Adelaide Festival. Gravity & Other Myths (GOM). Dunstan Playhouse. 15 Mar 2017
As the curtain lifts on the Dunstan Playhouse an odd, almost rehearsal-like, space is revealed with a hodgepodge of random items orderly arranged around the stage, the performers themselves lying amongst the organised chaos.
The random items – wooden poles, metal buckets, large rocks, a suit of armour, and items of costuming – are moved, removed, and switched and the players begin their acrobatic dance routine. Ascending to spectacular heights on each other’s shoulders they scale one another with absolute confidence - first two high, then three and finally four… the highest acrobat’s head almost touching the lights atop the proscenium arch. It is an impressive feat. It is a feat of great strength; the first in an 80 minute long barrage of exceptional circus skill, flexibility, strength, trust, and confidence.
The show continues with tribal-like rituals where sandy rubble is scattered in patterns on the floor. Circles, lines, mounds and geometric patterns are formed and the performers are almost instructed and controlled by the angle and direction of the patterns. They flip over it, wrestle in it, and throw themselves around with explosive energy.
There are representations of machines. Cause and effect. Perpetual motion and Newtons 3rd law. The human structures, tower over one another. The strength and agility one associates with the backbone is evident in panoply of images, movements, and forms.
The performer’s agility and stamina is beyond impressive. The trust they must have in each other and their absolute focus and understanding of limits is nothing short of spectacular.
This is a new kind of circus. It is understated. Humble. Introspective.
The work has been commissioned for the Adelaide Festival. The director, Darcy Grant, has envisioned a piece which he says “…examines strength. Honestly, ironically, and personally.” The production is raw, and it is evident in the staging, composition, and performance.
Elliot Zoerner and Shenton Gregory have composed a musical accompaniment which links the imagery taking place on stage, heightens the tension, lengthens the moments of awe-inspiring skill, and punctuates the drama. Their onstage performance of the music is equally dextrous, the two playing multiple instruments to create all manner of digital and musical effects.
Geoff Cobham’s design utilises laser technology in the lighting effects which is reminiscent of a bygone era dragged into the 21st century. Mirrors are used to spectacular effect and directional and shaped lighting draws focus to important imagery as it is played out by the performers.
The result is a spectacular 1 hour 20 minute production that whizzes by and leaves one feeling agog for the next GOM creation. It is easy to see why this is a multi-award winning company.
The performances continue for another 3 days. Miss it at your own peril.
Paul Rodda
When: 15 to 19 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. The Daughter Collective. Bakehouse Studio Theatre. 13 Mar 2017
Hobbling figure. Shrill old lady voice. Plucking hairs from the face.
And so we meet the mother figures of Matrophobia.
The Daughter Collective, which the Fringe program says comes from NSW, Victoria, Queensland and WA, has put on a show telling the world about how they fear becoming like their mothers. To that end, they do a spectacular demolition job on mothers. It is of such unbridled hatred that this mother cringed in her seat, blessed the fact that she had given birth to sons, and wished she could be somewhere else.
The three onstage cast members take poses for snippets of song and sit on stools; one reading, one sewing, and one grooming herself.
And they describe their mothers - turkey gobbles, drooping skin, sagging breasts, wrinkles, furrows, fissures from the lips, Hobbit feet, lattice works of green-blue veins, hands which can look like claws, a crack down the tongue.
It’s a loveless and unfunny barrage.
They go on to say how much their mothers annoy them, how valueless are their lives, how shallow to be devoted to cooking and caring even if they do go out to work. Mum does not challenge herself. Her life is stagnant. “Windex does not bring clarity of mind.”
Of course, youth does not bring enlightenment, either. These girls are in their 20s and, clearly, they think they will always be in their 20s.
Their ageist rants and general mocking of older women goes on, sometimes so stridently that one’s ears hurt. For some reason they strip down to undies and squeeze into corset-like shape garments and prance about in them. One young man in the audience finds it hilarious. The elastic garments squeeze into body cracks and look obscene. But that’s OK because they have a rant about their sexual organs and, gee whizz, they have a lot of different names for them.
They go on to dare to call themselves “Nasty Women”, clearly with no understanding of the political implications of this movement. Their “nasty” is crude, not strong.
Then they come out with toy babies attached to their breasts and leap about swinging babies. Huh?
At this point, your critic is beyond comprehension of what these young women think about anything at all.
When, with their street clothes on again, they stand front of stage and declare that they admire their mothers for their achievements and really love them more than anything for ever and ever, one utters an ironic laugh. However sincere they try to look, the damage has been done.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 18 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Holden Street Theatres. 12 Mar 2017
Pounding one’s feet and flailing the arms to mimic fleeing dinosaurs is not one’s average arts activity. However there’s an Adelaide palaeontologist who has established a rock star side career under the performance name of Professor Flint and he whips his audiences right into action to demonstrate the dinosaur stampede of 95 million years ago.
The site of the fossilised record of this event is in Queensland and Professor Flint’s show is, indeed, about Australian dinosaurs. He summons them up on screen and sings them up in very pithy songs. They’re all foot-tappers and most of them require extensive audience participation. The Prof wants everyone paying attention and remembering. To that end, the chorus lines are epic. The dinosaur names become aural memes. There’s Minmi, Muttaburrasaurus, Diamantinasaurus Australovenator and, of course, the inevitable Aye Oh with which Flint punctuates his lyrics to give them the fun, sing-along spirit.
There are funny, silly-billy ratbag ways of singing dinosaur names. And don’t forget that “bones” has to be said with specific Scottish pronunciation.
Funny ditties they may seem to be but Professor Flint is skilled at weaving the serious scientific facts into the boppy lyrics. And his musical skills are not bad, either.
There are tunes, dances and even, let’s all join in a bit of a Scottish reel dance because Professor Flint, in his wee tartan Tam o’Shanter, is a Scots-born Australian dinosaur specialist. His great theme song is I want to be a Palaeontologist "digging rocks and bones", the chorus line climaxing in “living the dream”. It’s the dream job. And that’s the secret with the Flint show. It’s all about love of subject. For kids it is a future dream about loving the past. And Flint has cast himself as the classic mad scientist, peering over perilously perched reading glasses and bopping around in a loose white coat.
Oh, and it is not all dinosaurs. Among the megafauna he brings to musical life is Wonambi, the giant python. Ooh. Seven metres long. He marks the size on stage. Everyone makes snake gestures and shudders.
It’s a noisy and energetic hour of in-your-face fossil fun and song. At the end of the show, families are given vouchers for free downloads of Professor Flint songs. And, there is a very human stampede to get them.
Samela Harris
When: 12 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Fringe. Noel Lothian Hall, Adelaide Botanic Garden. 11 Mar 2017
Joanne Hartstone has a distinguished track record in Adelaide Fringes as both a performer and an artistic director, and the excellence goes on. Here she presents an original work imagining a hopeful actress of the MGM Hollywood heyday. She tells the story of (stage name) Evie Edwards who grows up in the Great Depression in a shantytown called Hooverville where a compassionate landlady provides a strong musical influence. When she's eighteen her handyman single father takes her to Los Angeles and she finds work as an MGM messenger girl and thus gets entree to entertain the servicemen at Bette Davis' and Jules Stein’s famous Hollywood Canteen during World War II.
Hartstone has done a lot of homework about 1940s Hollywood, the star system, the scandals, the tragedies, and the mores. She imagines experiences of the young Evie which would have been typical for myriad would-be actresses of the day. She hooks her tale onto the end of that of tragic failed actress Peg Entwistle who committed suicide by leaping from the top of the Hollywood sign’s letter “H”. She weaves around Evie the studio gossip of the day and tales of the stars. There is poor Jean Harlow who every Sunday had ammonia and chlorine bleach applied to her head to make her into Howard Hughes’s “platinum blonde”, and poor exploited Judy Garland on her studio diet of uppers and downers, with only chicken soup and coffee for sustenance.
Hartstone has her character teetering on the crossbar of the “H” as she tells her story of Hollywood disappointments, of never being noticed among the other aspiring actresses, of failing auditions because she is too fat, too thin, not pretty enough, or having too flat a profile. It was tough out there, especially for poor girls with no connections.
Hartstone looks wonderful as Evie with beautiful luscious blonde locks and a stunning black frock which Evie brags once belonged to Theda Bara. She adopts not only a good midwest accent as Evie, but throws in different American accents for other characters. And she sings, song after song, in a classic 1940s style evocative of Billie Holiday.
She creates another world in the little popup Fringe venue out there on the outskirts of the Botanic Gardens. It’s a remote and hard-to find venue which suffers for the Hackney Road upheavals, not to mention Womadelaide. But it is worth the effort to be magically transported into Hartstone's faraway world of Hollywood at its ruthless fairy-story height.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 19 Mar
Where: Noel Lothian Hall, Adelaide Botanic Garden
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Token Events. The Garden of Unearthly Delights. 11 Mar 2017
“Where are we now?
Where are we now?
The moment you know
You know, you know.” (Where Are We Now?, David Bowie, The Next Day)
Justin Hamilton and I are huge David Bowie fans. We were compatriots of the 90s Adelaide comedy scene, he as a rising star of the scene in this weird duo called The Bunta Boys, I as a full throttle critic of a few years old for dB Magazine.
Hamilton’s look back at the past is as comically engaging and as significant as Bowie’s own profoundly deep and introspective reminisce of his formative Berlin years.
Justin Hamilton: Bunta Boy is more than a crack-up Adelaide memoir. It’s a brilliantly structured history walk cum shining-light to this era’s young comedians, and for those who’ve followed his career, a reminder of how richly he has matured as an artist since then.
Hammo kicks off his tale with an old-man kidney stones story and accounts of his less than fabulous 2016 travails. The perfect segue into what we call, ‘in my day…’.
The 90s.
When Rundle Street was the only street in Adelaide and Boltz Bar was the home of new Adelaide comedy, run on a shoe string of sorts. It was the place where two poor, crazy guys, who made videos for friends instead of presents, discovered they could do that, and a whole lot more, to make people laugh.
That’s video cassettes kids. Not an iPhone video posted to YouTube. We didn’t have that gear.
With slick comic microphone noise technique, and a routine deeply imbued with memory, passion, self- awareness, irony and sheer joy, Hammo reaches out to audience members who weren't there in the 90s, and reminds them that the good stuff happens when you’re young and do crazy things. He was full of nutty ideas and our small city meant writing a new show - every week!
Great comedy is always low tech stand-up, backed by fierce insights and translated to reach the soul’s funny bone. It means making mistakes, overthinking, not thinking, but most importantly - as a friend said of this formative era we were deeply enmeshed in - it was not so much about the art, but ‘having a fu*king good time’.
Justin Hamilton does just that. Here he is now. Check it!
David O’Brien
When: 11 to 12 March
Where: The Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Factory
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au