Leather Lungs: Son Of A Preacher

Adelaide Fringe. Ukiyo at Gluttony. 23 Feb 2019

Jason Chasland is a force of nature in his one-man cabaret show Leather Lungs: Son of a Preacher.

In an exhausting one hour, he shocks, amazes, titillates, and affronts as he sings, gyrates and postures his way through a song list drawn from diverse divas such as Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner. John Farnham’s iconic anthem You’re The Voice is also given the Chasland ‘treatment’ and the audience joined in and couldn’t get enough.

At the very heart of the Chasland treatment is his amazing voice, which spans four octaves and some. He is as comfortable belting out an operatic soprano line (without any hint of falsetto, that God!) as he is in delivering an entirely intelligible basso profundo growl. This guy’s voice is gob-smackingly amazing and his ‘wow’ factor is worn all over the jaw-dropped mouths of his deliriously enthusiastic audience. Everything that Chasland sings demonstrates another aspect of his versatile voice. He sucks you into his world and makes you his personal play thing, and the audience loved being played with. Putty in his hands.

Without any diminishment, his outstanding vocal control allows him to sing whilst standing, sitting, prostrate or even upside down! However, the over-amplification in the small tent-venue often makes it difficult to hear him with clarity. This doesn’t matter so much in the songs, but his deliciously irreverent and bawdy patter is sometimes not entirely clear.

Chasland is another gender-fluid artist – there are a number in this Fringe – but his extravagant high-camp costumes and spiky stilettos make it abundantly obvious that he is bloke, if you get my drift. And in all this high-campery lies an important message in the show: you are what you are, and it’s OK to be different, and boys should be raised to not supress their sensitive side, and girls should not be discouraged from becoming ‘fierce warriors’. So, although Chasland parodies gender and sexuality, by doing so he draws attention to the sometimes (often?) ‘uncomfortable’ lives that gender-fluid individuals need to endure. This message is tossed out to the audience with passion and in less than sixty seconds, but it garners a huge affirmative response, including from some youths who try and fight off their mothers who are trying to shield them from some of the more spicy and confronting goings-on on stage!

Chasland’s lungs are probably leathery – they really get a work-out – but they are an amazing instrument belonging to a performer with an expansive and generous heart.

Highly recommended, but leave your kids at home!

Kym Clayton

When: 23 Feb to 3 Mar

Where: Ukiyo at Gluttony

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

Rich Mix

Adelaide Fringe. Lewis Major Productions. The Odeon, Norwood. 23 Feb 2019

Simplicity blended with careful, gracious meditative silences.

That’s the quality of richness this engaging, calm, yet pulsating collection of nine contemporary dance pieces, sprung of myriad inspirations, offers.

The tone of the evening’s collected works is gently set in an overture, The Law of Least Effort (Tension). Carlie Angel sits in lotus position, in calm head bowed meditation, above her hangs suspended by rope-net a very large boulder.

There is peace in the moment, as the audience silently contemplates tension between the boulder and an at peace human. There is no urge for something to ‘happen’, because in the still silence, something is ‘happening’. Peace is being wonderfully expressed on stage, one can feel it being shared in the audience.

Talitha Maslin’s Mini Oper.1 gains its power from what is omitted, much as what is included in her passionate, raw and concise exploration of the idealistic, crushing standards of classical ballet and opera.

Maslin dances ragged excerpts from classics such as Swan Lake in a black dress with strategically placed cuts, sans pointe shoes, and in pained duress. It does much to deconstruct the classical style beauty myth. No gliding princess here. Just raw bare, stressed feet working overtime.

Here is a desperate pretty trying to live up to the song bird diva princess standard, and being crushed by reality in the attempt. A microphone stand with no microphone and sound leads disconnected on the floor adds further pressure to ‘be big’, all supported by Dane Yates’ equally classical/strident sound score.

Samuel Harnett Welk’s G I R L K I N G (pt. 1), performed in silence in red wash lighting, offers a dancer of extraordinary charismatic stage presence and an intensely expressive, controlled physical aesthetic of immense power and gracious athleticism.

Welk’s series of phrases, expressing a long number of subjects, is richly suggestive; not prescriptive. His choreography is so utterly mesmerising in its taut, unhurried shift from moment to moment, it matters not the ‘meaning’ or ‘subject’.

Here is play on an audience’s subconscious at its most effective.

Natalie Allen’s Climacteric is an intense expression of a ‘critical moment’. Birth/Death. Her repeated phrases of rise and decline are strong and clear with great impact, softened wondrously by a phrase in which she walks, hands up stretched, slowly releasing a steady trail of very small white balls.

Lewis Major’s choreography for The Australian Dance Theatre Youth Ensemble’s Two Pieces (excerpts) proves perfect material for the 15 member ensemble to offer a strong, engaging performance of contemporary moves in precision ensemble dance. Using chairs and mixed formations, it challenges them to deliver what they have within them with the fullest of their expressive capability.

Choreographer Pascal Marty and dancer Carlie Angel’s The Law of Karma (Day 1) plays with a physical expression of ‘karma’ using a whip.

It’s an audacious and, literally, cutting work. Smooth, powerful, fearless and dominating all at once.

While Angel may control the whip in motion, the whip’s innately dangerous ‘nature’ sets the boundaries of use, sets consequences for a wrong turn of wrist or body as the whip flies in glorious whirls, cutting snaps and sharp whispers in the air.

It is beautiful to watch. It’s also worrying as Angel’s circular relationship of interplay with the whip moves from being at one with it, to working warily against its capacity to strike like a viper.

Thomas Bradley’s 229 AVE VAN VOLXEM is a powerfully dark, baroque style work, brilliantly lit by Nic Mollison.

Bradley offers a strikingly dark, ghost-like street-lost person, deranged on a sidewalk, seeking something unknown.

The piece is very obviously exploring a deep, disturbed, questing, mental and emotional interior, effectively cued by Mollison’s stark side lighting which creates an eerie otherworldly setting; a table with chair set on top of it.

Bradley’s choreography is magnificent in its considered, deft, edginess as his character explores, seeks around the table, the chair and now unbound of his seemingly ordinary coat and trousers is even more a figure of an inner imagination than ever.

An intense, gripping finale to a genuine, only-at-the-Fringe evening.

David O’Brien

5 stars

When: 23 and 24 Feb

Where: The Odeon, Norwood

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

Cazeleon: The Movies In My Mind

Adelaide Fringe. Empire Theatre at Gluttony, Rymill Park. 23 Feb 2019

Cazeleon: The Movies in My Mind is a high energy solo cabaret act about gender fluidity and the attendant tribulations experienced by individuals when they dare to be themselves, however different that might be. This show might be described as a classy drag show, and it is, but it is also much more that. To only see a man costumed as one glamorous woman after another (even though he does sport a beard), diminishes the important messages that pervade the production.

Cazeleon (think chameleon) sequences a number of vignettes that explore his struggles from childhood when he vehemently protests that he IS a boy despite what people may think, through to adulthood as he questions and explores the social construction of gender and discovers and emerges into his own identity.

The tile of the show – The Movies in My Mind – refers to how Cazeleon samples from and depicts the life-styles of the rich and (in)famous of the entertainment industry, and selects songs of iconic divas such as Nancy Sinatra, Shirley Bassey and particularly Lady Gaga to plead his case that “..there ain’t no other way / Baby I was born this way”.

Cazeleon’s costumes are lush yet elegant, and his make-up is flawless and striking. None of it is draggy – it’s classy. His voice is huge and easily handles the rigours of the songs of the divas, but the backing tracks do not always have a clear line against which he can accurately pitch to the key of the music. However, it is easy to see why Cazeleon has won an Adelaide Fringe Best Emerging Artist Weekly Award.

Kym Clayton

When: Closed

Where: Empire Theatre at Gluttony

Bookings: Closed

Honest

Matt Hyde. Treasury 1860 – Bar. 23 Feb 2019

Arrrgh! I’ve had enough of office work, and strategic planning, and useless meetings, and birthday cupcakes, and piling the bags in the corner of the pub, and dancing on Friday nights with workmates I can barely tolerate, and small minded wingeing civil servants trapped in their jobs… oh, wait a minute, I’m actually one of those. I’m Dave and work in London.

Up and coming British playwright DC Moore wrote Dave a half hour rant about modern work and life in the big city - any city really – that nearly everyone who works in a CBD office will find embarrassing familiar and funny. Moore penned Honest in 2010, the same year his play, Empire, earned him a nomination for the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, and a nomination for an Olivier award for outstanding achievement in an affiliate theatre. As Honest and Empire are only his second and third plays, I guess you can say he’s up and coming.

Producer and actor Matt Hyde performs at the bar of the Bar at the Treasury consuming what seems like an inebriating quantum of beer and shots (but it probably wasn’t) as his Dave escalates mere complaint into action. A massive miscue of honesty with the boss results in a self-pitying all-nighter of alcoholic wonder and wander through familiar neighbourhoods of London (and he slips in an informative running commentary on class and architecture).

Hyde brilliantly conjures Dave’s misanthropic rave and his edgy boozy haze which perfectly smolders and ignites. He really could be someone you meet on a Friday night with sufficient charisma to go off the rails with. Director Jason Langley paces proceedings properly. One is reminded of The Catcher in the Rye, and of Bright Lights, Big City. Yet DC Moore has Dave spend too much time establishing his credentials at the bar and more amusing misadventure on his owl-hour sojourn would have been appreciated. Have another beer and enjoy the ride!

David Grybowski

4 Stars

When: 19 Feb to 3 Mar

Where: Treasury 1860 - Bar

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au