Mono no Aware has moved to Guerrilla Semiotics. Please update, thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience...

I am writing these words with the finality of betrayal that one usually feels when switching soccer teams - or whatever Australians do instead. After years on this address, the time has come to abandon Livejournal for something swankier, more manageable and, ultimately, more transparent.

We LJ-ers were always a bit more tribal than the other blogging communities. We could befriend one another, filter our posts so that only our friends could read them; it was, in one word, all very high school. I've had Mono no Aware since 2001, and it has been many things. For a few years, while I was moving countries and cities more erratically than I change music taste these days, Mono was literally my most permanent address, the best place to find me. I made friends on LJ, not to mention partners.

To cut the sentimentality short, that's the end of that. Livejournal has been changing hands since, roughly, 200...5?, and every change has been for the worse. It wasn't so much the lack of perks, but failure after failure of LJ to provide the minimum acceptable working conditions for a self-respecting blogger, from search and archiving options to design freedom. And then came the advertising... The moment I looked at this URL from a public computer, and found it smothered with advertising I had never asked for nor approved, I was going to leave.

I will continue writing on theatre and dance on Guerrilla Semiotics, an infinitely more pronounceable URL (if you have ever seen me trying to explain the spelling of 'misonou' and 'aware', you will be as relieved as I am), and a much more disciplined design commitment.

At GS, you can find my last articles: reviews of Shaun Tan and Jason Lutes's graphic novels, and an article on Woyzeck, currently playing at the Malthouse.

So long,
Jana

The secret of the success of any fool and criminal is that they are likeable. They don't succeed otherwise. Oh, they can have a hold of people or they can be immensely rich but, for the most part, the contradiction of the success of rotten people is that they are beguiling.

- David Marr

At the beginning of last year, I still believed in many things. I believed that all people were good; just weak. There is no way to underestimate this weakness, which I thought infinitely bigger than human capacity for good. Yet I believed that, as long as this weakness was cotton-woolled, sheltered from the elements, the good would have nothing standing in its way. I believed in some other things (trip-hop, good food), but they were marginal by comparison.

Now, on the 23rd of January 2009, I believe only that there is Hell. And I believe that, once you've ticked your boxes, you can meet Esmé every single day until you die, you will not be saved.

Snatched the best haircut in Carlton; near-religious as always. A good pair of hairdresser scissors costs a near $1,000. Steel from Japan, from Germany. Parallels between theatre and fashion photography. Long smile exchange with a man with a straw hat [od smijeha pravim saksofon; od sunca pravim put]. For a second there, contemplated saying hello, just-to-see. Insulation from the elements with conspicuous consumption: the long-sought Chatwin's In Patagonia and Rosenblatt's On Photography. Then bass. Sunshine. Footpath dancing. Fragori nella mente/ rumori dolori/ lampi tuoni e saette schianti di latte fragori e albori di guerre universali scontri letali/ SONICA/ SONICA. Perfect would be oldschool Marlene Kuntz for New Year. Which of course

Despite all my intentions to retire early, the dance season procrastinated, and it's only today that I am closing my year. It was an eventful one, and I am vaguely looking forward to a month of being a gentleman farmer: cooking, reading, watching films, and undertaking urban expeditions. Or something like that.

2008 was mostly a miserable year here, so beyond bearable that I refused to announce it, preferring to live in a never-ending 2007, until the clouds started dispersing - by which time the 2009 diaries were already on sale. This is one of the reasons why my theatre year is not entirely representative of Melbourne, Australia. Combined with a three-month return to Europe, I only got back to regularly attending local theatre events properly in September. Inevitably, I missed many unusually good-sounding productions, among which, in no particular order: Back to Back's Food Court, Schlusser's Life is a Dream, BalletLab's Axeman Lullaby, MTC(!)'s Blackbird and Simon Stone's direction of pool (no water) for Red Stitch. In Sydney, there were: Stoning Mary at Griffin Stablemates, Wharf2LOUD's Frankenstein, Hayloft Project's remount of their 2007 Melbourne show Spring Awakening at Belvoir Downstairs, The Rabble's Salome in Cogito Volume III and The Fondue Set's No Success Like Failure (which also had a short run in Melbourne).

Another reason is that the highlights of my year were uniformly European theatre products, and many of them on film. Purists will say aaaah!, but I have discovered that dance on film is the most beautiful thing in the world. Among my discoveries were the gorgeous films of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. I urge you to have a look at Rosas danst Rosas and Achterland, at least. The shows I loved were covered, laconically, for Real Time, and included: in Zagreb, The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Nature Theater of Oklahoma's NO DICE, and some mind-blowing student work. In Vienna, Mathilde Monnier and La Ribot's gustavia, Dalija Aćin's Handle with great care, and Hans Van den Broeck's Settlement. In London, Anthony Neilson's Relocated. In Venice, Random Dance/Wayne McGregor's Entity. While some of this was mainstage glitz, the amount of experimentation, passion, and sheer intelligence I found back home was a good reminder that, most of the time, unchallenged we just don't try hard enough.

Nonetheless, there was some exquisite local theatre, mostly clustered in the last few weeks (despite my dire need for rest). My personal, local Best Of would include: UHT's Attempts on Her Life; OpticNerve's YES; Elbow Room's There; Liminal's Oedipus - A Poetic Requiem; Black Lung's diptych of Avast I & II, and Phillip Adams's two shorts for VCA's Transmutations season. In Sydney, I saw the extraordinary Triptych, by De Quincey Co, and Hans Van den Broeck's Nomads, both at Performance Space. I also remember reacting very strongly to STC's The Season at Sarsaparilla and Hayloft's Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov, but I wouldn't vouch for those reactions anymore. Things were unusual, back then. It was a strange year for MIAF too, in which the best productions were a poetry recital, a film and a piece of formally near-hermetic dance.

Of the things to look forward to in the next year, there will be a full season of Hayloft, the Malthouse program looks unusually strong, I may finally catch a Schlusser production, and I'll be keeping an eye on Black Lung and Phillip Adams, solo or with BalletLab.

Altogether, I have seen staggering 145 shows, a huge leap from 65 last year. Even discounting the occasional gallery visit from this number, I have spent almost half (three-sevenths, more precisely) of my nights this year in theatre. I have written on 31 of them, although some of my notes are still around, scattered in notebooks, diaries, on the margins of program notes, and should be revisited and pulled together.

The unintended benefit of all the above-mentioned misery is that I have become something rather unusual: a person that doesn't worry anymore. I've started working full-time in research, at Melbourne University, won a scholarship to fund the rest of my interrupted studies, next year, and have been writing at a pace unseen since I was a glorious multi-tasking teenager. I have discovered to possess, among other strange loves, a passion for dance in all forms, visual dramaturgy, and deconstructive theatre. I have remembered wanderlust. I have given myself time until the end of 2008 to decide about the rest of my life, and I'm now extending that period. It's a transitional time. Now that the dust has settled, all is peaceful and quiet for the first time... ever. I can't remember the last year I had where I didn't have any worrying to look forward to. Not the past five, at least, and I don't remember those immediately preceding as rosy either. It's good. Needed.

1. Almost by accident, I came across the following story:

In [the Serbo-Croatian war in the early 1990s], for the first time in history, the tactic of rape became a strategy. Soldiers took women from their homes, from UN or Red Cross or refugee convoys, and put them in the so called "rape camps." Young girls, daughters taken from mothers, mothers taken with their daughters. They were systematically raped until they got pregnant; then they were released from the camps, but in a late stage of pregnancy when it is too late for legal abortion. These women came to Zagreb, the Croatian capital and second refugee stop. Newspapers were filled with their stories: what to do with the unborn conceived in such terrible circumstances. The word "children" was avoided. –Sanja Nikčević. Rape as War Strategy: A Drama from Croatia

I am not sure what a good artistic response to a story of this kind would consist of, but I am not convinced it would of a woman raped in a locker, vomiting on the floor, as in The Women of Troy, a field trip into abjection. Rape camps are a different story to the holocaust, and neither is the digital photography of Abu Ghraib an instance of banal evil: both, instead, are illustrations of the primordial excess, the glee of violence. Barbaric, sweet and sticky and ecstatic, just like the pre-historic wars were, but not mechanical, not absent-minded, not jogging suits, not plastic bags. In confusing the two, I am increasingly convinced the Kosky/Wright production misunderstood its role, and took part in the creation of gore, in titillation. It was competing with the images, trying to find a new angle, perhaps (although I doubt) re-sensitize us: in that respect, it was all about the internal audience equilibrium of emotion and revulsion. If there was any genuine banality there, it was the guilty banality of spectatorship, banality the audience may have been attempting to exorcise through submission to ever more disturbing images. And the point at which these images we are creating to ourselves become more excessive, more disturbing than anything likely to occur in real life, we are making a form of very simple, primary-coloured pornography: images for emotional masturbation.

To try to reduce the pain of others to the interchangeable familiar images, Baudrillard’s circular simulacra, is to deny them their particularity, to reduce them to symbols pointing at our own, limited experience that they sit squarely outside of. Far from being an exercise in sympathy, observing extreme suffering, arising from extreme consequences, is a deeply alienating experience. There is no more distant other than the person undergoing a pain we cannot even imagine, in circumstances profoundly distant from ours. By drawing on our bank of images, The Women of Troy gets implicated in another, more complex story.

( 2. The political in the theatre )

( 3. The Work of Wonder )


The Work of Wonder.

( 4. Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome )


Anatomy Titus. Christopher Sommers and Steve Rooke.

( 5. The radical in the mainstream )

The Work of Wonder. By Christian Lollike. English translation by Greg Hanscomb. With Dion Mills, Meredith Penman, Tim Potter & Chris Saxton. Director: André Bastian. Choreographer: Peta Coy. Set Design: Peter Mumford. Lighting Design: Stelios Karagiannis. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, 19 Nov – 20 Dec.

Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome, A Shakespeare Commentary. By Heiner Müller. Translated by Julian Hammond. Director: Michael Gow. Design: Robert Kemp. Lighting design: Matt Scott. Composition and sound design: Brett Collery. With John Bell, Robert Alexander, Thomas Campbell, Peter Cook, Scott Johnson, Nathan Lovejoy, Steven Rooke, Christopher Sommers and Timothy Walter. Bell Shakespeare and Queensland Theatre Company. Malthouse Theatre, Nov 26 - Dec 6.

1. Shelley Lasica is a choreographer like a bird like a butterfly, someone I do not understand, not even love. Someone who runs away from me, rather. The first time I saw her work, last year, you may remember I wrote: "Dance, for me, is the sea, is falling, is motion sickness." I didn't know, I didn't understand, I had thought, but not the right thoughts, just thoughts.

2. Shelley's mother Margaret Lasica was a pivotal figure in the development of contemporary dance in Australia, a member of the Modern Ballet Group in the 1950s, and the founder of the Modern Dance Ensemble in 1967. She was also an influential teacher: one of her students was Lloyd Newson, who later established DV8. And of course, Shelley, who has been making dance for 25 years, here and everywhere.

3. From Anna Schwartz Gallery press release:

Lasica has always demonstrated a rigorous commitment to the choreographic development of her work. Compositions are interrogated and the informed critical responses of others become part of the working process. For the same reasons Lasica's work is grounded in a discourse that seeks to engage dance with other visual and temporal art forms. To this end she has worked with Artists Tony Clark, Callum Morton, Kathy Temin and Gail Hastings; Architect Roger Wood; Composer François Tétaz; Video-makers Margie Medlin and Ben Speth and Designers Martin Grant, Kara Baker and Richard Nylon.

For Vianne, Lasica has brought together American-born Ben Speth, innovative and internationally acclaimed film maker and creator of theatrical environments; Robyn McKenzie, writer, visual arts curator and Art Historian; Milo Kossowski, musician and composer and band member of The Emergency; Anne-Marie May, Melbourne-based visual artist, and Ben Cobham, production designer/director for visually based companies. Together they will devise the set, sound score, lighting, costume design, projection and text. Vianne's dancers are Deanne Butterworth, Joanna Lloyd, Tim Harvey, Bonnie Paskas and Lee Serle.

4. This is all true. Vianne, currently playing at fortyfivedownstairs, is indescribable, and as review-proof as all of the above suggests.

5.

Bonnie Paskas, Timothy Harvey, Jo Lloyd, Deanne Butterworth and Lee Serle. Photo credits: Rohan Young.

6. Ah that's a cop-out, you'll say! And you'll be right. Isn't that why a person writes on dance?

Colleague Boyd has confided that Lasica is known for commissioning librettos for her dances. And damn, does one not wish that the dancers spoke! There is so much in Vianne, just like there was so much in Play in a Room, but it's buried so deep within that for once, just for once, you wish the dancers explained themselves verbally.

( ... )

Vianne. Choreographer and director: Shelley Lasica. Music: Milo Kossowski and Morgan McWaters for PEACE OUT!. Set and objects: Anne-Marie May. Costumes: Shelley Lasica and Kara Baker for PROJECT. Light and Design Consultant: Bluebottle / Ben Cobham. Dancers: Deanne Butterworth, Timothy Harvey, Jo Lloyd, Bonnie Paskas, Lee Serle. Curatorium: Ben Cobham, Milo Kossowski, Robyn McKenzie, Anne-Marie May, Ben Speth. At fortyfivedownstairs, December 3 - 14 2008.

...from the theatre territory into the holiday season, I've purchased two graphic novels that will, hopefully, close my collection of American indy. A scene that blossomed in the 1990s and will, hopefully again, finally die or evolve, it has been characterized by a very narrow range of writing and drawing, as befits an insular little community. All simple, understated vignettes on dysfunctional post-adolescents, but there is undeniable quality to a lot of this work. It just cannot go on forever.

In any case, the holy trinity of the American indy that I have finally put together comprises Daniel Clowes's Ghost World, Jessica Abel's Mirror, World (collecting most of her Artbabe series), and the two collections of Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve series, Summer Blonde and Sleepwalk. Together, this would make a four-volume library of pure, if uncomfortable, splendour.

With graphic novels becoming an acceptable middlebrow read in the US, American indy, up to now limited to self-published short zines, has seemingly been pushed into the longer format, mostly to the detriment of whichever quality their style had. Abel's La Perdida and Tomine's Shortcomings, both recently published, are pleasant enough reads, and highly praised by literary critics (whose greatest praise for a comic book is that it's as good as a novel, and most of whom couldn't tell a graphic novel from an illustrated text). At the same time, they are infinitely inferior to the short story collections that preceded them. La Perdida is a sort of Bildungsroman travel narrative, one long journey towards a simple punchline, and Shortcomings the sort of unpleasant-young-man-coming-of-age story that American indy has been coming up with in bucketfuls, with none of the astonishing, minutely observed narrative composure.

Save yourself money, and get the short stories instead.

Adrian Tomine is probably the most talented of this bunch. Often compared to Raymond Carver (justifiably), he brings a touch of lightweight Japanese minimalism to stories of urban estrangement. While all of the authors in this big family (not least Clowes, whose other work I greatly dislike), have a painful fascination with the unpleasant, absolutely unpalatable side of humanity (the geek, the anti-social, the uncomfortable), they often seem to dwell on the details without the ability to spruce up an intelligent conclusion. Graphic novelists being a strange, geeky and anti-social bunch themselves, this is more often than not narcissistic, if forensic, solipsism. Todd Solonz without the sardonic touch. Tomine, by contrast, is a master of form without a hint of misanthropic self-pity. Some of the stories in these collections are a mere panel long, but so tight and chiseled one is left gasping for air.

Both volumes are best read slowly, on a sunny day, with a glass of gin and tonic, and long pauses for contemplation and recovery.

I first encountered the Black Lung boys in Rubeville, in a Westgarth garage in 2006. As it often happens on the occasion of Fringe, the original venue had to be abandoned soon after the programs went to print, and I could be seen running up Smith St, having just read the handwritten notice on the ex-venue door, trying to get to a completely different suburb in five minutes. And it was worth every drop of sweat and every curse and kick of the tram door. Rubeville, I remember, was a ramble on the pursuit of money and fame. Some of it was obviously improvised, some of it probably wasn't. Most of the time, one just couldn't be sure. Eloise Mignon overdosed, vomited, and stepped out of character to complain about the gender politics behind her one-woman prostitution and drug abuse, surrounded with male heroes. Gareth Davies plotted to steal the Black Lung till and fly out of the country. Dylan Young offered his body to just about everyone in view. It was unpredictable, self-indulgent, plotless, but it was brilliantly written, fizzing with energy, and incredibly funny. It was brilliant theatre.

Having since missed all sorts of small-format Black Lung, including an intriguing-sounding Short + Sweet 10-minuter, 9 of which Davies spends raping Sacha Bryning (I hear), and Pimms in Fringe 2007, due to another venue catastrophe, it's been a relief to find Black Lung stable, intransient, programmed, unable to escape or collapse or disband or disappear, in the Malthouse Tower, presenting a revival of an old work, Avast, and an original sequel/prequel to it, Avast II. And they are still gorgeous, gorgeous boys.



Avast is grand and great. As we enter the Tower, completely transformed into a sort of magic shed of early manhood, all vintage porn magazines, rows upon rows of black umbrellas in the ceiling, graffiti on black walls ('Albert Tucker Mother Fucker'), animal skulls on wood panelling, damp Persian rugs on the ground and dead nannas in the corners, my companion smiles like only girls smile, and exclaims excitedly: "It smells like men!" Music is blaring, semi-naked dirty men with bushranger beards are jumping, dancing, and running through the space, and this chaos will seamlessly turn into theatre. Until it seamlessly turns out of theatre again, it will do the same as always: half of it, you will know, must be improvised, but you'll never be sure which half. Props will collapse, actors will seriously injure one another, bad stories will be told and audience members will try to leave only to get shouted at, and I quote: "Sit the fuck down or I'll punch your girlfriend in the face! That's rude!" (finding out that they were planted in the audience almost broke my heart). Among all this, the flimsiest narrative line emerges: two brothers reunited, for one to kill the other.

Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, the Malthouse-generated prequel/sequel, is a more coherent, more narrative-friendly performance. It has some semblance of plot, and is less of a meta-meander than Avast the First. It explains it, however, serving almost like an annotated commentary on the influences: an array of pop artefacts, from graphic novels (Preacher), films (Kill Bill), to cartoons (the Dragonball series). It is a western informed by the samurai Japan, by the gothic, by dungeons & dragons, a loose theme park of duty, family bounds, heroism, frontier mythology, resilience in the face of natural disasters, sword fights. It is a world devoid of women, where all the conflicts are between friends, fathers and sons. The story, if we should bestow such an honour on the ramble, follows an outlaw coming into the city, dragging an outcast, roped by the neck. The found man, nameless, with a hook instead of one hand, is baptised Diego because no-one can die without a name, and their arrival wrecks havoc upon the township, stirring shit in relationships between fathers, sons, friends (as already mentioned), and God. The narrative shifts left to right, following a logic of something other than plot, and music is employed like Melbourne doesn't get enough of it.

( Read more... )

Avast and Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, a Malthouse / Black Lung co-presentation. The Black Lung Theatre Company: Sacha Bryning, Gareth Davies, Thomas Henning, Mark Winter, Thomas Wright, Dylan Young. Sound designer / musician: Liam Barton. Lighting designer: Govin Ruben. Stage manager: Eva Tandy. Malthouse Theatre, 12 November - 6 December 2008.

Closes on the 7th December (Sunday) and should not be missed.

A couple of thoughts afterwards.

On the one hand, it is independent theatre for adults, by adults, distinctly different from most of independent theatre around, which is decisively children-centred. Affrontingly vulgar. There may be a few reasons for it. Has a strong retro feel, 1990s if not 1980s (always hard to tell when geography blurs chronology), all those accounts of Anthill suddenly shaped up into coherent images in my mind - this may be all completely wrong, I may be misled. It is crude, smart and brutally in your face in the way Melbourne independent theatre made by people of my generation simply isn't. (I blame the suburbs, but then, I'm an urbanist. I always blame the suburbs.)

It is well-written, -performed, and -directed. Keeps you on your toes. It does (almost) my dream theatre: a dystopian soap-opera, all imaginary problems taken to their extreme. It has flaws: the frantic acting and the verbosity often work one against another: the actors trip over the language, the language is lost. It is, however, an exhilarating night of theatre. Theatre. Not writing, not acting, etc. The whole thing is quite splendid.

Finally, it brings up an interesting question. Knowing that death is imminent makes us behave in ways quite similar to knowing death will never happen. The absolute of presence and of absence of death results in the same freedom, and it may be only the uncertainty that keeps us in check. (This, strangely, brings us back to Kundera, and the irrelevance of anything that happens only once.)

What makes it decidedly 1980s, and not now, I think, is the presence of death. In the 1980s, drugs were still lethal. AIDS was present, and so was the nuclear war. Contraception was not a given. One was still making choices. Today - apart from the suburbs, and the fact that most Australians of independent-theatre-making age were raised bubble-wrapped and fearful - we have had 9/11, we have had Belle and Sebastian, we have had the strangest combination of supremacy of the unReal (from suburbs and television to bubble wrap) and massive-scale trauma (Terror and the war against). Ecstasy doesn't kill, neither do computer games nor mobile phones. It is a much safer world. Much less real.

This Is Set In The Future is another Melbourne altogether. It is, in a sense, all about heroin.

The reason why I'm taking forever to respond to Bell Shakespeare's marriage with Heiner Műller is the complex ethics of the aesthetics of the unreal. When everything becomes a copy of a copy of an image, when consequences are many times removed, we are entering the realm of pornography. This Is Set In The Future, quite the contrary, is terrifyingly real. In that Műller sense of it being "the potentially dying person" that makes theatre special.

Startling.

This Is Set In The Future. Written by Glyn Roberts, directed by Robert Reid, designed by Sayraphim Lothian and Robert Reid, music by Josh Cameron. With Scott Gooding, Rachel Baring, Hayley Butcher, Joshua Cameron, Glyn Robert. La Mama, until 7 December. Thu - Sat 8pm, Wed & Sun 6.30pm.

1. There is nothing more dispiriting than coming out of a performance feeling exhausted, disappointed and sad, only to have to face the clamour of a delighted audience. People giving multiple rounds of applause, praising the same production for being moving, lovely or touching. For making them smile. I recently saw two, back to back.



The Age I'm In, by Force Majeure. Carriageworks, Sydney 2008.

The Age I'm In, by Force Majeure, at Carriageworks (still going), is an example of physical theatre that would not leave a hole in the world if it disappeared overnight. It is, in one word, unnecessary. It is, just like it could not be. Soundtracked with audio recordings of interviews with Australians of different age groups, it makes a diverse group of performers dance and lip-synch the responses about the joys and difficulties of life. It is a most unfortunate combination of verbatim, pedagogical, feel-good and accessible. It is dance drawn with crayons, Saturday night date theatre, and social commentary ranging from bold (7-year-olds saying cute things) to extremely provocative (vague mythologisation of the struggle against breast cancer). It doesn't have the power of a documentary on more concrete struggles, nor the centreless, open-ended poignancy of the 7 Up series. It has also been described, over at Stage Noise, as mesmerising, clever, innovative, imaginative, witty and moving.

On the other hand, Theatre du Complicité is filling the Sydney Opera House with A Disappearing Number, according to Diana Simmonds an amazing, exhilarating experience, making one feel happy, touched, humble and smarter (if I quote Simmonds again, it has more to do with the ready availability of her in-depth, articulate reviews online than to signpost a personal dislike; I respect Simmonds's opinion). The grand ordinariness of this production is a little harder to explain, due to its sheer foreignness to Australia. It is overwhelmingly expensive, produced, all glitz and media. However, underneath the seemingly complex narrative lines and moving screens, it is a very straight-lined story of an unhappy love, peppered with a biographical sub-plot of the maladjusted-genius genre. It has a grieving husband, some Hollywood-like, profound-sounding blabber on mathematics, pretty images and music, and the end is clearly visible quarter-way into the performance. Every element is presented in its most polished, most palatable, least surprising version: the American is a capitalist simpleton, every mathematician is out of touch with reality, every university a temple of intellectual pursuit. There is even a most calculatingly middle-of-the-road touch of post-colonial nous, discreetly pointing out that not every Indian-looking, these days, was born in India.


A Disappearing Number, Complicite. Sydney Opera House 2008.

( Read more... )

The Age I'm In, by Force Majeure and Carriageworks. Choreography Kate Champion. Set / Lighting Designer Geoff Cobham. Costume Designer Bruce McKnvin. Sound Designer Mark Blackwell. Visual Artist William Yang. Audio Visual Producer Tony Melov. Audio Visual Technician Neil Jensen. Performers: Marlo Benjamin, Samuel Brent, Annie Byron, Tilda Cobham Hervey, Vincent Crowley, Daniel Daw, Brian Harrison, Roz Hervey, Kirstie McCracken, Veronica Neave, Tim Ohl. Carriageworks, Sydney, 26 November - 6 December.

A Disappearing Number, co-production by Complicite, barbicanbite07, Ruhrfestspiele, Wiener Festwochen, Holland Festival, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth. Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney. Music Nitin Sawnhey. Design Michael Levine. Lighting Paul Anderson. Sound Christopher Shutt. Projection by Sven Ortel. Costume Christina Cunningham. Performers: David Annen, Firdous Bamji, Paul Bhattacharjee, Hiren Chate, Divya Kasturi, Chetna Pandya, Saskia Reeves and Shane Shambhu. Sydney Theatre, Sydney, November 19 - December 2.

I have had the most wonderful three days in the dreaded City Up North, the highlight of which may have been the drunken strolls up and down the alleyways of Surry Hills with our own Arts Journo, gin in one hand and writerly discussions on the other. It is a stunning city, beautiful more for the overwhelming floral lush and the balmy warmness of its people than for the harbour views. Theatre, as usual, seemed to be the dialectic of lukewarm mainstage and the excellent Performance Space. Public transport was inconsistent, but gozleme were everywhere. Other people's boyfriends, and some gorgeous girls, treated me to extraordinary food. (The absence of people to demand meals from is one of the sad downsides to the otherwise glorious state of singledom. I would love to stand up for my own well-being, and demand spicy fish soup with Turkish bread. But who from? The normal state of affairs has me regularly feeding two flatmates and many more-or-less random men.) I was treated to books and conversation. I was treated to markets and bookstores. It was the calm and peace, gardens and smoking, walking and Christmas-shopping, that I rarely get at home, surrounded with half-finished projects, with dirty laundry and possibilities of housework. It was so beneficial to move away from the mountain of reads, from plays to graphic novels, sitting on my desk.

Sydney has grown on me for all sorts of unanticipated reasons, in all sorts of unanticipated ways.

Nomads, part three in an ongoing project that started in Sydney in 2006, by Hans Van den Broeck plus dancers, is exactly the sort of theatre I love, the reason why I endure hours and hours of pretty dancing, of actorly acting, of witty dialogue and realistic set design. Every time I go through a door into a dark space with seats, I hope to see something close to Nomads. It is not the most pleasant theatre. It is, I imagine, tremendously frustrating to many. It is, first, not the kind of theatre that showcases skill: any theatre practitioner - and most theatre-goers, unfortunately, are also theatre-makers - will likely be underwhelmed. It is also not theatre that makes one feel anything much, which will inevitably frustrate any casual audience member. It doesn't tell a story, has no plot, makes no effort to lead the spectator, step by step, into a journey, the logic of each scene, or the sequence thereof, is never explained. It has all the predispositions to be labeled self-indulgent.

But. Just because this type of theatre-making, shall we call it European (although a particular kind of European, it is also not something normally found elsewhere), is not a common type of theatre-making in Australia, doesn't mean we should shun it as opaque et cetera. In fact, let me tell you how we could approach it. We could approach it like a sonata, or an early Renaissance triptych. It is certainly no more than a historical accident that we approach theatre like we approach the pilot episode of a sit-com? With minimal intellectual engagement, and infinite impatience? What if we approach it with an open mind instead, actively thinking our way through, with patience and willingness to adapt our sense of time? What if we are ready to wait, let the theatre take its time to show and tell, ready to do our own bit of work, ready to think?

Hans Van den Broeck, a psychologist by training, may be best known as one of the founding member of Les Ballets C. de la B., a freeform collective of dance extraordinaire. The overriding logic behind the project really appears to be the exploration of the relationship between Hans and the dancers, and his working methodology. At the heart of Settlement, the second stage, just like Nomads, was the very concentrated rehearsal time, two weeks with an assembled group of people, based on a strong concept, and a detailed scenario constructed beforehand. The resulting work is understood as finished, not a work-in-progress. Not unlike a real society, it is the free-form collaboration with an open, complex reality that emerges.


Settlement. Sydney, 2007.

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Nomads. Directed by Hans Van den Broeck. Performers/collaborators: Kathy Cogill, Nikki Heywood, Rowan Marchingo, Tony Osborne, Lizzie Thomson, Vicki van Hout, Nalina Wait, Anuschka van Oppen, Joe Jurd. Video design Sam James. Sound design James Brown. Lighting design Sydney Bouhaniche. Project convenors Nikki Heywood and Rowan Marchingo. Production manager Jenn Blake. Residency showing at Performance Space, Sydney, 27 - 29 November 2008.

A number of small performances will open and close: blink and gone!

Lily Kiara opens on 5 and closes on 6 December: Moving South at the Dancehouse. Shelley Lasica presents VIANNE at 45 downstairs, from 4 to 14 December. Glyn Roberts's and Robert Reid's This is Set in the Future, at La Mama, closes on December 7 and is, I hear, perfect. It is also your last chance to see the gorgeous gorgeous Black Lung, and Bell Shakespeare's unhappy fling with Heiner Muller, complicated but well-worth seeing, both closing at the Malthouse on December 6.

Meanwhile, up in Sydney, Frankenstein, based on Lally Katz and set design, opens at Wharf2LOUD next week. It was in the previews when I was up partying, and I don't know if it's any good. NOMADS, the best performance in the country this year that nobody saw, opened at Performance Space on Friday and closed on Sunday.

I've had a rich week of theatre, quite uncharacteristically. While I'm sorting out my notes, trying not to spend too much time wrapped up in YouTubing the extraordinary work that friends and not-yet-friends in Europe are putting on, with big budgets, institutional support, and critical welcome, perhaps it's worth noting that Black Lung's Avast season at the Malthouse is the most significant development in independent theatre in Melbourne 2008. Visibility rather than creative outburst, perhaps, sure, but significant nonetheless.

Your guerrilla semiotician has recently been treated to a series of short choreographic works on all sides: Australian Ballet's Interplay, a program of total art, Ballets Russes-style collaborations of musicians, choreographers and designers, closely preceded by Australian Institute of Classical Dance's showcase of young choreographers, Dance Creation 2008. On the other side of popular taste, VCA has presented Transmutation, a two-part panorama of student dance, with choreographies signed by names such as Phillip Adams, Neil Adams, and Stephanie Lake.

Dance Creation 2008, while unexpected and underattended, was very appreciated. Apart from the disappointing Reed Luplau and Sydney Dance Company, the range and breadth of the choreographies was quite stunning. Beautiful, in particular, was Wakako Asano's collaboration with koto musician Satsuki Odamura, performed by four very, very young girls (not older than twelve, I would guess).


Dance Creation 2008.

Australian Ballet's Interplay, in comparison, was a lukewarm affair, not living up to the grand promises. While executed with almost robotic formal brilliance, and featuring a range of fantastic music, Stephen Baynes's Night Path and Matjash Mrozewski's Semele sacrifised the possibilities of movement to stream-lined narration, in a way that seemed awkwardly anachronistic. Nicolo Fonte's The Possibility Space, rejecting, perhaps, the expectation of palatable ballet as Disneylike fantasy, was a much more interesting dance. Eschewing narrative, it is emotionally sophisticated and formally surprising, a thingof aqua costumes, bare feet, and set halfway between Logan's Run and a pacific island. Coming at the end of the interminable performance, however, my partner and I were already too exasperated to care. Interplay was loudly hailed as an experiment in innovation and brilliance, and perhaps it was our mistake to take the tag line to the letter.


Interplay; Night Path. Photo by Jeff Busby.

( read more: ballet, VCA, Phillip Adams )

Dance Creation 2008. Presented by Australian Institute of Classical Dance. Choreographic works by Wakako Asano, Tim Harbour, Reed Luplau, Kim McCarthy, and Tim O’Donnell. Melbourne, 31 October - 1 November, National Theatre.

Interplay. The Australian Ballet. Choreographic works by Stephen Baynes, Nicolo Fonte and Matjash Mrozewski. Sydney, 6 - 25 November, Sydney Opera House, with Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra.

Transmutation, Program 1. Victorian College of the Arts. Choreographic works by Neil Adams, Phillip Adams, Brett Daffy, Anna Smith. Melbourne, 12 - 15 November, Gasworks Arts Park.

Transmutation, Program 2. Victorian College of the Arts. Choreographic works by Neil Adams, Phillip Adams, Natalie Cursio, Stephanie Lake. Melbourne, 19 - 22 November, Gasworks Arts Park.

This is a show starting with such clear limitations: it's community theatre; even more, circus. It features a large, non-professional cast. And it is highly issue-driven, all based around, I presume, celebrating the centenary of women's suffrage in Victoria. All these lines drawn on the ground, setting up a fabulous failure.

Women's Circus, to elaborate, was established in 1991, and has developed a reputation for engaging women who survived sexual abuse, assisting them to reclaim their bodies and to build self-esteem in a safe and non-competitive environment. Are you shrieking in terror yet? I am community-minded alright, but the path to bad art is paved with good intentions, self-esteem building, and non-competitive environments.

Instead not: it succeeds. And it does so wonderfully, perhaps, because the lines are so clear, so stubbornly clear right from the beginning. If there is magic in the theatre, it is almost always in a clear limitation transgressed, in something made to disappear, and something else made out of this nothing.

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Here: Where We've Always Been. Women's Circus. Directed by Nadja Kostich. Musical director Irine Vela, assistant director/circus choreographer Sara Pheasant, production manager/lighting designer Emma Valente, set and costume designer Marg Horwell, video design Zoe Scoglio, animator Isobel Knowles. Cast and band Women's Circus. Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 24-30 November.

A high-school boy, at the end of The Women of Troy, tells me uncertainly: I'm not sure if it's not making me feel anything because I've been desensitized by television... Despite the necessary reservation we should have for this self-analysis, as children today have been so overanalysed in their exposure to televised and game violence that they are conscious of the expectations placed on them to be heartless before their time, the boy is correct.

I am reading, over and over, The Women of Troy described as powerful, shattering, poignant, and these are such disingenuous words. It is, quite the contrary, deliberately distancing, alienating, from beginning to end. If anything, we may guiltily leave the Malthouse Theatre feeling like we should feel shattered, unsure whether it's not touching us because we're philistines, or because we've become desensitized to Abu Ghraib as idea and image, but that is the extent of the emotional reaction. And that is, ultimately, the problem with The Women of Troy: it doesn’t seem to exist for an audience. It doesn’t want to make us feel, it doesn’t appear to want to make us think. If anything at all, it wants to disgust.


The Women of Troy.

Staging a clef is a very common way of modernising a theatre classic: dressing it up with imagery or situations from another time, usually contemporary, in order to bestow some relevance onto the text, some universal resonance onto our time. However, semiotically and dramaturgically, it makes a mess more often than not: all those colliding, flapping bits, all those elements contradicting one another. A classic, according to Calvino, is a work that has never finished saying what it has to say. To that purpose, I believe the theatre maker(s) has every right to dismantle it completely, build onto whichever thread of relevance she wants to follow. Or, having no emotional connection, she can stage it as a piece of historical formalism, in the key of an era, even if this means to succumb, like MTC, to neotraditional nothingness. Present an ancient Greek tragedy as a detention camp dress-up, however, and it opens up more problems than it solves.

The Women of Troy is a very clear manifesto on the banality of evil, from the blood-stained blue carpets to the torturers in mismatched tracksuits, helped by the chorus which, whenever there's blood, launches into classical muzak in direct defiance of Adorno. The plight of Trojan women after the fall of Troy is shown in bright light, completely de-romanticized. However, that seems to be the extent of the production's conscious intent at saying something.

It is not quite clean if either of the two conflicting elements is meant to be alienating, and if either should provide emotional content. Perhaps we should recognise our shock and horror as we recognise the motifs of Abu Ghraib, and the lines of Euripides would then make this violence strange. If correct, this is simplistic logic: no emotional content travels with these visual quotations, because they are just that. Clean, empty quotations.

Susan Sontag was deeply concerned about the effect that existence in a culture shaped by a sustained reproduction, recycling, of imagery, had on morality. In Regarding the Pain of Others she considers the ecology of images created by the way photography tears fragments of reality out of their historical and geographical contexts, mixing them freely into a visual soup of pop, iconic, ready-to-use images, and compares it to the surrealist collage. This promiscuous aestheticisation of experience, in her words, “makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” It is not merely, thus, that being exposed to a pastiche of shocking images does not provide one with understanding of the complex ways in which suffering somewhere else exists in the same reality with our comfortable experience of regarding suffering on stage. More insidiously, being repeatedly exposed to shocking, brutal images hardens us against feeling shocked, feeling brutalized, by them. The repetition and the distance makes them feel less real, banalises.

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The Women of Troy, by Euripides, adapted by Tom Wright and Barrie Kosky, directed by Barrie Kosky. Designed by Alice Babidge, lighting by Damien Cooper, musician Daryl Willis, sound design by David Gilfillan. With Robyn Nevin, Melita Jurisic, Arthur Dignam, Natalie Gamsu, Queenie van de Zandt, Jennifer Vuletic, Patricia Cotter and Kyle Rowling, Giorgios Tsamoudakis and William Larkin. Sydney Theatre Company, presented by Malthouse Theatre, until November 22.

I am a little tired of that incessant guilt I feel for not responding to theatre, all sorts of theatre, fast enough to give a review, a criticism, and publicity, in time before each and every show ends.

For that purpose, here. Your viewing list for the week:

VCA end-of-year showcase is coming to an end, with Transmutation, Season 2 (Graduating Students), on until Saturday 22 November, at Gasworks. If you've missed Season 1 (1st & 2nd year), boo-hoo, it was spectacular. Season 2, while not quite the gem, has Bocage by Phillip Adams, who may be the most important theatre-maker currently active in the country. Worth the ticket price just to see his piece.

On the same side of the river, Red Stitch are opening Christian Lollike's The Work of Wonder. Directed by the intriguing Herr André Bastian, it looks like a good end-of-year post-dramatic rollic, and I'm hoping something truly different and perhaps genuinely brave. Goes on until 20 December.

The Malthouse have that group of gorgeous boys, The Black Lung, doing a diptych of bushranger gothic, Avast I & II, until December 6. Alison has already written on both performances, but I am recommending blindly. I am trying to squeeze them both into my disastrous-looking schedule - if only because Dylan Young hugged me whilst inviting, and because I saw the guys on Fringe 2006, grabbing everyone's attention with Rubeville.*

*EDIT: Black Lung are indeed every bit as good as Alison makes them sound. If you only have the money for one theatre visit before Christmas, make it Avast I.

Finally, Red Cabbage are putting on a large-scale, ferry-around-the-bay, site-specific pirate thing called Collapse. Ferry and bus journey included in the ticket price. Until 30 November. Bookings on 03 9932 1000 or hobsonbaytickets.com.au

The beautiful, enormous space of Carriageworks – probably at least half the size of the Venice Arsenale – is a good place to think about the relationship between body and space. It is a semi-reconstructed, semi-abandoned train shed, a glass and iron enclosure of large volumes of air, with narrow but tall corridors, with sprinkles of soft benches, chairs, on the concrete floor, a space as impressive, in its effect on the mind, as any intentionally good architecture – as pleasant to wander around as that opera house. Sivan Gabrielovich mentioned being in the outback, experiencing for the first time the enormity of Australia, and feeling bare, lost, foreign, and unable to hide to herself. Nothing casting a shadow. I have often, returning to the Kvarner Bay after long periods overseas, felt the immediate realignment between my physical existence and the dynamics of the relief: the regular rhythm of the hills, the safe mutability of the sea, the enclosure of the islands all around.

The philosophical background to Bodyweather likewise – the acceptance of being a part of the world, and not a constant confrontation with it, is what has driven Far-Eastern thought strongly towards understanding applied arts and everyday practices as spiritual pursuits, perfecting the tea ceremony and work ethics just like the Western thought has engaged in still life painting, biochemistry and walking on the moon. As Okakura says, in The Book of Tea, "The art of life is in constant and repeated adapatation to our surroundings."



Bodyweather is a comprehensive training and performance practice, developed by Min Tanaka, a butoh dancer and choreographer, and his Mai-Juku Performance Company, exploring the intersection of body and environment. Body is conceived not as a fixed, separate entity, but as a constantly changing, permeable element in the order of things, responding to the processes inside and outside the body. Like the weather. Strength is drawn from the acceptance of its fragile finiteness. As a former member of Mai-Juku, from 1985 to 1991, Tess De Quincey introduced Bodyweather to Australia in 1988, before establishing De Quincey Co. in 2000. She has since engendered a strong teaching and performance practice, and developed different projects, the most fascinating of which must be the Triple Alice Laboratories, which explored the landscape of the Central Desert of Australia, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of artists and scientists, indigenous and non-indigenous, in situ.

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Triptych - Robin Fox sample from Samuel James on Vimeo.

Triptych. By De Quincey Co. presented by Performance Space. Choreographer/Director Tess de Quincey. Performers Peter Fraser, Victoria Hunt, Linda Luke, Lizzie Thomson. Sound composition Chris Abrahams. Audio-visual production Sam James. Video footage Tess de Quincey. Oscilloscopes Robin Fox. Performance Space @ Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, Sydney. 6–15 November.