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Feb 03 2012
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2011, dance, Dance Massive, Dance Massive, RealTime, reviews

Dance Massive: Journey of the tribe (reviewed: Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham’s Sunstruck)

Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck. Photo: Heidrun Löhr.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE CONTEXT MAKES! IN 2008, SUNSTRUCK FELT LIKE A WORK ABOUT THE DROUGHT— THE THICK, ENDLESS, DUSTY THING EVERYWHERE AROUND US ON THIS OLD ROCK OF A COUNTRY. THIS RAINY BUT APOCALYPTIC YEAR, I HEAR SOMEONE ASK IN THE FOYER, PRE-SHOW: “THIS IS NOT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, IS IT?” I SENSE FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR AN IMMINENT WAVE OF THEATRE AND DANCE, LEAVING US AWASH WITH DRAWING ROOM DRAMAS IN WHICH THE AID-WORKER DAUGHTER INTRODUCES HER BOYFRIEND, A SURVIVOR FROM A SUBMERGED ATOLL, TO HER CLIMATE SCIENTIST FATHER…BUT SUNSTRUCK IS NONE OF THESE.

One of the great benefits of Dance Massive is that it brings some important dance works that may not have received the attention they deserved to a receptive and curious audience. Having been among the relatively few who saw Sunstruck at the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, it is very rewarding to now see it delight a whole new audience.

Nick Sommerville, Sunstruck. Photo: Heidrun Löhr.

At the time, I compared it with the paintings of Russell Drysdale, to Camus’ protagonist who kills an Arab, blinded by the sun. The simple geometry of these works was concordant with the simple geometry of Sunstruck: the single source of light, the single circle of chairs for the audience, the black of the two male performers’ clothing. The series of gestures, interlocking (yet seemingly independent) movements that the two performers engage in—the youthfully strong, mannish Nick Sommerville and the older, fluid, catlike Trevor Patrick—build to create a universe of silent masculinity, in which one can only self-express whilst blinded by the sun. At the same time, the heat, the absence of rain, as much as it delivers them into ecstatic abandonment, also appears to strike them down. Or is this just a beginning of something new?

Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck. Photo: Heidrun Löhr.

In 2008, I saw a personal journey in Sunstruck, a sort of dictionary or compendium of particularly masculine Australian body language—there was great restraint, silent grief, competitiveness, care and extraordinary liberation of body and emotion which, unsurprisingly, ended in weeping. A great deal of the choreography, indeed, is very close in form to mime—staring at strong light, combing hair, smoking a cigarette. However, this time I saw what Helen Herbertson talks about in her director’s notes—a death, a childbirth, the ecstasy of existence, the heavy load of being alive. It was a journey of a tribe rather than of the individual.

But it is hard to describe Sunstruck, because it is not technically ‘about’ anything—it is an experience, rather than a work of representation. The crucial aspects of the work, though, are also the easiest to overlook: the great dark space, greetings from the artists, receiving a warm drink, sitting in a close circle. The atmosphere it creates—of quiet meditation, but a communal one, not unlike sitting around a campfire—is the container for the experience. If after the show has ended we all remain seated in our chairs, quietly enjoying the tangible community we now are, that would be why. We have seen different things in Sunstruck, but we have all shared a cup of the same tea.

Nick Sommerville and Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck. Photo: Heidrun Löhr.

Dance Massive: Sunstruck, concept collaboration Helen Herbertson, Ben Cobham, devisor, director Herbertson, design, light Cobham, performers Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 14-16; www.dancemassive.com.au

First published on the RealTime website, as a part of RealTime’s critical coverage of Dance Massive 2011. Reprinted in RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 12. The 2011 Dance Massive archive can be accessed here.

Feb 03 2012
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2011, dance, Dancehouse, RealTime, reviews

Revelling in the now (RW: The Little Con, Dancehouse)

Ryuichi Fujimura, Jonathan Sinatra, Alice Cummins. Video still: Ryuichi Fujimura.

MARTHA GRAHAM WROTE, VERY BEAUTIFULLY, “TO UNDERSTAND DANCE FOR WHAT IT IS, IT IS NECESSARY WE KNOW FROM WHENCE IT COMES AND WHERE IT GOES” (MARTHA GRAHAM, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1966).

Some theorists, such as André Lepecki, make a big deal out of the melancholy of the dance critic, imbuing the experience of writing about movement with a sense of loss (however unintentionally) that I have always found melodramatic. But the question of remembrance is related to culture, to fashion, to fame, to legacy and as such is more interesting to the critic and to the choreographer than to the dancer. To dance is to revel in the now.

Dance improvisation has to be understood as something very different from finished choreography. Choreography is to movement what a play is to stage presence: a set of directions, located outside particular time and space; universal and thus generic. Says William Forsythe: “The purpose of improvisation is to defeat choreography.” All the arguments made in Performance Studies, in favour of presence over representation, apply.

To witness an improvisational dance performance requires the observer to look beyond the movement itself. It cannot be judged as choreography, because it is deeply unrefined, unedited movement: at best serendipitous, often cacophonous. To watch improvisation is to watch a performer shed layers of performance until, if lucky, we are left with a body moving as if for the first time; a raw and vulnerable, unpredictable life; pure presence. As Paul Romano, one of the Little Con organisers, says, “Improvisation is living amplified.” In that sense, improvisation is more thoroughly dance than any other kind.

At The Little Con special, the audience sits in a cross-shaped line of chairs, dividing the performance space into four rectangles, each with a different ‘curator.’ The one closest to the entrance is animated from the start: Fiona Bryant and Lucy Farmer are engaged in frenzied movement anchored in a recognisable social reality, like over-caffeinated secretaries. At five-minute intervals, other rectangles join in. After an hour, they similarly fade out.

Different quadrants expand on different areas: Bryant and Farmer present a poppy, humorous and very accessible exploration of states under pressure. Tony Yap and his two dancers, on the other hand, explore both ritual movement and voice, using the tools of the Malay shamanistic trance dance tradition: singing on the very border of inarticulation accompanies movement. Peter Fraser, whose background is in Bodyweather, and his three dancers, work strongly as a cohesive team of bodies, splattering across the walls, chairs and floor of their quadrant, but always extraordinarily attuned to each other’s presence. In this wealth of movement around me, literally around me, I am only vaguely aware of what is happening in the last rectangle, occupied by Alice Cummins, practitioner of Body-Mind-Centering®, and collaborators.

As they increase, some collisions are very satisfying: Cummins’ presence electrifies the interrelations of Fraser’s quartet. Some are more disruptive of the precarious balances created. There appear at least glimpses of every pitfall of improvised performance: competition for attention, imitation as a means of achieving a semblance of unity, a certain aloofness as a vehicle for comedy. But interaction is sometimes hilariously consonant: as Tony Yap delivers a long, focused shamanistic gargle of sorts, Fiona Bryant, in a red dress, with scissors and shoulder pads, climbs on a chair and starts screaming in response.

The key to it all is the extraordinarily heightened presence of the performers, and the accordingly sharpened concentration of the audience. Since the movement cannot be predicted, there is no arc to any gesture. Except for the final 15 minutes, the absolute absence of structure creates an experience without horizon. Much of the joy comes from watching audience members respond with great focus to interaction that they cannot anticipate the ending of: two boys slowly leaning to one side of their chairs as Farmer appears to be attempting to walk over them. In another moment, Cummins shifts across the floor, but ends up thoroughly immersed in picking through my frilly skirt.

Only once it is over do we notice that the space has assumed the temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. It has been an exhausting, exhilarating hour. There is simply no melancholy to this experience, no sense of loss. As Martha Graham elaborates, the dance comes from the depths of man’s inner nature, and inhabits the dancer; when it leaves, it lodges itself in our memory. In The Little Con, this trajectory is revealed on stage from slow start to exhausted end. The mystery of the choreography, a finished thing which appears out of nowhere and is gone, is something quite different from movement that rises like a roar from the core of the dancer, levitates suspended and then slowly closes onto itself. These have been some of the most intensely focused minutes I have had as a performance audience, not unlike trance, or meditation. Who would have thought that our concentration span could be so long?

The Little Con is a monthly dance improvisation organized by a dedicated collective since 2005. It is hosted by Cecil Street Studio, the home of Melbourne’s improvisation community, but has also appeared at Deakin University and elsewhere. Sometimes it is free form, but throughout the year there are special, curated events, such as this one from curator Paul Romano.

The Little Con, curator Paul Romano, performers Emma Bathgate, Brendan O’Connor, Tony Yap, Lucy Farmer, Fiona Bryant, Peter Fraser, Kathleen Doyle, Alexandra Harrison, Jonathan Sinatra, Gretel Taylor, Alice Cummins; Dancehouse, Melbourne, Aug 6, www.thelittlecon.net.au.

First published in RealTime, issue #104, Aug-Sept 2011, e-dition.

Jan 24 2012
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2011, Artshouse, dance, performance, PERFORMANCE, published, RealTime, reviews

the mysteries of curation (reviewed, Arts House, season 2/2011 – Aphids, Team MESS, post, Gabrielle Nankivell, Joan Baixas)

Thrashing Without Looking, Aphids. Photo Ponch Hawkes.

INCREASINGLY, I WANT EACH ARTS HOUSE SEASON TO COME WITH A CURATORIAL STATEMENT.

Yes, the art world has, for at least a decade, been engaged in a furious debate about whether curatorship has come to supersede the work of art. Curation, in Anton Vidokle’s much-quoted words, now routinely oversteps the line, becoming a

reinforcement of authorial claims that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts. Movement in such a direction runs the serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists (e-flux Journal 16, May, 2010)

.
However, as Alison Croggon has put it elsewhere, without critical reflection on the art of the times, without drawing connections, instead of a culture we will merely have ‘a lot of art.’

While offering much to enjoy this year, Melbourne’s Arts House has so far presented us largely with a lot of art. While I concede that it might understand its role as presentational rather than culture-shaping, as serving the artist rather than imposing a zeitgeist, Arts House is nonetheless the premiere venue for live art in Victoria. It makes programming decisions that shape how this city understands an artform. Its lack of explanation does not diminish its curatorial power—it merely renders it opaque.

Finally, I am unsure whether artists benefit from this silence at all if, as this year, the programming presents works of clashing sensibilities; works that, without proper juxtaposition, appear to negate each other’s propositions, ideas and statements.

By way of example: members of Sydney-based Team MESS introduced two intriguing participatory works, both sitting broadly within the British-inflected tradition of live art in which the unpredictable, artless liveness of the performance event is its chief intriguing ingredient, and art-ness obtained almost exclusively from the framing of the encounter. The first, This Is It, is set up as a press conference for a non-existent film that—judging by the promotional material we are offered—merrily merges an infinitude of clichés of Australian cinema: a moody drama about a childless couple, haunted by suburban malaise and a mysterious dark-skinned stalker. The actors are terrific as diplomatic mouthpieces for the film: some with underlying anxieties (Malcolm Whittaker’s hands almost imperceptibly shaking throughout the evening), some unflappable in their pretty muteness (Kate Randall, perhaps a dumb starlet, but perhaps simply settled into her role as conference eye-candy); and finally Frank Mainoo, explaining that his character is simply “darkness,” “the Other” and “really a plot device more than a character.”

This Is It, Team MESS. Photo Ponch Hawkes.


The format opens up for playful interaction as the event opens for questions invited from the floor. Questions start pouring in: about the reason for including zombies, shooting in 3D, possible sequels, Pasolini influences, interlaced with inquiries into Dara Gill’s directing method and racism. It was thrilling to watch the performers respond to this barrage of challenges, rising to incorporate our flights of fancy while remaining true to the characters and the set-up. “Well,” opined critic Paul Harris, the host of the event, “I’d say it might be a racist movie, but it does not endorse racism.”

The second work was Malcolm Whittaker’s A Lover’s Discourse, a love-letter-writing project for perfect strangers. As any performative dimension is completely absent from this collaborative effort, it presented itself through participants’ personal accounts, followed by attempts to find their correspondents live on Omegle (a kind of chat-roulette; roulette-like, random pairing chat room). Although the event soon became tedious, as one’s recommended daily intake of irony was surpassed, it nonetheless ended with a queue to sign up for further letter writing (and me in it).

Both these works create only tenuous artistic frames around a collaborative exchange between participants who are only vaguely aware of the project’s agenda and in no way prevented from hijacking it. Indeed, the wide margin allowed for creative play is the biggest strength of both projects and much of the enjoyment seems to derive from actively testing the elasticity of the artful boundaries.

By contrast, Thrashing Without Looking, a project bringing together a number of prominent Melbourne-based live artists, divided the audience into two groups: one that assembled a karaoke video from a cryptic menu, and the other, strapped into video goggles (thus watching the event from the camera’s point of view), obediently executed their selection. Participation is the wrong word entirely to describe the audience’s role in this work. It is more accurate to think of us as theatre fodder, disoriented bodies reacting to a confusion of sensory inputs, or choosing through such a short list of options that a randomising script could have easily done the same job. However, the main interest of Thrashing Without Looking is in something else entirely: the old-fashioned blurring of mediated and live experience and the emotional and sensory vulnerability it provokes.

Post’s Who’s the Best? sails through similar waters, although the blurring here is, as usual, between the performers’ real and their performed selves. The technology is not only reduced to the bare bones of theatre (curtains and lights), but even those are wonky: the contest to decide which of the three members is the best is constantly undermined by the stage going about its own business, structuring the banter into a Shakespearean dramatic curve largely on light and sound alone (not dissimilar to Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s NO DICE).

Next to it, Talya Rubin’s Of The Causes of Wonderful Things, a one-woman play that involves a town in the American South, missing children, a private detective and many small props, looks like an archival piece. While Rubin’s is an evocative performance—her ability to shift character is instantaneously mesmerising—there is so much style in the work (the 1940s noir, which has come to replace the Gothic as immediate indicator of macabre) and so little evidence of the concerns present in the rest of the season (liveness, mediation of reality, audience experience) that these qualities all but disappear in context.

I left My Shoes on the Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain, Gabrielle Nankivell. Photo Ponch Hawkes.


The same could be said for Gabrielle Nankivell’s poetic I Left My Shoes on Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain. It is a dance work weighed down by dense narration closely collaborating with sound and light (Luke Smiles and Benjamin Cisterne) to create a syncretic image of anxieties and fears plaguing a young woman. While technically impeccable and brilliantly performed, formally it is no more than an introspective dance poem, and it is unclear what prompted its inclusion in this ostensibly live art program.

Finally, what to make of the inclusion of Joan Baixas’ Pregnant Earth? An astonishing work, which incorporates live painting, puppetry and spoken narrative, from one of Spain’s great artists, it was both timeless and not of the moment. It revealed a depth of craft and a relatively independent set of concerns that needed to be somehow brought back into relation with the more fumbling, but fresher, set of local performances we had witnessed immediately prior. Without such a context, Baixas’ delicate and violent narrative, which moved from the burnt National Library of Sarajevo to a puppet that did not like to perform, was both weighty and stupefying.

We have come to expect such radical decontextualisation from mainstream festivals, which in Australia function exclusively as showcase. Indeed, Pregnant Earth would have made perfect sense had it been programmed in the Melbourne International Arts Festival. And yet, if even food and film festivals shape their programs with some subheadings and introductions, how is it possible that suggesting the same to an arts festival has become a hallmark of art sabotage?

Arts House: This Is It, created by Team MESS, performers Frank Mainoo, Natalie Randall, Malcolm Whittaker, Meat Market, Aug 5; A Lover’s Discourse, devised by Malcolm Whittaker, Meat Market, Aug 12; Thrashing Without Looking, creators Martyn Coutts, Elizabeth Dunn, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms, Willoh S Weiland, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 3-7; Who’s the Best?, devised and performed by post: Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose with Eden Falk, Meat Market, Aug 3-6; Of the Causes of Wonderful Things, writer, deviser, performer Talya Rubin, co-deviser, director Nick James, Meat Market, Aug 11-13; I Left My Shoes on Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain, text, physical content & performance Gabrielle Nankivell, sound Motion Laboratories – Luke Smiles, design Benjamin Cisterne, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 11-13; Pregnant Earth, devisor, performer Joan Baixas, Arts House Meat Market, Melbourne Aug 16-17

First published in RealTime Arts, issue #105, Oct-Nov 2011, pg. 36.

Jan 24 2012
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2011, Chunky Move, dance, published, RealTime, reviews

from the fears of innocents (reviewed: Adam Wheeler’s It Sounds Silly for Chunky Move)

It Sounds Silly, Chunky Move. Photo Jeff Busby.

ADAM WHEELER’S IT SOUNDS SILLY IS THE FOURTH PRODUCTION IN THE NEXT MOVE, A SERIES OF DANCE PERFORMANCES BY YOUNG CHOREOGRAPHERS, COMMISSIONED AND PRODUCED BY CHUNKY MOVE. AFTER BYRON PERRY AND ANTHONY HAMILTON’S I LIKE THIS, MICHELLE HEAVEN’S DISAGREEABLE OBJECT, AND STEPHANIE LAKE’S MIX TAPE, HERE IS ANOTHER SHORT, DRAMATURGICALLY MODEST WORK.

Next Move productions have so far all been different sorts of ‘dance in a box’ products, armed with extraordinary clarity of vision and purpose, as such being useful as mini dance primers. Positioning It Sounds Silly outdoors, on an important pedestrian nexus point adjacent to Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station, not exceedingly past the peak hour, was therefore a constructive intervention. At its primary level, it made It Sounds Silly work as a particularly astute piece of public art, one that presented a resplendent image of Australian youth back to its people. For every dozen spectators rugged up in the ad-hoc auditorium, there clearly to support a son or daughter performing, at least two office workers or urban joggers stopped in their tracks or looked momentarily over their shoulders, entranced. Robin Fox’s large-scale video installation, Benjamin Cisterne’s equally elaborate lighting and the tangible charm of the 28 young dancers constituted a spectacle that combined simplicity, beauty and innocence as well as sense of community and purpose—as if the city had acquired a very well behaved, underage, open-air disco.

Using as its starting point the dancers’ childhoods, It Sounds Silly builds as a series of images of the strange things the performers believed when they were young. It quickly progresses from humorous (“when I was little, I ate a lot of cheese, because I thought it would make my voice more squeaky”) to linger on the frightening. At one memorable point, the dancers line up from the oldest to the youngest, each introducing themselves and one of their fears. The fear line-up changed between performances, reflecting the dancers’ momentary preoccupations, but a clear pattern was nonetheless established: quick descent from fully formed relationship and identity anxieties of the 20-somethings to more inchoate fears of the younger kids—falling, social embarrassment, monsters under the bed, right down to marrying a woman named Helen if one’s surname is Pellin.

The degree of metaphor varies, from mime-like literalisation, via swaying monsters built of clusters of dancers, to complex compositions teetering on formlessness, in which phantasmagorias of childhood are represented as half-image, half-mood. The latter are the most successful: in their labyrinthine, repetitive, playgroundish, unsurveyable synchronicity, they manage to simultaneously evoke the work of two Flemish masters: Brueghel’s ethnographic figuration and Bosch’s conceptual fantasies. Close up, these semi-trained dancers perform with physical elasticity, imprecision and undeniable freshness—they are predominantly interesting as bodies with strong, unschooled presence. However, from further away, it is possible to appreciate the large-scale intelligence of the stage imagery, and the performance reveals that, just like Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, it is much more than a mere jumble of intriguing detail. Wheeler’s choreography, respectful of the disorientation in time and space native to a child’s worldview, adopts composition rules that are thus properly pre-Copernican.

A certain kind of framing is crucial to the enjoyment of this work. While It Sounds Silly is hardly groundbreaking, it is coherently conceived, intelligently plotted and courageously executed. As a work based on the physical and mental qualities of its young performers, it is rigorously truthful to its material.

Chunky Move, Next Move & SIGNAL: It Sounds Silly, director, choreographer Adam Wheeler, multimedia designer Robin Fox, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, sound Alisdair Macindoe, costumes Benjamin Hancock, SIGNAL, Flinders Walk, Melbourne, August 19-20

First published in RealTime Arts, issue #105, Oct-Nov 2011, pg. 16.

Jan 24 2012
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2011, Eurokaz, PERFORMANCE, published, RealTime, reviews

how to speak about tomorrow (reviewed: Dewey Dell, Phillipe Quesne, Faustin Linyekula)

how to speak about tomorrow

Big Bang. Photo Martin Argyroglo Callias Bey.

WE ARE LIVING IN UNCERTAIN TIMES. STABLE CLIMATE, LIBERAL DEMOCRACY, CAPITALISM AND THE GLOBAL DOMINANCE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION ARE ALL LOOKING LIKE THEIR TIME MIGHT HAVE PASSED. A SIMILAR SENSE OF IMPENDING CRISIS IS TANGIBLE ACROSS THE STATE FUNDED ARTS IN EUROPE. THIS YEAR’S EUROKAZ PROCEEDED IN A SPIRIT OF AUSTERITY, ITS BUDGET REDUCED BY A STAGGERING 30% AT THE 11TH HOUR.

With the program accordingly thinner, it was hard to escape the feeling that much contextualising of the remaining works had also disappeared. The curatorial thread of the festival was reduced to a dashed, disconnected line: successful works remained, but were significantly less eloquent about each other than is usually the case.

Between tableau theatre, Congolese performance, dance on science and an entire video retrospective on Christoph Schlingensief, critics had to deal with a cacophony. However, the highlights of the festival could be lined up as examples—if stand-alone—on how to speak, how to make a sound, on the future of the world.

noise

This year’s program-within-the-program consisted of four performances by emerging artists, created within the European Focus on Art and Science in the Performing Arts. Unfortunately, the majority of works presented could be dismissed as Chunky-Move-on-a-Shoestring. The conceptual framework often appeared no deeper than placing a machine among the dancers and turning it on, but the machines—unlike Chunky’s often brilliantly innovative technology—seldom excited with their possibilities. So Santasangre’s Bestiale Improvviso (Beastly all of a Sudden) delivered dancerly twitching to harsh sounds and stormy lighting, atmospheric but hardly thought-through. Technology in this context, disappointingly, was largely interpreted as noise and flashing lights, a well-worn metaphor for impending catastrophe. In contrast, WE GO vzw/Vincenzo Carta presented Gnosis #1, a research-driven work, the main thrust of which was the dancers’ states of mind activating stage lights of different colours. However, while this resulted in fairly opaque stage business, the mechanics of the translation of mind to light was never explained sufficiently, leaving the audience sceptical as to the exact method employed and unable to judge its success or failure.

I would single out Dewey Dell’s Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti (Furious Fifties, Roaring Forties, Shrieking Sixties) as the most successful in this program—not because it offered significantly greater dramaturgical thrust (it did not), not even because it engaged with technology beyond the obvious (it did not), but because its sheer strangeness was unapologetically devoid of either facile catastrophism or technophiliac laziness. Three young women, the next generation of the Castellucci family, appear on stage in padded black unitards that exaggerate their thighs, white-painted arms and faces in similar blistering white, but with central black circles, resembling the traditional Venetian moretta (or ‘mute maid’—a small, round woman’s mask, held in place by biting onto the button on the underside). A series of very simple movements—arms slicing, small hops, upper body swaying—rigorously correlates with Demetrio Castellucci’s music, a rhythmic bunch of roaring, shrieking noises, every so often embracing a broad tune, such as a two-tone siren wail. But instead of attempting to illustrate a tragedy, Dewey Dell create a dark, childishly primal pantomime of a badly remembered nightmare. There are seas, shipwrecks, maidens in distress and sandmen in this show, all executed in an aesthetic realm halfway between Lemony Snicket and Michel Gondry’s music video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World.” Vaguely built around the mystical harshness of the Antarctic winds, the performance lacks the maturity of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s adult works, but is powerfully visceral in the best sense of the word.

silence

Big Bang. Photo Martin Argyroglo Callias Bey.

From these relatively superficial explorations of a noisy cataclysm, Philippe Quesne and Vivarium Studio proceed to play with silence. Big Bang, defying expectations, opens with a woman reading at a table, silently constructing the word BANG from wooden letters. The end of the world again. However, instead of pathos, Quesne offers soft, benevolent humour. The evolution recommences. Amoeba-like creatures, crawling on barren land, rise into hairy apes around a fire and surprisingly quickly evolve into humans sitting in an upturned car, reading Chris Ware’s comics and drinking canned beer. A lake appears, as do astronauts, and someone is always walking around with a sketchbook, finding aesthetic pleasure in the apocalypse. The scale shifts between miniature and lifesize, a number of performers in green overalls walk around unperturbed, setting the scene, and a small island is formed from the debris upstage.

Quesne’s background is in set design, and the work builds as a series of gradually shifting tableaux; the dramatic structure is entirely unencumbered by words. His professed aim is to develop a new dramaturgy that evolves around an almost anthropological observation of the human microcosm, sidelining the simplistic inquiries of text-based theatre. Ambitious. But Big Bang—despite sometimes gruelling slowness—is never hostile to the spectator; Quesne has quickly become an audience favourite in France. His post-Bang trajectory from plankton to postmodernism is gentle, melancholy and humorous and we are quietly entertained despite having sat through the end of the world—twice.
However, Big Bang also plunges one into the sludge of First World resignation, no less genuine, or troubling, for its Tati-like sweetness. Watching it almost feels like making peace with despair—or perhaps walking into and through it.

talking

More more more future. Photo Agathe Poupeney.

Faustin Linyekula and Studio Kabako’s More more more…future begins where Quesne ends, with impotent silence at the end of the world. Linyekula starts at a real, non-metaphorical place of catastrophe: his native Democratic Republic of Congo, still blistering from the biggest war in African history.

Trying to use the social power of music, Linyekula wants to marry ndombolo—hugely popular Congolese pop music, wild and energetic and profoundly escapist, carrying with itself a culture of bling—to the political spirit of punk. The show is structured as a musical performance, centre-stage given over to the Kinshasa guitar sensation Flamme Kapaya. He performs a powerful mix of hip-swinging ndombolo and raging rock to the seething lyrics of poet Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, a political prisoner in Kinshasa and Linyekula’s childhood friend.

So far, so predictable. But the emotional trajectory of this concert is devastating. Muhindo’s lyrics unravel the history of Congo, from clinging to tradition, idols and ideology to the revolution against Mobutu, and the illusory promise of democracy that ends in civil war. Muhindo weaves in Zarathustra’s thoughts on the ever-turning cycle of history, but continues to plead for a break to the pattern: “more than a glorious past, give us the future.” The future here stands not even for a time in which our optimistic plans come to fruition, but a time in which optimism has a chance to exist. It is a call for hope, the same one spoken about by Deo Masugi in SBS’s documentary Go Back To Where You Came From (director Ivan Mahoney). After 10 years in a refugee camp, “we can’t ask for anything more than tomorrow.”

While the musicians are dressed in ‘authentic’ ndombolo glitter and gold, the three dancers wear frilly, ballooning outfits made from refugee bags [cheaply made sacks of woven nylon fibres. RT Eds]. They begin with simple ndombolo dancing. As the music heaves and grows in anger, the dance transforms into trance, madness and, finally, violence. The energy on stage is numbing. Why not live for today, if there is no tomorrow? “Carpe diem, even if it’s the middle of the night.” And then, after the physical fighting has subsided, the thread of the performance is slowly picked up again.

Writing on political performance, cardinal Flemish dramaturg Marianne Van Kerkhoven has said, “A process of truly interiorising the social options is for the ‘political artist’ probably the most important artistic deed.” This is a profoundly political work, agitating without propaganda and empathetic without resignation. Unlike others in the program, it is not a romantically apocalyptic narrative, but an attempt to articulate a way out of a real cataclysm. In a Gramscian sense, it couples pessimism of intellect with optimism of the will. Linyekula does not romanticise the political power of music, nor African sensuality, but neither does he cerebrally avoid them. Instead, he acknowledges ndombolo’s agonistic tendencies, seeks to uncover its generative potential and allows it to disintegrate as it naturally would. Yet the performance does not end in despair, but with sombre, tenacious hope. Linyekula goes that one step beyond Robyn Orlin’s Dressed to Kill…Killed to Dress… (RT 87,p38), not simply staging a culture of escapism and excess, but pushing it to come to its own catharsis.

An ethical question that increasingly troubles me at Eurokaz is the misplaced colonialism of the continuous importation of First World melancholy and cynicism, through art, into a culture of a developing country. It is often genuinely unsettling to see the apathy of a consumer society, in which all of one’s insignificant wishes are a priori sated, performed in front of an audience of precariously-employed, politically disenfranchised, economically doomed citizens of an unstable democracy. Last year’s Ballad of Ricky and Ronny (RT 98, p125) was one such instance, this year’s Big Bang another. The high value accorded to such art, its forms and ideas, always teeters on the possibility of creating an educated apathy where it is least needed and imports melancholy as a baseless fashion.

There is a place for melancholy performance, and for apocalypse, but there is also a somewhat conspicuous excess of both in the world today—perhaps a natural extension of the general state of crisis we are living through. There is a lot more to take home—from the kind of questioning to the cathartic path out—a lot more that is intelligent, emotionally rich and, ultimately, new from the work of Faustin Linyekula.

Bestiale Improvviso, Santasangre, authors Diana Arbib, Luca Brinchi, Maria Carmela Milano, Pasquale Tricoci, Roberta Zanardo, MSU, June 28; Gnosis #1, WE GO vzw/Vincenzo Carta, concept, choreography Vincenzo Carta, concept, soundscape Ongakuaw, MCUK, June 29; Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti, Dewey Dell, choreography Teodora Castellucci, performers Sara Angelini, Agata Castellucci, Teodora Castellucci, sound design Demetrio Castellucci, set and light Eugenio Resta, MSU, June 29; Big Bang, Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio, concept, direction Philippe Quesne, artistic and technical collaboration Yvan Cledat, Cyril Gomez-Mathieu, production Vivarium Studio, ZKM, July 4-5; More more more… future, Faustin Linyekula/Studios KABAKO, author Faustin Linyekula, music Flamme Kapaya, Patou ‘Tempête’ Kayembe, Le Coq, Cédric ‘Béton’ Lokamba, Patient Mafutala Useni, dancers Dinozord, Papy Ebotani, Faustin Linyekula, text Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, production Studios Kabako, Dance Centre Zagreb, July 3, 5; Eurokaz festival, Zagreb, June 27-July 5

First published in RealTime Arts, issue #105, Oct-Nov 2011, pg. 4.

Dec 11 2011
5 Comments
MKA, politics, reviews, theatre

RW: The Economist + Addendum

1.

With The Economist, the little MKA theatre draws to a close an impressive year. Pushing for new writing in all forms (domestic, international, staged, rehearsedly read, commissioned, unearthed), its effort in getting dramatic text seen and heard has really made it apparent how little dramatic text one could get to before. We did not know what we did not have, yet it seems indispensible now, and that is certainly a great compliment to the MKA.

2.

The Economist, a theatrically astute meditation on Anders Behring Breivik, is one of the most exciting theatre works I have seen this year. The writing, joyous and rich, has been put on stage with great dramaturgical and directorial intelligence. There have been a few kinds of dramaturgy which this country has had a lot of accomplishment in: the anxious surrealism (Katz, The Rabble), the middle-class dreamy realism (Holloway, Hardie), the high-concept performance (Elbow Room, certain kinds of puppetry and circus); but until this work I do not think I have seen any political theatre worth writing home about. Even in its own, suburbanly evasive way, The Economist points to a homegrown way of tackling big questions that, on its own, is enough of a reason to recommend it. The season has been extended, and closes in a week’s time.

3.

In a nutshell, The Economist is based on the life and work of Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian who, earlier in 2011, killed 77 people in the Oslo area, largely teenagers on a summer camp associated with the Norwegian Labor Party. Fuelling Breivik’s one-man terrorist attack was a murky soup of right-wing ideas and beliefs: islamophobia, anti-feminism, white supremacy, cultural conservatism, ultranationalism, anti-multiculturalism and antipathy to something called ‘cultural Marxism’. Interestingly, only days before the premiere of the play, a panel of experts found Breivik insane, rather than a cold-blooded murderer, re-igniting the debate on whether a white European enacting right-wing beliefs is immune from the label of terrorism.

It seems that the consensus is that, no, he can only be an exception – Breivik’s misdeeds cannot be equated with his entire civilization, the way Al Qaeda for many synecdochically represents an entire violent, West-hating Islam. Alison Croggon thinks this is bad, Melbourne’s tabloid press (which kicked a small fuss over the play) that it is only natural. However, The Economist intervenes in this debate rather interestingly, bringing to life the many obsessions, delusions and shall we say quirks of Breivik’s existence. Desire to join the army; militant anti-feminism and general inability to treat women as human beings; delusional paranoias; fears of disease, extending to wearing a mask indoors and refusing to eat his mother’s food; obsession with his appearance; and, of course, a raging conviction that Europe must be defended from a range of evils (Marxists, Arabs, women) by the power of Knights Templar et cetera.

The extent to which Breivik’s madness is fuelled by societal input is entirely up for discussion, not least because he has, so far, acted in isolation. There is no army of Breivik. I am not sure that equating one kind of violence with another is the right methodology to discuss the broader questions of cultural orientalism, economic and cultural consequences of colonialism, and the general inadequacy of neo-liberal economics, fuelled rather more by ideology than any praxis, to nurture developing economies into prosperity. But, while MKA artistic director, and author of The Economist, Tobias Manderson-Galvin, was quoted in the said local tabloid press saying that Breivik was “no madder than John Howard or Peter Costello”, the play does not in any significant way say the same. Quite the contrary, The Economist is a portrait of a delusional psychotic. It produced an even less tangible connection between a society and an individual than The Baader Meinhof Complex did in regards to its own Red Army Faction – and the latter was generally understood as a thorough critique of its subjects.

4.

What happens in the play, though? Breivik has been renamed Andrew Bolt Berwick (a mash-up of one of Breivik’s pseudonyms and our own right-wing rabble-rouser Andrew Bolt), but otherwise it is a biopic. A series of vignettes from Breivik’s life – imaginatively dramatised, with great recourse to his many, many, many writings, from diaries to manifestos – is presented in almost-chronological order. Breivik held in the police for graffitying. Breivik undergoes plastic surgery in the USA. Breivik takes steroids in the gym. Swedish neo-Nazi singer Saga gives her condolences to the bereaved families. Breivik joins a hunting club. Breivik buys a gun in Prague. Breivik buys prostitutes, but is unable to have sex with them. There is pop-flavoured humour in each and every scene, drawn out by the strong performances and snappy direction. It is driven by Breivik’s loopy, increasingly unhinged worldview. The world of the play morphs from a hipster Scandinavia into a semi-surreal Image-Fiction of sorts, in which our own reality is mirrored through the ironic prism of psychotic delusion. It is beautiful throughout, but that is part of the irony.

Addendum: 4a.

The irony here is of a particular, post-2006, hipster kind. The entire cast is clad in a weird, IKEA-coloured uniform of beige pants and red jumpers, supposedly clothes Breivik was wearing when arrested, but also a colour palette of Scandinavia if there ever was one. There is a deer head on the wall. There is a Norwegian flag. Picture-perfect Scandinavia is among the first things mentioned in the text, and it is not the Scandinavia of welfare state and progressive taxation, but a Scandinavia of designer furniture and Roxette. In terms of mood and feel, this production takes not so much the political-satirical angle, but a detachedly-twee atmosphere-building found in all those films featuring Jason Schwartzman or Michael Cera. In other words, this is not a critique of some political evils of contemporary Norway, as much as a parodic picture of some dreamy, dislocated, retirement-village-like foreign land. The real event that is the pretext to this text seems rather accidental to the imaginative universe created atop. What happens in the play is rendered with such ironic over-the-topness as if the fact that it really happened is either uncertain or accidental to the text.

5.

Van Badham, the dramaturg and director of the play, is a major contributing force to the success of the production. The text has been pruned into a tight, dramaturgically cohesive work to an extent rarely seen in unfunded independent theatre in Australia. Taking enormous advantage of the simple space, and a few props, the cast of six announce each scene with its stage directions, use the props at hand to create a live score to each scene (effective, engrossing and much commented upon), and inhabit a vast range of characters gender-neutrally. Cast as Breivik is Zoe Dawson, a tall, blonde, slim and female human being, while the remaining cast is largely dark-haired, bearded, male. Masking tape Xs mark the location of objects.

All this Brechtianism has a funny effect of safety: we are simply not allowed to plunge into empathy for Andrew Berwick, the delusional right-wing terrorist. But Brechtian inquiry into systemic conditions of individual problems is, as I wrote earlier, not included: very, very few connections are ever drawn between Berwick the individual and Europe as a social context. In one, the family-friendly face of the neo-Nazi underground, Swedish singer Saga, expresses shock and horror at being nominated one of Breivik’s idols, in a honeyed, toasty voice, and ends with some best wishes, throaty and motherly-sounding and warm, for a strong white race, and a Nazi salute.

6.

More moments of this sort would have been in consonance with the production’s Brechtianism worn-on-sleeve, but they would have also counterpointed some of the stranger effects of the staging. For example, it is very hard not to sympathise with Zoe Dawson, whose girliness makes Andrew Berwick look like a helpless victim, and neutralises the violence directed towards women (of which there is much). Thus there is an extra layer of irony in this production: while the text is largely driven by the surreal humour of Breivik’s delusions (and ironically detached in its own right), the staging takes to the letter much of our (pre- or just conscious) sympathy for him, and depicts Andrew Berwick in a way so easy to empathise with that, if we shut our ears, this really could be a neo-Nazi text in which a young blonde woman is tragically led to her own demise by a crooked society of short, dark, bearded men. Something akin to The Birth of a Nation, or The Sound of Music (in Zizek’s reading).

7.

In between these layers of irony and a scaffold of utter craft, I don’t know that it is possible to even talk about an overall effect. I might speculate that we are distanced from Anders Breivik the terrorist, but encouraged to empathise with the poor Zoe Dawson, who happens to commit exactly the same murders as Breivik, but in fiction. In this reading, we can indulge in our little anti-social fantasies while never having to admit that they follow through to real deaths. Or, perhaps, I could conclude that Zoe Dawson’s Berwick is cut off from his social context while the playwright itself, and the entire theatre-going conversation around the play insists on Breivik as a symptom of a right-wing conspiracy. Therefore, the play sells itself to an audience as a work of ideological certainty, while it really tells a much more complex story of psychological disturbance, effectively subverting its own promise. Or, that this is a complex issue where the goal of the artist is to say: “See, Herald Sun accuses the arts of being a waste of taxpayer’s money on left-wing propaganda, but what we have really created, and continue to create, is complex and sophisticated analysis of a troubled human being, and we do that with our men as well as with yours…”. In this reading, the entire political purpose of the play might be to get an upper hand with the right-wing population of Australia and the right-wing media itself, all while having a very long laugh at the poor delusional Breivik…

All of these readings are possible, and I don’t think any one excludes the others. It is certainly a work wrapped up in multiple ironies, far and far beyond anything that was happening when David Foster Wallace was writing about irony. It is, in a certain sense, totally heartless; and it is also, in another sense, amoral – irony is a disavowal.

8.

It is also troublingly close to the in-yer-face forms that were blossoming in Europe throughout the 1990s, that have been superseded there, and that I cannot praise for originality for that reason. There seems to be some kind of law in place that Australia lags only ever about 10 years behind what is happening in the mainstream elsewhere (the margin is another story, more complex), and I would like to see that law revoked.

9.

But, for all its moral shortcomings, The Economist remains political theatre, and more interesting political theatre than anything I’ve seen in Australia in a very long time. It is also technically excellent. And I will always rather see something as bewilderingly thought-provoking as The Economist than something I know I will simply like.

Addendum: 9a.

I need to qualify my last paragraph: there is a moral shortcoming to this text, and it is its detached irony. The problem with all irony, but particularly the post-1970s irony of young people, and even more particularly of the one exercised by twenty-somethings in Australia in 2011, is that it is a self-conscious irony fuelled by:

1) naïveté about how the world works, fuelled by general lack of variegated and diverse life experience (suburban upbringing, lack of international travel, Australian media isolation from wider world and limited participation in social, political, etc global trends)
2) a sense of personal deficiency born out of a perceived absence of real life experience (the meaning of which is personally defined, but also societally as 1) )
3) a self-consciousness born out of 2)
4) an awareness that an entire cohort is feeling 3), and therefore this collective sense of individual deficiency is statistically incorrect, which results in
5) a suspicion that, if the feeling of 4) is universal, then somewhere down the line we have all been lied to, and there is no real life to be experienced in the first place…

…which brings to life the particular unreality and aestheticism in creating the hipster Scandinavia in The Economist, and is a troubling angle from which to be political. But:

6) all of this is further complicated by any international travel one does, or real experience (in the form of armed conflict, fame, enormous personal wealth, association with famous figures or places or events, etc). Such experiences, if in sufficiently small doses, add enough social capital to one’s life to get them ahead in the rat race of irony. If I may draw on personal experience now, I was told by a young male theatre artist from Melbourne, once upon a time, that he feels like he needs to travel to a war zone in order to experience ‘weird shit’.

The moral issue is that, in The Economist, the Breivik massacre and events leading up to it, are in no small dose presented as some such weird shit.

10.

The question of sensitivity/respect should be brought up now. It is not-a-little-bit alarming that almost every review I have read of the work insinuates that there is some political analysis in place here, although, to their credit, they all specify that it is in the service of dark humour. Is this disrespectful? Quite probably so, actually.

But how does one show respect to something one does not understand? Certainly not through false sympathy, in which one draws on one’s experience of pet hamster dying in order to conjure up emotions likely to experience at a massacre… There is a great deal of such theatre in Australia (and with a good justification, for this is a very peaceful country with a keen interest nonetheless in the dramatic human interest story, from however afar), all with political pretensions, and most of it is shit. It is falsely felt, its emotions insincere, its analysis inadequate. The naive irony of The Economist is, paradoxically if you wish, a more genuine response to a tragedy than false reverence would have been, in which we stand in silence while we feel the hysterical urge to giggle.

Further reading:
Cameron Woodhead
Chris Boyd in The Australian
Eugyeene in Promptside

Onomatopoeia on the controversy surrounding the play

The Economist by Tobias Manderson-Galvin, directed by Van Badham. Design by David Samuel, sound design by Nick McCorriston, lighting design by Julia Knibbs, costumes by Chloe Greaves. With Marcus Mckenzie, Zoey Dawson, James Deeth, Conor Gallacher, Sarah Walker and Peter Paltos. MKA Theatre, MKA Pop-Up Theatre, 73 Nicholson St. Abbotsford. Season extended until 16 December. Book here.

Sep 26 2011
10 Comments
classics, Daniel Schlusser, formal inquiry, masculinity, reviews, theatre, women

RW: The Dollhouse

The Doll’s House

0. NORA
I have seen two versions of this play just recently: Anja Maksić’s LUTKINA KUĆA/ZMIJA MLADOŽENJA (Doll’s House / Viper Groom) at Eurokaz in 2008 (here’s the account), and Thomas Ostermeier’s Schaubuehne production (called NORA) on DVD in 2010. I am not unusual in that. Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House – which I may occasionally refer to as ‘Nora’ in this text, because that is its officially unofficial name in Europe – is the most performed play in the world. Even in Australia, a place fairly meagrely serviced with theatre by any global measure, there are doll’s houses springing up at universities, at Fringe time, at arts festivals (e.g. Mabou Mines’ DOLLHOUSE at Brisbane Festival 2006). This is a play staged for show, not for servicing the text. There is hardly anyone left today who doesn’t know this play, doesn’t know that Nora Helmer is the childlike wifey of a Norwegian banker Torvald, doesn’t know that she ends the play by slamming the door that leads out of her marriage, doesn’t know that this was a scandal on stage when it premiered. The Doll’s House is a play with a cultural significance that goes far beyond its pure literary value, and for this reason the text itself is distinctly unimportant to the productions of this play. The audience is not here for the plot. We know the play well. We are here for style. We are here to see how this particular creative team will grapple with the conundrum that is this text. We are here to see how she will solve the technical problems particular to the play (the changed condition of women, which largely neutralises the weight of the ending), and how she will claim her space in a very crowded arena of interpreters.

This is our ground zero, in the discussion of this work. This is a play that a director chooses in order to make a personal statement – not in order to honour the playwright. Western culture has already done that.

1. DANIEL SCHLUSSER
Everyone who is anyone seemed to be there at the opening of Daniel Schlusser’s THE DOLLHOUSE, a semi-revival of the work he made in late 2007 with VCA acting students (although ‘on’ them might be a better choice of words, the way choreography is done ‘on’ bodies). It was a praised work then, and a pocket-sized one on top. It was also the first work Schlusser had done in Melbourne in a long time, having come back from Germany not long ago, and the first of a series that would shake Melbourne’s theatre theatre scene up. From it followed: LIFE IS A DREAM in 2008, revived in 2010, THE ZOMBIE STATE in 2008, A href=”http://guerrillasemiotics.com/2009/04/rw-peer-gynt/”>PEER GYNT and POET NO. 7 in 2009, THE HOLLOW in 2010, and MACBETH just recently, but at Monash (raise hands ye who have seen it, and tell us what it was like).

Schlusser has attracted a devout following in these years*. There are very few theatre theatre directors in this town that could be classified as architects, as opposed to construction workers or builders. Apart from Schlusser, and by-now-expat Kosky, only Liminal Theatre’s Sitarenos and Draffin, and to some extent Marcel Dorney and Jenny Kemp (who use original text) come to mind**.

To some extent, there isn’t enough straight theatre in this country for radical interpretations to get desirable (on which I wrote here), and to an extent we are lacking the deep understanding of classical texts, their context, their impact, their importance, their critiques, their successors, in order to be able to read radical interpretations. We are all lacking this knowledge: the directors, the audiences, the critics.

Schlusser’s work, however, has gained traction despite its hermeneutic complexity, because he has made it a hallmark of his style to make works on at least two, sometimes six or more, levels. Almost every work of his I have seen has had the ability to function both as an extremely intelligent deconstruction of a canonical text, and a sort of freeform, chaotic stage event that one can appreciate, in a way similar to how Forced Entertainment’s BLOODY MESS could be appreciated, without having even the most general idea of how it related to any text at all. His version of Calderon’s Life is a Dream was, on the surface, a story of six siblings trapped in a basement their entire life, reminiscent of that year’s paramount tabloid story, who make up power games to fight boredom. His version of Ibsen’s troll fantasia Peer Gynt was a bogan wedding rehearsal, followed by a boozy house party. If you knew the text, each one of these productions was an absolute feast of intertextuality, with classic quotes reduced to non-verbal detail (Peer Gynt playing with some onions in the corner of the stage for about five seconds), but if you didn’t, you still felt embraced by the event. A certain kind of obscure, unfriendly hermeneuticism which is so often a quality of postmodernist theatre direction was here annulled.

But there are deeper qualities to Schlusser’s method. While turning Peer Gynt into a bogan party comes with a series of beneficial effects – shortening and rephrasing the text, finding surprising contemporary cultural equivalents for what are often alienatingly different circumstances of the original text – these are effects that are, on their own, enough to gain an Australian director the label ‘auteur’, and their importance might be highly overstated.

More interestingly, reducing the time of the work means reducing the entire play to a single situation, and this has allowed Schlusser to make some extraordinary statements about the source texts, far beyond a simple transposition. To place Calderon’s text into a basement of wild, unsocialised children is to locate the Baroque European court at the very extreme of incestuous, isolated idleness. Similarly, his PEER GYNT shed the frills – the ships, the trolls, the pyramids, the asylum – to become a story of a very immature little boy, fed the lines of his life by his mum and his girlfriend, at a party where nothing anyone does can really matter. It re-played the grand drama of the original play as soap-operatic melodrama, and found emotional hollowness in every utterance kept on stage. This movement semiotically sideways is in Schlusser’s work always surprising, but meticulously judged.

A consequence of this move sideways is that the text habitually stops being the vessel of truth, both of life generally, and of the true meaning of the performance, and turns into a voiced delusion: a game played by basement-bound children in LIFE IS A DREAM, or an invented adventure of a boy nobody is taking seriously in PEER GYNT. It is entirely legitimate to appreciate Schlusser’s productions as illustrations of how we use fiction to give grandeur, drama, height, to the banality of our reality.

Then there is the extraordinary quality to the performances he elicits. Schlusser is, like no other director I know, capable of stopping the actors from acting, and settling them into a long-lasting low-performativity timbre, in which they are indistinguishable from stage hands (but there are also never any stage hands here – everyone is part of the show). This has made the entire PEER GYNT, and large stretches of his other shows, look like improvisation, or the pre-dramatic beginning – you know those few minutes at the very beginning of a certain kind of performance, in which the actors arrive, fumble about, speak to each other in a low voice, settling into the stage? – of a dramatic performance. This kind of performance creates a constant, durational, low-intensity buzz, and is interesting to watch the way a street corner is interesting to watch. The energy of the stage swells and subsides, pockets of intensity build in corners, gigantic storms occasionally sweep the entire space, and sometimes the action is as dispersed as the shaking of leaves on a tree. It lends itself to being observed as rhythm, or patterns of energy, and is accessible through all sorts of swarmy, crowdy and weathery metaphors. Since everything important happens as detail, sometimes inaudible conversation, one becomes engrossed, and focused in a way that is really rare in our contemporary world. This is not TV or cinema focus, and not really a theatre kind of focus either. Rather, an anthropological, ethnographic, fieldwork sort of focus.

I have never found time to write a reflection on Schlusser’s last big work, a version of Agatha Christie’s THE HOLLOW. I will have to make a longish aside for it here, because that work showed a real evolution in these very qualities. Schlusser condensed the entire crime, investigation and revealing of the murderer to a single, long garden party, in which everything that happens in Christie’s crime happened, in a linear fashion, one event after another, on a large large stage, with a large large cast. Apart from showing the entirely non-tragic, inevitable mechanics of Agatha Christie’s world – an interesting intervention into the standard dramatic composition of her oeuvre – it was the first time that anthropology came to my mind as an apt metaphor for Schlusser’s poetics. The killing of John Christow was presented on this stage with an engaged disinterest comparable to the way the killing of an antelope would be depicted in a nature documentary. But it seemed that Schlusser was starting to play with re-introducing dramatic performance and stage effects into his weathery work, to exciting effect; and the slippage between levels of unreality had by now assumed a baroque complexity.

Another thing worth noting before we continue is that Schlusser’s large-cast works have a poetics distinct from his small-cast works. Whether this is intentional or not I am not sure. The height of performativity differs, and with it the entire experience. In all of his productions so far, Schlusser allows his performers to play with the original text, to chew on it and spit it out at times. The effect is often that of play-acting, sometimes that of voicing a role only semi-consciously. However, the rule of thumb has been, the smaller the cast, the longer and more weighty the text. Interestingly, it is as if Schlusser doesn’t trust a small swarm to hold the audience’s attention as well as a large swarm can. Whatever the reason, large-cast performances hold all of the qualities I have been discussing better: they are less theatrical theatrical, and more like nature documentaries, than his small works, which are remain more focused, less loosely paced, more tied to the original text, more dramatic, and quite simply less unusual and inventive. THE DOLLHOUSE is one such small- cast work.

2. RESTRAINT AND EXCESS
Schlusser writes, in his notes, about restraint and excess being the core of this particular dollhouse (I would love to be able to consult his notes further, but I am writing this from a hotel room in Nagoya, far away from my desk). I missed the original, 2007 production on which this short remount is based, so I cannot compare, but the current, 2011 production is one dollhouse centred around consumption, gratification, and people’s ability to resist their urges.

Australian theatre, interestingly, is not hugely concerned with consumerism (is it because it is too ungenteel a topic?, or is it because theatre is for rich people?), but this is a recurrent question for Schlusser. PEER GYNT, THE ZOMBIE STATE and THE HOLLOW had at their core money, what money can buy, and how one’s ability to buy things affects one’s social value and self-worth, in a contemporary reality largely pinpointed as Australian. More than anything, Schlusser is concerned with what we might call class, but understood more deeply, as the effect of a certain kind of monetary power on the psyche. Similarly to Christos Tsiolkas, Schlusser is interested in what we might term the essential, profound amorality of contemporary Australian society – a certain absence of core values produced by atheism, Australian national narrative, and what many people I speak to call ‘the effect of the Howard years’. Both of these story-tellers are prepared to go beyond sparkling drawing-room satire (from David Williamson’s uneven oeuvre to Hayloft Project’s excellent DELECTABLE SHELTER, and dig into the moral barrenness of lives in which plasma-screen TV becomes a measure of a great deal more than one’s disposable income.

When we meet them, Nora and Torvald have been very successfully transposed to contemporary Australia – Torvald has just got a promotion at the Macquarie Bank (Australian bank known for its aggressive investments – for those of my foreign readers, because every Australian knows Macquarie Bank). Nora is a yummy mummy, living a life of shopping and parties, with sidekick Dr Rank. The simple patriarchy of 19th-century Norway has become a more complicated story: Nora is a sex kitten alright, but Torvald is now the PlayStation husband, performing his masculinity through absence and silence, playing shoot ‘em up games from an Eames armchair for most of the play. If Ibsen’s Nora had to be a chirpy little lark for a husband who treated her like a child (monitoring her candy intake, among other things), and if their marriage functioned as a happy game of pretend-domination and performed immaturity, Nikki Shiels works hard on being a sex dolly, offering a range of pornographic services in order to get her husband’s attention away from the computer game. This is not a household based on honesty, but two people’s unspoken fantasies of the other sex welded into a marriage. But Australian contemporary masculinity is a complex thing, lined with taciturn violence, where aggression is expressed more often as subdued undermining than paternal reprimanding: caught with marshmallows, Nora is seated in the Eames chair and made to gorge on them, while Torvald makes her repeat “nobody likes a chubby mummy”.

Everything here, be it sex, money or lollies and jobs, becomes a transactional good, a reward, a bribe: excess comes to signify happiness, and deprivation is meted out as punishment. There is a capitalist logic to this emotional world, very similar to that of Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, in which all love and all sex are simply transactions that raise or lower the characters’ social standing. But where Franzen shines a very harsh light on the Lambert family, Schlusser keeps his stage pastel-lit, in a way both ironic and earnest, critical and gentle. The constant gratification, an eternal present tense of morality, creates a household engaged in an ongoing party (another Schlusserian constant): the apex of the production is a beautiful, wordless celebration of gifts bestowed upon the house guests by Nora, with Torvald’s money, a choreography of Christmas lights, to the music of Sigur Ros. It is a seductive, pleasant fantasy world, and there is a surprising sweetness to this production. Even when Mrs Linde and Krogstad, whose emotionally honest romance provides a strong counterweight to the emotional candy floss of the Helmers, decide to let all secrets be spilled, they do it in a well-meaning spirit “I’ve been here for three days… nobody talks”.

Nikki Shiels. Photo: Marg Horwell.

For all the meta-frills and naturalistic banality, you can see this is a very faithful rendition of Ibsen’s play, and as such perhaps a lesser Schlusser work, certainly for my taste. The transposition is accurate, the interpretation convincing and intelligent. Still, it is a remount of an early work, and it anticipates rather than further developing the extraordinary theatricality of PEER GYNT or THE HOLLOW. There is a lot of acting here, a lot of text delivered in a fairly straight way, and we have by now seen Daniel Schlusser attempt and achieve more. I am much tougher here than I would be with almost any other Australian director, because Schlusser operates in another league entirely, and should continue to do so. It often feels here that the text is used as a crutch, to fill the stage (the swarm is too small) or to give shape to the performance – and I understand that this is a ludicrous thing to write, but I count on enough people to have seen PEER GYNT to understand what I mean. For all its merits, THE DOLLHOUSE is still reasonably conventional theatre, and Schlusser’s good name in my books is largely due to his other works. But, as I said earlier, there is a distinct separation between his small- and large-cast works, and this was a small one.

3. LOU SALOME AND THE ENDING
I had never quite believed in Ibsen’s ending of The Dollhouse. Nora’s final transformation from chirpy doll to emancipated woman seemed mechanical and too sudden, like a dramatic device with no grounding in realistic psyhology, until I read Lou Salomé’s interpretation of the play. Salomé, an early Freudian, wrote an exquisite psychoanalytical analysis of Ibsen’s female characters. In her interpretation, which I found eye-opening, Nora is a woman who not so much acts in someone else’s story, as stretches the limits of her own fantasy until she can no longer believe in it. Replacing one father figure with another, she responds to perceived love the only way she knows: by building her identity as an object of joy, as a happiness-bringer, a 19th-century manic pixie dream girl (this Natalie Portman in Garden State). According to Holly Welker, “MPDGs are said to help their men without pursuing their own happiness, and such characters never grow up, thus their men never grow up.” This is as good explanation as any to the dynamic of the Helmer marriage. Salomé:

Helmer’s joy in merriment and loveliness is, at the same time, the ordinary person’s aversion to struggle and seriousness – to anything that could disturb the aesthetic comfort in which he enjoys himself and his existence. The apparent moral rigor that helps Helmer gain prestige, his need to appear blameless and to keep his dignity unblemished – all this self-control in daily life ultimately arises out of the same egotistical perspective on pleasure.

For Nora, love requires a certain sacrifice of self, and according to Salomé she does gain strength through this sacrifice, to the point that, when she realises that Torvald is not prepared to do the same for love, she resigns from the game. For Salomé, Nora’s final disappointment in Torvald is akin to a loss of God, a total demystification. Her love is revealed to be a hoax, the object of her love unworthy of it. (Note that there is a mystical quality to this kind of love, something femininity has not yet gotten divorced from – Pauline Reage’s Story of O might be read as the Holy Testament of this worldview. It is also deeply, deeply romantic – something Elfriede Jelinek picks up on in her sequel to Ibsen’s play, What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband.) Salomé:

What all the worries and experiences of the entire recent past had not taught her is not accomplished in one instant: she suddenly sees life as it is, as it stands before her in the shape of Helmer, an ordinary person, who is tormented by fear and selfishness. All her life and her thought were concentrated in him, it was in him that her life took on its truth and self-evidence – it could be demystified and destroyed only in him. (…) Something strange and immense occurred in her. All her slowly awakened strength and independence, everything that she had so humbly and zealously collected as a present, a gift of love – her entire, inner being – now rears up and fights its way free from this love in an enormous protest.

When Nora slams the door to the dollhouse of her 19th-century marriage, she is not going anywhere much. She cannot work, she will never see her children again, it is a suicide in more than one sense. This was an entirely unrealistic ending at the time it premiered, an unexpected coda to what was until then a simple bourgeois story of drawing-room intrigue. It is said that women stood and applauded, and men sat in shock. What happened on that stage was staging of something impossible. It was performing a dream, a Marina Abramović moment. This was the original effect of The Doll’s House that cannot be replicated anymore. The technical problem of The Doll’s House today is how to credibly stage this ending, how to give it the devastating impact it had then. The underlying assumption of tragedy is, thankfully, no longer possible. A woman would be leaving a marriage with children, off to a menial job (or three) and – in Australia at least (as opposed to, say, Iceland) – a world in which single mothers are still routinely assumed to create somewhat delinquent children. But still, this is not a tragic ending anymore. So Schlusser resuscitates the alternative ending, one that Ibsen had to provide for actresses that refused to perform the ending: an awful dialogue in which Torvald shows Nora her peacefully sleeping children and asks how she could possibly leave them, her dear little angels. No, she couldn’t, she decides, and stays.

I cannot quite make up my mind about the ending to this production. It strikes some false notes with me, but also some scintillatingly right ones. In retrospect, it looks quite smart. At the time, however, I was unconvinced, in particular by Kade Greenland’s Torvald, whose anger I found neither convincing nor frightening. Ostermeier’s NORA, for all its banalities, managed to create an enormous sense of physical threat, fear and loss of faith – when his Nora shoots Torvald in her Lara Croft costume, I understood why she would. When Schlusser’s Nikki Shiels comes out in a tracksuit and has a long protofeminist dialogue with her husband, whom she has now decided to leave, the production is, at least on the opening night, at least for me, hitting between the keys for the first time of the evening. And yet, upon her suggestion that they give back their rings, here is Torvald saying “I paid for both”, in a moment of majestic truth. Here is a man whose morality exists as righteousness, and whose righteousness is based on the money he earns, and who reacts instinctively to insult – in one line. Then, revealing a real, blonde sleeping child pierces your heart, because no child was until then visible on stage. And yes, this is an incredibly hard scene to get right – but it is also the scene on which we judge the success of any interpretation of this play. When Torvald hugs his daughter, the possibility of him having just acquired another songbird is terrifying, but the text has been largely kept, and a mother, however irresponsible, would today probably not be getting out of a marriage without her children. Is this a passive-aggressive, inconsistent, emotionally manipulative man, a product of contemporary patriarchy? Perhaps. Is this a woman who speaks like she knows what she wants, but doesn’t really? Or is she a woman who chooses yet another sacrifice of self, in the all-too-short moment of reflection as she is walking off the stage? Perhaps. It was not clear. After so much precision, I suddenly saw the interpretation missing its mark.

I understand and share Schlusser’s suspicion towards Nora’s emancipation. I cannot quite shake off the impression that modern-day Nora still ends up in a territory closer to the owlish disintegration of self announced in Story of O than in a fulfilled feminist dream. But this confusion that women’s lib has brought us is grasped so uncertainly by this ending, which itself would need to be less confused if it were to pinpoint it properly. This is a very minor criticism of a work which is extraordinary on so many levels – but the effect of a work of theatre is largely in its landing.

* of which I am a somewhat-member; the tone of this review will hopefully explain how and why
** although I am speaking here as a person who has managed to miss every single production by Four Larks and Mutation Theatre, please bear with this gap in my knowledge

SEE ALSO (and disagree with me, because Daniel Schlusser’s work ought to be discussed more than it presently is):
Alison Croggon’s review
Cameron Woodhead’s review

The Dollhouse, adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Tiffany Abbott, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, sound by Martin Kay. With Nikki Shiels, Kade Greenland, Edwina Wren, Josh Price, Daniel Schlusser and Cate Bastian/Gabrielle Abbott. Fortfive Downstairs, September 15-25.

Jul 29 2011
4 Comments
MKA, programming, reviews, theatre, women

Review: J.A.T.O.

Until mid-July, I was in Zagreb, a place with a big beautiful central square, a predisposition to extraordinary negativity and bitterness (on which in another post), and an excellent theatre scene (but try telling that to a Zagrepčan, and they do look at you like you have just deeply embarrassed yourself by disclosing the lowness of your standards and the narrowness of your horizon).

But, while there, I had the opportunity to acquire one of the more recent issues of Frakcija, a very good theatre magazine, dedicated to the last decade of Croatian theatre writing, which included a generous fragment of Vedrana Klepica’s J.A.T.O., a play I would later have the opportunity to see staged in Melbourne, at the MKA. The world is at times a manageably-sized place. Continue reading →

Apr 12 2011
5 Comments
Bertolt Brecht, Malthouse, reviews, Simon Stone, theatre

Review: Baal (Simon Stone @ Malthouse)

On Sunday afternoon, I saw a production that wasn’t very good, of a play that wasn’t very good. The play was Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, the production Simon Stone’s, currently on at the Malthouse, and my Sunday was spent picking it apart.

Theatre in this town is an ideological business, and I should proclaim loudly, before I begin, that I am not ideologically opposed to anything that happens on the Malthouse stage: I think there are good reasons to think of Brecht as one of the most important dramatists and directors of the twentieth century; I am always interested in seeing Simon Stone’s work; and I believe theatre exists in present tense as well as in history. None of the procedures employed had to fail – but I would like to suggest, nonetheless, that they did.

So what is this Baal, I hear you ask? An early play of Brecht’s, written when he was twenty years old, staged first in 1923, before the musicals, before the Verfremdungseffekt is theorised. A youthful play, imperfect, a series of scenes hanging together with some music, rather than a dramaturgically cohesive work. But just as Brecht has been apt to turn every one of his shortcomings as an artist into a system, a theorised and passionately argued virtue, so has Baal been re-written and re-interpreted, by Brecht himself, as complying with his later political position. Baal writes poems, is cheered by the town, copulates, abandons women who then suicide, keeps multiple lovers, and generally wreaks havoc until he finally dies, in a hut, alone.

It is important to note that Baal in itself is, on the one hand, a beautiful work, an example of the bleak German Expressionism of the era, and an innovation in the Romantic tradition of depicting the artist as a thunderous, chaotic outsider – but one whose existence touches those around him in ways that are overall spiritually uplifting. It also follows in the tradition of Wedekind and Buchner, young Brecht’s likely reading material, of morally chaotic and emotionally turbulent theatre of bleak poetry. But it is also important to note that, innovation aside, Baal is exactly the sort of play one would expect from a twenty-year-old that has just managed to avoid being conscripted in World War I, and who is playing bohemia in and out of his comfortable middle-class home in Augsburg. It is the kind of work full of pictures, of images of reality, but it is clear that its own grasp on the meaning of what is depicted is not very strong. The author’s youth is visible in the fragmentary plotting (Brett Easton Ellis, a better mind than he is a writer, and not entirely out of context here, once said that a young writer will always have problems with narrative, because s/he doesn’t have sufficient life experience to understand how consequences shape out of actions), but also in the vague sense of what it is that is happening, who is it that is getting harmed and how, what drives these characters, and what the point ultimately is.

I may also add that, as John Fuegi asserts, at the time of writing Baal (or in this general period anyhow), a certain Bie Banholzer was sent off to the country to give birth to a little Brecht away from the respectable bourgeois milieu of Ausburg, that Brecht publicly celebrated his paternity (but not to the extent of taking care of the young mother and child), and that he soon began liaisons with a number of young women, lecturing each on the need for monogamy, and going so far as to have written contracts drafted. And by all accounts, Brecht spent the rest of his life having liaisons outside his marriage, collaborating with women and then claiming whole ownership of the written work, abandoning lovers, and generally behaving very poorly towards the women in his life.

These are important points, not because I am a moralist (I am not), or because I don’t think Brecht can do this and remain a great theatre theorist and director (he can and he is), but to point out that, while there is a certain kind of beauty in Baal, it is almost entirely a picturesque one, a beauty of style, Expressionism-cum-youthful-romanticism gleaned from reading Wedekind. I don’t think I’m reading too much into it if I see there a need to emulate his reading, both in his writing and in his life. And while this beauty of style (which Ellis also points out is a mark of a young writer) is certainly there, and while there is a certain detachment in the portrayal of the artist as a god of doom, I have failed to see any real critique in the text, or even a fundamental understanding of what it is that happens in it on a psychological level. The clarity of vision that characterises Brecht’s later works, the ability to present the world as a moral machine of sorts, is not here – but neither is there a psychologically complex universe of the previous generation: Ibsen, Chekhov. Instead, the whole thing works as a 1920s sort of Brett Easton Ellis novel: a series of foul actions committed by aloof characters leaves us with no sense of purpose.

And here problems start occurring for Stone, the director. Stone has made his name by essentially re-writing, then directing, the works of that same previous generation – and the generation Brecht was particularly defining himself in opposition to. And at this he has been very good. Stone’s interpretations of Chekhov and Ibsen have been quite rightfully praised as some of the best ‘theatre theatre’ this country has seen recently. But these dramatists’ work function in a radically different way to Brecht’s: they are all Nordic atmosphere, meaningful silences, socio-political subtext beneath the respectable bourgeois surface. And Stone has directed them aptly Bergmanesquely: in chiaroscuro, with long shadows, carving hints and glimpses of universal significance out of meticulous portrayal of the mundane. Re-writing has been an important part of his success: Stone’s productions are largely plays of his own, following carefully another playwright’s dramaturgy. (As a side note, the success of this approach is also an example of a young writer circumventing his own shortcomings on narrative grounds, yet doing the most of his deftness with style.)

The problem with Brecht is that he is precisely the opposite kind of writer. Whereas a scene from Ibsen is a meticulous moment of mundane, through which one may glimpse a universal significance, Brecht’s writing is blunt, sketchy, showing only the essential point of the scene. The role of the spectator is then to relate this sketch to an everyday moment, to anchor it in reality (in this aspect Brecht’s writing functions as satire).

So. Ibsen: particular hinting at the universal. Brecht: universal hinting at the particular.

I don’t think it’s easier to direct the former than the latter kind, but much of this production nonetheless looked like Stone wasn’t sure what particular he was hinting at. The early scenes were much stronger than the later, because that balance was gotten right. In the opening scene, a group of elegantly-clad women toast Baal, dressed in tight black jeans with an electric guitar. He sings of diarrhoea and hell. They want to publish him and make him famous. He wants a glass of wine. They think he is a great artist. He wants to fuck one. Another says, I made my money cutting down the Amazon forest, but now I want to sponsor art. Nobody talks like that in real life! But because we recognise the reality behind it, because we see the grunge god Kurt Cobain and the goth cowboy Nick Cave in Baal, and because we recognise the capitalist arts-enthusiasts, the scene works exactly the way Brecht needs to work – as satire laced with arsenic.

Photo by Jeff Busby.

An interesting question opens up here, one certainly dear to any theatre-goer – the question of the bright young man, and our adoration of him. To have him appear in a production by a bright young male director makes it all the more interesting.

But then, as it progresses through copulation, rain, collapsing sets, red knickers, prams and babies, multiple deaths, it is less and less certain what this production is attempting to do. It seemed that, as the end neared, Stone was trying to strip Baal down, to let its universal message shine through – but, as previously discussed, Baal doesn’t know what it is, that essence isn’t there. And the hints pointing at the extra-theatrical reality get increasingly blunt: while prams and hoodies, amps and cans of bourbon&coke are still able to transport us somewhere, what are we to make of Chris Ryan in stilettos and bikini, except remember Michael Kantor? By the end of the show, the stage has been drenched in three kinds of rain, all sorts of transgressions have been depicted on stage, and Baal’s dead body is hauled out by two friends – housemates? – making ironic remarks about artists; the overall atmosphere is that of the end of something puzzling, multifarious, but ultimately unsatisfying – not unlike a typical Kantor production.

The other problem is the text, on which the actors occasionally choke, and which is frequently delivered as a sort of overblown declamation – very unlike Stone’s customary subtle direction. It has been pointed out to me that Stone’s penchant for re-writing the play entirely may have caused the problems here: perhaps too much Brecht was left in the text?

But Stone’s is nonetheless a valiant attempt, and a better Brecht than I have seen in this town in a long while. Some features of the production were very interesting: the 6-actress female chorus as a generalised aggrieved population; the extended nudity of almost everyone, which created voluptuous and abject carnality instead of Melbourne theatre’s customary rosy view of sex (see Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass). However, in a production that generally doesn’t achieve what it sets out to do, these momentary successes of form and meaning are islands in a sea of confusion.

Baal, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Simon Stone and Tom Wright, directed by Simon Stone. Set and lighting Nick Schlieper, costumes by Mel Page, composition and sound design Stefan Gregory. With Bridig Gallacher, Geraldine Hakewill, Luisa Hastings Edge, Shelly Laumann, Oscar Redding, Chris Ryan, Lotte St Clair, Katherine Tonkin and Thomas M Wright. Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until April 23; Sydney Theatre Company, May 7-June 11.

Feb 10 2011
2 Comments
FULL TILT, reviews, story-telling, theatre

Reviews: NO-SHOW and Invisible Atom

1. A really, really long preamble (scroll down for the reviews)
Contrary to the popular opinion, I really like a good story. There are exactly four entry points into the explanation why. The first is perhaps obvious, and I have mentioned it many times: human experience is organised narratively, we understand the world through story-telling (as anthropology and folklore studies tell us), we even experience our own lives as an unfolding story and, in fact, one of the more reliable signs of mental illness is the inability to understand one’s life as a coherent narrative. Stories are not pop, in other words, no more than oxygen or a functioning bladder would be.

The second relates to bedtime stories, my memories thereof. My parents reading me whatever was at hand, in their case large books of Greek myths. Jason and Medea being my favourite, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear. At one point my clever parents started recording these stories as they read them to me in bed, and then would present me with a pile of tapes to listen to instead. I don’t remember having any problems with that – recorded fairy tales, narrated by actors with beautifully rounded voices, sometimes with music and singing, were all the rage in children’s pop culture at the time. I eventually developed my own collection by recording, every evening at 19:45, the bedtime story on the national radio, and listening to it a little later, in bed. Great stuff: stories from Goscinny’s ‘Le petit Nicolas’ were only one of the highlights. Then came other stories, told by my parents: stories of life. My dad’s stories about his childhood in the country, my mum’s stories about her high school years, the graduation dance, and then even better stories of grown-up life: how they once moved from a tiny town in Istria back to Rijeka by driving an entire house, piece of furniture by piece of furniture, in their little Renault 4, even if it meant going up and down a tall mountain, on a narrow and windy road; how they went to Prague and had to spend the night in the car because all the hotels were booked; how they went to Italy to buy CDs and jeans, hiding money in their clothes because only a certain small amount could be taken out of Yugoslavia, how they once got searched because all the customs officers knew everyone crossing the border was lying, and how the customs officer let them go once he found the money, because he was more interested in seeing whether he could find it, than punishing anyone for it. These were great stories, and they didn’t spoil with repetition. I played my favourite tapes over and over again, knowing perfectly well that Medea becomes priestess after killing her children. I would ask my mum: „tell me the story of how your friend slept in and came to school with hair going in all directions!“, because I liked to hear my mum impersonate the class laughing, the teacher laughing, the boy saying „Sorry, I didn’t wake up on time“, the teacher laughing harder, and him saying, „But I really didn’t!“, confused. It was the telling that mattered, not the surprise. A good story was like a couch of sorts, getting better with every sitting.

The third is brief and psychologically revealing: I cure my existential crises, which are many and frequent, by watching Hollywood movies. It’s all very simple: I don’t have crises of meaning, those big ‘is this all there is to life?’ quandaries. I have small crises of doing: ‘how does one hit the right balance?’ The last time it happened, I saw The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 3D, and I came out in a much better shape than I went in.

The fourth is nostalgic, and will strike some as Euro-centric, or just maladapted. It’s alright. I’m not Australian, and if I say it so often it’s not because I feel the need to enforce the boundary between Australia and myself, but because people are genuinely unaware of the extent to which I am from somewhere else. This is possibly a result of not many people here knowing much about any place, certainly very little about Croatia, and also a result of me being white and reasonably fluent in English. I am probably not as lost in Australia as I would be in South Korea, say, but in South Korea the distance would be made easier by Koreans’ expectations of distance. I imagine, some attempts would be made to bridge the gap, attempts which Australians don’t make. In any case, I come from a place where people tell stories a lot more. Life is communicated through stories. Jokes, rather than the witty one-liners, take a more narrative form.

(Digression:

Dear Santa, in 2009 you took away from me my favourite singer, Michael Jackson, my favourite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favourite actress, Farrah Fawcett. I’m writing to you just to remind you that my favourite politician is Tony Abbott. Thanks!

Or:

Bear walks through the forest when he stumbles across a camping site. The campers run away, the bear starts rummaging through their things. And so he finds a packet of viagra and eats the whole box. He goes home, when after a little while he starts getting a hard-on! What to do?, nothing else is possible!, and our bear starts screwing the forest folk. Two days into the situation, the bear sees the fox. He wooes her and talks her into it. After the big shag, while they’re having a cigarette, the bear asks:
“Was I good?”
The fox answers:
“Yes, it was fine, but, man, you’re really hairy down there…”
The bear looks down and exclaims surprised:
“Ooh shit, I still have the rabbit on…”)

This communication of life through stories if all-pervasive: just like I found out about my parents through the stories they told of their life before me, so I find out about my friends these days. One of the highlights of my last trip home was my dear Srdjan telling me the long and exciting story of how one morning at 6am, just before going to work, the police arrived at his door and he got arrested for not showing up in court as a witness a few weeks earlier. Another dear friend had great stories about his workplace falling apart and the firm finally going under, everyone had great stories about the corruption in the government, and I had a few stellar ones of my own about divorce. The point is not simply to make someone dear to you laugh, although it is that as well: it is to inform, entertain and instruct, all at the same time. To tell a funny and sad story about a horrible divorce is to say: this is how it happened (the mechanics), this is what it was like in all its unique and horrifying glory (the anecdote), and this is what I think it meant (the conclusion). Just like those tapes from when I was little, these stories are enjoyable when reheated: I told the story of how my friend Srdjan got arrested at least another five times, so good it was.

Australians don’t do any of this. You people don’t tell stories about your life. You serve each other witty one-liners, you sigh and offer short, discrete summaries of what you’ve done and how, and you nod in return. I, in all honesty, have not yet discovered how people here transmit information about their lives, how they tell each other what’s going on in their relationships, in their families, at their work. Do you infer it all from the casual comments and try-hard one-liners? Are you people so skilled at reading between the lines that what results is a full story, with the funny detail and the moral and everything? Do you feel that you know the people mentioned in it by the end, your friend’s workmates and grandparents and classmates from high school? Do you feel that you know how the other person felt when this implied event happened? I know that my friend Srdjan is the sort of man who, when locked up at 6am with no explanation, tries to make friends with the evil-looking policeman, because he is trying to procure himself a lift back home when whatever is happening finishes, but also because he feels the need to convince the policeman that he is not a criminal; I know this because he told me. I know that my friend Rene’s grandpa is a nasty old man who remembers me as ‘that girl whose arse is like the back of a bus’, but I also know that Rene loves both me and his grandpa, because otherwise he wouldn’t have told me that particular story. Without the stories, how do you know who other people are? Is it all implied and, if so, how do you know when you’re wrong? How do you know that life is more complicated than you thought (for example)? How do you know that what you’re being shown (not told) is exactly what you’re seeing?

I miss stories because I like people who are honest about life, and Croatian people overwhelmingly are honest about life, their life, and then life generalised. I miss a story being told because it’s a good story, and a necessary one, not because it makes the narrator look good or because the punchline is great. I’m reading Aleksandar Hemon right now (Hemon is Bosnian-Ukranian) and his work is full of it: however post-modern (very) and however clever (very), Hemon’s writing is also humorous and full of soul, and it truts along like a steadfast train taking characters somewhere distinct, and there is a story in it to get immersed in even if the journey is manifestly intellectual. It reminds me of another extraordinary book, Bora Ćosić’s The role of my family in the world revolution, which is Serbian, ridiculously funny, and a story about surviving World War II. It is possible to be smart and simple at the same time, and that is how.

2. Reviews
I was watching Invisible Atom and wondering if Australians don’t do narrative very well because they don’t tell stories about their life to their friends, and their jokes are short too.

Invisible Atom, by a Canadian company called ’2b’, but largely a work of a single man, Anthony Black, is essentially a staged story. A first-person, single-voice story of Atom („not as in the apple, but as in the bomb“), an orphan who grows to be educated, rich, working in finance, a success story, and then has a crisis of conscience. One man, no props, some lighting changes, less than an hour on stage. A lot is woven into it: physics, history of economics, philosophy. (2b present themselves with these words: „Our work reflects the urban intellectual climate of our city, a city that boasts five universities.“ Melbourne boasts more universities than Toronto, but I have never heard a local theatre company talk of this as an asset.) Ultimately, however, what makes Invisible Atom a great evening at the theatre is that all this thinking is integral to the story, and it’s a great story, with twists where they should be, changes of heart whenever plot turns should decelerate, and moments of thinking when the accumulated information demands sifting through. It is thoroughly entertaining, informative and instructive, in the sense that I want to tell you exactly how he starts and how he gets to the end, the way I wanted to tell Srdjan’s story to everyone I know. But the details are too finely picked, the narrative too satisfying, and the thinking too crystalline, for me to do it justice.

If Invisible Atom is a finely crafted and balanced dish, akin to Fincher’s The Social Network, Richard Pettifer’s NO-SHOW, on the other hand, is a delicately woven wonder, very similar to what Spalding Gray achieves with a glass of water and some notebooks. Pettifer has so little to start with („I have no show“ is what he first says, and he is being entirely honest) that Invisible Atom, with its tight script and obvious months of development starts looking like a bloated whale in comparison, but the two one-man shows have a great deal in common nonetheless. They both spin a story almost without theatre: a little bit of light, a little bit of sound, some words. But where Invisible Atom tends towards Hollywood almost against its better judgement, instinctively – and this is fine, if you’ve read my rambling preamble – Pettifer turns the other way, towards a deconstructive anti-theatre, and tells a story without even perhaps knowing that that’s what he’s doing.

There is no fine weaving of theme and motif here, text and subtext. Pettifer tells the story of another theatre show, Smudged, which had a text, four actors, Twitter incorporated („Brecht and all that“), which Pettifer directed. The story is of the show we’re not seeing – resounding hints of Forced Entertainment, here, as Pettifer describes what happened on stage – of the process which led to the show, of the process failing, of the shows failing in their effects on the audience, but it’s ultimately Pettifer’s story, and he tells it with the same authenticity and investment with which my friend Goran told me of how his firm once again miraculously didn’t fail. One of the greatest problems of Australian theatre is this corrosive need to conflate a good story with some special event: death of a child, end of the world, massacre, war, history. NO-SHOW tells a simple story of how a piece of theatre was made, and there is more basic, essential human truth in it than an average recent year of Australian dramatic writing would muster if piled up in one large heap. If it’s gripping, engaging and rewarding, it is because it tells how it happened, shapes anecdotal and amusing detail with great gusto, and finishes touching upon the question of what it meant that it happened. It finds its structure, its skelleton, in a deeply personal place – it holds together because it makes sense to the narrator – and in that sense resembles the autobiographical works of Spalding Gray, works which showed a deep and strong internal coherence despite Gray’s own chaotic process.

Here, another anecdote: I learned almost nothing while studying theatre – theatre studies were a place where, by and large, there were no attempts to learn nor to teach – except that Spalding Gray got it right. One day, we watched him on DVD, talking about his doctor, his mother, losing sight, going to Cambodia, being neurotic, and so on, for hours, and then had to go away and write and perform a personal monologue. Every single person in the room came back with an excellent piece of dramatic writing, and an excellent performance thereof. People with no training in writing and barely any training in performance did a series of short performances that were absolutely top notch, talking about things that were personal, funny, paradoxical, but always interesting, interesting because they made sense to the person telling. NO-SHOW gets it right in the same way. Even though it looks like a very Pirandellian essay on what theatre is, it really functions as a story.

Both shows, no need to stress, are really worth seeing. Both are ending very soon after really short runs.

Invisible Atom is presented by FULL TILT and showing at The Arts Centre. Ends on Saturday, 12 February.

NO-SHOW is showing at La Mama and ends on Sunday, 13 February.

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