Review: Adhocracy 2016

Vitalstatistix, Waterside Workers Hall, 2–4 September 2016. Curated by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and Paul Gazzola.

Raft of the Medusa. Photo: the author.

It’s with a strange mixture of pleasure and pain that I find myself writing, once again, about Adhocracy, the national artist hothouse presented annually by Vitalstatistix at the Waterside Workers Hall in Port Adelaide. Pleasure because this festival-in-all-but-name remains a highlight of South Australia’s performing arts calendar, bringing together multidisciplinary artists from across the country to develop new works in the presence of fascinated audiences; pain because it’s impossible to forget the precariousness of it all, Vitals, along with Slingsby and Brink, having born the brunt of the Coalition’s funding cuts to the small-to-medium sector in this state (the company waits on tenterhooks while its application to Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst, the successor to George Brandis’ short-lived NPEA, is considered).

Adhocracy seems emblematic in this regard: scrappy and investigational, infused with feminist, queer, and environmental politics, it is an aesthetic light year from Brandis’ beige, unthreatening prescription for the arts: canonical, formally conservative, bound to received ideas around artistic merit. The loss of Vitals itself would leave a distinctively large hole in the state’s performance ecology: no company outside of the State Theatre Company of SA maintains such a busy and varied annual program—developments, presentations of touring work, performances, residencies, events, long-term projects, and exhibitions. While there’s no telling what the future holds, a paring back of that program seems the more likely outcome—a testament to the hard work and resilience of creative producer Emma Webb and her small staff.

This year’s Adhocracy, the sixth since its day-long format was abandoned in 2011, was held for the first time in September, having followed the sun from its traditional Queen’s Birthday long weekend berth. No doubt the move was a question of logistics rather than audience comfort—despite the welcome sunshine, the evenings were familiarly bitter—but the novelty of a sunny Port for much of the event was strangely thrilling. Perhaps Adhocracy’s rescheduling was thrown into relief by something else too—the fact that this year’s event felt to me, more so than in previous years, like a consolidation rather than an advancement; not exactly a greatest hits compilation, but something like one of those late-career albums by a veteran artist content, for once, to restate rather than innovate, to finesse an established groove instead of push at its edges.

There was, for example, Aeon, this year’s two-week residency project, which strongly echoed last year’s large-scale participatory sound work Crawl Me Blood. Both works provided audience members with personal audio devices while they navigated the area around Hart’s Mill Flour Shed, finally ending up in the Mill itself where what had been an individualised experience turned into a collective one. Whereas Crawl Me Blood used Jean Rhys’ 1966 postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea as its launching off point, Aeon (led by artists Lz Dunn, Lawrence English, Lara Thoms, and Shian Law) drew on the principles of bird flocking, in particular the three behavior types that have been identified by computer modeling since the 1980s: separation, alignment, and cohesion.

Separated into groups of about ten or so, each assigned a different starting location—mine was the Wells Street laneway beside the Waterside Workers Hall—audience members were given a small portable speaker and a business card-sized piece of paper on which was written a relevant factoid or, in my case, epigram: Everything is natural. Nothing is normal.

Thus equipped, we were left to drift as we may, informed only by the instruction that, as with birds, we were to think of ourselves as leaders as well as followers. While our speakers piped out birdsong, snatches of human voices, and drones of varying volumes, my group fanned out organically towards the river, eventually melding with the other groups where the presence of several provocateurs became more obvious, some attempting to seduce us into running or flapping our arms or, more challengingly, remove items of clothing.

Our collective destination, it becomes clear, is the cavernous Mill, where we exchange our speakers for blankets at the entrance and find a space in the semi-darkness among a floor strewn with bodies. The low lighting fades away, and a drone begins. I fight down rising panic—there’s something about the combination of near-pitch darkness and the vast, empty space that evokes the kind of existential anxiety that makes anechoic chambers so famously unendurable—as the drone builds to a chest-rattling crescendo, then dies away.

As with the rest of this work-in-development, it’s a moment that, while experienced individually, carves out a communal space at the same time. In the darkness, unlike outside the Mill when we were answerable to our smaller, more clearly defined groups, our sense of responsibly to the rest of the human beings around us—of being a part of something larger than ourselves without having our agency stripped away—diminishes, leaving us feeling adrift and cut off but not alone; a richly metaphorical provocation in the neoliberal era.

The author, during Aeon. Photo: Jennifer Greer Holmes.

                

Also responsive to place was Pony Express’ Raft of the Medusa, another participatory work featuring an intersection of natural and anthropogenic worlds. Intended by its creative team of Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer to finally be performed on a life raft, the blackly humorous work is a commentary on rising sea levels, the titular watercraft—inspired by Théodore Géricault’s infamous depiction of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse—pitted against a dilapidated yacht in a “mid-apocalyptic” contest. Not much of this, admittedly, was in evidence during the artist talk I attended on the Saturday evening, but its on-water potential is beyond doubt: the kayak we lugged from the Workers Hall shop front to portside proved eminently seaworthy, Sinclair delivering his artist talk through a loudhailer while an alarmingly multiplying group of seagulls swooped at the hot chips covering his body, and Kronemyer successfully rowed in a loop around the Port River. According to Sinclair, Port Adelaide is second only to Bangladesh in terms of its vulnerability to climate change-induced sea level rise. True or not, Raft of the Medusa was a welcome complement to Vitals’ ongoing Climate Century project—a five-year series of commissioned artworks, projects, and events speculating on how we might commemorate this dangerous historical moment—making us complicit in its response to potentially catastrophic environmental change without sacrificing the playfulness that Pony Express have come to be known for (see, for example, reports of their recent Next Wave work, Ecosexual Bathhouse).

It’s difficult in a single piece of reasonable length to do justice to Adhocracy’s richness—eight works in various stages of development led by a total of 33 artists—but I do want to briefly mention three more projects (unfortunately, due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to engage with Angela Goh’s Uncanny Valley, Girl or the equally intriguing Lady Example by Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride). The Lost Art of Listening, a collaboration between two South Australian artists, Zephyr Quartet’s Hilary Kleinig and “conversationalist” Emma Beech, is shaping up to be a fascinating meditation on an essay by pianist and memoirist Anna Goldsworthy on whether classical music has lost its relevance as technologised distractions multiply, and our relationship to music becomes increasingly passive.

In an intimate, leveling exchange of a kind typical of Adhocracy, Kleinig engaged us with a series of questions that functioned as an exchange between audience and performer, rather than a one-sided presentation of her discoveries so far. We were invited to share our recollections of times music had made us cry, and to attach our answers written on tags to small trees steeped, so we were told, in the tears of those who had come before us. (My recollection? Hearing Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for the first time, in a state of total unpreparedness, while splayed on the couch one slow-burning Sunday afternoon. The wrong piece of music can move you to tears if you happen to hear it at the right time—while grieving, or in the middle of a breakup say—but some require no special circumstances to open up a world of feeling.) It looks as though the final work will build on Kleinig’s previous explorations of incorporating electronic elements into democratised sound works, including mobile phones operated by the audience.

Two final works rounded out my experience of this year’s Adhocracy: The Tension of Opposites, by newly-formed multidisciplinary collective Capture the Flag (Hew Parham, Meg Wilson, Nick Bennett, Paulo Castro, and Sascha Budimski), and Dirty Pieces, a highly embryonic attempt by dancer/choreographer Rebecca Jensen and Adhocracy regular Malcolm Whittaker to unpack the difficulties associated with understanding contemporary dance. I saw two showings of The Tension of Opposites, though not much changed. It’s an unusually developed work for Adhocracy, the two performers, Parham and Bennett, using an established text—Austrian writer Peter Handke’s Self-Accusation—to explore notions of dictatorship and conflict within Wilson’s highly detailed apartment room set. The audience were divided from the performers by a wall, some panels cut out, others covered with obscuring gauze. By removing the two rows of seating that had been in place during the first showing, the audience were able in the second to move from panel to panel, in a sense editing their own film by “framing” different parts of the action from moment to moment. Such filmic gestures, as well as a distinctly political-European sensibility, are typical of Castro’s body of work, with which The Tension of Opposites feels strongly of a piece.

As for Dirty Pieces, a work that recalls the quip, attributed to Elvis Costello and others, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, it’s difficult to know what to say. “This work is about…” Whittaker repeated over and over again, before exhausting his own struggle for interpretation, for meaning-making, and handing the microphone over to various members of the audience. “This work is about everything,” one of them said. “This work is about nothing,” responded another.

Review: 'Machu Picchu'

Sydney Theatre Company and the State Theatre Company of South Australia, Dunstan Playhouse, 13 April–1 May 2016. Written by Sue Smith. Directed by Geordie Brookman.

Photo: Brett Boardman

‘In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood,’ begins Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The sentiment, although attributed to the author’s 35-year-old narrator, has an inclusive ring; we all, Dante seems to be saying, stumble into the selva oscura – the dark wood – sooner or later.

For playwright Sue Smith, the entrance to the wood was marked by a cancer diagnosis – non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the same cancer my oldest brother was lucky to survive as a child – in 2014. Smith’s play Kryptonite, a co-production by Sydney Theatre Company and the State Theatre Company of South Australia, was about to start rehearsals; the news that she was seriously ill must have arrived like a thunderclap, the first sign of a deluge that washes away all the old certainties.

In her new play, Machu Picchu, Smith transmutes her experience of cancer into a creakingly familiar scenario: a sudden, unexpected event – in this case a car crash – turns the lives of middle-aged, middleclass engineers Paul (Darren Gilshenan) and Gabby (Lisa McCune) upside down. The play opens with those lines by Dante, muttered by Paul moments before a stray kangaroo propels him into the depths of his own selva oscura with a ‘C6 incomplete spinal cord injury’.

Permanently disabled, and haunted by drug-induced visions while recovering in hospital, Paul’s pain and immobility kindle an existential crisis that was probably going to happen anyway. Incan engineering marvel Machu Picchu, with its remarkable cut stone infrastructure that ensured the famous ‘lost city’s’ endurance as a historical site, becomes the locus of Paul’s dashed dreams: he and Gabby had always meant to go, but now it is too late. Life, as they say, intervenes.

Smith knows how to write complex but humane dramas that, like a clear voice emerging from a loudhailer, project the narrowly particular onto the vertiginously universal. Kryptonite was, for me, a fine example of this kind of play, director Geordie Brookman’s epic theatre flourishes vividly exposing the vim and sweep of Smith’s deeply thought and felt inquiry into Sino-Australian relations since the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Machu Picchu reunites Brookman with Smith, but the results are altogether more mixed. It’s said that the stones of Machu Picchu fit together without mortar so tightly that a knife blade still can’t penetrate the cracks between them – would that the same could be said of Smith’s play. Where Kryptonite was unerringly taut and outward-looking, Machu Picchu feels jerry-rigged and insular.

Watching it, I was reminded of critic Murray Bramwell’s observation about the middleclass plays of Yasmina Reza: that they are about less than they seem. Paul’s tragedy, however entertainingly leavened by Smith’s witty dialogue, rarely connects to the world beyond his and Gabby’s cocoon of bourgeois privilege. That Smith relentlessly satirises the indulgence and narcissism that are the fruits of this privilege – as in a scene set in a meditation retreat run by a stuttering guru (Renato Musolino) – only draws attention to the play’s circumscribed vision. Unlike in Chekhov’s tragicomic meditations on middleclass frustration, Smith’s characters only ever seem to be speaking for themselves.

This would matter less if Machu Picchu held together as well as Kryptonite, but unfortunately it doesn’t. More than one reviewer of the Sydney premiere season suggested that the play was a couple of drafts away from being stage-ready. I hear that changes have been made between then and its present run in Adelaide, but there remains much to be ironed out.

Neither the play’s flashbacks nor Paul’s hallucinations – indifferently staged in this production – provide much in the way of psychological insight, and the script abounds with improbabilities: not only does the guru pop up again, this time as a new-agey psychologist, at the hospital where Paul is convalescing, but so too does his daughter, Lucy (Annabel Matheson), who happens to be a nurse there.

It might fairly be asked, too, why Paul and Gabby have remained friends for so long with a couple as obnoxious as Kim (Elena Carapetis) and Marty (Luke Joslin), and with whom they seem to share little chemistry. A more significant question is that of who’s story Machu Picchu is; it feels, variously, like both Paul’s and Gabby’s, and the uncertainty twists out of focus the play’s themes: perseverance in the face of personal tragedy, and making the most of lives we know to be fragile and finite.   

Gilshenan and McCune, familiar from innumerable television roles, are well cast as Paul and Gabby, McCune successfully playing against type, Gilshenan impressing in his fearless uptake of Smith’s unsparing portrayal of disability’s physical and mental hardships. The smaller roles, anemically drawn, give the rest of the cast little to do except fill in the interstices of Paul and Gabby’s deteriorating relationship with broadly humorous brushstrokes. It’s tempting to wonder whether the two-hander form Smith applied with such success to Kryptonite might not have been fruitfully reemployed here, perhaps in combination with a set less grimly naturalistic than Jonathan Oxlade’s uninspired wall of hospital-green flats.

Machu Picchu strives to invite us to imagine our own sudden descent into Dante’s ‘deep place’, untouched by the sun. But Brookman’s direction, compassionate as it is, can’t make the leap for Smith – or for us. 

Is bigger better?: reflections on Adelaide Fringe 2016

It seems that every year since going annual in 2007, the Adelaide Fringe Festival has been convulsed by a fresh bout of severe self-reflection. Normally, the Festival’s artists and commentators have the good sense to wait until the last bleary-eyed comedian has left the city, or returned to her day job, before reporting on the Festival’s vital signs. This year the examination began prematurely, initiated by a Facebook broadside from British comic Alexis Dubus on 5 March, over a week out from Festival’s end. Dubus’ post, much quoted by approving artists and local media sensing a useful ruckus, read in part:

Well it saddens me to say this, but farewell Adelaide Fringe. This is going to be my last time playing you.

9 shows in and my total sales across my entire run are still 50% of my OPENING NIGHT sales in Perth.

Something’s not right here any more.

When I first came here in 2009 it felt like a genuinely experimental and exciting creative hub, with audiences seeking out tucked-away venues and subversive shows.

Having visited Adelaide before, I was blown away by how much this sleepy town got behind the weird and the wonderful offerings that Fringe threw at them.

Seven years on and those people seem to have vanished.

I wouldn’t be so cynical as to suggest a marketing ploy lay behind Dubus’ clearly heartfelt missive, but a part of him must have been satisfied to see his words embraced by local, national and, eventually, international media in a way he felt his show, Alexis Dubus Verses the World, had not been by Adelaide audiences. The city’s daily tabloid the Advertiser ran Dubus’ post in full as an op ed, and both the ABC and the Guardian picked up on the story as it made ripples as far afield as the UK. Unsurprisingly, however, the debate played out with the most intensity within the small circle of artists for whom the Adelaide Fringe has traditionally been a key stop on the global circuit that underwrites their professional existence.

The Garden of Unearthly Delights

  

This year marked my Adelaide Fringe debut as an artist (I’ve covered the Festival as a critic since 2009) and, like many artists, I had my own set of experiences against which to hold up Dubus’ comments. As a maker of (relatively) serious-minded theatre, I sympathised with Dubus’ bemoaning of the seeming preference of Adelaide audiences for ‘soulless, mass-produced bollocks over thoughtful, innovative works in quirky spaces’. But is this true?

The raw facts tell us only that ticket sales have been going up every year, as have the number of events (up to around 1,200 in 2016) in what remains, true to the Fringe’s original vision, an open-access festival. At such a size – second only to Edinburgh – there are no guarantees of quality for audiences, and no guarantees of full houses for artists. My own show, This Storm, ran for five performances at Tuxedo Cat, the same venue where Alexis Dubus Verses the World struggled. Conversely, we enjoyed audience numbers well above our expectations with an average house across the season of over 90 per cent (current Fringe director Heather Croall reckons 40 per cent is ‘a pretty good night’ – we did too, as reflected in our budget).

Alan Grace, whose company Duende produced two plays at the same venue by acclaimed Adelaide playwright Duncan Graham, told me his experience was similar:

For the most part, audience numbers exceeded our expectations, or were about where I had hoped they might be. We did really well for the last week, and sold out two of the nights of the season. With a 70-seater venue, we were extremely pleased with that.

Local comedian and fringe circuit veteran Fabien Clark, whose show The Walking Dreads played for two weeks at CBD venue The Producer’s Bar, was similarly positive when I asked him how it went, describing this year’s Adelaide Fringe as his ‘best to date’ in terms of ticket sales. Dubus also had a successful show, albeit not the one at Tuxedo Cat: his Marcel Lucont Is proved a considerable commercial and critical success at parklands hub Gluttony.

I’m not suggesting that this small sample of experiences is broadly representative – I also know of artists who struggled, like Dubus, to fill even small venues, and those who ended up having to cancel underselling shows, even taking into account Adelaide audiences’ notoriety for booking late/not at all. A Melbourne-based playwright I know has stated publicly that, after bringing shows here for six consecutive years, she won’t come again after her last play in 2014 got houses of three to eight people a night as against between 30 and 60 in Melbourne and Perth (Dubus has made contradictory statements about whether or not he’ll return to Adelaide).

But the historical reality is that for every show that undeservedly bombs, one deserving of good houses gets them. No doubt this equation has been skewed in the wrong direction by the heightened competitiveness brought on by the increasing domination of cashed-up venues The Royal Croquet Club and The Garden of Unearthly Delights – not to mention the Festival’s sheer size in the face of a small, economically disadvantaged and geographically isolated population – but artists like Dubus have no more right to feel entitled to large audiences than audiences do to, as Dubus rightly lamented in his post, access shows for free.

Like a lot of artists, I’m not immune to wishing that more people would seek out provocative, non-mainstream (i.e. actual fringe) fare rather than queuing up for the latest, reassuringly familiar appearances by the same marquee comedians who were here last year (and the year before that). As someone deeply invested in both seeing and making this kind of work, and who believes in its unquantifiable benefit to society, I understand the urge to implore audiences to challenge themselves and, in doing so, support local and emerging artists. But how quickly this desire turns into contempt for audiences, and the most repellent appeal imaginable that says you must do something because it is worthy. Maybe Dubus’ Tuxedo Cat show deserved to fail – more likely, if the reviews are anything to go by, it didn’t. Either way, pointing the finger at ‘the attitude of Fringe-goers’ is to disappear up a rhetorical cul-de-sac. It ignores the inconvenient but nonetheless decisive reality that audiences for live art are shaped by many factors, not the least of which – especially in Adelaide during the city’s famously event-saturated ‘Mad March’ – are limitations of time and money. 

Michael Allen (l) and Tamara Lee (r) in This Storm. Photo: Lauren Playfair

Why shows succeed or fail commercially sits on a complicated axis of geography, timing, reviews, publicity, word of mouth, luck, and the vagaries of public opinion. The mix is even more convoluted during festivals where competition for the attention (and cash) of audiences is fierce. It’s no wonder that, as it grows seemingly exponentially in size, increasing numbers of artists are feeling like committing to the Adelaide Fringe is to dive into the deep end, left to sink or swim alongside commercial leviathans like The Garden by a management primarily concerned with profit. But smaller venues – none of which are run by Fringe – must step up too. Holden Street Theatres, in inner suburban Adelaide, recorded its highest ever Fringe ticket sales this year, the result, largely, of slick advertising and the canny crafting out of a niche in a certain kind of show – well-made, minimalist, lightly political – imported from Edinburgh.

Anyone watching these events from that city will no doubt be doing so with a feeling of déjà vu. Edinburgh Fringe, too, has gone through its share of growing pains. One result was Forest Fringe, a free, not-for-profit ‘Fringe of the Fringe’ launched in 2007 as ‘a community of artists making space for risk and experimentation’ – in other words, the fostering of exactly the kind of work fringe festivals were established to showcase. It remains to be seen whether such an enterprise could work in Adelaide, but Edinburgh – with its three and a half thousand shows – is nevertheless seen as the model: in August, members of Festivals Adelaide, the umbrella organisation that represents ten of South Australia’s major arts festivals, will travel to Edinburgh on (depending on your point of view) an intelligence-gathering mission or a junket.

What they won’t need to be told is what everybody already knows: that Adelaide simply doesn’t have the population, or proximity to a large centre such as London, to sustain a fringe festival of anything like Edinburgh’s size. The irony is that it is precisely what has traditionally made Adelaide Fringe special – the city’s small size and compact CBD, which allow for the electric, all-encompassing atmosphere of a bustling village – is the very thing that is now perceived to be threatening its sustainability. Whatever the Festivals Adelaide committee discover in Edinburgh, the same debates will rumble on about the dominance of big venues and big comedians, and about what Writers’ Week director Laura Kroetsch and others regard as Adelaide’s festivalisation problem – too many cultural events taking place over too short a space of time, resulting in an overcrowded calendar in February and March, and little going on for the rest of the year.

But the reality is that a culture of festivalisation suits the economic interests of all the big players, right up to the state itself. As Croall recently told the Advertiser:

There is this growing idea that you should shut down big shows in order to make people go to the little shows – that is totally never going to work.

On the table at the moment instead, according to Croall, are subsidies for artist accommodation and venue hire. These will help. Talk of an imagined lost golden age won’t, and neither will excoriating audiences for going to the ‘wrong’ shows. We can expect more hissy fits while the Adelaide Fringe goes through its difficult adolescence. But we have no choice but to work together if we are to maintain and strengthen its viability as a platform for independent artists to try out new work, to experiment with form and theme, and to engage with audiences in ways that won’t happen anywhere else.           

Review: 'The Events'

State Theatre Company of SA, Belvoir, Malthouse Theatre and Adelaide Festival, Her Majesty's Theatre, 25 February-5 March 2016. Written by David Grieg. Directed by Clare Watson.  

Photo: Shane Reid

All art, the old truism goes, should ask questions rather than answer them. Scottish playwright David Grieg’s play The Events, loosely based on the 2011 Norway attacks, is abundantly enquiring. However, the interest generated by its moral and political conundrums is ultimately outstripped by a frustrating lack of either development or resolution.

Claire (Catherine McClements) is an Anglican minister in a small town. The multicultural community choir she leads becomes the target of The Boy (Johnny Carr), a disaffected right-wing extremist who guns down a number of the choir’s members in a vicious, unsparing attack. Claire, lucky to survive when The Boy found himself with only a single bullet and two potential victims holed up in the church music room, struggles to make sense of the events in their aftermath, spiraling into a destructive cycle of grief, psychological instability, and existential doubt.

Her quest for answers leads her to fraught encounters with psychologists, politicians, her partner, Katrina, The Boy’s friends and family, and, ultimately, The Boy himself (Carr embodies all of these characters with little physical or vocal differentiation, requiring some work on the part of the audience to ascertain who’s speaking in each scene, but it’s nevertheless a strong performance, grounded and attentive to detail, especially in Carr’s unsettlingly reasonable portrayal of the killer). Above all, Claire wants to know why.

‘I kill to protect my tribe from softness,’ The Boy intones chillingly, echoing history’s legion of masculinist butchers. For Claire, it’s not enough. Mad or evil, she insists on knowing. Is his father to blame, or the anti-immigration party of a Geert Wilders-style politico, or violent video games, or a crisis of masculinity? All familiar debating points that will resonate with different audiences for the same reason: the recurrence of the figure of the lone, white male killer, embittered and delusional, and, like Camus’ Meursault, estranged from mainstream society – Martin Bryant in Australia, Timothy McVeigh and countless others in the US. Grieg may have been thinking of the Norway attacks when he wrote The Events, but surely the Dunblane school massacre – perpetrated by another toxically aggrieved white man, Thomas Watt Hamilton – could not have been far from his mind either.

Perhaps overcompensating for The Boy’s conformity to this stereotype, Grieg throws the audience several curveballs. Both Claire and the killer are same sex-attracted, and their relationships to violence are startlingly reversed: we hear about The Boy’s defense of a young woman under assault by three men, and Claire’s infanticidal daydreams. On one occasion, she violently forces a kiss on Katrina then spits in her face. Is Grieg, in these moments, simply implying that everybody is capable of good and evil, that psychopathy is a spectrum and not a stable descriptor? If so, it seems trite in the face of the events. If not, these moments are difficult to read.           

Various contrivances and omissions prove similarly puzzling. It’s occasionally hard, for example, to swallow the choir’s endurance, and PTSD-affected Claire’s continued leadership of it. Claire’s unsegregated meeting with The Boy seems implausible (or is it another nightmare?). Given that she is an Anglican minister, we also learn surprisingly little of the nature of Claire’s faith. She is still a believer, apparently, although not in providence. ‘Do you pray?’ she is asked at one point. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Nothing.’ Claire’s flirtation with spiritualism, alienating to her choristers, reveals her dissatisfaction with mainstream faith, with its failure to provide her with either answers or solace after the massacre, but the audience is given scant sense of her religious journey. ‘Before I was good,’ is as much as she says. ‘Before I was happy’. Was she? There’s no way of telling.       

The play’s most striking conceit is the appearance, each night, of a different community choir on stage that functions, albeit in a limited way, in the manner of a Greek chorus (there’s also a Brechtian touch, with members roleplaying from time to time). It’s a device that neatly inverts the divisive tribalism evinced by The Boy, reminding us of the suturing power of community and of music (it’s telling, of course, that Claire instinctively fled to the music room to escape the shootings even if, in the end, it proved a sanctuary only for her). Sharply directed by Carol Young and performing traditional hymns as well as contemporary pop songs, in addition to original music by John Browne that lightly comments on the action of the play, the rough energy of the choir (the wonderfully named La La Land on the night I saw it) is a delight.

Catherine McClements is excellent, a finely measured account of Claire’s emotional and spiritual bewilderment happily banishing memories of a storied film and television CV. Geoff Cobham’s plain set – steel-frame chairs and battered upright piano evoking a dusty church hall – nicely complements Clare Watson’s unembellished direction, and is lit by his own design that makes effective use of both warm washes and chilly, driving followspots.       

Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the finished work, in our times and climate of anguish, is a lie’. It may be that The Events says no more than this: that closure is an impossibility, because finally life – and death – resist reason, and can never be fully understood. However appealing this view is in the age of ISIS, Syria and the world-as-battlefield mentality of a US empire in its death throes, it’s an unsatisfying foundation for drama, and one that, perversely, risks aping the nihilism it identifies in its subjects.

‘Sometimes shit just happens,’ one of Grieg’s characters says. But there’s a difference from being usefully discomforted by this thought, and being convinced that it’s more profound than it sounds. A lot of shit just happens to Claire over the course of The Events, too much of it inscrutable, too little that adds up to a clear and compelling trajectory. No doubt the play is an assertion of the good of community, of the coming together of disparate people in the name of a shared sense of belonging (and, by extension, of the good of theatre itself). But the play also reminds us that none of these things – even if within them might reside the source of our recovery and our redemption – is of itself capable of stopping a hail of bullets.

Maybe The Boy needs a name. Maybe the play’s brevity (it runs for just over an hour) is constrictive. In any case, we are left with a jumble of questions – puzzle pieces set out in front of us as Watson puts it in her director's note, only there’s no picture on the box to guide us in their assembly. Why?

Review: Adhocracy 2015

Vitalstatistix, Waterside Workers Hall, 6–8 June 2015. Curated by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and Paul Gazzola.

The curators of Adhocracy – headed, during the past three years in which I’ve been writing about it, by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and Paul Gazzola – know a thing or two about lassoing the zeitgeist. In 2013, as the murky palaver of Labor’s leadership unrest was approaching its nadir, the national artist hothouse hummed with questions of personal and, especially, political authenticity and illusion. Artists like David Williams and Malcolm Whittaker pulled back assorted veils to reveal harsh truths (and untruths) about liberal democracy’s terminal condition in a time of radical capitalism, fiercely partisan politics and the irresistible ascension of the tycoon and spin-doctor alike.

Adhocracy 2014, meanwhile, landed as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was finalising its Fifth Assessment Report. The report’s findings? That atmospheric and ocean warming is unequivocal, that it has been occurring since the middle of last century at unprecedented rates, and that it is virtually beyond question that human beings are responsible. By the time the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, Adhocracy’s traditional timeslot, came round, a government led by one-time climate change denialist Tony Abbott had been in power for ten months and was just weeks away from repealing Australia’s eminently sensible carbon pricing scheme. A piquant admixture of hope and despair infused the numerous works-in-progress – chief among them Future Present, led by Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects – that assayed an irrevocably climate-changed future.

This year, if we are to accept the enduring adage that the personal is political, Adhocracy’s gaze turned inwards but nevertheless retained the interrogative charge of previous years. As the commentariat sparred over the merits and meanings of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, companies All the Queens Men and Applespiel investigated the fluidity of truth and identity in still-developing works rich in ambiguity and sly humour.

Crawl Me Blood. Photo: Bryony Jackson

Perhaps contradictorily, however, I was most taken this year with a project somewhat removed from this ambit, and otherwise discrete from the rest of Adhocracy’s program on account of its scale and literary lineage. I’m talking about Crawl Me Blood, a work-in-development by Halcyon Macleod, Willoh S. Weiland (of large-scale arts project specialists Aphids), and a posse of collaborators drawn from a variety of disciplines including sound (Tristan Louth-Robins, Felix Cross, James Brennan), text (Alan Grace, Phillip Kavanagh), and performance (Ellen Steele, Josie Were).  

Crawl Me Blood’s source material is Jean Rhys’ 1966 postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and it’s intended that the development will ultimately blossom into a radio docu-drama and a live installation experience. I attended the final showing, having been warned that it would be substantially different to the previous two, and can report that the work, whatever form or forms it eventually takes, contains an embarrassment of potential.

Its setting was not the Waterside Workers Hall that has served as Adhocracy’s base since its inception, but the newly renovated Hart’s Mill Flour Shed, a cavernous space a few hundred metres from the Hall and which we, the audience, entered with portable radios pressed against our ears, the easy lilt of reggaeton beats filling the decidedly un-Caribbean-like Port Adelaide air.

Once inside, we were gently shepherded between a series of performance sites, each one a response by one or a small group of artists to either an aspect of the novel or one of the many interviews that had earlier been conducted by Macleod and Weiland with Caribbean women and expats. These responses – loosely allied by Brennan’s woozy, swathing sound design, and light installations (including an outsize Christian cross, symbol of suffering and defeat, triumph and salvation) that seemed to flicker into life at our presence – were invariably intriguing. Almost all of the human senses were played upon in vignettes, redolent of the novel’s setting, that had us gently assailed by the Flour Shed’s massive industrial fans (the Caribbean’s famous trade winds?), handed cups of rum punch as we entered a room imbued with a tropical atmosphere, and situated us as witnesses to monologue-as-autobiography, the construction of a pineapple sculpture, and the loud, unnerving intrusion of a ute into the space. All the while, the distinctive chiming of steel drums teased the edges of our hearing, not to mention our wintered faculties with evocations of warmer climes. What a joy and a privilege to see a work of such scale and lightly worn ambition so early in its life, and at a time when economic, and, concomitantly, aesthetic austerity is the name of the game.

Crawl Me Blood. Photo: Bryony Jackson

As to the theme alluded to earlier – namely, the unfixedness of identity – Applespiel’s Jarrod Duffy Is Not Dead and All the Queens Men’s Versions of Truth staked out the territory. In the first, the titular Jarrod is revealed to be the ninth member of the company who supposedly vanished without trace in 2010, a mere fortnight before he was due to appear in an Honours show (the company is made up of graduates from the University of Wollongong’s Creative Arts program). In this second stage creative development, the story of Jarrod’s disappearance and the subsequent attempts by the rest of the company to find him takes the form of a sort of live podcast, Appelspiel’s members gathered behind assorted laptops and microphones at a desk.

Laced with irony, Jarrod Duffy amusingly deploys tropes that will be familiar to anyone who has listened to podcasts such as This American Life (part of the joke, I suppose, is that Serial, This American Life’s popular spinoff, is about a real-life murder case whereas the mystery around Jarrod Duffy turns out to be, shall we say, rather more prosaic). The work, as I saw it, finds itself on less sure ground with an excessive conclusion during which, among other things, a wheelchair-bound Jarrod in a wig is pushed onstage to the tune of Rodgers and Hammersteins’ ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. It may be that this is the company’s preemptive response to the question the work in its present form will inevitably face from audiences – why not simply make an actual podcast? – but the effect is jarring, and serves to detract attention from the other, more important questions the work opens up – about the nature of truth, the ethics of appropriating other people’s stories for public consumption, and about how possible it is to know someone, even a cherished friend and colleague, truly.    

More puzzling again is Versions of Truth by All the Queens Men, a company better known for large-scale participatory projects than the intimate, audition room-set work presented here. Beginning with the premise that ‘our lives are built on made-up versions of ourselves’, performer Tristan Meecham guides two participants (one, I think, was a plant) through an acting audition that includes a screen test. The auditionees are variously challenged and humiliated by Meecham, who also weaves throughout the work stories (presumably, though not explicitly, drawn from his own experiences) about life in the acting business. These stories, which include Meecham’s successful audition for the role of the Young Collector in a Melbourne Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire, are sinisterly undercut by allusions to some terrible event that is never revealed.

Versions of Truth situates itself within the current wave of ‘confessional’ performance art but Meecham’s performance is far too slippery for the fit to be a snug one. The work gets stranger as it goes – ‘down a rabbit hole of deceit’, as the program, not inaccurately, puts it – and winds up, confusingly, with an almost wholesale recreation of the Fiery Hawk Comic Relief skit that went viral a few years ago. I was not alone in being unable to discern the purpose of the skit’s inclusion/imitation; was it an homage, a parody of a parody, some wily comment on artistic pilfering or something else? I couldn’t believe for a moment that it was a guileless rip-off – and, who knows, maybe that in itself was the point.

Future Turf. Photo: Heath Britton and Jennifer Greer-Holmes

Finally, it is worth mentioning, if only briefly, two works that enjoyed first stage creative developments during Adhocracy 2015, Awkward Sex Scenes and Future Turf. Both are embryonic but, growing out of clear, fertile ideas – the often uncomfortable relationship between artistic representations of sex and audiences in the case of the former, and the intersections between the built environment and the human form in the latter – show great promise. Awkward Sex Scenes, concerned with a seemingly universal but often unspoken experience, will find ready audiences wherever it goes, and it would do well to retain the interactive element whereby audience members are invited onto the stage to recount their own awkward experiences with sex scenes as the creative team of Ahmarnya Price, Dan Koerner and Ingrid Voorendt shuffle elements of the set around them to evoke those sites, mostly lounge rooms, of occasional but supreme discomfort.

I gather that Future Turf underwent radical transformations between its three showings, but the work’s underlying hybridity – a meeting of text by poet Emily Stewart, sculpture by Henry Wood, performance art by Emma Hall, and choreography by Rachel Heller-Wagner – looks as though it will be carried through to subsequent developments. This will be no bad thing; Future Turf is cross-disciplinary practice with the brakes on, a meditation on the politics of both home and land ownership that may find one of its great strengths is its open-hearted and open-minded search, if not for any kind of truth, then at least for poetic, meaningful resonance.            

'We know that we are cruel': a conversation with theatre-maker Sarah Dunn about comedy, kindness, and the Theatre of Compassion - part two

This is the second part of an email conversation between myself and theatre-maker Sarah Dunn about her production of Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play, and the possibilities for a 'Theatre of Compassion'. You can read the first part here.

I was prompted to explore the issues raised in these pieces by two very different performance works: Sarah's Melancholy Play, and Cat Jones' Somatic Drifts, which I participated in at Vitalstatistix' artist hothouse Adhocracy in 2014. This is what I wrote about Somatic Drifts: 

Grounded in horticulture and neuroscience, Cat Jones’ full body experience for one person at a time was an undoubted highlight of this year’s program. Gesturing towards the emergent ontologies of a post-human future, Somatic Drifts sought, through sensory and aural immersion, to radically unsettle the sense of self of participants, who had both human and plant identities progressively imposed over their own through sound, aroma, touch and visual feedback. My initial trepidation was quickly forgotten, the work proving unexpectedly affecting in its therapeutic, closely guided dislocations of sense and self as well as its emotive engagement with ideas around the fostering of empathy between species. Still in its first stage of research and development, the progress of Somatic Drifts will be keenly monitored by this writer. (RealTime issue #122, Aug–Sept 2014, pg. 44)

I invited Cat to participate in this discussion but that 'progress' I said I would monitor is keeping her extremely busy; she has just begun a new creative development of the work at the UNSW. (Happily, Cat has agreed in principle to have a chat with Mr Marginalia when time permits. Stay tuned!)

I mention all this because Sarah felt that we might be painting a pretty grim (not to mention parochial) picture of the performing arts in Australia if we didn't take into account other artists who are working in a similar vein, and I agreed. As we shall see, overseas artists are also developing practices that can be loosely, though usefully, gathered together under the umbrella of performance that brings special care and attention to the situating and role of the audience. 

In Australia, in addition to Cat and Sarah, I would add a third artist, Astrid Pill, whose 2006/7 Adelaide Fringe/Malthouse show Cake bobbed to the surface of my mind when I found myself considering possible antecedents for Sarah's (as yet embryonic) 'Theatre of Compassion'. Reading contemporaneous reviews by Jan Chandler and Alison Croggon, I was freshly struck by the similarities between Cake and Melancholy: the engaging of multiple senses (especially taste), and the close blending of music (what is it about the cello?!), text, and physical languages; Croggon's observation that Cake 'could all be too cute for words, but the show’s intelligence and wit – and its slyly obscene subversion of the apparently inhibited femininity it explores – ensures that it never is' could apply with equal incisiveness to Melancholy Play. At the risk of being accused of advocating some form of gender essentialism, I wonder too if there is anything more to be said about the fact that all these artists are women. If there is, however, that's a conversation for another day.                        

Rebecca Mayo in Melancholy Play. Photo: Yvonne McAuley

Ben: I should have said (I think I talked around it a bit) that your production of Melancholy Play and Cat's work tap into a wider resurgence that’s going on at the moment around experience-based performance. The reasons why this resurgence is happening are complex but I’d suggest it’s partly a reaction against the atomising effects of social media, and a resultant craving for deeper, face-to-face exchange. A curator recently said to me she’d heard another curator say that she can’t sell paintings anymore because people want experiences now instead.

Sarah: I think you’re right about a growing awareness of our physical isolation. I think there’s a more practical element to that too, though, for performance art, and that’s that you have to provide something that really necessitates people leaving their homes, physically travelling somewhere, and then sitting in a room full of other people. While we may crave deeper exchanges, I think we are also unwilling to go to the theatre only to be a detached observer, since we can do that more easily and comfortably in our own homes. You have to provide something that cannot be delivered to people through a computer or a television, I think.

I have also been pondering whether there might be something else going on, which is about the rise of individualist politics. This can be seen really clearly through capitalism and neoliberalism, but there are also echoes of it in feminism (the personal is political), environmental politics (everyone can contribute to recycling, for example). We are, in our current societies, the protagonists of our own world. Everyone has followers, everyone has a voice, everyone sees themselves as central to their own lives. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but I think it might (possibly) be something that is taking people away from non-experiential theatre.

B: I found your comment ‘sometimes people will have a negative reaction even if you don’t intend it’ really interesting, as I know not everybody who saw Melancholy responded to it in the same way I did. So I guess something has to be said about work that sets out to ‘make people feel good’ and the usual corollaries about the subjective nature of our responses to art.

S: Yeah, for sure. I think in Adelaide especially we have a relatively small pool of theatre*, which means that anybody who follows the theatre pretty much goes to everything. I think what that means is that we expect that if something is ‘good’ (whatever that means) then we’ll like it. Obviously I’d love for every single person on earth to love the theatre I make, but I think it’s unlikely to happen. All of the theatre pieces I have loved have had other people hate them (except maybe Roman Tragedies, but that was just freakishly, impossibly brilliant). And of course, some people don’t want to feel the things I’m asking them to feel, or they don’t go to the theatre for feelings, or they don’t engage with the subject material, or any number of things. Ideally, I would love for theatre to be seen more like music, where we can allow ourselves to have preferences, be open to possibilities of liking something else. I think I’d probably be something like indie pop.  Not everyone likes indie pop, or is moved by it, or is interested in it. That’s cool with me.

*This obviously doesn’t go for festivals, where I think these thoughts don’t apply, perhaps because we’re not expecting to like everything.

B: This is slightly tangential, but your comment about the sexuality of some characters in Melancholy resonated with me because I remember saying to Caryn [my partner] after the show that it’s strange that, though so much progress has been made in the developed world as regards the rights and representation of homosexuals, it’s still unusual to see something in which gay characters simply are – i.e. in which their sexuality is not foregrounded or framed as an issue. In other words, I think we’re still somewhat conditioned to think about ‘why’ characters are gay in a way that doesn't really reflect how much community attitudes have shifted in this area. I found it very refreshing to see Melancholy challenge this.

S: It is exceptionally unusual to see queer people onstage who could be easily replaced by straight people, and even more unusual to see butch women on stage. This was one of the things I loved about the play when I first read it, that it locates queerness to be just as valid as heterosexuality as a choice for the author to make. You’re right to say that we normally only see queer people (or people of colour, or people with a disability, or even still, in some cases, women) when it’s an Artistic Choice that we somehow need to decode. I hope that we can start to dismantle that coding because it’s getting in our way, I think.

L-R, Rebecca Mayo, Lochlin Mayberry, Holly Langridge, Ashton Malcolm, Antoine Jelk and Rachel Bruerville in Melancholy Play. Photo: Yvonne McAuley

B: Predictably, I Googled ‘Theatre of Compassion’ after the earlier part of our discussion. As we suspected, there’s not much scholarship or anything else around this idea, but I did find an interesting interview with the American playwright Catherine Filloux. I don’t know Filloux’s plays but she’s written about some pretty heavy stuff – genocide, honour killings and so on. She talks about her work in quite a surprising way. She says in the interview: ‘it is not the “big issues” which guide me, but my own personal connection to love which urges me to build plays, as what can be called pieces of art, like castles of hope. I use the word castle not for its grandiosity, but for its qualities of dream and magic. And theater can be like a haven with a moat around it, somewhere sacred where you get to come in, no matter who you are. You are protected, in the sense that a play is a different gift for each person that sees it.’ (I should add that Filloux points out that tickets to her play LUZ were relatively affordable at $18.)


S: I love the thought of theatre as a haven with a moat around it. It conjures such a beautiful sense of safety, but also of potential attack from the outside world, which I think speaks volumes about what we’re talking about.

I always think of it in a little more rudimentary way, which is that theatre is the seeing place (the root meaning of the word), and that I ought to make it easy for people to see that which is difficult to see otherwise. And I completely agree with the notion that it is a sacred place, and a sacred place for everybody. That’s a task all on its own, to create that sense, and I think that might get to the root of the thing – what does it mean if everyone is equally welcome? Equally valued?

B: Do you already have other plays in mind that you would like to produce using the same techniques you applied to Melancholy? I know that you have also written for the stage. Do you have any ambitions to build your own ‘castles of hope’?




S: Indeed, I hope to approach all of my work, without exception, with three key things in mind: thought, tone, and heart. I think those basic building blocks create the effect we’re talking about. Thought relates to an ‘issue’, I suppose, or, more accurately, some connection for the audience to draw to their social/personal/political/combination of all three lives. This also relates to my queer and feminist discourse, which is throughout all my work. Tone refers I suppose to the feeling in the room. I don’t mind what the feeling is, as long as it is palpable, and all-encompassing, and irresistible. Heart refers to caring about the audience’s experience, and I think this is perhaps what might sometimes create that uplifting feeling. It’s also that vulnerability I mentioned before, and the commitment to being compassionate to the audience as well as to the characters. 

I think you could do these three things with anything that had something strong to hold onto (strong character, strong narrative – anything fundamental to storytelling). I am particularly interested in early naturalism for their feminist discourse, Shakespeare (natch), Lally Katz’s work, the list goes on.

In terms of writing – well, it’s been a little while since I wrote anything, but the last time I did it certainly had a similar composition. It was an exploration of grief, using comedy and music and had all sorts of similarities [to Melancholy]. I was working with six actors though, and they were as much the creators of that project as me. I certainly would be interested in playing around with those ideas further in playscript form, but for now my focus is on finding these qualities in existing works and bringing them out, rather than making new ones. I’m a bit of a collaborative beast, and working alone makes me feel isolated and not creative at all. Maybe I’ll learn to work alone and become better suited to writing – fingers crossed!

—

Sarah Dunn is a founding member of milk theatre collective, independent theatre maker and directing student at the Flinders University Drama Centre. At the Drama Centre, she has directed several productions including a devised piece, The Girl Who Grieved Everything, The Boys by Duncan Graham, A Single Act by Jane Bodie, Dracula, Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce by Sarah Ruhl, and The Thugs by Adam Bock. As an actor, Sarah has worked with State Theatre Company, the ABC, ActNow Theatre, Patch Theatre Company and various other independent companies. She devised, directed, and performed in several forum theatre workshops with ActNow Theatre, the Legal Services Commission and the Marion Youth Health service developing Expect Respect and Speak Out. Sarah has directed and written for Urban Myth Theatre, the five.point.one reading sessions, independent theatre company go begging, and was dramaturg and writer for milk theatre collective’s first show, Alice and Peter Grow Up. She assisted Julian Meyrick on Neighbourhood Watch in 2014 at STCSA.