Brink Productions in association with the Adelaide Festival Centre. Space Theatre. 13 Oct 2015
A musty scent of earth and grass pervades the theatre. The roof is a canopy, close like a lowering sky lit by a ball of amber light. The stage is a small mound surrounded by circles of punishing wooden picnic chairs upon which the audience must sit. Beneath the feet, the lawn is summer-bleached and strewn with eucalyptus leaves. Tiny flies, gnats, come with the territory. They visit the audience members, landing on hands, programs, and foreheads while generating small outbreaks of "the Australian wave".
Enter the actors. They might be costumed like figures from a Russell Drysdale landscape, but they speak the spirit of Patrick White. It is as if, in adaptation, Chris Drummond has, like a literary alchemist, distilled the essence of White.
The original short story had the prosaic title of Down at the Dump. In renaming the story for the stage, Drummond has extracted the focal character with a melancholy twist. Daise is dead. The audience members attend her funeral. She lives among them. She is put to rest. She rises as a ghost of memories in her community. Her life was not complete. Aspirations are not just aims; they are breath.
It's about love and loss, about small minds in a big landscape and it is set in an insular Australian yesterday which we may now identify as an era when the country's cultural forces were at the height of idiomatic self-awareness.
The cast of four roams from character to character, not gender specific but divided by generations. Two great actors play the spans of suburban community seniors: the long-suffering wife, the plodding rustic man, the posturing local dignitary. Paul Blackwell dons shaggy dun brown overalls which make you itch to look at them and some rather odd old-fella makeup and uses artful demeanour as his primary tool of characterisation while from Kris McQuade arises that glorious gravel voice to ring forth a wonderment of White inflections and imagery.
James Smith and Lucy Lehman embody the experiences of growing up there in Sarsaparilla amid the secrets of the bush and the judgements of their elders. Lehman also represents Daise in her shades of approval from the tight little establishment of yesteryear while Smith elicits Ozzie, the symbol of the Aussie underdog. Oh, that young man can act. He is something special to watch. And to hear. White's wondrous lines stream naturally from his character depictions.
And there is the mind music of White's words placing these characters so vividly in the White world: the "small pink tilted house"; "standing among carnations"; "brindled with crystal crimson"; "turned into the speckled bush"; "trees with grey blades"; "face closed up tightly like a fist".
There's a graveside association with the deceased and the recollection of eating a caramelised baked apple; so incidental yet piercingly intense. Ah, behold the power of Patrick White's minutiae.
The players clomp in leather shoes through the grassy scape while lighting designer Nigel Levings plays harsh Australian sunshine through the shades of day upon the vast canopy under which the audience sits in The Space; a large world narrowed so carefully by designer Michael Hankin. If ever there was an award-worthy design, this is it.
But there is more.
There is the Zephyr Quartet: Hilary Kleinig, Belinda Gehlert, Jason Thomas, and Emily Tulloch. They are seated at four points among the audience, sometimes plucking strings in sweet tuneful eloquence and at others, rolling forth the atmosphere of this timeless Australian yesterday. It is intimate, perfectly balanced, and of mellow tonal beauty, with shades of swirling Philip Glass; the music embraces and caresses the audience. It is the final touch to the complete experience, to a particularly brilliant evocation of Patrick White Australiana.
Following the superlative, award-winning litany of productions of his career so far, this lovely lull of Australiana cements the belief that Brink artistic director, Chris Drummond, is the genius theatre mind of our time.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 24 Oct
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Oz Asia Festival. The Space. 3 Oct 2015
Anyone familiar with the Japanese reality TV scene which SBS has done a great job of broadcasting in Australia, will have an immediate hook into the kind of experience Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker promises.
In a mere three years, Director Choreographer Toco Nikaido has taken her company and work to Europe as well as the Asian arts festival circuit and made such a name for themselves they are invited back. Not hard to see why.
What a mind bending, joyous, wild and thought provoking experience the work is. Imagine being in the middle of the high-energy insanity of your favourite Japanese reality TV show. Imagine having buckets of water thrown at you from all directions along with constant showers of multicoloured glitter falling on you from the rig above. All the while, you’re being bombarded visually by pop culture video, song and dance straight out of the zaniest traditions of karaoke bar life.
There is definitely method in the madness, a crazy mixed up story blending the struggles of Miss Revolutionary Idol alongside the freedoms and wonders of Australia. All this told in delightful sugar coated fantasy style accompanied by cliché Aussie tourism images of your standard cute koala bear and flag.
Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker is the most insanely brilliant melange of European styles of immersive theatre, theatre of cruelty and cinema with uniquely Japanese styles of story telling and mythology clearly reflecting the 70 years plus influence of US consumerism and culture on Japan since World War II.
What makes it so unique from an audience perspective is you’re never sure if you are the show for the performers, who are having a blast peppering you from all sides in the friendliest fashion, or the show in front you is meant to be the show. All the while, your mind is being very much love bombed into instant happiness by all the smiles, fun and games going on.
When the audience is invited onto the stage and applauded by the performers, it’s the moment you really start wondering, what’s important? The seemingly disposable pop gum experience or clearly genuine enthusiasm of the artists, for us as human beings?
David O’Brien
Where: The Space
When: Season closed
Bookings: Closed
John Frost, Karl Sydow, Martin McCallum and Joye Entertainment in association with Lionsgate and Magic Hour Productions. 4 Oct 2015
The buzz in the foyer before the sell-out performance I attended was incredible. Some, like me, missed the 1987 hit film starring Patrick Swayze (tragically dead at age 57 by pancreatic cancer) and Jennifer Grey, or the world premiere stage production in Australia in 2004, and were there because of the huge reputation of this work. The low budget, independently produced movie had no major stars (no, Patrick was not yet a star) but grossed skyward of $200 million. It was the first film to sell more than a million home copies; the hit song, (I've Had) The Time of My Life, and the soundtrack won Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe awards. All this started with the boy-meets-girl story that writer Eleanor Bergstein could not sell.
The action takes place in the summer of 1963 in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. Wealthy Manhattanites would retreat to woodsy resorts - like the Kellerman's as presented in the show - where the management organise skittles, talents contests and most pertinently, dance lessons for families. While it all seems a bit corny now, and the resorts lost their popularity in the 1980s, this sort of action has shifted to the cruise ships, as well as all the hanky-panky between the male staff and wide-eyed teenagers or bored housewives.
Basically, a nice girl in her gap summer falls in love with the dance instructor and has the time of her life. Some of the dramatic elements were later borrowed by Baz Luhrmann and his co-writers for the 1992 film, Strictly Ballroom. Due to partner problems, the top dog dancer reluctantly teaches a novice for a big number under the duress of a deadline. Baz even replicated the emphasis on Spanish rhythms and how to learn them - "leesin to yur 'art."
The design team created a filmic background for the stage production with motion imagery of lake water, rain, and scenic hills. Plantation shutters dropped periodically to help transit scene changes. The ambience of a high quality, old-school resort was there, meeting Bergstein's objective of placing you into the three dimensional present, as opposed to film's sense of two dimensional memory, as she put it.
The dancing is unbelievably good - exciting, visceral and sexy - the dirty dancing of the title. Maddie Peat and Kurt Phelan playing the top instructors at Kellerman's opened the dance numbers in an awesome display of virtuosity. The chorus choreography is highly individualised. It is in the relationship between Kirby Burgess's Baby Houseman and Phelan's Johnny Castle that Strictly Ballroom meets Grease (1978), for here we have a Sandy Olsson type falling for a Johnny Zuko type. The audience cheered for their success in seduction and choreography. And weren't those the biggest melons you have ever seen?
While a lot of the music was sixties soundtrack, James D Smith - who as Billy Kostecki introduced Baby to the debauchery of the staff quarters - sang In The Still of The Night with the clarity of a Herkimer diamond, and shone with Anna Freeland in the inspirational theme song of the finale. Unfortunately, director James Powell kept them in theatrical twilight in opposite corners of front stage, as this is a dance show after all. The other original songs are also left to the ensemble as the leads do not actually sing. Fans of the early sixties will enjoy all the contextual information - the Mississippi bus protest, Kennedy's Peace Corps and the liberal idealism that that president fostered - but also parental conservatism and illegal abortion, new stuff in addition to the romantic narrative of the film, I am told.
There was a standing ovation when I attended. Dirty Dancing is a terrific night out, sticking to the winning formulae of the film, and fulfilling a wish to re-engage with this love story by the immediacy of a stage performance.
David Grybowski
When: 4 October to 1 November
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Oz Asia Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 30 Sep 2015
Artists often take their inspiration from nature, but it is usually from what is seen or heard and rarely from what is un-sensed. Superposition is an artist’s attempt to make tangible what is essentially the ultimate in intangibility – the quantum world.
Superposition is a fusion of synthesized sound and computer generated imagery that assaults your senses. It is not an enjoyable experience, and nor is it un-enjoyable. It is provoking and arresting – it demands and commands your attention and if you can’t give it you have but one option, and that is to leave the ‘event’. That is exactly what some did, but only a few.
At its heart is science and mathematics, and it’s confusing. If you know nothing of quantum physics or informatics your enjoyment would be diminished, and seeing it several times would, I suspect, not fill in the gaps. The program notes aren’t of too much use either. I’m fortunate (or not) to have some training in mathematical physics and I could appreciate what creator Ryoji Ikeda was trying to say, but it’s dangerous to overstate your case. Ikeda’s Artist Statement in the programme notes concludes by saying that “Superposition is … foolhardily and quixotically aiming to explore the new kind of information through art.” Maybe foolhardily, because the quantum world defies common sense.
Suffice to say, Ikeda drew inspiration for his ‘event’ from the ambiguity and confusion that plagues a mere mortal’s attempt to explain and describe the quantum world.
The event comprised a perplexing and stunning array of graphic images projected onto multiple screens, sometimes with expositions of the underpinning data, and always accompanied by seemingly chaotic signal generated sounds. It was loud. Your body felt the ‘music’ – your sinuses vibrated. At times two actors manipulated electronic and mechanical equipment on stage and we saw graphical and mathematical representations of what they were doing. The pace was relentless, and each spectacular electronic display was outdone by the next.
Can our lives be expressed in mathematics? Is reality deterministic? Who knows? Philosophy aside, the audience loved it.
Kym Clayton
When: 29 to 30 Sep
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Oz Asia Festival. M.O.V.E. Theatre. Nexus Arts. 2 Oct 2015
Dear Taiwan,
Who would have thought to mount a celebration of John Cage's 101st birthday? Cage is not the first composer one might have imagined would turn on the Taiwanese creative juices.
Cage was the American who delivered the music of silence, who deconstructed instruments, created "indeterminacy" as a musical concept. He was the great avant-garde original of the 20th Century. And it seems, you, Taiwan's M.O.V.E. Theatre, have fallen in love with his sounds, his philosophies and created both visual art and science around his themes. You have called it "sound immersion experimental" and turned him into experiential theatre for millennials.
Here in Adelaide for OzAsia, you have made the Nexus performance space dark and uncomfortable, so the people must stand, sit on the floor or perch uncertainly on the edge of the stage or the odd rough pine box. You allow them to move around but warn them not to touch the "instruments" in the blackout darkness. Then you play lights here and there as sonic effects are brought into use. Sometimes audience members help by pulling a string or two on some chime suspended aloft.
You add a dancer in white who shrugs on a suspended jacket connected by wires to an opened piano frame and then elicits certain notes as she strains invisible elements. There is a musician to play at this raw piano belly. She pounds and strokes the strings with soft sticks and mallets.
Upon the stage boxes contain clear plastic tubes which, when activated, rise and fall under pneumatic pressure, a laboratory pipe organ of some sort, squeezing out pipe whistles some soft and some so strident they assault the senses.
The dancer moves through the audience, adding percussive complements. White lines create a box in which the dancer struggles with a wooden box and it drums and thumps and then, as she leaps upon it, rattles wild staccato like a human castanet. Piece by piece, light falls upon the boxes around the room and new sounds are released. Is that rain on the roof or the shimmer of a shamanistic tube rattle? As one listens in the darkness, the sounds become layered and build into what is often a pleasant Cage-style sort of tune. Or not.
The random aspects of Cage philosophy are thrown into the mix, most exquisitely when a child in the audience is invited to follow a light through the room and then help to switch on and off and off and on a line of hanging light globes. The child innately understands the expectation of the piece and it is beautiful.
From the beginning and the one constant through the hour-long show is a pleasurable metranomic sound.
Finally, under a shaft of blinding light, it is illuminated as water droplets making controlled splashes into a glass beaker.
And thus, dear Taiwan, you bring us a night of strangeness and auditory adventure. Very serious and mysterious. Science and art and history and love in a big, dark wonderland.
Thank you.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 3 Oct
Where: Nexus Arts
Bookings: Closed