Good Cop Bad Cop, Kassys photo Prudence Upton |
The Netherlands company Kassy’s Good Cop Bad Cop snuck up on me. Here was an immaculate domestic setting, ideal for a sitcom or a David Williamson play, with three casually attired performers loitering onstage pre-show and occasionally striking unusual poses while staring intently at nothing in particular. What unfolds is a gentle fable-cum-soap opera about the lives and loves of domestic animals, acutely observed, cleverly avoiding standard mimicry (the actors dropping in and out of animality) and complemented with an onscreen commentary from the characters in a more human vein, but never too complicated so that the human-animal divide is constantly erased. Instead of anthropomorphism we’re offered a comic vision that looks both ways—distancing us from animal behaviour, to regard it anew, while pointing up our need to project intention onto animals and simultaneously confirming our own animal-ness. Beautifully paced and performed with loving attention to detail, Good Cop Bad Cop was a welcome surprise.
Food Chain, Animal Farm Collective photo Prudence Upton |
While the bear behaviour is nicely executed and the stage design is embracing, the structure of Food Chain is loose, the pacing sluggish and the comic neo-Darwinian tooth and claw savagery taxing. Redemption comes in a beautiful and unexpected coda as the entire cast form a positive version of the chain of animal life, one of mutuality. This is the descent of species in which cooperation is vital and eternal: singly and then wondrously linked the performers perpetually lower themselves down the tree, disappearing ever so briefly behind it only to appear again at its top with the most subtle directorial sleight of hand.
Gob Squad’s much anticipated Super Night Shot also adopted animal guises, in the form of cheap masks as four performers ventured into the world immediately around the Sydney Opera House, each with a camera, to make a quickie movie in an hour which was then immediately shown unedited and sound-mixed live for us on four large screens. At the centre of a highly synchronised venture was the chance outcome of approaching strangers to find one who would kiss the performer wearing a rabbit mask. The resultant blend of technological assuredness and the happenstance of improvisation was engaging, and quite free of profundities. The work simply celebrated DIY spontaneity, technologically and performatively, with a Live Art back-to-basics vision challenging the sophistication and complexity of the big end of the entertainment world.
Entity, Random Dance photo Prudence Upton |
McGregor’s fascination with the science and psychology of the creative process makes for good reading but the subject is not convincingly embodied in Entity: “By forcing breakdowns of coordination in his dancers, McGregor hoped to gain an insight into the relationship between their physical and cognitive functions. To this end he submitted the dancers to perturbations, assigning them tasks like counting backwards while dancing, and making them wear prisms over their eyes to distort their spatial awareness” (Luke Jennings, program note). Certainly the dancers evinced a remarkable certainty of purpose against the odds of speed and complicated shaping but Entity’s rhythmic sameness (countered somewhat by the melancholy string score of the first section but underlined by the driven pop pulse of the second), the iterated theme and variation structure and the vapidity of the screen deployment gravitated against coherence and interest. The relationship between dancers and projections was nil, the raising and lowering of screens insignificant—a prime example of ‘background new media.’ Australian artists Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Garry Stewart integrate dancers and stage materials, whether objects, projections or devices, with thoroughness and creativity.
Alexandra Harrison, My Bicycle Loves You, Legs on the Wall photo Prudence Upton |
Bigger Than Jesus, written and performed by Canadian artist Rick Miller was a minor festival highlight, a bit like Richard Dawkins doing his atheism number as stand-up. Mixing forms (comedian, lecturer, preacher) and media (live video, rough puppetry, superimposed stage and screen images), Miller vented his hostility to organised religion with glee (the demotic Blakean preacher being the best of it) and cunning (an hilarious Last Supper featuring among the guests a John Lennon doll and a Homer Simpson PEZ dispenser as Judas). In the end it’s clear that Miller is not only fond of Jesus but in a curiously narcissistic finale becomes physically one with a projected painting (Dali I think) of his crucified other. With the debates over atheism, religious belief and fundamentalism still raging, Bigger Than Jesus is a timely entertainment if sagging mid-way in its jet flight to Jerusalem routine and in the datedness of some of its screen technology.
The less said about the festival’s big ticket show, The Giacomo Variations, the better. An underdeveloped, clunky cut and paste life of Casanova interpolated with occasionally apposite songs from various Mozart operas, it featured a very good soprano and a fine tenor (both required to do extraordinary physical acts while singing—usually of a sexual variety), an adequate actress and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra sounding fine. John Malkovich as Casanova meandered through the narrative with none of the brisk, varied delivery of his long-ago Dangerous Liaisons movie performance as a similar rake. It was indeed strange not to have a festival with a centrepiece (as awkward as that concept can be) like the Hamlet or the Wars of the Roses of recent Sydney Festivals.
Rosie Dennis, June Hickey, Driven to New Pastures photo Heidrun Löhr |
Fleur Elise Noble, 2 Dimensional Life of Her photo Jamie Williams |
Sydney Festival 2011: Kassys, Good Cop Bad Cop, Seymour Centre Downstairs, Jan 26-30; Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood, Animal Farm Collective, Food Chain, design Moritz Muller, Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, Jan 26-30; Gob Squad, Super Night Shot, Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 25-30; Random Dance, Entity, concept, direction and choreography (with the dancers), design Patrick Burnier; Legs on the Wall, My Bicycle Loves You, story by Beatrix Christian, Patrick Nolan, Anna Tregloan and company, director Patrick Nolan, designer Anna Tregloan, projection consultant Tim Gruchy, Sydney Theatre, Jan 11-15; Bigger Than Jesus, performer Rick Miller, creators Rick Miller and director Daniel Brooks, Wharf 1, STC, Jan 18-29; The Giacomo Variations, writer, director Michael Sturminger, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 20-22; Driven to New Pastures, writer, performer Rosie Dennis, performer June Hickey, Downstairs, Seymour Centre, Jan 11-16; 2 Dimensional Life of Her, creator Fleur Elise Noble, Downstairs, Seymour Centre, Jan 9-13
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 14-15
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]