Postcard from Perth Festival 3

Michael Keegan-Dolan/Teac Damsa, Swan Lake/Loch na hEala; Komische Oper Berlin/Barrie Kosky/1927, The Magic Flute

When my kids were little, I used to read to them from a storybook called Tales from the Ballet. It contained illustrated retellings of the plots from famous ballets, many of which were originally folk tales. I can’t speak for its effect on my kids, but it rekindled my own interest in ballet, which I had previously found an alienating artform. 

Irish choreographer, writer and director Michael Keegan-Dolan has been doing something similar for the past decade with his companies Fabulous Beast and now Teac Damsa (‘House of Dance’), reworking classical ballets such as Giselle, The Rite of Spring and Petroushka by returning them to their roots in folklore, folk-dance and folk-music, as well as enlivening them with contemporary stories, themes and staging. He’s particularly interested in reclaiming ballet for the people, but also in making political work about Ireland, and in paying attention to the dark side of human nature.  

Swan Lake/Loch na hEala is set in the Irish Midlands, and tells the story of Jimmy, a young unemployed Irishman living with his ageing mother Nancy in a rundown bothy on the edge of a lake and suffering from depression after the death of his father; his depression is exacerbated when the local council grants Nancy permission to demolish the bothy (which has been occupied by his father’s family for generations) and replace it with a new council house. One night Jimmy goes down to the lake with his father’s gun to shoot himself (shades of Chekhov’s The Seagull) and encounters Fionnuala and her three sisters (Chekhov again), who have been transformed into swans after the local priest tried to rape Fionnuala, was interrupted by her little sisters and laid a curse on all four condemning them to be turned into animals if they told anyone what had happened. Sub-plots involve Nancy trying to marry Jimmy off to one of the few available local girls, and a scheming local politician who wants to gain publicity from rehousing Nancy. The climactic scenes involve a birthday party for Jimmy to which the local girls are invited and which is interrupted by the appearance of Fionnuala (now a black swan rather than a white one); and an attempt to force Jimmy to leave the house which leads to a police shooting.

Swan Lakeis distinguished by strong writing and acting, fabulous music and dancing, and exceptional staging. As a friend and colleague remarked afterwards, it’s more a work of ‘theatre-dance’ than ‘dance-theatre’ – at least in the sense of the German tradition of Tanztheater which tends to be less reliant on language or narrative (Dimitris Pappaioannou’s The Great Tamer being a good recent example in the Perth Festival program). Indeed earlier in his career Keegan Dolan was a choreographer for dance and ballet sequences in opera and theatre; and the mostly folk-dance-derived choreography in Swan Lake (as in Tchaikovsky’s original ballet) has a strongly narrative and expressive function (which is arguably true of all folk dance in its original form); certainly it has less to do with the autonomous or abstract ‘language’ of contemporary dance as developed by practitioners like Cunningham or Forsyth.

The work is anchored by a mesmerising performance from actor Mikel Murfi, who is the central storyteller and also takes on the ‘villain’ roles of priest, politician and policeman. It’s also (at least initially) a very physical performance (Murfi trained at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq): the opening of the show sees him in a pair of dirty underpants tethered to a concrete breeze block in the centre of the stage, circling and bleating like a goat, before being surrounded by a kind of village chorus of three male dancers (Saku Koistinen, Zen Jefferson and Erik Nevin) who force him down onto a red cloth on the floor and then drench him with water and beat him with red towels in an image which suggests a sacrificial animal (or perhaps Caravaggio’s Saint Paul). There are also exceptional performances from Viennese dancer Alex Leonhardtsberger as Jimmie and French-born Rachel Poirier as Finola; Leonhardtstberger in particular provides the physical and emotional core of the work, totally convincing as a skinny working-class Irish lad, nimbly perching or shifting position atop a pile of breeze blocks like a bird, his body dissolving with liquid grace when he dances with Finola and her swan sisters.

Sabine Dargent’s minimalist stage design and Adam Silverman’s stark lighting highlight the performers and their bodies, along with Hyemi Shin’s simple but striking costumes, which are mostly in black-and-white or shades of grey; the image of Poirier wrapped in broken black wings crawling out of a box at the climax of the birthday party is particularly harrowing. The work is accompanied by live music from onstage band Slowly Moving Clouds, which like the choreography is mostly Irish-folk-derived, apart from the trance-like Latin beat which underpins the dreamlike ensemble dance of flying feathers that closes the show. 

The only flaws for me were in terms of performance dramaturgy. I found myself wanting Murfi as actor-storyteller to have the only dialogue; venerable Australian dancer-choreographer (and founding artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre) Elizabeth Cameron Dalman was visually arresting as the silent figure of Jimmy’s mother Nancy in her wheelchair, but less effective for me when she spoke. Conversely, in general I found the role and representation of the women in the story a little one-dimensional in comparison with the men. Perhaps this is a function of the archetypal nature of fairy-tales (though these contain plenty of strong and complex female characters); but here the male roles (including Murfi’s villians and even the speechless Jimmy) were endowed with depth and agency, whereas (apart from Poirier’s defiant and heartrending performance as Finola) the female roles seemed more functional, and I felt a little uncomfortable watching the crudely grotesque impersonation of (typically undesirable) local village girls by the male Chorus.

Nevertheless, I found Swan Lake a powerful experience, with important things to say about mental illness and ageing, as well as sexual and political exploitation and abuse. Keegan Dolan has forged a unique instrument with his form of theatre-dance; one that speaks to multiple audiences and in many cultural contexts. 

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Barrie Kosky’s co-production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for the Komische Oper Berlin (where he is currently Artistic Director) was created in collaboration with Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt, who are co-founders and co-artistic directors of 1927, a London-based company who integrate live music and performance with silent film and projected animation (the name of the company ironically refers to the year when sound was introduced into film with The Jazz Singer). I remember being enchanted by their production of Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea when I saw it at The Malthouse in 2008; Kosky says in a program interview that when he first saw it some years later he immediately wanted to do The Magic Flute with them. One can see why: the childlike storybook simplicity of 1927’s work dovetails neatly with at least one aspect of Mozart’s opera (and particularly Schikaneder’s libretto) as well as with Kosky’s own taste for tightly-staged visual surrealism. 

The astonishing set (designed by Esther Bialas) consists of a huge vertical advent-calendar-style wall (which also serves as a projection screen) with revolving windows at various levels through which characters appear and disappear, as well using the wings and hugging the wall along a narrow strip of forestage. The wall is set inside a cinema-style proscenium, which in turn sits inside the actual proscenium arch of the theatre stage – in this case, the Edwardian grandeur of His Majesty’s in Perth. It’s a brilliant device not only for integrating the performers and projections, but also more generally the two media of theatre and film – and more particularly vaudeville and silent cinema. As such it also suggests period and costumes (also designed by Balias), which are accordingly drawn from the late 19th and early 20th centuries – again from the world of vaudeville, silent cinema, photography or visual art. Thus Tamino is a music-hall entertainer in a black-and-white tuxedo; Papageno and Pamina are dressed like Buster Keaton and Louise Brooks; Monostatos looks like Nosferatu (his white makeup and black gloves cleverly subverting the racist stereotype of his ‘blackness’); and the Three Ladies are pre-War German Hausfrauen in dowdy dresses, hats and furs; while Sarastro and his Knights are top-hatted, frock-coated and false-bearded Victorian or Edwardian gentlemen. Other characters are augmented by the more free-flowing Art Nouveau (or Steampunk-inspired) visual style of the projected animations: the Queen of the Night notably appears as a giant skeletal spider (or Mother Alien), its huge predatory legs extending from the singer’s gaunt white human face, which emerges from a kind of chrysalis-body binding her tightly to the wall.

The whole thing unfolds like a dream or nightmare: a quality already present in the opera, with its abrupt musical, dramaturgical, scenic and generic shifts and non-sequiturs, but accentuated by the staging (Tamino even sings his opening aria with a superimposed projection of his legs running on the spot) and Kosky’s interventionist approach to an already fragmentary libretto and score. In particular, Schikenader’s spoken dialogue between the musical numbers (which makes the work technically a Singspiel rather than an opera) is replaced by projected titles on the screen like a silent film, accompanied by a fortepiano playing excerpts from Mozart’s C minor and D minor Piano Fantasias, again as in a music-hall or silent film screening. The overall effect is arguably to give the work more structural integrity than it originally possesses, especially given the imbalance between the genius of Mozart’s music and the mediocrity of Schikenader’s libretto. In fact for me this version of the Flute was ultimately a more successful staging of the libretto than the opera, and as such lacked the fundamentally musical élan of Kosky's most exciting work as a director. Nevertheless there were great musical and dramatic riches in store.

The roles are mostly doubled, and I’m not sure exactly whom I saw on the night (no program insert was provided), but all were exceptional actor-singers, with outstanding performances from a deeply sympathetic Papageno (Joan Martín-Royo/Tom Erik Lie) and an unusually rich and warm Pamina (Iwona Sobotka/Kim-Lilian Strebel) – the two characters who typically provide the work with its heart and soul. They were supported by a clear-voiced and penetrating Tamino (Aaron Blake/Adrian Strooper); a thrilling Queen of the Night (Christina Poulitsi/Aleksandra Olczyk); an agile Monostatos (Ivan Tursic/Emil Lawecki); a playful Papagena (Talya Lieberman); a magnificent silvery bass-voiced Sarastro (Insung Sim/Andras Beauer Kanabas), here doubling with the offstage voice of the mysterious Speaker; and an energetic trio of Ladies (Ashely Milanese/Mirka Wagner, Karola Gumos/Maria Fiselier and Nadine Weissman/Caren van Oijen). Mention should also be made of the trio of boys from the Tölzer Boys Choir (appearing in a hot-air balloon like little Koskys in thick black rimmed glasses) and the Chorus of the Komische Oper as Sarastro’s cohorts. The WA Symphony Orchestra gave a forceful and detailed if at times somewhat driven account of the score (presumably because of the exigencies of the staging, and particularly the more or less continuous animation), conducted by Hendrik Vestment or Jordan De Souza (again, no information was available as to who was on the podium that night), with Mark McNeill providing sensitive accompaniment on the fortepiano (as well as playing glockenspiel for Papageno’s magic bells).

As Kosky points out in the program, The Magic Flute is a ‘heterogeneous’ work which ‘any attempt to interpret...in only one way is bound to fail’. Nevertheless I felt that the production – and particularly the staging – imposed a rigid form and an almost trapped physicality that became increasingly nightmarish, with the set, projections and tightly focussed lighting (by Diego Leetz) making all the characters look like helpless insects ‘pinned and wriggling to the wall’. In terms of narrative and thematic content, a story of initiation into the mysteries of love became increasingly one of normalisation, patriarchy and binary thinking about gender, sexuality and race, culminating in the image of Tamino and Pamina being surrounded and absorbed into two separate groups of men and women – identically dressed in black-and-white tuxedos or Louise Brooks smocks, collars, stockings and hairdos – for the final chorus. It’s a powerful and disturbing reading of the work; but like TheTempest (which in so many ways it resembles) there’s another, perhaps more deeply human layer to The Magic Flute,which can be heard in Mozart’s music (as in the music of Shakespeare’s language), and which points beyond revenge and recrimination towards the possibility of renewal and reconciliation. In the words of the final chorus: ‘Holy are you, O consecrated ones! You pushed on through the night! Thanks to you Osiris! And thanks to you, Isis! May your strength be victorious, and crowned with beauty and wisdom as a reward!’

Postcard from Perth Festival 2

Dimitris Papaioannou, The Great Tamer

As has been endlessly remarked on, the Greek experimental theatre director Dimitris Papaioannou began his professional life as a visual artist. As such he belongs to the tradition of theatre that is oriented more towards showing than saying (in Greek, theatron means ‘a place for seeing’). As such, language or narrative play a relatively minor (or perhaps rather hidden or buried) role in In The Great Tamer. According to Papaioannou, the work was partly inspired by news reports of the mysterious disappearance of a boy who was bullied at University and later found dead by a river, ‘but whether it was murder or suicide no one knew’. Pappaiannou says the story left him ‘with emotions I didn’t know what to do with’. As such, The Great Tamer can be seen as a dream-like attempt to process an unassimilable trauma – one in which images and free association supplant the role of words or logic. 

Papaioannou studied painting under the major Greek artists Yannis Tsarouchis and later Dimitris Mitaras. A quick glance at the work of the former reveals the influence of Matisse in terms of colour and vitality, and many of his canvases portray strong but vulnerable men; Mitaras seems to have followed more in the footsteps of Picasso, focussing more on female nudes, and shifting in style from realism to abstraction. Both men also designed sets and costumes for the theatre: Tsarouchis in particular created a memorable costume for Maria Callas in Medea, and famously staged an adaptation of The Trojan Women in an Athens parking lot. Pappaioannou thus shares with his mentors a fascination with theatre and the body, as well as a Matisse-like celebration of life, shadowed by a Picasso-like preoccupation with sex and death. 

In terms of his own professional trajectory, Pappaioannou shifted focus in the 80s and 90s from painting to illustrations, comics and magazines with countercultural and gay themes (which were somewhat taboo in Greece at the time). Meanwhile he was also taking an interest in theatre and dance, attending seminars on Butoh at La MaMa in New York and working as an assistant to Robert Wilson. In 1986 he founded the underground performance company Edafos Dance Theatre in Athens, whose productions included The Last Song of Richard Strauss, Medea, A Moment’s Silence (the first play in Greece to deal openly with AIDS) and an Oresteiaat Epidavros with music by Xenakis. Most famously he was Artistic Director of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004; works since then include 2 (which dealt with homosexuality and masculinity) and Still Life (Sydney Festival 2017) which focussed on the myth of Sisyphus and saw Papaioannou increasingly using simplicity, absurdity, repetition, illusion, body parts, slowness and silence – all of which feature heavily in The Great Tamer. In 2018 he was the first person to create a new work for Tanzteater Wuppertal since the death of Pina Bausch (New Piece 1: Since She).

Art and mythology, life and death, men and women, sexuality and corporeality, materiality and the search for meaning – these are Papaioannou’s themes and motifs. According to him, the title of The Great Tamerrefers to Time (which Homer in The Iliad called ‘the all-tamer’); perhaps it’s also worth noting that the Greek god of time Kronos (whom the Romans called Saturn and who is also associated with agriculture and the cycle of the seasons) castrated his father with a scythe and threw his genitals into the sea, instigating and presiding over a mythical Golden Age, and devouring his own children until he was in turn overthrown by his son, Zeus (Saturn is also associated with melancholy and was slowest-moving planet known in the ancient world). Time, the seasons, agriculture, castration, infanticide, melancholy, slowness – these then form a cluster of sub-themes that permeate The Great Tamer; other Greek classical figures invoked include the Goddess Demeter, Narcissus, Tiresias and the hermaphrodite creatures described by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium.

These references to classical mythology are however heavily mediated by images from Renaissance and post-Renaissance painters such as Mantegna, Da Vinci, Caravaggio, de Ribera, Velasquez, Rembrandt and Goya – especially those ‘black paintings’ which make heavy use of tenebrism and in particular the heightened contrast between dark clothing and pale flesh. Such images are of course highly theatrical in terms of lighting but also because they also focus on the body – in particular the Christian (or post-Christian) ‘fallen’ body, especially the male body, and notably that of Christ himself. These images are in turn mediated by the influence of Surrealism, in particular the work of Duchamp, Magritte and Dalí (who of course also famously ‘painted time’, not to mention moustaches, skulls and women’s bodies – all of which feature also heavily in The Great Tamer). In short: the sensuous materiality of classical Greece is penetrated by the other-worldly spirituality of Judeo-Christianity, and beyond it, the philosophical and cultural materialism of modernity (there’s nothing ‘New Age’ or ‘post-materialist’ about The Great Tamer, and its references remain resolutely Western).

This venerable list of more or less overt mythological, art-historical and thematic references might sound a little creaky, or even like a rather tedious obligatory post-modern or post-dramatic roll-call – and indeed it’s not hard to situate Pappaioannou in a line of auteur performance-makers from Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson to Romeo Castellucci. In terms of literature, apart from surrealism, one thinks of T.S. Eliot (‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’) and perhaps especially of Samuel Beckett; indeed there’s a Beckett-like minimalism and mood of absurdist black comedy that at times makes The Great Tamer resemble a kind of melancholy circus. 

What made the work distinctive for me was the honesty and vulnerability of the performers, the elegant simplicity of the staging, and the unforgettable beauty/comedy/sadness/horror of the images. There are ten performers, seven male and three female. The men’s costumes (designed by Aggelos Mendis) consist of black suits and shoes and white shirts; a few have moustaches and resemble Pappaioannou himself at various ages, and their demeanour is mostly calm and unhurried. The women likewise are all mostly simply dressed, but their physical and emotional journey is a little different from the men. There’s a great deal of nudity, exposure and illusionistic dismemberment and recombination of body parts; the influence of mythology, psychoanalysis and surrealism is clearly felt in the motif of ‘the body in pieces’ (including cross-gendered pieces). In general however I was struck by the difference in the way male and female bodies and forms were treated: the male bodies seemed more like erotic, pathetic or comic objects, while the female body seemed more like a façade concealing an enigmatic interior (Freud’s ‘dark continent’).

The set (designed by Tina Tzoka) consists of an undulating raised platform loosely covered with plywood slats painted black (the undersides of some are white) which can be shifted, raised, flipped over or climbed, stepped or fallen through by the performers (who also occasionally roll or leap off the back and disappear); beneath is presumably an invisible grid-frame support with a network of holes. The only furniture consists of a few small stool-tables, which the performers occasionally sit or climb on. Lighting by Evina Vassilakopoulou is mostly in cool white tones and designed for maximum exposure of the stage and (and the morbid pallor of the performers’ flesh). Music consists primarily of slowed down and distorted fragments of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz (adapted by Stephanos Droussiotis), which underscored the repetitive slowness of the action and had a sickly fin de siécle circus-effect; I was reminded of Karl Krauss’s joke about the dying days of the Hapsburg Empire that ‘the situation is hopeless but not serious’. I also couldn’t help thinking of Kubrick’s use of the same piece in 2001 at key moments of evolutionary and technological transition; and indeed there’s something of Kubrick’s post-humanism, coldness and visionary sweep in the show. This association was reinforced by the recurrent (and otherwise apparently anomalous) image of an astronaut slowly wandering the set and digging up earth, bones, body parts, artefacts and other human remains; the amplified sound of their breathing also recalled Kubrick’s film. In fact the theme of excavation, and the related actions of covering and uncovering, extracting and even eviscerating, are central motifs in the show.

On this surrealistic ‘operating table’ a series of unforgettable and artfully staged images, tableaux and ‘chance encounters’ take place. A man removes his clothes and lies down naked in the centre of the stage with his feet facing forward and genitals prominently displayed; another man enters and covers him with a white sheet; a third man enters and lifts, inverts and drops one of the pieces of plywood beside him so that the gust of air blows the sheet off the body; the sequence is repeated endlessly. The image references Mantegna’s Dead Christ, but also the figure of Lazarus (and more generally the theme of death and rebirth). Later the same man lies down again naked and feet-first but upstage right at an oblique angle; he is surrounded by black-clad performers who suddenly put on white ruffs and assume the tableau of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson; a moment later they begin operating on him while he is still conscious, and then pulling out entrails and eating them, and then discarding organs and bones, in a monstrous parody of Goya’s ‘black’ painting of Saturn Devouring His Children (and other myths of sacrifice and cannibalism from the feast of Thyestes to the Last Supper). A woman with a bare torso is borne aloft by two men, each with one black trouser leg removed and one hairy leg exposed wearing a stiletto; the effect is at once comic, grotesque and erotic; one thinks of Surrealist juxtapositions like Magritte’s Rape, and mythological figures like the transgendered Tiresias or hybrid creatures like satyrs, centaurs and chimeras. Two naked performers (male and female) interlock bodies and slowly roll over each other across the stage like a wheel; one thinks of the torments of the damned in paintings by Heironymous Bosch, but also the mythological four-legged hermaphrodites in Plato’s Symposium. A man lies on his back on top of a stool-table and holds another man above him by the waist who mirrors him with the tips of their shoes touching; the image recalls the figure of Narcissus (who is also invoked later by a man leaning over a pool of dark water in a gap between the slats, in an image that also clearly references Caravaggio). A marvellous hail of golden darts flies through the air and lodges in the floor (while a performer shelters under one of the raised boards) to became a field of corn or wheat; a seated female figure in a robe with a basket sits beside them, like the goddess Demeter; and we think of the cycle of the seasons, sowing and reaping, life and death. Towards the end of the show, a man sits crouched over an ancient open book beside a skull, like Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome - or Pappaioannou himself, meditating over the relics of his own memento mori. (A friend and I went up after the show to inspect the book at close range: the open pages were meticulously reproduced and aged copies of pages from Leonardo’s notebooks with their tell-tale mirror-reversed handwriting, including a drawing of a foetus in the womb – again reminding me of the closing shot of 2001.)

For me however the most indelible image in the show was that of a man leaning over a prostrate naked woman with a covered face and repeatedly reaching out as if to insert his hand into her torso, while she arched her back and crawled backwards away from him, her face distorted in agony. The gesture was repeated endlessly, and each time I expected him (in part because of the earlier Anatomy Lessonscene, in part because the gesture involved his upstage hand) to actually pull something out. Once again of course the scene references images from myth, religion and surrealism, but I also found it a disturbing reflection on sexuality and objectification, in part because of the complicity of the staging, which (as elsewhere in the show) involved the artful use of space and expectations; Pappaioannou is a magician in his capacity to direct (or misdirect) our gaze.

As with all images, to describe these is scarcely to do justice to their power. They are obviously meant to arouse cultural and personal associations in us, but also to speak for themselves, in their own silent language. In fact there are no words in this show, apart from the odd outburst of collective muttering; but a hidden scaffold of language and narrative underlies the imagery, much like the hidden framework that underlies the set. The impact of the work also continues to expand and reverberate like a slow-motion depth-charge long after seeing it.

In sum: The Great Tamer is one of those unique Festival works that will be talked about for years to come, especially by artists and performers. It’s perhaps something of an anomaly in terms of Perth Festival Artistic Director Wendy Martin’s typical programming in its lack of overt ‘community’ focus or involvement – but then again, artists and performers are an important community too. Sadly it also represents a level of work that’s unlikely to be achieved in Australia under current conditions because of the long-term investment involved in a singular artist, work or – crucially – ensemble of performers.

Postcard from Perth Festival 2019

 Nouveau Cirque de Vietnam, Lang Toi; Gideon Obarzanek, One Infinity

Lang Toi: My Village is a contemporary circus work about traditional Vietnamese village life created and directed by Vietnamese juggler Tuan Le in collaboration with French-born but Vietnam-raised brothers and co-creators Nguyen Nhat Ly (who is also Musical Director) and Nguyen Lân Maurice (Artistic Director) together with choreographer Nguyen Tan Loc and a troupe of fifteen Vietnamese acrobats and four musicians (some of the acrobats also sing or play instruments). All three co-creators and the show itself have a hybrid artistic and cultural background: Tuan Le had previously performed with various European companies including Cirque de Soleil; Nguyen Nhat Ly received his musical education in Paris and has worked in traditional and ethnic music, education and research; his brother Maurice trained at the National Circus School in Hanoi and performed with Paris-based Cirque de Plume before becoming director of circus school Arc en Cirque in the French town of Chambéry; the show itself had its genesis in a masterclass at the National Circus School in Hanoi; and the Nouveau Cirque du Vietnam now has permanent homes in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An. 

In short: Lang Toi is a fascinating mix of high-end European so-called ‘New Circus’ (of which Cirque de Soleil is probably the most famous and commercially successful example) and traditional Vietnamese elements and materials. In fact this use of ‘ethnic’ content and forms of expression (including personnel, instruments, techniques and themes) is fairly typical of the genre (and a symptom of globalisation generally); what saves the work (at least in part) from accusations of cultural appropriation or neo-colonialism is the presence of the Vietnamese performers, who unfailingly transmit an air of unfeigned joy and passion in their work (though one can’t help feeling that the representation of village life has been somewhat de-historicized and sanitised in the process).

The most striking aspect of the work for me (albeit one also typical of ‘New Circus’) is the continuous flow of action (in contrast to the discrete series of ‘acts’ typical of traditional circus). The program refers to this as ‘storytelling’ but to me the through-composed nature of the work was (thankfully) more musical or choreographic than narrative in terms of its principles of development, and the form of visual representation had more in common with genre-painting than narrative – collective scenes of village life like Brueghel’s ‘Children’s Games’ came to mind. In fact the work is above all image-based, and could be described as a work of visual theatre as much as circus; though spoken language is used on occasion, it’s mostly in the form of briefly uttered speech acts such as greetings, commands, suggestions, protests or words of encouragement (all of which tellingly remains untranslated) rather than dialogue providing narrative information about characters, setting or events.

Despite some astonishing displays of skill, the prevailing physical and emotional tone is gentle and even intimate rather than being emphatic or spectacular, perhaps in keeping with aspects of Vietnamese culture but also certain traditions in French art and music. Lang Toi could even be called a work of Impressionist circus or theatre, with a nod to the influence of East and South-East Asian culture on late nineteenth-century French art and music (ironically in part as a consequence of French colonialism). In particular, this effect of Impressionism applies to the extremely subtle transitions from one action or image to the next; in fact one could almost say that the entire work is in a continuous state of transition.

Bamboo provides the principle material support for the entire work: set, props, musical instruments and possibly even the fabric of the simple and softly coloured costumes. Central to the design is a collection of bamboo poles of varying height and thickness which are tossed, juggled, used as climbing poles, balanced on, stepped across and joined together in various ways to form swings, trapezes and high wires. They also form the basis for various images of village life: tent-like structures, climbing-trees and (memorably) an acrobat manoeuvring an invisible boat with a bamboo pole across an undulating surface of bamboo poles. Once again, the transformational and imaginative use of minimal set and props is a common feature of New Circus; it also reminded me of Western (and particularly French or French-inspired) physical and image-based theatre companies such as Théâtre du Soleil, Complicité and the work of Peter Brook at the Bouffes du Nord.

In sum, I found Lang Toi an exquisitely realised work, but one which raised artistic and political questions for me about the complexities of history and culture. In particular I couldn’t help reflecting on the legacy of colonisation and war as well as current political, social and environmental realities in Vietnam – issues which were largely conspicuous by their absence. To be sure, this is to be expected in what is essentially a high-end work of popular entertainment by a company somewhat problematically described in the Festival program as ‘Vietnam’s most recognisable cultural export’. In fact there was only one moment of turbulence in the show, when yet another harmonious image of village life was disrupted by an outburst of music and lighting, a scattering of the performers and set and the appearance of a dishevelled woman screaming as if traumatised or possessed. Once again it remained ‘generic’, and had no lasting consequences, much like the brief storm in Beethoven’s 'Pastoral' Symphony. Nevertheless for me it was a reminder that all is not sweetness and light in the village.

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One Infinity is a Festival co-commission that began as a musical collaboration between recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey and guxin (a kind of traditional Chinese zither) master Wang Pang and his ensemble Jun Tian Fang. The musicians were then joined by UK electronic/ambient co-composer Max de Wardener; finally director and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek staged the work with dancers from Beijing Dance Theater and Dancenorth Australia, associate choreographer (and Dancenorth Associate Artistic Director) Amber Haines, lighting designer Damien Cooper, sound designer Jim Atkins, costume designer Harriet Oxley and a set co-designed by Obarzanek and Cooper.

The Chinese title of the work apparently translates as ‘beginning/no border’, and the program notes from Lacey, Wang Peng and Obzarnek share artistic, cultural and philosophical themes of collaboration and communion. Lacey has a longstanding interest in Western Early Music (which is of course deeply connected with religion and spirituality); Wang Peng has an almost mystical view of art and culture as unifying forces; and Obarzanek’s work has increasingly focused on artistic and cultural collaboration, as well as the relationship between dancers and non-dancers, performers and audiences, performance and ritual.

The work is staged in traverse, with a central runway covered by highly reflective black tarquette that resembles dark water or Chinese lacquer-ware – especially under the glow of Cooper’s exquisite lighting. The musicians are seated on the floor, with the dancers initially seated unobtrusively amongst the audience down the centre of both seating banks (Chinese on one side, Australians on the other), with a single dancer (likewise Chinese and Australian) seated at the top of each seating bank and framed by a kind of box like a figure in a shrine. At the start of the show, Obarzanek (and a Chinese translator) inform the audience that at certain moments during the show we are to copy the movements of the figure at the top of the seating bank opposite us, and a brief practice demonstration follows; the movements mostly involve arm or hand movements, and occasionally standing or sitting, and are reminiscent of birds or butterfly wings, or the multiple arms of gods.

Musically the work was introduced by a recorder solo from Lacey and followed by a series of classical solo, duet and ensemble works for guxin interspersed with further solos from Lacey and a Chinese bamboo flute player (whose first almost toneless breath-playing solo was for me the most hypnotic moment in the show) as well as pre-recorded music and sound by De Wardener (including passages of organ and electronic noise) which played an increasingly dominant role in the latter half of the show. Lacey and Wang Peng are mesmerizing performers, and the liquid bird-like sound of the recorder complements the fragile delicacy of the guxin beautifully – the extreme quietness of the latter instrument (usually played unaccompanied) here amplified so that the sound of the player’s fingers against the strings made an even more visceral connection with the audience. I was less convinced by De Wardener’s music, particularly in the latter half, when it began to resemble the clanging electronic soundtrack of a sci-fi film (and sadly so much contemporary theatre) and for me clashed with the aesthetic of the rest of the work. As for the dancers: as well as leading the moments of audience participation, they created a series of slowly moving mandala-like shapes on the seating banks during some of the music pieces (which we observed either directly opposite us or by twisting around to look at them), before descending onto the floor and engaging in slightly more animated movement patterns for the final section of the work.    

The moments of audience participation were surprisingly effective both kinesthetically and visually – especially each time the lights came up on the opposite seating bank to reveal a wave of slowly moving arms and hands. These moments also made me reflect on the difference between contemplation and participation as forms of aesthetic experience. This was also a fascinating aspect of Obarzanek’s previous work with Dancenorth Attractor (seen at last year’s Perth Festival and reviewed here); the key difference being that in the latter case volunteer audience members (including this reviewer) joined the dancers onstage and received instructions via headphones, whereas here the entire audience remained on the seating banks and mirrored the movements of their dancer-instructors, so that the visceral thrill of joining the dance (or watching us do so) was replaced by the more meditative pleasure of performing (or contemplating) mirror-movement.

As with Attractor, however, I found myself less engaged by the choreography of the dancers – particularly once they descended onto the floor, when dramaturgically the work seemed to implode. I also couldn’t help feeling that the strengths of the Dancenorth dancers were somewhat under-utilized – and/or perhaps somewhat mismatched with their seemingly less skilled or less autonomous Beijing Dance Theatre counterparts. I was also unsure about the costumes – particularly the more softly coloured and loosely flowing ‘Asian’ costumes of the Australians (as opposed to the more tightly fitting and brightly coloured ‘Western’ outfits worn by the Chinese dancers). Perhaps the contrast was a deliberately cross-cultural choice; if so, I wondered if it would have been more effective to see them all in similar street clothes (or even rehearsal clothes. 

For me the heart of this work was musical (in particular the exquisite work of Lacey, Wang Peng and the Jun Tian Ensemble), with the participation of the audience providing a fascinating and mostly effective physical counterpoint, supported by the lighting and set design; while the contributions of the dancers, choreography, costume and sound designs (as well as De Wardener’s music) were somewhat more equivocal. Ultimately (and perhaps ironically) One Infinity seems a less unified work than Lang Toi; nevertheless both are works of great beauty and virtuosity; and both raise interesting questions about the aesthetics and politics of collaboration.