Illuminate Adelaide/Insite Arts. Nexus Arts. 11 July 2024
Such a deftly simple idea.
Offer a group of artists across dance, visual arts and performance art a 3.5m round white stage, five video monitors behind them and see what they fill it with, or rather, how they envision filling the earth.
Juha Vanhakartano’s concept is one in which he allowed artists involved to bring whatever ideas and tools needed to execute their visions and remained hands off from there. Vanhakartano worked sculpting the overall concept and video design in partnership with Sound Designer/Operator Sascha Budimski and Lighting Designer/Operator Nic Mollison.
This is where the simple bit ends. Here, it’s all about the framing of images and meaning in action in this tiny stage space. Your eyes and mind are constantly at work devouring and comprehending a lot of phenomenal information.
Across seven sharply different, deeply engaging, through provoking works, Fill The Earth goes places far beyond the physical span of the space works are confined.
Visual Artist Thom Buchanan is already at work as the audience files in, performing Anthropocene Epoch.
Sit down or walk around the artist, as he etches/smudges hard and light charcoal lines into the canvas.
Buchanan is hard at work. His stained feet leave black marks, whirling about the canvas. Monitors show an overhead shot of the work. You see a white ice age world of growing cracks. Yes, this is the world. Before the world.
Yumi Umiumare’s M.M.E – My Mother Earth is the only work restricted to video monitor. The ice cold of the Anthropocene gives way to this eerie bubble shaped figure which proceeds to grow, glow in green, blue and purple to an exactingly tingling soundtrack. Awe is a good word for this piece. Umiumare manages to express the fecund nature of birthing life on bare earth that’s quite transcendent and yet primitive.
Caleena Sansbury and Adrianne Semmens’ Here, Unseen is a delicate, sparse but very rich focus on country, Kuarna Yerta country. Video footage of stick branches fused with the performers begins they piece as the offer a dance that’s very much one love for the ochre lands, the bare vegetation and so importantly as voice overs, older to younger generations chant, “our country holds our stories.” Yet they are immersed in this land, they are certainly here, but unseen.
Paulo Castro and Jo Stone’s O Sabor do meu Pomar of all the works brilliantly pulls off the challenge of framing a work and its intent differently from what is seen from audience view and what is seen in overhead shot video view.
Stone enters the stage. From her dress hem drop around a half dozen red apples. She exits, returning with a radio, a bag. Listens for radio sound. She exits twice, returning each time with a large dead apple tree limb, laying one limb on the stage dais behind her, the other in front.
This a scene of devastated earth. So smashed, unreal it’s enough to attempt sticky taping apples back onto branches to recover a sense of normal Earth. It’s as uncomfortably disconcerting, the sound of tape stretching over an apple and a tree limb as it is to watch. Stone can now lie down and look the sky. Only form overhead view on video, looking down on her and the scene, Earth looks perfect again. It’s a scarily real-time world image to ponder.
Co-director sisters Alison and Bridget Currie’s Sister of Icarus is a dive into art mythology from another angle which takes its cues from three August Rodin sculptures.
Accent is on comfort. Alison Currie and Cazna Brass play with sculptural shape using rocks, cloth a cloth enclosed sculptural form. It all seems so hard for these two to find ‘ease.’ As much as they change positions, change placement of small rocks on their bodies in Rodin imitation, nothing seems quite settled. The piece also suggestively hovers around the idea of an actual sister of Icarus falling down the rocks, not up to the sun as Icarus did. It’s beautiful, taught, lightly tragic demanding work in which being supportive and being ok is the battle.
Stephen Sheehan’s Adam is an existentially whimsical work about a man with a door. What he might find behind the door. Or not. The psychological world made physical with all its little unknown moments as he knocks on the door, peers around it, uses it as shelter from scary things.
Overhead video shots of this man/door journey are fascinating. Is Adam attempting to wall himself in or out of the world?
Lina Limosani’s Mele is totally the modern world. Grey. Angular. Fast. Unforgiving. In dancer Rowan Rossi, she has the perfect talent to execute the most brutal, sharp, savagely exact choreography seen in some time with ripping soundtrack in support. Rossi is mesmerising. He is modern man. Today. Which no one really wants to suffer being.
David O’Brien
When: Closed
Where: Nexus Arts
Bookings: Closed
Laughter Through The Tears Productions. The Space. 3 Jul 2024
Rebecca Meston’s Hits is her Adelaide music industry/culture love letter in a long line of such, across many a decade and form, from film to novel.
Rhiannon (Ren Williams) finds herself with just Mum after Dad, Rod (Eddie Morrison) hits the tour road with his band. Forever. At least she has her beat box, headphones, and love of sappy mainstream 80s tunes to comfort her. It ‘ain’t enough really.
Until the day she leaps off the bus chasing a guy, ending up in a record store owned by a totally cool chick called Suzie (Annabel Matheson) and a world beyond her folks’ sappy tunes, school uniform, bland clothes and uppity peers opens up to her.
Lifeblood of being young; getting into music, finding your therapeutic aural fix when life sucks boosting you again for another day, another battle with the world.
Meston as Director mashes comedic caricatures laced with rather pointed observation of cultural mores of the day, in a sweet and sour nostalgia binge that nonetheless is also a fight between two cultures - mainstream and alternative.
In the midst of this, Rhiannon’s making choices, fending off negative influences within both mainstream and alternative culture. Williams’ superbly balances nostalgic elements of the production with the more caustic, serious undertones of Meston’s writing, as does the entire cast.
Suzie runs her record shop and her customers, her way. Choice of music is imposed on buyers to grow their knowledge, not feed infantile feelings. Quintessential 80s-90s mainstream radio jock DJ Barry (Eddie Morrison) rules the airwaves and listeners in a similar fashion (shocking into life memories of how really, really, really, bad mainstream radio was in the day).
Mother, Linda (Emma Beech) is an 80s magazine style queen who nonetheless is still living in the 70s. Rhiannon’s school peers, Meels, Footsy (Emma Beech) and Bee (Annabel Matheson) are as vacuously 90s bitchy and pretentious as the Vogue magazine they primp over.
It’s a smooth, fluid moving production across a stage set up for a band, utilising put on, pull off chairs, decks and tables.
A mosh pit crew consisting of first year Flinders University Drama Centre students, choreographed by Erin Fowler, add head banging passion and zest to the sophisticated score by Jason Sweeney, deftly hinting at music history of the day’s clashes.
Hits is not a pop show. Certainly not rock and roll high school. It’s a clever look at the way things were and still are today. Same issues, different tunes, different mediums.
David O’Brien
When: 3 to 6 Jul
Where: The Space
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Madness of Two. The Void. Flinders University Drama Centre. 26 Jun 2024
So much of yesterday’s science fiction has come to pass that it makes one wary of fictional prognostications. Let’s hope that Starweaver does not follow the pattern.
It is scary.
Certainly Jamie Hornsby and Ellen Graham, acknowledged and considerably awarded now as bright lights of promise on the theatre scene, have thrust their Madness of Two company far into the future, to the year 2149, wherein A.I. blurs reality and it takes fearless activists to thwart ghastly capitalist domination. Only those who can afford to do so may view the starry night sky in their nightmare of tomorrow. Heroine of the time is Cato, a genius A.I. engineer who, in ragged traveller clothes, carries hacker technology in an old-school backpack.
The production, in The Void at Flinders Drama Centre, is an intriguing mass of anachronisms, on the whole highly aesthetic with design by the renowned Kathryn Sproul. Indeed, the play is directed by State Theatre’s Shannon Rush and comes in under the wing of the 2024 Stateside season and developed under the Australian Writers' Guild David Williamson Prize along with the State’s InSPACE program. There is a lot of professional clout behind it - and a LOT of the latest technology.
It transforms The Void into a strangely warm womb of a performance space seating just thirty-four. It is both intimate and immediate theatre dominated by a large cyclorama. Thereon is projected a fearful future-world: spacecraft interiors, giant tech corporate factory corridors, open spaces occupied by cloned virtual protestors, a Mars space station, city and sky-scapes, and even the verdant interior of a biosphere. The curve of screen warps proportions and adds to the weird experimental feel of the world out there. The images are huge and sensationally high-res. They’ve used CGI, motion capture, and videogame technology and the creditable credits include Mark Oakley as technical director with Paul Goodman on sound.
The actors onstage interact with the filmed characters and, on occasion, mime movements as if within the locations. This is not always convincing but, when the tech blending works, it produces some quite jaw-dropping moments.
It is really immersive theatre. With the close proximity of the actors and the massive immediacy of the screen images, there are times when one feels enveloped despite the sci-fi absurdity of it all.
The plotline is old-school goodies versus baddies with a healthy anti-corporate-greed political heart. Venal capitalism would have us pay to look at the stars.
Mark Saturno onscreen makes a fabulous champagne-sipping baddie. It’s a lovely performance which threatens to steal the show. However, Ellen Graham is the star of the show as Cato, the valiant genius activist hacker. It is an exhausting role by the time she has finished being brutalised by future rays from a virtual maniac villain and conjuring her brother from a cyber egg thingie. It has been indeed a strong and committed performance. Hornsby, her co-writer of this work, plays Cassius, counsel and fellow hero. His costume is some interesting layered trenchcoat look, half Columbo and half complicit sage. The costumes are puzzling. There are Starweaver mystics in black cloaks like Macbeth’s witches and fellow henchmen in civvies. Clones are in sports attire with boots. Heroic Terra, played by Maeve Hook, is in quasi machine-gun battle gear. Then there is Mark Aspen played by Brett Archer up there on the screen, chic and villainous in a sleek metallic-hued formal suit.
It has taken a large village to create this 90-minute work with full marks to Jason Bevan and the Flinders University Visual Effects and Entertainment Design students.
It is out there and ambitious and dangerously balanced on its dependence on tech reliability. Its preview performance fell foul of a tech issue.
This brave new creation follows Madness of Two’s triumph with the five-star kids’ show Claire Della and the Moon.
What a contrast. What an interesting young company. What on earth or elsewhere will it do next?
Samela Harris
When: 26 Jun to 6 Jul
Where: The Void, Flinders University Drama Centre
Bookings: events.humanitix.com
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 22 Jun 2024
It’s always a big load to carry, being the child of a revered artist when you’re working in the same field. Lisa Simone carries this weight well, perhaps because she doesn’t try to be her mother, Nina Simone. Comparisons are artistically odious, and in this instance, there isn’t much in terms of their vocals to compare them. The timbre and throaty nuances of Nina’s contralto simply aren’t present which makes it simpler to consider Lisa on her own merits, albeit while performing songs that Nina made famous.
Lisa was a latecomer to a singing career, spending 10 or so years in the military, and has enjoyed a very successful career on Broadway (Rent, Aida, The Lion King) and recorded a number of albums. This tour is very much dedicated to her mother’s body of work; Keeper Of The Flame was recorded by Nina in 1967 and is a most appropriate name for the show.
The program began with an extended instrumental number from the 16-piece band, who tested themselves out with various instrumental solos, while still paying very close attention to their chord charts. This made for a bit of a stilted beginning, but it is difficult to have a free-swinging vibe when you’re just not used to playing together.
Simone came on to sing the eponymous opener, and the softly spoken singer quickly won over the audience as she went on to tell anecdotes, jokes and some lengthy stories between songs. All the favourite standards were there: Fine and Mellow, Gal From Joe’s, Pay’em No Mind and audience participation came in Go To Hell, while band members also got to perform a few scheduled solos, a highlight being James Muller’s guitar solo in the blues Do I Move You.
After a brief interval, Lisa was back with a very up-tempo version of Mood Indigo, and then went on to perform some of the greatest songs that form Nina’s legacy. Black Is The Color (of my true love’s hair), My Baby Just Cares For Me, Feelin’ Good and I Put A Spell On You. She then placed her own stamp on the concert by closing with her own Finally Free, really showcasing the voice (and amazing breath control) that has won her accolades and award nominations on Broadway.
This carefully and closely curated show pays homage to the late and great Nina Simone, and at the same time allows Lisa Simone to come out from under that shadow, showing that she is a performer in her own right. It would be great to see her let loose and get a bit of improv happening on stage; for this performance however, the audience was more than happy to listen, sing along at times, and give this talented performer a standing ovation. A good close to a fabulous festival.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 22 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Banquet Room. 21 Jun
Michelle Brasier and Ben Russell play a divorced showbiz couple whose luminous careers have descended to casting for the Wagga Wagga Amateur Musical Society. Their CabFest show features the divine Gillian Cosgriff onstage at piano under strict instructions to stick to “plinkyplonk" and not, under any circumstance, upstage those two stars.
Being an award-winning comedienne, musician, actor and composer, she plays her part as well as she plays the piano and, come the show’s denouement, she plays the audience most charmingly, too. An endearing CabFest star she is.
Brasier is pretty impressive, too. Talk about confidence. She’s so over the top, she’s a flood - so very funny and, of course, talented with capital T’s and an extremely short skirt. Russell is something else. One has never seen an actor with a more actorly face or, indeed, actorly demeanour. The two of them caricature most beautifully the divine arrogance of the very toffy repertory fallen stars who have succumbed to their own myth of stardom, now “resting" in the sticks.
Their shtick is very good fun and there is plenty of ensuring improv as they bring on their auditioning comedian singers.
First up, Boo Dwyer who, of course, is fabulous and hams it up nicely as the amateur hour discovery. Very Weilley, too. (A bad Kurt pun.)
Broden Kelly turns up as a loudmouth Ocker spouting Adelaide’s unfashionable suburb’s names for cheap, easy and successful laughs. He plays at his dream of being a Gypsy. The audience loves him to bits. It is loving everything.
Jealously, Braiser explains the audience’s enthusiasm with a gag about how it would even laugh at being asked if it liked drinking water. “Yes", it torrents. She and Russell conclude that this is all part of the odd phenomenon of being cabaret performed in a 6.30pm timeslot. Silly them. The Banquet Room tables are laden with champagne bottles. There’s a bar outside the door. This critic has a pink gin and soda in hand. It’s Adelaide CabFest time. It is Friday after work, for heaven’s sake. The sell-out crowd is happy already.
The next auditioner has a name that is hard to catch. She identifies herself as “the brown one”. She turns out to be fabulous and fearless Leela Vargehese. She sings beautifully, strips off her butch black leather outfit to reveal a white coat and brings the house down with the I’m Your Dentist song from Little Shop of Horrors.
Then Mad Dog Malcolm struts through the audience. What a roughy! He says he’s only here because his old mum wants him to audition. He then sings They Call the Wind Maria. It is so pure and powerful and utterly sublime that the room holds its breath. Dammit. Give him the job. Any job. Can I marry that voice?
Finally, an overly breathless and inept would-be star comes aboard with words and sheet music in hand. She’s been a bit too busy to learn her song, she says. Not surprising. It’s CabFest supremo Virginia Gay. Um, yes, a teeny bit busy. She does the Sweeny Todd pie song and throws ham, ham pie and, indeed, very well-cured gourmet ham into a dauntingly energetic performance. One may mention the voice. She is right at home in that big-musicals genre and her vocal range is very pleasing. She puts out. She’s a team player and it is her team.
The Wagga Wagga pair insists the room stays black so that their “plinkyplonk" pianist won’t show off while they exit to consider their verdict.
Cosgriff lures a couple of audience members to illuminate her with their iPhones and she gives a spellbinding performance.
Even she ends up being selected for the Wagga Wagga musical and everyone sings a grand finale of Magical Mr Mistoffelees from Cats. And they sing it and sing it and…er. Everyone’s singing it. Did they say for 20 minutes? They have 20 minutes to fill? The show has run short? Perchance they are one auditioner short.
For an improv show, one wonders why two of the country’s most accomplished improv performers could not have improvised a rabbit out of their hat when they had time to spare.
Oh well. Big deal. The audience gets back to the bar early.
It’s Cab Fest time. The warmest winter festival in the world. It was a good laugh. Everyone one is plain old-fashioned happy.
Samela Harris
When: 21 to 22 Jun
Where: Banquet Room
Bookings: Closed