Cold Blood

Adelaide Festival. Michele Ann De Mey, Jaco Van Dormael and Kiss & Cry Collective. Ridley Centre. 5 Mar 2020

It is surreal outside the Ridley Centre. Two massive queues are snaking around the building. Five hundred? A thousand people? None is young; Adelaide bluebloods and culture vultures, all. They wait very quietly, keeping a distance from each other. The fear of coronavirus is in the air. And they are here to see a show about death.

Inside the towering show hall, perched high on scaffolding bleachers, they soon forget the world outside as the Belgian performance company captures their imaginations.

The voice of Tony Regbo envelopes them like a soothing blanket.  Think Jude Law in timbre and tone and perfect enunciation. This calm and gentle voice is to carry the audience through a strange wonderland of hands, fingers, special effects, and extremely unlikely stories.

Beneath a giant screen, black-clad performer/operators work as an artful team, moving miniature landscapes, water-baths, lights, and even cities around a complex of rail tracks whence cameras capture and project giant images to dance aloft. It is high-tech digital theatre, the digits being dancing fingers rather than algorithms.

The stories are enacted by hand alone. Hands dance in the darkness to music. Fingers make a glory of kaleidoscopic patterns. Wearing thimbles, they tap dance in a shimmering ballroom. They carouse in the water.  They toddle around in perfect dollhouse rooms, designed to their size and projected immense on the big screen for the grand tier of massed audience. They finger pole dance. Oh, my, and how they pole dance.  Sometimes their interplay is sad and serious. Sometimes it is sensual. Sometimes it is comical, none as funny or absurdly inventive as their adventure in the car wash. And the stories run one after another about a series of unlikely deaths, from swallowing a bra clasp to abreaction to mashed potatoes.

Music adorns their world, from Bolero to Major Tom, interspersed with the beautiful voice of Regbo, superbly paced so that not a word of the script is missed. It has been written by Thomas Gunzig and translated by Gladys Brookfield, and it is a thing of great beauty which sings with its own lyrical ingenuity, using similes such as “a scent like a day off work” or “death is like a sleeping cat”.

The miniaturist artistry is wonderful, reminiscent of the taste Adelaide audiences received with the production of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with actors in sight of the audience using projectors to make a toy plane swoop as huge, terrifying crop-duster across the Festival Theatre’s backdrop.

In this case, much of the performance is meditative, sometimes ponderous, mainly fascinating. One occasionally hears spoken directions from the cast as they move their complex world of props, cameras, lights, smoke, and sound in the darkness. Seeing a figure seemingly flying vertically as a ghost on the screen, one also sees the technical reality of an actress lying flat on a black bench on the stage. Indeed, one could say there are two shows for the price of one. If only the seats were less punishing.

Samela Harris

When: 5 to 8 Mar

Where: Ridley Centre

Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au

Leo Kearse: Transgressive

★★★★

Leo Kearse. Adelaide Fringe Festival. The Sky Room at The Griffins Hotel. 5 March 2020.

‘Transgressive’, adj, involving a violation of moral or social boundaries.

And that is exactly what Leo Kearse does in his show Transgressive: he identifies as many boundaries as he can and then savagely puts them to the sword in rapid and ruthless succession, and tears of laughter – not of moral indignation – run down the faces of the audience by the bucket load.

Kearse is an imposing man: he is tall and strongly built, and his thick Glaswegian accent and buzzed haircut almost makes one instinctively categorise him as a ‘bovver boy’, but his stylish patterned shirt puts pay to that! Appearances are deceiving.

Kearse does ‘affront’, but that’s the job of a comedian, isn’t it? He makes light of things that are often not openly discussed, but when they are opinions often get polarised very quickly. Like any good comedian, Kearse takes an extreme position on nearly every topic he touches upon, and the comedy lies in that. But is this an act? Is Kearse merely playing a ‘character’ for the sake a performance? One gets the impression that what one sees and hears on stage is nothing but the real him, and that makes Transgressive more impactful. We take sides at what Kearse says, but we’re rarely binary, it’s never all this and none of that. As a result, the audience laughs not only at the outrageous things Kearse says but also at our own reactions, because none of us are unflawed. Kearse personalises his material: his own family is in the firing line; he is in the firing line.

Kearse was Scottish Comedian of the Year 2017/18 and it is easy to see why. In 2018 he toured no less than twenty countries and inflamed passions and protests everywhere. There have even been attempts to ban his show, and thankfully there is no such extreme censorship in the Adelaide Fringe.

It almost seems incongruous that Transgressive starts at 6.15pm and takes place on a small daylight-lit performance space in The Griffins, but this gives Kearse his first deprecatory gag of the night, and they keep coming at machine gun pace.

Recommended.

Kym Clayton

When: 6 to 15 Mar

Where: The Sky Room at The Griffins Hotel

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

(Mis)Conceive

★★★★★

Adelaide Fringe. Karul Projects. Ngunyawayiti Space (Tandanya Theatre). 5 Mar 2020

Let’s begin this slowly… four dancers are onstage for this exploration of what it means to be Aboriginal in the present day. The man enters first, tribal, dappled light, back to the audience, and gets dressed. The women join in, one by one. T-shirts and stretch wear is the dress code. The audience, very modest in size, are lightly framed by the haze of the smoke machine and are silenced by the music; rich and textured and tonal.

Composition and choreography is by Thomas E.S. Kelly, who is also a dancer. This is, in a very real way, his story and his performance. As the dance unfolds, singular expression coalesces into ensemble work, then slides back to the individual form. The four move together, and against each other, waves of motion which beguile, occasionally set against each other in the tidal movement of the piece.

This is dance work of the highest quality; the narrative is clear and yet the simple components of the piece require some teasing out. We can follow the story without understanding each and every motion. If a rigid forefinger and cocked thumb indicate a pistol, then this becomes a dance of incursion and violence.

The music pulsates with the energy of the dancers’ physicality, sometimes too much so. This is hybrid dance, neither tribal nor western. Brolga dance steps are incorporated into a more contemporary hip-hop motif, effortlessly. It is not flawless, far from it, but it is the most assured and beautifully realised piece of contemporary dance I have seen in many years.

Kelly has cut his designs in the dance as if with a knife, paring away superfluous movement almost completely. This is assured choreography, the result reinforces the narrative, the school scene is easily deciphered. For me the signature moment came with a harsh light bisecting the stage diagonally, silhouetting three sets of bare feet, perfectly poised for a brief second or two. It made me think of footsteps being laid down upon the land for the first time.

(Mis)Conceive is simply magnificent.

Alex Wheaton

When: 5 to 14 Mar

Where: Ngunyawayiti Space (Tandanya Theatre)

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

The Final Hours Hour

★★★★★

Adelaide Fringe. Ben Volchok. Holden Street Theatres. 4 Mar 2020

There has been a contagion of end-of-the-world reflection in the Adelaide Fringe and Festival. The Festival’s opera was a requiem for the planet, and “me” was included in the grief. There was a lot of discussion about the social damage from fascism and neoliberal economics at Writer’s Week by authors from around the world. And that’s just the arts. The real world was abuzz with unprecedented bush fires, incompetent leadership, coronavirus panic, unsustainable financial rescue packages, and tanking share markets taking people’s pensions south.

Welcome to Victor Bravo’s broadcasting studio. A lone character is surviving in a post-apocalyptic world by pretending his onions-in-a-blender drink is a banana milkshake while he reaches out via what he suspects is the last radio station in the world. You will hear echoes of Good Morning, Vietnam – a past-apocalypse.

Comedy writer Ben Volchok cut his teeth at the Melbourne University Comedy Review Board and finally comes to Adelaide with his absolutely stunning one-man play. In a cluttered and claustrophobic homemade radio studio, he brews his off-beat sense of humour with climate change anxiety to create his VB – Victor Bravo.

The play’s construct is beautifully simple and brilliant. There is a world outside the door upstage that we can only guess at with increasing anxiety while VB drip feeds us the details. He collects onions, reads notes from listeners and takes their phone calls. Everything is happening in the present as opposed to many one-person play concepts where the past is recounted, or the character needs to tell us what he/she is doing. VB is actually doing it, every minute. He uses a broadcaster’s microphone ensuring a fair hearing for the audience. It’s a shining gem of real time action.

The opening commences with a sound track of ambient noises in the dark. I forgot how powerful this stage technique is in setting mood and mystery. Indeed, the control of disturbing ambient sound overriding an eerie silence is a powerful component of the production, which unfortunately was compromised during a key moment by the tumult from a coeval show in an adjacent space. This was a disturbing intrusion that I hope the theatre management will address.

The uncertainty and loneliness of post-apocalyptic existence permeates the action, but it is foiled by admiration for VB’s resilience obtained through humour and memorabilia. The moment I finally comprehended VB’s real situation, I was overcome with empathetic sadness. Upon meeting Volchok whilst existing the theatre, I was still so choked with emotion I could barely utter my thanks for his marvelous and powerful creation. Double Bravo!      

David Grybowski

When: 3 to 15 Mar

Where: Holden Street Theatres

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au