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Théâtre du Soleil, The Flood Drummers |
Testimony: The Legend of Charlie Parker
Jazz has rarely found a home in Australia’s international arts festivals. Concerts are one thing, but an outright celebration of jazz is something else, and that’s what Testimony is. First it is a response to the work of the jazz great, Charlie Parker, by an American poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, in 14 sonnets arranged or (mostly) musically composed by Sydney saxophonist Sandy Evans, or spoken by Bobby C. Secondly, it is implicitly a tribute to Australian jazz, to the musicians of the always impressive Australian Art Orchestra (under the direction of Paul Grabwosky) and in turn the many outfits with which they play, to the many vocalists who perform in Testimony, and not least to Evans herself. She treats Komunyakaa’s words with respect and verve and has created some outstanding compositions. The CD is eagerly awaited.
The challenge in theatricalising what was originally a work for radio is to not diminish attention to the words and music. Director Nigel Jamieson, designer Dan Potra and video artist Andrew Savage achieve this by making the orchestra the visual centre of the action. A small ensemble of shifting dimensions (but always with piano, bass and drums) occupies the forestage and is frequently joined by vocalists. Meanwhile, the orchestra is encased in several storeys of scaffolding with full-scale screens front and back (the forward one is raised and lowered). Members of the orchestra can be spotlit. The orchestra can be disappeared or silhouetted. Images appear in front of them and behind, as if peering through. They range from the face of the narrator, to big city scapes, buses and cabs moving dreamily towards us, 50s style decorative patternings, maps, trains and chain gangs. A repeated, poignant slo-mo, kaleidoscopic shot of Parker playing as his life goes to pieces (“He was naked...”) is paralleled by the orchestra and violinist John Rodgers’ performing a dark, modernist fragmentation, followed by a divine, sustained lament.
The constructivist impulse of the staging means that the simple set is constantly transformed—lighting and projections altering the depth of field, evoking movement (a camera tracks up the Chrysler Building; huge industrial wheels turn), providing visual motifs corresponding to musical and poetic images. At times there’s a superfluity of images, too literal, too much video clip business when the music is already hard at work, and too many visual styles relieved only by returning to key images.
Komunyakaa’s poems comprise fragments of a life (including the death of Parker’s daughter, his temporary recuperation from heroin addiction), impressions (“always on the move on some no-man’s land”), character (“enough irony to break the devil’s heart”), desires (his favorite food, chicken) and the poet’s own witty be-bop-inspired litanies, ideal material for Evans. The poems are served best when they become the lyrics for Evans’ compositions. Testimony does not in fact narrate Parker’s life and only falters when it slips in that direction, or promises to and can’t. It’s a pity that on opening night the song lyrics weren’t always audible in the awkward sound mix and, worse, that they hadn’t been reproduced in the printed program.
There were too many high points, too many excellent performances to single out here save to mention that some of the most eccentric moments were the most celebratory: Jackie Orzacksy singing and playing electric bass on Abel & Cain and the indefatigable Joe ‘Be-bop’ Lane scatting on Barrow Street and Moose the Mooch. The blend of small, taut ensembles and a magnificent, burnished big band sound, the classiness and confidence of the 11 vocalists (8 of them women) and the occasional bursts of raw but always coherent and plangent sax and trombone, made for one of the most memorable festival shows in Sydney for a very long time.
“Take a bow Christopher Williams of (ABC) Audio Arts,” wrote John Shand opening his review for the Sydney Morning Herald (Jan 18). Sad to say, Soundstage, the program for which the innovative producer Williams originally conceived and commissioned Testimony, is no more, a victim in 2001 of “reform” at the ABC that has greatly reduced the possibility of creating such large-scale, cross-artform, stereophonic art works.
Testimony: The Legend of Charlie Parker, music Sandy Evans, libretto Yusef Komunyakaa, musical direction Paul Grabowsky, stage direction Nigel Jamieson, design Dan Potra, image design Andrew Savage, sound design John O’Donnell, lighting design John Rayment; Australian Art Orchestra and vocalists: Kristen Cornwell, Kate Swadling, Dan Barnett, Jackie Orsaczky, Tony Allayiallis, Tanya Sparke, Shelley Scown, Tina Harrod, Joe Lan, Michelle Morgan, Lily Dior. Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 16 & 18
La Fura dels Baus: øBS: Macbeth
After the infinite joys of Michael Kantor’s King Ubu for Belvoir St in late 2001, the strictly finite pleasures of La Fura dels Baus’ ØBS (for Macbeth’s obsession) seemed slight. Kantor and his team managed to evoke through design and stylised performance an eery sense of Jarry’s original. At the same time they left the museum and opened out Ubu into a rude, adroit political satire of contemporary Australia. ØBS looks contemporary, but its huge mobile screens, its TV game-show version of the witches, its VR-attired killers are just as kitsch as Lady Macbeth’s long-winded pole-dancing and have nothing to say about power, let alone obsession, or the mass (and new) media which are loosely satirised.
For a company whose principal claim to fame is its risky relationship with its audience and for whom narrative has not been an issue, the telling of the Macbeth story is inevitably unwieldy. While there are still the thrills and spills of almost being mown down by huge metallic sculptures, mobile screens and ramps, of being hit by a heart, stained by a liver, slapped with a sausage as King Duncan is disembowelled and consumed (a la Totem & Taboo), ØBS is a show where the audience can feel rather secondary to the action. Their view of it is diminished at times by the very 3-D glasses meant to enable them to enjoy, for example, the giant pulsing labia behind Lady Macbeth’s bump and grind. The ending is typically anticlimactic. As Macduff’s sword swings towards Macbeth’s head—blackout. Look the other way and you might see his head rolling about on a screen. The end.
Nonetheless, there’s a perverse pleasure at times in being part of the chase, enjoying the projected advice (“do not form groups”, “definitely do not disconnect your mobile phones”), admiring the sheer scale of the 2 monstrous war machines that tilt across the space, and feeling fear as Macbeth’s thugs round up and slash people (cast members) in the crowd and fling them onto ramps that dump the bodies in obscene piles. Acting is replaced by broad gesture—we see Lady Macbeth’s imaginings as she is paraded in a bath full of blood. Spectacle evokes primitive ritual—at its best when you feel fleetingly complicit. The La Fura dels Baus’ artistic team directed an acclaimed Berlioz Faust (now available on DVD) for the Salzburg Festival 1999—that I would like to see.
La Fura dels Baus, Øbs: Macbeth, director Pep Gatell; Hordern Pavilion, Fox Studios, Jan 12-18
Théâtre du Soleil: The Flood Drummers
The massive fires that had surrounded Sydney over Xmas and into the New Year sparked impassioned debate about, among other things, the maintenance of national parks and the dangerous luxury of environmentalism. Théâtre du Soleil’s The Flood Drummers seemed timely—in an ancient Chinese feudal realm an imminent flood can only be diverted by destroying a dam. But which one? Either the peasantry or the city dwellers of the kingdom will have to perish. The complexities of choice for an ageing ruler, his perspicacious but alienated advisor, various opportunist lords and the advisor’s heroic spouse, play out over 3 hours with the moral twists and turns of the dilemma heart-breakingly accelerating in the late stages of the work.
Ariane Mnouchkine and her great French company have finally made it (if hesitantly because of their anger over the ‘Tampa crisis’) to Australia. They bring with them a scale of vision and production, of ensemble training and sustained development we can only envy. A sense of inclusiveness is also on offer—arrive early, eat, watch the performers preparing, and enjoy the drummers again after the show. The greatest pleasure to be had is relishing the skills of the performers not only playing complex multiple roles but pretending-to-be-puppets-pretending-to-be-humans. In an idiosyncratic fusion of Bunraku and Kabuki, the performers play both puppets and their masked manipulators, while the set echoes the scale and some of the magic of the Kabuki stage (giant silk scrims fall away to create new backgrounds, the elaborate castle-cum-landscape stage finally floods). While the strict formalities of Bunraku are not observed (no narration from the side of the stage, no un-masked master puppeteer), the embodiment of the puppet is studiously realised, every entrance and exit exhibiting the transformation in and out of doll-like stiffness and complex motion (and emotion). Of the actors, several, like Sava Lolov (the villain, Hun) performed with such precision that it was frightening—a human-cum-expressive puppet. As the flood drummers (warning the populace of danger) the whole cast excelled, managing demanding rhythms while maintaining the exact sense of being manipulated. However, the device here of 2 puppeteers dressed in white loosely ‘controlling’ the flood drummers—as marionettes—from above seemed as ineffectual as it was unecessary.
It is one thing to skilfully evoke the worlds of Bunraku and Kabuki (and fashion a script that sounds like it could have come from 16th century Japan), it is another to make sense of why you’re doing it other than enacting an odd kind of mimickry and appropriation. Puppetry in The Flood Drummers begins as a conceit and remains one. It never flowers into metaphor, nor blooms into motif. We admire the artistry of the ‘puppetry’, grow anxious as the flood threatens and lives and values are discarded, but something is missing. Curiously, it’s the last reflective minutes of the play that depart from the feel of literal reproduction and become more suggestive. Earlier in the play there is concern Baï Ju, a master puppeteer, will have his work destroyed if the flood sweeps the city away. In the final scene, as the waters rise, tiny puppets are flung (rather indifferently after so much precision) into the flood. Jun Bai stands chest deep in water amidst them, staring at us as helpers rescue the dolls and place them in a long row on the edge of the stage, gazing impassively, in a reflective scene evocative not only of the loss of life but also of the art that disaster and corruption can destroy.
Watching composer Jean-Jacques Lemêtre at one side of the stage seamlessly play dozens of instruments from viol da gamba to unnamed exotica (some of his own making) was a special pleasure, as was his sensitivity to the relationship between voice, movement, music and effects (cast members joining him to howl up a storm).
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Force Majeur, Same, same but different |
Force Majeure: Same, same but different
The image of exhausted couples struggling to keep dancing is familar from the American play and film They Shoot Horses Don’t They, an account of tortuous competitions for money prizes held during the Great Depression. It recurs as a kind of race throughout Same same but different, Kate Champion’s initially whimsical but increasingly dark, dance theatre vision of the life of the heterosexual couple, from flirtation and seduction to various discontinuities and breakdowns and on to dependency. In the end the race flows from the performers onto a big screen in black and white and then colour. While the image has power, more potent throughout is the struggle that goes on within each of the couples and the individuals therein. In fact the relationship between the desparate race of a mass of couples and the dilemmas of individual pairs is never clear. Other alternations work—the aged couple, seen recurrently on their own, reveal a quiet on-going intimacy, finally threatened by the dementia of one—or the group scenes, individuals moving at a table against life size projections of themselves with which they move dextrously in and out of synch, a vast crowd of competing desires and wrenching loneliness.
Early in the work the portrayal of couples is primariy presented through dialogues, where one partner speaks and the other physically enacts their emotional state, their voice (often at odds with what they appear to feel) is delivered from the dark by another member of the company. Here and there these are sharp, though too often quaint and yielding cute overracting. In a one-off mode of delivery, a couple dance against a large projection of courting giraffes, reproducing the animal’s loping grace but also interpolating it with moments of irritation, a motif that recurs more forcefully as the work develops. The device might be too one-off, but it is part of Same, same’s obsessive investment in screens and framing. Not only are projected images inherently framed, but also much of the physical performance. A stage wall slides open and shut into various compartments or window-like spaces where we glimpse small, intimate moments or bodies falling or tussling. In one of the 2 most sustained and demanding scenes in Same, same, the wall opens a little to reveal Benjamin Winspear and Roz Hervey in a small, tight space. He faces us, angled tensely against the wall, locked into a cycle of gesture signalling ever-increasing frustration. Hervey paces behind, her back to us. Breaking the projection frame, an image of a reclining, restless Hervey, is eerily cast across the front of Winspear’s cell and his lower body. Unlike the literalness and brevity of the earlier scenes, moments like this and those around the table yield constellations of suggestiveness that endure.
The climactic and most emotionally engaging moment of Same, same has Hervey and Shaun Parker locked in an intimate dance. We’ve seen it earlier, especially the cradling motif—she has her back to him, sinks into him, or he takes her to him, both sets of knees slightly bending before the couple unfold. As the dance locks into a cycle, the cradling becomes more like a trap, tension moves into the dancers’ faces, their desperate breathing is audible, sweat flows—this intimacy is as demanding as it is sustaining.
Same, same starts out lightly, episodically (the audience responding with short bursts of applause), even slightly, but darkens and deepens. Although what it has to say about relationships is limited, it speaks with enough anxiety and pain embodied in memorable images and movement for us to both recognise what we have seen and anticipate what we fear. It is the emotional directness of Champion’s work and the theatrical virtuosity that frames it that will win her growing audiences. It’s also her excellent choice of ensemble and collaborators. The choreography is not always distinctive (its mellifluousness though is miles away from the sharp edges of many of her contemporaries) but the careful distribution of motif and constantly inventive framing make for vivid images that linger long. Several of her cast are actors, but she knows exactly how to work within their movement limits and still make great use of their expressivity gesturally. And she knows how to draw emotional power from dancers without, for the most part, imposing the actor’s mask. All the performers are good, the sense of ensemble already strong. But in this production Winspear and Hervey excel (a reminder just how good Hervey is and how rarely seen), not a little because Champion gives them the space and time to mine her investigation so thoroughly.
Impressively, once again Champion and her collaborators (filmmaker Brigid Kitchin, cinematographer Roman Baska, set & lighting designer Geoff Cobham) get the relationship between performers virtual and real right—as Champion sees it in her program note: “the increased multiplicity we now live with...our limitless options...our refracted narratives. The diminished continuity of people, place and responsibility compared to the generation of my parents.”
Force Majeure, Same same But Different, director Kate Champion, lighting & set design Geoff Cobham, filmmaker Brigid Kitchin, composer Max Lyandvert, performers Roz Hervey, Kirsty McCracken, Veronica Neave, Shaun Parker, Byron Perry, Benjamin Winspear, Arianthe Galani, Brian Harrison; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 14-19
William Yang: Shadows
William Yang’s unfolding life on stage and screen takes a less effective and less intimate turn than usual in Shadows, a string of photographic and verbal associations, some stronger than others, a few simply not taut enough. However, it’s those moments when the personal breaks through that remind you that Yang’s persona in these works is often that of the observer, the man with a camera, especially now that he’s moving away from his well-mined family and personal history. Roland Barthes wrote that it is the punctum, the unlooked for, in a photograph where unexpected meaning hovers. Those moments are verbal in Shadows and warrant more reflection than Yang affords them. A few irritable words about a declining Aboriginal community spending all day playing cards become more significant when Yang suddenly wonders, with a hint of desperation, if these people are really his friends. He is frustrated when his planned expedition to photograph a massacre site is constantly thwarted by his Aboriginal contacts—one even opines the event a myth. The man with a camera wants evidence of genocide, but is not going to get it.
However, documenting his contact with an Aboriginal community (originally through the artist George Gittoes) has enough detail, personalities and history to suggest just how far removed most of us are from Indigenous life and how much we need to understand. Between Yang’s 2 visits over a decade, welfare funding declines, Fulla Shillingsworth (a boy earlier ‘adopted’ by Gittoes) has had children by 3 women and been gaoled for fighting racists, alcoholism has ruined some of the family and the weight of responsibility for looking after children is still with the elderly Ruby. The community doesn’t display despair, but Yang sits on the edge of it, the outsider—still further in, if uncertainly, than most of us will ever get. But part of you wants to break the casually awkward, conversational, diffident Yang spell, to call out, ‘How can you be a friend to these people at 10 year intervals? Who are you kidding?’
Yang tells a parallel story, well, not really a story, rather fragments of history about Australians of German stock interned during World War I. Although he shows us his Hahndorf informants, they don’t seem to have provided him with the specifics that could make this story personal in the way we expect of Yang. One of them tells him that people didn’t speak of the internment because they were ashamed. (The association here becomes a young German artist with whom Yang has a relationship. The artist’s father refused to speak of the war, but when pressed dug out a box of books, including Mein Kampf, as evidence of what swayed him as a young man. Presumably he too had not spoken, and still would not, out of shame.)
Given that my family name was mentioned or shown a number of times as part of the German ancestry of South Australia along with shots of the old homestead, I took more than a little interest in this part of Shadows. (I’d also co-written and performed a work about that heritage, Photo Play, in 1988 and 1994.) I don’t recall from my childhood anyone speaking of internment with shame, but rather resentment. After all, my great grand father Johann Joseph Gallasch was naturalized in 1841, 2 years after his arrival in Adelaide, 73 years before World War I. The strongest moment in this section of Yang’s performance comes when he simply shows a long list of German town names in the Adelaide Hills and Barossa Valley along with their English replacement names, an act not revoked until 1937 (not long before another round of internments). Hahndorf became Ambleside, Lobethal became Tweedale. Not that Yang probably knows it, or that he’d have space to tell it, but the Gallaschs were not German Lutherans, but Polish Catholics who fled with Lutherans persecuted by the German state. Under the same state, these Poles had been forced to speak German, adopt German names and the name of their Silesian town, Zbaszyn, had been changed to Bentschen. The small town the Gallaschs soon settled, not far from Hahndorf, was Grunthal (meaning green valley), which was renamed Verdun (more green) during World War I. The name stuck, despite the repealing of the Naming Act, though there was an unsuccessful lobby during the renaming to use the Aboriginal name for the area, Tumbeela (green valley).
Yang’s story of German internment is atypically dry and short on detail and personalities, though its entry point, the Adelaide Festivals of Christopher Hunt and Jim Sharman (Yang was official 1982 Adelaide Festival photographer) and the cultural influence of Don Dunstan and Kym Bonython, are brief, entertaining reminders of histories yet to be written. Closer to Yang’s home, an excellent documentary on Queensland canecutters on SBS (As It Happened, Jan 26, 7.30pm) revealed that Italians (and other nationalities) had been interned during both wars (even when in World War I Italy was not even the enemy), some of them in South Australia, presumably on the bleak Torrens Island internment station on the Port River that Yang shows in Shadows.
Having surveyed the harassment of an old migrant cultural minority, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing struggle of Aboriginal Australians, Yang concludes his journey with photographs of the Reconciliation March across Sydney Harbour Bridge that capture the size and celebratory disposition of the huge crowd—a faintly reassuring but necessary gesture in the current political climate where we seem to be doing just as badly, if not worse, by minorities and refugees than ever before.
Colin Offord supports Yang with his idiosyncratic blend of entwined vocal and instrumental music with some nicely sustained passages as, for example, when Yang’s road shots evoke the geographical and cultural distances the photographer (and not a few of his subjects) travel.
Shadows, written & photographed by William Yang, music composed & performed by Colin Offord, lighting Martin Langthorne; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 20-25
The Marrugeku Company: Crying Baby
The Marrugeku Company’s Crying Baby has been extensively written about and reviewed on these pages (RT41, pp 8-9, RT 42 p24). It was good to see it at last even if the rain that followed the bush fires severely depleted rehearsal time onsite and made opening night a sometimes uncertain occasion. The performance space is immediately engaging—a lurching phone box centre-stage, red earth littered with television monitors, poles and wires cutting across the terrain, a skeletal vessel, tall metal plants, a large circular screen, and a humble gathering point for the musicians. With a Les Ballets C de la B casualness the performers gradually occupy the space (including a couple who had wandered pre-show among the audience looking like real trouble), chatting, dancing and squabbling it into being. The ensuing performance and its soundscape soon confirm the double life of the spatial design—actual and virtual, contemporary and ancient, inhabited by ghosts, spirits, forgotten history and ideologically-driven mythology—the colour footage of the lone, white child lost in the bush pitched against black and white documentary records of too, too many Aboriginal children lost to home and family.
The presence of Arnhem Land story custodian Thompson Yulidjirri telling both the Crying Baby story and the history of the invasion of his culture by the missionary Mr Watson (conversationally translated by composer Matthew Fargher), validates and intensifies the sense of co-existence of past and present that the performance constantly conjures. Watson is surrounded by a spirit world that he is either totally blind to (we witness its dancing Mimis) or must deny so he can enforce his mission. The show’s ahistorical narrative climax has Watson finally come face to face in an aerial acrobatic battle with this other world, a fight he will lose, no solace offered by his blazing Bible, only madness.
The contemporary framework is less tangible than the Watson story (and the Crying Baby and lost children analogies). The suggestion is that the present (with its outbursts of drunkenness and violence, its own sense of loss) needs storytellers, ceremonies, re-enactments so that the way forward can be envisioned and a culture reconnected with the land, and the young with tradition. The Watson story, partly told by Thompson Yulidjirri while marking out the terrain in the sand, is mostly revealed through action, but is not always clear; some of the gaps in the performed tale are frustrating. Theatrically, the rhythms of the performance and the marking of physical and emotional peaks (like the shaping of the otherwise spectacular storm or Watson’s delirium in his spiritual wilderness) sometimes seemed underdeveloped, even given the demands of such discursive narrativity. However, the visual management of the space, the dynamism of the Mimis (even more dextrous and dancerly here than in Mimis) and the power of traditional dance (sometimes seamlessly blending with contemporary idioms) all make for a unique experience. The presence of Thompson Yulidjirri, as he watches the unfolding of the stories enacted by the young cast is pivotal. Those reviewers relieved by the work’s apparent lack of didacticism should take note of Watson’s demise as a less than gentle hint of the torment of cultural and spiritual denial.
The Marrugeku Company, Crying Baby, storyman Thompson Yulidjirri, director-writer Rachael Swain, choreographer Raymond Blanco, composer-musical director Matthew Fargher, designer Andrew Carter, costumes Edie Kurzer, set engineer Joey Ruigrok van Der Werven, lighting Mark Howlett, film director Warwick Thornton; collaborators-performers Dalisa Pigram, Sofia Gibson, Trevor Jamieson, Katia Molino, Simon Pearl, Tanya Mead, Rexie Barmaja Wood, Alan Gagiba, Lee Wilson, Sean Chollburra; Heritage Lawn, Australian Technology Park, Jan 17-24
The music from Marrugeku’s Crying Baby
is available on CD from www.skinnyfishmusic.com.au.
Lyndal Jones: Deep Water/Aqua Profunda
On a warm, steamy Sydney Australia Day, the cool floor of the MCA is littered with bodies, sitting or stretched out, staring with a dreamy attentiveness into the large video tryptich on one wall of Lyndal Jones’ 2001 Venice Biennale work, Deep Water/Aqua Profunda. From time to time these watchers look back, at the single large screen behind them, or to their left, another screen, but on which a segment of the image is always tautly framed, the rest set at a darker hue. More persistently they turn when a voice is raised, a woman’s from a small adjoining room. They glimpse her, on a window-like screen, in the thrall of the passion that is ‘waiting,’ a tear down a cheek, a hand tangled in hair, the curve of the back, or the direct gaze of admission. Some go and sit on long benches in the small room to be with her, savouring the confidentiality, the poetic obliquity, the unnerving clarity of face and voice. Meanwhile, the big room moves, gently like a ship, like a ferry actually, in Venice or in Sydney, as video images mark the rise and fall of water with long close-ups of waterlines, paintwork, pylons, faces, almost as still as paintings. Suddenly, the ferry moves off, a joyful acceleration of image and sound, the walls of Venice flickering by, Harbour water restlessly, impressionistically patterning colours from the world above. We stand, testing our sea legs. Deep Water/Aqua Profunda is a great pleasure, offering serious choices, granting the satisfactions of film’s mobility with the stillnesses of visual art, unpredictable alternations of silence and sound (so that images can float free), and the intensity of performance. The watchers savour their waiting, loath to leave the reverie that has become theirs.
In a nearby room there’s great pleasure too, and yearning, to be had in the video and other documentation of Jones’ Prediction Pieces (1981-91), unique performance works of a kind and scale no longer seen or affordable in Australia. Fortunately the principles of creation that imbue them are still to be found in Deep Water/Aqua Profunda. Even if performance is filmed, Jones’ attentiveness to nuance means its power is never diminished.
Lyndal Jones, Up to and including...Deep Water/Aqua Profunda, selected works of Lyndal Jones 1997-2002, MCA, Sydney, Dec 8-Jan 28
RealTime issue #47 Feb-March 2002 pg. 5-7
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]
