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.