Gilbert and Sullivan Society of SA. Arts Theatre. 1 Oct 2015
The magic of theatre. When it happens, when one realises that, within the big black box, one has become part of one great big single organism bonded in the shared pleasure of the moment, it is profoundly good. It is what theatre is all about.
This sensation was extraordinarily intense on the opening night of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society's production of Guys and Dolls. The audience responded to the performance like a big beating heart, responsive to each nuance.
G&S has an excellent reputation for mounting lots of slick and professional musicals, especially the light opera of its eponymous composers. But this show in The Arts Theatre steps it up a Broadway notch.
The teamwork between director Karen Sheldon, choreographer Kerry Hauber, and musical director Martin Cheney reflects both understanding and generosity of spirit as well as expertise. Interestingly, all three have honed skills with Northern Light Theatre Company.
Of course, Guys and Dolls is one of the great musicals of all time. Based on a Damon Runyon story scripted by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, it is rich in classic characters, love and fun, humour and satire, absurdity and redemption, all gift-wrapped in Frank Loesser's score of evergreen hits.
The director says her first participation in Guys and Dolls was a catalyst to her making theatre her life path and it is still her favourite show. This shows. But, of course, you can't make a hit production without some pretty talented performers. Sheldon has found a full complement. Her principals are stunning. Then again, any show that his Nicholas Bishop in a minor role has to have a creamy cast. Bishop plays the constantly-snacking gambler Nicely Nicely Johnson and when he sings Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat, it is nothing less than a wild show-stopper. The audience applauds and hollers itself into exhaustion.
Jason Bensen is the official star of the show, playing the inveterate gambler Sky Masterson who accepts a bet that he can convince a Salvation Army girl to go on a date to Cuba with him. Bensen is suave and handsome with good acting skills and a voice which can carry the Sinatra-famous songs such as I've Never Been in Love Before, albeit that no-one can actually match Old Blue Eyes. What Bensen does is create a strong, romantic character and a real sense of chemistry with the female lead, Sophia Bubner playing Sister Sarah Brown, the missionary girl. She is copybook perfect in her part. She has to carry some fairly tricky songs with treacherous high notes, but she does so with sweetness and charm, going on to belt out some big ones like If I was a Bell. She has the most beautiful and interesting qualities to her voice.
Ever-loving Adelaide is the other female lead; the showgirl in love with the gangster Nathan Detroit. And here's one Jeri Williams, an American with a stunning, big Broadway voice, masses of chutzpah and comic presence and, on top of it all, dancing skills. She's breathtaking. And partnered by a peer in the form of Brendan Cooney who has a splendid, distinctive voice along with all the stage skills upon which a comic-musicals player needs to call. These two performers seem almost born to play these renowned roles. All around them are good players giving their all: Ian Brown, Raymond Cullen, Nathan Quadrio, and Lauren Noble.
This is all done with good sets and costumes and wonderfully spirited and atmospheric choreography which makes all dancers look good. This is a big, blockbuster stage show with a large male ensemble as the New York gamblers and a large female troupe as the Hot Box showgirls. They not only have to turn on a diverse array of dance numbers, but some important choral work. Oh, how beautiful it is to hear the harmonies of these singers. Martin Cheney has them rehearsed to perfection, all the while accompanied by what feels like a massive, powerful orchestra down there in the pit. It is eleven-strong. Its string section is just dreamy. In toto, it has found its balance with the miked voices and it spreads the joy. A lovely feeling of enthusiasm and engagement seems to rise from that invisible underworld and connect itself with the audience. It is not a common phenomenon and it is part of what makes this show so very special.
Buy a ticket to this one - even if you have to sell your children to do so.
Samela Harris
When: 1 to 10 Oct
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: gandssa.com.au
Photography by Timeless Event Photography
Dancenorth/Batik. Oz Asia Festival. 30 Sep 2015
Profound moments of epiphany, for audiences and artists, come along only so often. When they do, they change the way work is created, because that change allows an unseen truth or reality of human existence and interaction to appear as if in a flash of brightly lit realisation.
Jane Austen, Mary Shelly, Berthold Brecht, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Vittorio Di Sica wielded ancient and modern art forms in such a way they built new foundations for how we see the world, each other, and how we interact. They were forces for change in human consciousness still manifest today.
Kyle Page and Amber Haines’ Dancenorth, in collaboration with Japanese company Batik’s Josh Mu, Mamiko De and Rie Teranishi Batik have unleashed something new and profound for contemporary dance in their work Spectra.
Their marriage of Japanese movement form Butoh with western contemporary dance is extraordinary from a philosophical viewpoint for contemporary dance work development.
Buddhism is central to Spectra. Basic knowledge of Buddhism’s focus on meditation geared towards warding off distraction and the egotism all humans have in them, to reach clearer realisation of what’s true, important and what’s merely transient is all you really need to know. As for Butoh, it’s a very assured, clear, gracious and ceremonial form of dance requiring extreme concentration. It makes sense then, that to successfully create dance melding the conscious fast and furious ‘look at me’ vanity in performance of western contemporary dance, with the slower, considered and impersonal, ritualised grace of Butoh, a completely new performance style is needed.
Spectra is a first demonstration of it, successfully gripping opening night audience’s hearts and minds in something so breathtakingly new, Buddhism in motion.
How? Spectra is feature length work in which the ensemble moves, to use an analogy, like a series of falling dominos. Their every measured brush, touch, jump, pull and slide neatly creates a sense of place and awareness greater than each individual.
There’s total focus on expressing something collectively, which has no place for a sense of the individual. When there is a solo, such as Amber Haines’ delicately poetic series of lift and glides, it is performed in such a way that any communicated sense of distinct personality is totally absent. There’s a moment of contemplation before action, something rarely seen in other contemporary work.
Emotion and personality in the work comes again and again from the shapes and relationships between the dancers, many mesmerising not just in their beauty but also in what they seem to say about how small humanity is amidst the forces of time and pure physics
David O’Brien
When: 29 to 30 Sept
Where: The Space
Bookings: Closed
Oz Asia Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 26 Sep 2015
Masks have a profoundly significant role in the performing arts cultures of so many nations. Topeng in Indonesian means ‘mask dance’. This production makes beautifully clear a truism of this art form. The mask does not move, but it speaks. How sad Topeng Cirebon is offered for only one performance. It has so much to offer for those seeking experiences of performance, and music styles completely new to them.
Topeng performance comes from the coastal city of West Java, Cirebon. Two styles are performed; the spiritual Losari style and the more showy Selangit style. By alternating styles the two leading dancers of each form, Neni Losari and Inusi Kertapati, entrance the audience, drawing attention not only to the physical differences between each style overall, but also to how each mask ‘speaks’ of character, experience, status, even the circumstances the mask is relating to - be it in a directly or indirectly spiritual or ritual context.
Supporting the choreography are 17 brightly costumed musicians playing gamelan compositions whose performance alone is gripping. A predominantly percussion based musical style melded with wind instrumentation, the gamelan moves with remarkable ease in tempo and nuance. Sometimes working with the choreography, sometimes differentiating in beat and tempo and working against the choreography, the music heightens the performance’s depth and significance.
The costuming is rich and ceremonial. Each flick and turn of cloth holds significance and meaning. Each mask expresses emotions through skilful physical deployment and exacting choreography, down to the detailed movement of single fingers.
Bravo.
David O’Brien
When: 26 Sept
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Oz Asia Festival. Papermoon Puppet Theatre. 25 Sep 2015
53 years is quite a long wait to feel comfortable about tackling extremely dark moments in a nation’s history publically in performance. Then again, it’s only roughly two generations removed from the political violence and unrest that gripped Indonesia in 1965. For some nations, that might be considered too early.
Papermoon Puppet Theatre’s Mwathirika successfully manages the difficult task of revisiting what one historian described as the “black hole” of Indonesian history; the nation-wide massacre of PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) members, those perceived to be members, or opportunistically assumed to be members as a means of settling village scores. All this occurred as a response to allegations the PKI was involved in a coup against the military, lasting well into 1966.
Writer/performer Maria Tri Sulistyani and Visual Artist Iwan Effendi’s production balances a complex blend of puppetry, human actors and multimedia elements to express the fatal consequences for the innocent, caused by sanctioned political actions. Their intelligent, beautiful and gently developed story of two close brothers, nine-year-old Moyo, his little brother Tupu and their father, Baba, strives to discover and reclaim a deep humanity from the aftermath of the nation’s blood thirsty past.
To a child, a red balloon is an innocent thing of joy, of play. Baba gives such a balloon to Tupu after Moyo has broken his toy wooden horse. A travelling show visits not long after replete with clowns, and red flags are eagerly handed out. After the excitement, Tupu leaves the balloon outside overnight. The morning finds a red triangle painted on their home’s window shutter. What does this mean? A visit from a an armed soldier asking the neighbour who lives there makes the danger of the red triangle clear.
Mwathirika’s emphasis on crumbling communal trust between neighbours, brutal oppression of people, no matter who they are or what part of the nation they come from, and meek acceptance of this by those targeted, is writ large in Moyo and Tupu’s experiences.
Moyo and Tupu’s innocent games, the joy of the red balloon and their communication with each other using red whistles, mark some of the many bonds of unity and support they enjoy. The encroachment into their lives of fear and the gradual stripping away of support is heart breaking; made comprehendible by the simple directness in the performance of the narrative, and subtle nuances of characterisation elicited from the production’s five puppets.
Mwathirika seeks neither to offer qualified context or slant to an audience. It offers merely a series of real consequences to real events, leaving the audience entirely free to formulate their own opinions and structure their own pathway to further understanding.
David O’Brien
When: 25 and 26 Sep
Where: Rehearsal Room
Bookings: Closed
OzAsia. Banquet Room. 25 Sep 2015
Patience must be the gift of the viewer just as endurance is the gift of the performer. And originality.
If Melati Suryodarmo is anything, she is original - in the same way that Yoko Ono was original back in the day with her very strange performance art asking people to cut the clothing off her immobile body or imagine their own art work.
Suryodarmo requires no such direct action from her audience. They are simply witness to her art and to think their own thoughts.
For OzAsia, they can see it at the CAS gallery or in The Art Space as videos. Pop on the headphones, sit on the ottoman, watch the artist’s extraordinary efforts rolling on a floor and writhing her way into a veritable op shop of garments, one after another, layer upon layer upon layer. The longer you watch, the stranger it seems. Weird, unpleasant, sad, unnecessary. What is she saying? Surfeit rules? Yes. And one can ponder out myriad theories as one watches her go on and on, the mind wandering, conjuring…
And isn’t that the point.
Hence, Suryodarmo is all over town, so to speak, in various manifestations of her performance art.
She is most famous for the butter dance in which, in high heels, she dances slowly and steadily upon a little stage made of blocks of butter. As she breaks into them, they become more and more viscous and slippery and she begins to fall, heavily. She is not a small woman. She falls again and again, hauling herself up to once again dance, try to balance, fall again. Bruised and brave she finally gives in after about 20 minutes. Why? It’s life, hard knocks from soft things.
Its…what you think it is.
Suryodarmo brings a new work to Adelaide. She has given it a name which represents the girth of the planet - 24,901 miles. She has explained that she is thinking of circles as beginnings and ends and continuities.
For her live performance, now moved from The Artspace to the Banquet Room at the Festival Centre (because of the disruptions from the Noodle Night Market on the plaza) she works in a classic gallery space. There is an opening for audience members to enter and a few chairs. People may also sit on the floor. Annoyingly, vacant chairs are reserved by people who have left possessions there while going off to do other things.
It is an epic performance. No one is staying there for the duration. People come and go. Sometimes only one or two people are watching.
To be frank, when Suryodarmo’s performance is not hypnotic, it is pretty boring. I spent what felt like too long watching her hiding under a mattress. I thought she would never move. We were sitting there looking at a mattress. My partner was nudging his restlessness. People were getting up and leaving.
There was hardly anyone left when, eventually, very slowly, she rose and began to undertake a journey with the mattress, wading through a floor of deep red sand in the twilight hues of the performance space. She saddened me. Her journey was arduous and lonely. She was somewhere nowhere in a bleak landscape, her mattress a shelter, a comfort, a companion, a burden…
No one will have seen the entirety of Suryodarmo’s performance. The endurance is hers alone. We have choice to go out into the sunshine, eat, wander in and out…to come back the next day and watch a bit more.
Many, like my partner, will think her art is an absurd indulgence, a waste of precious time and attention.
But, if they look upon it for a while, I’m betting just as Suryodarmo is, that they will find themselves thinking about it, pondering the ifs and buts of life, the universe and art and, most likely, never forgetting it.
Samela Harris
When: 25 and 26 Sep
Where: Banquet Room
Bookings: Admission free
Works also at Artspace Gallery until Oct 4
Contemporary Art Centre of SA Until Sept 30