Composer and Producer
Kiah Gossner is the new kid on the block in South Australian music.
And before we go any further in introducing him, that elegantly unusual name, “Kiah”, is pronounced as in “fire”.
Kiah Gossner is already an award-winning musician, producer and composer and his flair has not escaped the attention of the Adelaide Festival Centre which prides itself on cultivating and elevating the up-and-coming creatives who have found new edges with which to cut. Hence, he is working on a major venture called Contact, a multi-art-form piece to be presented in the Space Theatre as part of the inSAPCE program on November 29 and 30.
Gossner’s style has already been picked up by advertising and theatre companies. His motivating TAFE ad music, (link) and his beautifully meditative fashion score (link) are examples.
Of course, he has not just sprung out of the ether. Kiah Gossner studied music at the Elder Conservatorium and threw himself into the Adelaide music scene at an early age.
“I became somewhat of a gun for hire working with lots of different musicians as a session musician,” he explains.
“It was a fairly organic progression from session musician to producer/engineer. From there it was a very natural progression to working on composing and collaborating with other musicians.”
But Gossner also has been mentored by the distinguished Sam Dixon, a Grammy award-winning composer and producer associated with such names as Sia, Adele and Christine Aguilera.
Gossner met Dixon through a Music SA program.
He attributes that program to setting him on the course to be a music producer “and Sam was the person who gave me the confidence to take it on as a career”.
“I had my first European tour a few months after we met, and we ended up at his studio in London where he took me through the process and got me on the right path forward.”
Gossner more recently has been mentored by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with whom he has been working in LA.
But, perhaps the essence of this 27-year-old's rise to the musical fore really comes from his roots.
He emerges from an Adelaide theatre background. His mother is set designer Jill Halliday and his father lighting designer Peter Gossner. They raised him on a diet of regular WOMADs and “a diverse creative environment”.
As a keen collaborator, he is bringing his parents in as part of the team behind Contact. Halliday will design the set and Peter Gossner will do the lighting. There also will be poetry from Dom Symes and film and projects from Thomas McCammon.
It is a large-scale and ambitious venture, or, as Gossner puts it, “a huge undertaking”.
“The original idea came about on a four-month tour through Europe,” he explains.
“We had a lot of time to kill driving between cities every day. I would often sketch some ideas at the venue then orchestrate them on the drive. It began as a string quartet with a grand piano but soon grew to a ten-piece ensemble.”
Gossner says he is still working on the production. It is meant to be an “immersive” work.
“When I compose a large work, I take a long time as I treat the process very much like a film, often working from a narrative,” he expounds.
“The narrative is usually a very personal experience or something that has touched me.
“Story is very important to me in my work and I try to capture the emotional within said story in my score.”
Since producing work also is a strong element of his career path, Gossner has learned to take a different track when collaborating and “to put my own emotional input to one side and try my best to support the creative narrative of the work”.
He says he loves both aspects of musical work and thrives on dividing his life between creating and producing.
“I go a bit loopy if I spend too much time in one role,” he adds.
He doesn’t wish to ramble about the artists he loves, he says, but just for the record, there’s Mingus, Coltrane and Avishai Cohen in the jazz world and pop/hip groovers such as Christine and the Queens or Fran Ocean.
“If I’m scoring more classical styles, then Philip Glass, Ravel or Einojuhani Rautavaara,” he says, adding Sufjan Stevens, Big Thief and Andrew Bird in for a spot of folky balance.
Samela Harris
When: 29 and 30 Nov
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Thomas Henning is braced for his OzAsia work to be contentious.
In collaboration with Malaysian theatre makers, TerryandtheCuz, he is premiering a play about Adelaide’s founder, Colonel William Light and his father Francis Light, founder of the British colony of Penang in Malaysia. They were a father-and-son phenomenon in many ways, albeit they spent almost no time together.
It is the family saga of Colonel Light which has intrigued the Australian writer and director, Henning, who will be remembered by Adelaide audiences not only for his The Black Lung Theatre company but also for his involvement as performer and co-writer of Thyestes, one of the most heart-stoppingly brilliant Australian theatre works to feature in an Adelaide Festival of Arts.
Henning, who has specialised in challenging rule-breaking theatre, expects this new work of Light to upset a few historical applecarts when it is performed at Nexus Arts in October.
Today he is on the phone from Malaysia where the work has been in creative development.
“It is less Adelaide-centric than people may expect,” he says. “It is primarily about Light’s family. On its first development phase here in Kuala Lumpur, after I’d spent eight months researching, it turned out to be a very long book. It ran three to four hours in a reading. No one could really follow it. It was just straight facts.”
Thus did the development turn into honing and shaping and prioritising until now, says Henning, it is “culturally rich and fascinating”, and down to two hours and 20 minutes with interval.
Henning says the process of researching Light was very demanding.
“I didn’t go to old churches and dig up records,” he says. “I found everything I needed in the library collections at Flinders, the Mayo and Dutton collections. They were great. Really cool.”
Among them, through an archivist he names as Alan Horsnell, he came upon the surprising drawings and diagrams which did not belong to Colonel Light’s considerable oeuvre as an accomplished sketcher and watercolourist. These were period illustrations depicting the life of Maria Gandy, Light’s famous common-law wife.
“These had the quality of Coles Funny Picture Book illustrations,” he enthuses.
And, therein, he discovered that, Maria Gandy, later to become Mrs Mayo, moved around the state “with an entourage of dwarfs.” “Yes, dwarfs. Nasty, aloof and spitting dwarfs. They moved around north of Adelaide and into the bush."
But this strange piece of information is not in his OzAsia production. It was post-Light.
“And I couldn’t fit it in. There was just too much stuff,” laughs Henning.
“Light is principally about Light’s family. The first half is Penang and Malacca-centric. The second is Euro-centric, and, of course, it includes the enactment of the laying out of Adelaide, but a decade of fights and struggles is whittled down into a line.”
The production looks at the world from Light’s inner perspective. It looks at what is perhaps more his world view, and touches on "the values and notions of nationalism".
Its scale has evolved from a broad historic sweep, Light’s life was not long, but it was big in terms of historical scope.
As Henning points out, Light left Penang when he was only six to be educated in Britain. He joined the Royal Navy at 13 and then a few years later the British Army. He fought for Spain in The Napoleonic Wars, under the Duke of Wellington and the Peninsular War and in the 1830s he became close to Mohammad Ali, the founder of modern Egypt under the Ottoman Empire, helping to establish an Egyptian navy.
“He watched the rise of empires,” says Henning.
His private life was difficult. His first wife, only recorded as E. Perois, was said to have died in tragic circumstances. But nothing is known of her. His marriage to Mary Bennet, the rich “natural” daughter of the Duke of Richmond was rich in travel and art. But she abandoned him and, when he came to South Australia, it was with a “companion”, Maria Gandy, who was to care for him in his house at Thebarton. Light had survived serious war wounds and was riven with tuberculosis; hence, his early death aged only 53.
As Henning sees him, despite all the travel and action and his accomplishments (he was reputed to be a skilled people-manager and linguist) he was not really a fulfilled individual.
“In fact, his life was also lonely and drifting.” Henning surmises.
The forthcoming production will draw links between the world of father and son. Light’s father, Captain Francis Light was the illegitimate son of a Suffolk landowner and a serving girl. In Penang, Francis was to marry Martinha Rozells “according to native custom”. She was said to be a princess. Her exact ethnic heritage and position in Malay hierarchy remains a point of debate but she was most definitely Eurasian. It was she and her family who were to somehow lose the considerable fortune Francis Light had established in Penang, a point of disappointment to William when later he sought to recover his inheritance. William Light was their second son.
There are many intriguing threads between the father-and-son narratives, many of which will unravel when the production is premiered at OzAsia.
However, Henning warns and warns again.
It is probably not what Adelaideans are expecting.
“It will be contentious.
“There will be discussion and debate.
“There will be people who want to drum us out of Adelaide."
Samela Harris
When: 17, 18 and 19 Oct
Where: Nexus Arts
Bookings: ozasiafestival.com.au
Words and reflections by Samela Harris.
So much changes and yet stays the same. It was 1960 when Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge first was performed in Adelaide. It was bold and controversial, a cutting-edge piece of American theatre which dared to confront the ideas of incest, homosexuality, and illegal immigration.
Not only but also, it was staged in the round under the direction of Colin Ballantyne whose Adelaide Theatre Group gave birth to the State Theatre Company and professional theatre in South Australia.
Almost 60 years later, that very company reprises the play and demonstrates that its themes of family, class, and immigration may no longer be cutting the cultural edge but they remain fresh and relevant, and that A View From the Bridge is a superbly-written piece of theatre, a contemporary classic.
It was in this context that former STC artistic director, Geordie Brookman, programmed the play, leaving it in the surprised hands of renowned director Kate Champion.
“It was not a play I would have picked to direct,” she says. “I have a strong commitment to new Australian works.”
Now the Sydney-based director is thriving on her immersion in a classic.
“And, it is a relief to direct something so well written,” she reflects.
“Familiarity with this play does not reduce its intensity. The more you get to know it, the more it reveals: the language, how it captures a long-term marriage, how it captures intimacy, how the dominant patriarchy holds sway.”
A View from the Bridge was written and is set in the mid-1950s. It depicts an Italian-American family living in Red Hook, a downscale suburb in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman on the docks, has become fixated on Catherine, his wife Beatrice’s almost 18-year-old orphaned niece who lives with them, so much so that marital relations have almost atrophied. Hence, when Beatrice's cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, come to stay, illegally, in the US in the hope of finding a better life, tensions churn up in their confined family living quarters. It seems that the glamorous young Rodolpho has set his sights on Catherine. Eddie fears he is looking for easy citizenship. As the dominant male, he seeks to defend his territory.
The story seems straightforward and, indeed, it is. It concerns jealousy and suspicion, love and loyalty, rivalry and betrayal, innocence and spite, hope, and the risks people are taking when they flee their country and become illegal immigrants, among other very human strengths and frailties.
Thus does it endure.
The play has had a colourful history. Right here in Adelaide, it was something of a sensation, performed in the long lost Willard Hall in Wakefield Street. Colin Ballantyne was king of quality in Adelaide’s prolific and excellent theatre of that period and many distinguished Australian actors emerged from his stable. In this production it was Les Dayman, who went on to become a major national stage and television identity. This performance was to imprint his talent upon the audiences forever. Also in the production were noted Adelaide actors Frank Foster Brown, Neil Lovett, Tina O’Brien, Don Gooding, Bruce Koehne, Judith Symon, Bill Pitman, Dennis Scrutton, Don Tilmouth, Jacques Tarento, and Bernard Walsh.
It was Adelaide’s first-ever production in the round and the theatre world rippled with excitement at how brave and innovative this was.
It worked triumphantly and plays performed in the round became quite fashionable. The Space theatre was built with performances in the round very much front of mind.
This now celebrated piece of American theatre was reprised in Adelaide again in 1993 at The Arts Theatre under the direction of Warwick Cooper. It featured Adelaide actors including Michael Baldwin, David Grybowski, Julie Quick, and Elizabeth Siebert.
Dayman is now well and truly retired and for this new incarnation of A View from the Bridge Champion has cast Bill Allert, Brett Archer, Mark Saturno, Elena Carapetis, Dale March, Malah Stewardson and Antoine Jelk, giving the celebrated Victoria Lamb responsibility for the set.
Where Ballantyne’s boxing ring set featured ropes as thematic, Lamb also has incorporated ropes and boxes. This is not because of the pivotal boxing scene in the play but, she says, to reflect the work of the Brooklyn longshoremen “and a sense of the claustrophobia of the people in the tenements living on top of each other.”
Also, there’s a suggestion that we’re all hanging on, one way or another. "Nothing in life is solid.”
Champion says they are symbolic of the tenuousness and tensions of the play, just as the bridge in the title reflects not only the setting but acts as a metaphor for the bridging of cultures portrayed in the work.
One of the members of the historic 1960 Adelaide cast was Neil Lovett, now retired and living in Queensland. He played the role of the lawyer who also is chorus to the play. He recalls vividly much of the intensity of creating the production with Ballantyne and being coached by fellow cast member Frank Foster Brown in the American accent. Indeed, he says the cast was so focused on preparing the work that it was oblivious to any controversy surrounding it.
“I enjoyed working with Colin Ballantyne,” he says. “He was very histrionic in his form of direction, and it worked.”
The production engendered very positive reviews. “I recall one by Anthony Rendell in Mary’s Own Paper (the precursor to The Adelaide Review). It was positive but a bit arch at times. Young people tended to be a bit arch.” Rendell went on to be a renowned innovator in Australian and British current affairs media. He died in 2016.
Lovett also enjoyed working with Les Dayman, now in poor health, and their friendship endures to this day.
Dayman’s performance in that historic boxing ring in-the-round set was incredibly potent and it made quite clear that Les Dayman was an actor for whom great things lay ahead. I say this with the authority of one who was there and on whom that courageous production made an indelible impact.
Samela Harris
State Theatre Company’s A View From a Bridge plays from the 12th of July to the 3rd of August at the Dunstan Playhouse.
When: 12 Jul to 3 Aug
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
It is out! At last. The Cabaret Festival program is public. We can start booking our seats.
Phew.
And how relieved is its artistic director, Julia Zemiro, who is one of life’s enthusiasts; hence someone who is dying to share, share, share.
Keeping secrets has been tough for her; shtum is not her preferred style.
Luckily, the marketing powers-that-be allowed her to leak out bits of the program to trusted journalists so she had a few chances to bubble with excitement. Now, after all the planning and programming, she’s looking forward to the foyer talk during a couple of action-packed weeks in which she will be doing a spot or more of performance herself.
Zemiro realises she has been appointed to the CabFest because she has an appeal to a younger demographic. Her challenge has been to find things which are a bit different. She talked and talked to the showbiz world. She went to Edinburgh Fringe and overdosed on a program so huge she found it hard to work out what she could choose from it. She has a much smaller model to fill. Under 50 programs are the shape of Adelaide’s winter CabFest.
No, it will not be a program full of burlesque, she reveals; only the inimitable Maude Davey who is going to bring back her burlesque show about not doing a burlesque show. My Life In the Nude.
“She does not want to do it anymore. It is a show about why do people want to work in the nude. It is a show so moving and so beautiful that I had to go away and talk about it for three hours.”
But the big headliners of CabFest 2019 are, ta-da, Dami Im and Kate Miller-Heidke, Australia’s popular Eurovision stars, both so dazzlingly young and so different.
Zemiro was blown away by Kate's Eurovision performance and tips her to be in the top five next time. Yes. She will stand by that. Noted.
Of course, Zemiro has a big soft spot for Eurovision, having been the adored commentator for many long years, albeit the public knows her also for RocKwiz, Good News Week, Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery, and as Australia’s Brainiest TV star, among other things.
But the Eurovision years brought Zemiro into the hearts of many Australians, showcasing her witty smarts. There has been much grumbling about her departure. She laughs it off. It’s best to leave when one is at the top, she explains. And she had been “midwife” to Australia’s inclusion in the competition itself.
To keep the fan base happy, there will be quite a strong Eurovision presence in the CabFest. And also, another thing at which Zemiro excels, Improv. That is an entirely new ingredient in a Cabaret Festival, bound to have people arguing that annual chestnut: “what IS cabaret?”
Look out for Spontaneous Broadway.
To Zemiro the Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2019 must resonate as a something for everyone creation full of surprises. So, her first program is categorised, not by conventional entertainment genres but by internal human preferences such as thrills and risks and ease and laughter.
It will even have "curve balls", taking audiences out of their comfort zones, she warns.
“People might not like every show but they will not be able to argue the skills involved,” she challenges.
“There will be more flesh on the bones. Substance! Shows with strong stories, I can stand by every show. And I’ll be in the foyer every night to talk about them.”
Also, high in the spirit of the Zemiro CabFest is its old inspiration and founder, the late and beloved Frank Ford.
“We pay respects to Frank Ford and I’ll be raising a glass to him nightly,” she asserts.
Another first from Zemiro is the idea of a "Literary Cabaret". This is represented by a show called Liner Notes which derives from the old CD covers one could often barely read because they were so tiny. But one studied and read them over and over while listening to the music. Zemiro says she was a great devotee to Liner Notes and there are about fifteen albums she says she knows inside and out. The literary aspect is the challenge for “interesting writers and performers” (she is not giving away names yet) to listen to a track and then prepare five-minute reactive liner notes to be delivered as a song or a speech or a poem.
“Where were you then? How was the world for you then?” she suggests for the content.
Of course, there will be old-fashioned cabaret things such as concerts and solo performances by talented and imaginative singers. There will be new blood and old blood.
“David Campbell! I’m getting him back off the TV. He’ll do a huge swing show at the Thebby”, touts Zemiro.
Since the Festival Theatre is booked with a musical and Her Majesty’s in major re-creation mode, the dear old Thebby has come to the rescue once again.
Indeed, the razzle-dazzle opening gala show, which now is not officially called "opening gala" but is instead a cabaret party called The House Is Live, will be in the Thebby. And it will feature a wild variety lineup of stars, some of whom are not actually performing in the CabFest. There will be Paul Capsis, Reuben Kaye, Omar Musa, Meow Meow, Queenie van de Zandt, and other new talent on the national rise.
For kids, there is a Random Musical in the CabFest program.
“I might get caught up, too, with my old character. I might bring her up,” Zemiro warns.
“I want people to come to the Cabaret Festival and have a good old bloody laugh.”
She also wants to thrill with the “classic cabaret conceit” of performers telling life stories, to which end siblings Vickie and Linda Bull are likely to be a sell-out attraction.
"From Tongan background to stardom,” cheers Zemiro of the former Black Sorrows singers.
RocKwiz, another Zemiro special, will have its spot. “Rock the Rock Musical,” she declares. Look for Tim Minchin and music from The Who and Queen and Elton John and Abba….and… “shit hot singers to sing the hell out of the songs.”
And, not only but also, some very special dance is programmed. Aaron Cash, special dancer for Cher, pas-de-deux partner for Twyla Tharp, and Ballet Revolution legend, will be on the program.
"What a story he has to tell. What a superb dancer,” swoons Zemiro.
“He’s not 25 anymore but he’s still gorgeous. I wish I could go back and do his dance classes.”
And so it rolls on into a winter wonderland of entertainment.
Names roll off Zemiro’s lively tongue. Look for the lights of the Blues Brothers, Cher, Bowie, Andy Griffiths, and in complete contrast, the bright new sparkle of Deborah Conway’s brilliant 21-year-old daughter Alma Zygier.
There is almost too much to take in.
There is even the beloved Spiegeltent, with vivid big band happenings afoot.
Only in Adelaide, the Cabaret Festival city, can one say: “Yippee, winter is on its way."
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 22 June
Where: Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Program: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
State Theatre Company. 30 Mar 2019
The winds of change have blown a gale on the world of Aussie Rules football.
Not only do we now have female football commentators and a fully-fledged all-woman pro-league football team but now we also have a female interpretation of the classic Australian footy play, The Club.
If eyebrows are up around the town about moustachioed women performing this renowned piece of macho tradition, its creator, playwright David Williamson, is just fine with it. He knows the time is right. He knows the zeitgeist when he sees it.
Director Tessa Leong of the isthisyours? independent theatre company had the idea of a sex change for The Club about two years ago.
“It’s hard to know where ideas come from. They build up sub-consciously,” she says.
She distilled it for a while and then sounded out on a few theatre people in Sydney.
“The first two said it was a great idea but David Williamson would never agree with it,” she reports.
Tessa says her proposal to the playwright outlined "the way in which we are in a stage of world evolution in which we are questioning the power structures that make society tick, our safety and things not keeping people safe, and the abuses of power…
"We are having a discussion around women and the re-interrogation of women’s place in society in a way that has not been seen since the 1970s.
“The play was written in the 70s”.
The Club is a satirical expose on corporate presence in sport. It is a discussion on how to breathe new life into a football club in crisis. It is one of the most performed plays in the country.
“There is something happening now akin to what was happening in the 70s, the discussions of who holds the power and who lays down the law and who keeps everything standing.”
Interestingly, in articulating these thoughts to the playwright, the director of the brave little female theatre company found she was further convincing herself that she had the right idea.
Her thoughts had emerged almost osmotically from her own Aussie roots, from the SANFL games of her childhood, growing up with a footy-mad mum and then navigating her way through allegiances to the AFL when she moved to Sydney.
“We’re in the third season of AFLW. Times have really changed. It’s not just Buddy Franklin that’s the big star now. It’s Erin Phillips.
"Sporting life has changed. And with it we have watched the rise of the corporate AFL. What was once a community activity has become a corporate structure. This is what David Williamson was distilling in The Club."
Williamson concurs.
“When I wrote The Club around 40 years ago, about the all-male, testosterone-driven political infighting behind the scenes in an AFL club, I never thought I’d see an all-female production of the play,” he responded.
“But as my aim was to satirise males behaving badly, who better to make the satire even sharper than a very talented team of female actors/comedians?” says Leong.
“We had to explain to him that we are a company of only so many people with only three actors able to perform the play at this point.
This forced and encouraged us to think outside the square with the play’s characters since the women would be playing multiple roles.”
Knowing that their target production would be with State Theatre in Adelaide, isthisyours? performed a small try-out season of the concept at Belvoir Street, what Leong calls a “conceptual version of the show’s bare bones”. It was a success.
It enabled the company and cast to test the waters with an audience which does not have AFL as its first local loyalty. Sydney is a rugby city, but the corporate nature of today’s sport and the influences of social media on stardom emerge as common threads.
“It was wonderful opportunity we were afforded that generosity by Belvoir,” says Leong.
And so it comes to pass that we now have not only a famously male-oriented play performed by women but also as an historical milestone for the State Theatre Company of SA.
“We discover that we are the first all-female cast and administration team in State Theatre’s history,” declares Leong.
Indeed, with Tessa Leong as director, the company brags Renate Henschke as designer, Susan Grey-Gardner as lighting designer, Catherine Oates as composer and sound designer and actors Nadia Rossi, Louisa Mignone and Ellen Steele as the cast, along with lots of fake moustaches.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 20 April
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au