Adelaide Festival. State Theatre Company and Belvoir Theatre. 25 Feb 2020
In the world of the 13 year old, there is little that gets in or out. You want what you want, and most people on this planet exist to stop you from getting it.
For the dancers from Pat’s dance Academy in Liverpool, Ohio, in training to make the finals in Florida, the world of the hormone driven 13 year old inexorably begins to unravel around them; friends are lost, passions are ignited, ambitions are thwarted and reality is denied.
The teens are played by a cast that aren’t anywhere near 13; grown women (and one male) of varying ages take up the roles, stepping out in sassy sailor costumes for the opening number, and for the most part, despite the cute red leotards, they just don’t look like dancers. But they could have been, and that nostalgic nod to what might have been is referenced throughout the production.
Mitchell Butel plays dance teacher Pat and is very understated. He does little to inspire either us or the company; one keeps waiting for him to break out, and he just doesn’t.
Playwright Clare Barron has taken on some meaty issues in this play; ambition, expectation, friendship, love, sexuality and broken dreams.
To the fore is sexuality and its concomitant power. Men know this power, and they own it. In Dance Nation, these sexual neophytes are exploring their bodies, trying to understand the changes that are going on, what this means for them, and for their dancing.
Yvette Lee plays teacher’s pet Amina, the best dancer in the company and best friend of Zuzu (Chika Ikogwe). When Pat announces that the competition production will be an homage to Ghandi, everyone expects Amina will get the main dancing role, but it goes to her friend. Zuzu knows she is a good dancer, but she also knows she will never be “sensational”, as she explains in one of the moving soliloquies of the piece. Zuzu comes to understand that this a turning point in her life, and turn she does.
Amina also learns that she needs to own her talent, and in the way of many women, suffers from ‘imposter syndrome’; she doesn’t think she has the skills that she so obviously does, and Pat challenges her to understand this.
Rebecca Massey plays the gentle Maeve, who wants to be an astrophysicist. It helps, as she secretly acknowledges, that she can fly. And one day, she bluntly states, she’ll forget how, and that she ever did.
It is Amber McMahon as Ashlee who most deftly shows what the results can be when women work to own their sexual power. Ashlee is right into masturbation, and eager to learn about new sexual experiences. She tells us that men think she has a fantastic arse; that she is beautiful. But she denies their compliments, knowing full well that they are true. She’s brilliant, and she’s going to get 100 per cent on her SATs, and she’s going to be a surgeon - but men don’t want to hear that.
Ashlee’s monologue is shocking, breathtaking, funny, confronting. As she owns her body, her sexuality, and her explicitly named body parts, she screams, “I am your god. I am your second coming. I am your mother and I’m smarter than you and more attractive than you and better than you at everything that you love and you’re going to get down on your knees and worship my mind, my mind and my body, and I’m gonna be the motherfucking KING of your motherfucking WORLD.”
The ensemble work well together, and the device of older women playing 13 year olds really works. It helps to accept some of the dark, strange thoughts of the girls – because young girls do have dark, strange thoughts. It’s why they love Sylvia Plath.
It’s a tight production from Imara Savage, and an intelligently rendered ‘dance studio’ set.
This is not a production for everyone; the coarse language is really coarse, and some of the concepts are very confronting. But if you think theatre should be confronting, then this is absolutely for you.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 25 Feb to 7 Mar
Where: Scott Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Patch Theatre. Queen’s Theatre. 25 Feb 2020
Geoff Cobham has had an illustrious career lighting up Adelaide high art since 1992, principally special events designing for the Adelaide Festival, as resident designer for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and most recently, as Artistic Director of Patch Theatre since July 2018.
The Lighthouse is a triumphal exhibition of inventive virtuosity in the lighting department, but also an experiential interactive theatre piece complete with live and recorded soundtrack. The small audience is guided through a number of intimate rooms full of variations of all things light, with influences from Cobham’s considerable theatrical lighting design career.
Mirrors, lasers, miniatures and mime form an astronaut and fairy tale wizardesses. The sheer delight as you play hopscotch with beams is signaled by the squeals of amazement from the kids, as this is definitely a family-friendly event. Best not to describe, to preserve the element of surprise. When you exit into ordinariness, you’ll realise that an hour was not long enough. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 25 Feb to 7 Mar
Where: Queen’s Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. By Michel van der Aa featuring Kate Miller-Heidke. Hetzel Lecture Theatre, Institute Building, State Library of South Australia. 27 Feb 2020
Michel van der Aa is a multi-award-winning modern composer from the Netherlands, and more…he has enhanced his operas and other work over the last twenty years with his own moving imagery. But this Australian premiere production called Eight takes the cake. Technically, it’s the cutting edge of sensory immersion utilising perfected virtual reality technology. Viscerally, it’s an unforgettable, mind-blowing, freak-out walk through the cosmos and it would be the mistake of your life not to experience it.
Eight can only be consumed one at a time. An usher helps you don wireless noise-cancelling headphones and a helmet-like contraption containing the visual VR gear. Once you’re comfortable in the darkness, a lovely reincarnation of a woman beckons you on your journey. This isn’t some elaborate 3D set-up or hologram nonsense – your senses are telling you it’s all happening yet it’s so ethereal and ghost-like. The young woman is voiced by none other than Australia’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv, Kate Miller-Heidke. At Eurovision, she received the Marcel Bezençon award in the Artistic category for the best artist as voted by the commentators of the contest. Michel van der Aa conceived Eight expressly for her. Kate’s soaring soprano sings an enigmatic poem whose words you can study from a sheet before you go in. But wait a minute, now she’s somebody else, and where did this vast, unbelievably beautiful mountain meadow come from? That’s the pic in the program and I’m telling you nothing more.
Remember in The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, realises he can dodge the bullets – even in slow motion – but only once you truly believe the seemingly solid world of your senses is only a fabricated figment reality created by the aliens? You, too, can have that experience. And it’s exquisite.
Even after fifteen minutes of walking about after the immersion, I questioned the solidity of my surroundings with tentative steps and by touching walls. Whoa, man, that was an-other place. I think I’ll go back. Double Bravo!
PS Eight is an interactive experience in a virtual but seemingly unstable terrain. The program warns that it’s not recommended for individuals who have severe claustrophobia or epilepsy, or who experience seizures or extreme vertigo. Not listed for wheelchair access.
David Grybowski
When: 28 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Hetzel Lecture Theatre, Institute Building, State Library of South Australia
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Bakehouse Theatre. 26 Feb 2020
There is some compelling and exquisitely performed theatre in this years’ Adelaide Fringe, and Spitfire Solo, which has played here before to rave reviews, is one of them. Do add it to your calendar!
Spitfire Solo is another production for a solo performer, and it is written and performed by Nicholas Collett. It is set across the lifetime of Peter Walker, a retired WWII pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain eighty years ago. Over fifty enthralling minutes, Collett gives us an intimate glimpse into Walker’s life, ranging from his terrifying missions in the war, meeting his wife to be, and her untimely passing, the estrangement of his daughter, his guest speaker efforts in a school, through to him meeting his granddaughter for the first time.
It is a touching story and Collett is a consummate story teller. Every word of his beautifully crafted script is brought to vivid life through a sustained and completely enchanting and disarming performance. His body language effortlessly conveys him as is a young man, as well as suggesting of the aches, pains and stiffness that comes with old age. Him miming being in a Spitfire during battle is unsettling – you almost feel the aerial manoeuvres and vicariously experience Walker’s fear and exhilaration.
The setting on the Mainstage at the Bakehouse Theatre is ideal. There is an eclectic collection of chairs, a table, and a few hand props. Everything has a purpose and is used in inventive ways to draw you into the multilayered story. Occasionally there are projections on the rear wall of old WWII film footage to add to the atmosphere and give context. Stephen Dean’s lighting is perfect, again, and goes to prove that even minimalistic effects that are expertly designed and executed are capable of great impact.
The script plays out across a number of time periods, moving seamlessly back and forwards between them. This is not an uncommon theatrical device, but it rarely works as well as it does in this superlative production.
Nicholas Collett’s Spitfire Solo is worthy of your time. Do experience it yourself. You will love it.
Kym Clayton
When: 26 Feb to 7 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Red Phoenix Theatre. Holden Street Theatres, The Arch. 26 Feb 2020
For the first time, Holden Street’s celebrated, award-winning resident theatre company has joined in to the venue’s wild and varied Fringe program lineup. But what an odd offering.
The King is a short play (or long skit) about what happens when a hen-pecked husband succumbs to a high-pressure sell. It is written by respected Texas-born Adelaide playwright Jimmy Lyons in American idiom but performed with Australian accents. Hence, many funny lines flounder in a cultural wilderness. Red Phoenix seems to have an issue with American accents. It eschewed the southern drawl in American playwright Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate and now, in this exercise on the crass American hard sell, it has done it again, this time under Adrian Barnes’ direction.
Perchance, the script could be Australianised and the “grill” become a barbie. Then again, the salesman’s tenacious pushiness may need changing. Of the three characters in the play, ironically enough, he seems to be the most complex and interesting. He is the absolute, tragic, desperation bottom line of Willy Lomans, a salesman who will sink to any depth to make a sale. He is fearlessly embodied by Michael Eustice, who creates a soul so persistently obnoxious that one wants to run for cover. Fortunately, his customer is a complete dolt and a very uninteresting man and he takes the bait. He is a pussy-whipped loser. One is surprised that any self-respecting career woman would be married to him. But, she’s an ugly unfulfilled character. He’s an ugly unfulfilled character. Their relationship is a crude passe #metoo battle of the sexes. One does not want to know about their sex life.
So maybe the accent is not the thing, the play’s the thing.
One is left admiring the valiant Red Phoenix cast of Eustice, Nigel Tripodi and Sharon Malujlo. They’re three terrific actors, troupers through and through, and they each deserve a star.
Samela Harris
When: 26 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au