded that Company was my favourite piece thus bringing him back onto (relatively) safer ground for me...]

[CHRIS BOYD:] SO I WAS DELIGHTED TO HEAR YOU WERE DOING MORE BECKETT...

[Philip Glass:] I work with Beckett when I can. Actually, when he was alive I worked with him a lot. But since he died some years ago, his estate has curtailed the use of music in his works. Even though he himself instructed me about how he wanted it, they claim he didn't have any connection to music which is absolutely nonsense.

So I'm not allowed to do it very often, but very recently I was able to do the one. We got permission. We had to get permission to use music! [laughs] Oh, gosh!

THE ESTATE ATTEMPTED TO CLOSE DOWN A PRODUCTION OF WAITING FOR GODOT IN SYDNEY RECENTLY... BECAUSE THEY DARED TO USE A DRUMMER!

And they claim to be protecting the work and, actually, they're ruining... They're ruining the opportunity for another [generation?] of Beckett lovers to interpret it. And that is the future of any work. The future is not what we do, it's the future work people after us do.

I mean/
Clearly/
They're not gonna be doing exactly what/

Let's not get started/
I'll get more angry!/
I've been the victim of that!

Not only with Beckett, but with Genet, with Brecht, with Kurt Weill... So many of the big estates are trying to rein in everything. And it's just horrible! Anyway, we don't need to talk about that.

That was basically my response to your/
[very slight pause]
I guess it was a question!

THERE WAS A BIT OF A QUESTION MARK AT THE END OF IT!

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