Postcard from Adelaide #2

Text-based theatre: the epic and the intimate

Belvoir/Co-Curious, Counting and Cracking; Young Vic/Isango Ensemble, A Man of Good Hope; Verbatim Theatre Group, Manus; Milo Rau, La Reprise 

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As mentioned in my previous Postcard from Adelaide (on music, dance, physical and visual theatre), the big social and political themes that recurred for me at this year’s AF were masculinity, racism, tribalism and displacement – alongside the more familial, personal and artistic themes of loss, trauma, death, memory and the nature of performance. Not surprisingly the first group of themes were dealt with more extensively in the more large-scale or ‘epic’ productions, whereas the second group emerged more clearly in the more intimate works; but there was also a significant crossover. Many of the large-scale productions hinged dramatically on intimate questions of loss, trauma and memory; several of the more intimate works raised ‘larger’ questions about masculinity, racism and tribalism; and many shows across both categories were also ‘epic’ in the Brechtian sense, in that they explicitly drew attention to their own artifice (or ‘foregrounded the device’) rather than being naturalistic or illusionistic – and did so in order to invite personal or artistic reflection and perhaps even social or political action. 

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To begin with the large-scale: Counting and Cracking was the most emotionally powerful work I saw at the Festival, and I believe the most significant event in Australian theatre in terms of redefining what ‘Australian theatre’ means since, perhaps, John Romeril’s Floating World (both the original Pram Factory production in 1974 and the Playbox remount in 1995 with an all–Japanese cast). 

A collaboration almost six years in the making between Belvoir Artist Director Eamon Flack and Sri Lankan-Australian first-time playwright S. Shakthidharam (and his company Co-Curious), Counting and Cracking travelled to Adelaide straight after a season at Sydney Town Hall, and was staged in the Ridley Centre at the Adelaide Showgrounds – a big empty barn which was the venue for last year’s Human Requiem, and which was in this case filled by a spectacular but simple set (designed by Dale Ferguson). It’s a three-hour show (with two intervals, during which Sri Linkan food is served), featuring a cast of sixteen actors (almost all of whom are South Asian) and a live band of three musicians (two of whom are also traditional Carnatic players of South Asian heritage), and tells the story of four generations of a Sri Lankan family, from Colombo in the 1980s to contemporary Sydney, based on Shaktidharan’s own family history. 

I remember being hugely impressed hearing Eamon speak about his collaboration with Shakti a couple of years ago at the National Play Festival. I was struck by their mutual commitment to produce the work only when the conditions were right, and without compromising on their shared vision – including the scale of the work and the large multicultural cast. It’s a commitment that’s paid off handsomely, and a lesson to theatre companies and playwrights everywhere, when there’s such pressure for the former to program ‘safely’ and for the latter get one’s play on at all costs.

None of this however would mean a thing if the writing, staging, direction and performances weren’t so effective and deeply affecting. The play shifts back and forth in time and place, with the present-day scenes set in a western suburb of Sydney, and the scenes from the past set in the courtyard of a wealthy family home in Colombo during the rise of populism that lead to the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983. The two dramatic arcs converge in a feat of writing that had me by the throat at the climax of Act One when the two main characters, Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar) and his mother Rhada (played in her younger incarnation by Vaishnavi Suryaprakash)simultaneously both say ‘Yes’ to older and younger versions of the same man, Thirru (played respectively by Antonythasan Jesuthasan and Jay Emmanuel) in fateful decisions that will change their lives. 

The production itself (despite its scale) was an inspired piece of imaginative ‘poor theatre’. Ferguson’s set comprised a huge thrust stage with a gate at the rear; the thrust was surrounded on three sides by a low wall with an open channel of flowing water. As such it more or less resembled a typical Sri Lankan inner courtyard; the water also represented the Georges River in Sydney’s south-west to which Rhada’s mother’s ashes were ritually returned, as well as more symbolically the river of death and the waters of life that unite us all. All this was in turn surrounded on three sides by a pop-up auditorium with high outer walls. The entrance to the auditorium at the foot of the thrust also represented the inner doorway to the house in Colombo; so that one had the feeling of entering the world of the play and inhabiting it along with the characters. The rear gate was surmounted by raised platforms for the musicians, and for the actors to raise and lower barriers above the gate, with locations and dates written on detachable signs and hung on the barriers at the start of each scene. These made much expository dialogue superfluous, as well as reinforcing the sense of artificial borders being imposed between and within countries on the basis of race, religion, class and above all politics.

Costumes (also designed by Ferguson with cultural consultant Anandavalli) were simple but beautiful, with exquisitely coloured cloths for the women; unfussy lighting (by Damien Cooper) was mostly a general wash to unify the action (which largely occupied the whole stage); and furniture and props minimal (handle-receivers of old-fashioned telephones for example being simply held up and passed around by the actors). Stefan Gregory’s unobtrusive score (based on traditional South Asian Carnatic music and played by the live band) sensitively accompanied the action without ever being overbearing or kitsch.

The most effective device of all was the spoken translation into English of all Sinhalese or Tamil dialogue (which comprised about a third of the play) by cast members who were not in the scene but were seated on the low inner wall around the stage. This effectively created a kind of ever-changing chorus of interpreters relaying the action to the audience. It also highlighted the politics of language itself, and in particular the use of English, Sinhalese and Tamil to colonize (and later polarize) Ceylon/Sri Lanka before and after independence.  

The ensemble cast were uniformly strong, with outstanding performances from senior Indian actors Kalieaswari Srinivasan as the older Rhada – an embittered pragmatist and the emotional core of the play – and Prakash Belawadi as her father Apah, the defiant idealist who dreams of a united Sri Lanka but finally endorses Tamil violence in self-defence when the centre can no longer hold. Indeed much of the power of the play came not from its humanist sense of compassion and hope but from its dispassionate analysis of how the populist genie once out of the bottle leads inexorably to intolerance and inhumanity; while the dramatic conflict between the opposing principles of predominantly male power politics and the traditionally female prioritization of family harks back to Antigone.

To be sure, there are some dramaturgical weakness that could easily be addressed. The scenes in the present seemed more of a framing device than a parallel plot, and were somewhat sketchy in comparison with the more fully realised and unified scenes from the past, which seemed to be the real raison d’être of the play. In particular, subplots involving Siddhartha’s budding romance with a young Aboriginal woman (a confident performance by Rarriwuy Hick), and the older Rhada’s courtship by an ever-optimistic Lebanese handyman (an ebullient Arky Michael) seemed a little tacked-on and even tokenistic; the use of expository monologues to the audience in the final scenes was clunky and unnecessary; and the almost certain fate of indefinite detention for Apah under the current regime hung over the somewhat hastily contrived ending. However these are minor quibbles in the context of an extraordinary artistic and logistical achievement, which is urgently timely in terms of domestic and international politics. In Australia 2016, as in Colombo 1983, we are not yet done with cracking heads.

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The Young Vic/Isango Ensemble co-production of A Man of Good Hope told a similar story, using similar ‘poor theatre’ means. It’s based on white South African author Jonny Steinberg’s book about a Somali man’s decades-long odyssey across Africa to Cape Town as a refugee from post-colonial ethnic violence. Steinberg met Asad Abdullahi when the latter was working as a street-errand hustler, and paid him to meet and tell his story every day for a year. They met in Steinberg’s car because, as Asad says in the play, if they met in his shanty-town home the presence of a white man with an expensive car would attract men with guns. 

The Isango Ensemble is a Cape Town-based company of singer-performers and marimba-players from townships similar to Asad’s (though not necessarily with his refugee background). It was co-founded by English-born director Mark Dornford-May with musical director and singer Pauline Melfane (who was also born in a poor part of Cape Town). The company has previously specialized in South African adaptations of European classics like Carmenand The Magic Flute. A Man of Good Hope is more like a musical, or perhaps even a play with songs (indeed much like The Magic Flute), as most of the action is in the form of spoken text, punctuated by outbursts of African popular music and (mostly ensemble) singing and dancing. 

The play also resembles The Magic Flute in that it’s a young man’s journey or even pilgrimage from innocence to maturity. Like the Fluteit’s also a love story, and includes more than one mother-figure and surrogate father, as well as a series of tests of integrity, faith and trust; and there’s a similar pantomime-like simplicity to the storytelling. However the terrain Asad must traverse is infinitely more perilous than Schikaneder’s allegorical fantasy-land; his wisdom and experience is acquired at considerable cost; and even though he finally makes it to South Africa, there’s no journey’s end there in terms of safety, security or sense of belonging. In fact I felt that the geographical irony of the title extended to the very notion of hope itself, at least in the context of Asad’s situation as a Somali refugee in South Africa – as demonstrated by his ongoing poverty and fear of being killed. He finally gets his visa to America, which he believes without apparent irony to be a land of plenty where there are no guns. To me this prospect of deliverance was cold comfort, in a play where Asad’s story becomes an allegory for an entire continent, and indeed the whole world.

The singing and musical skills of the performers are glorious, and the staging full of energy and inventiveness – including the deft use of portable doorframes, movable sheets of corrugated iron and two-dimensional wooden toy guns. However the simplicity of the form toppled over at times into over-simplification, and the overall mood of ebullience sat uncomfortably for me with the realism and even pessimism of the content, in a way that didn’t seem to be ironic or satirical. The acting was also uneven, the strongest and most complex performance being from Thandolwethu Mzembe as the young man Asad (the third of four incarnations); most of the other characterisations were somewhat two-dimensional. Again this wouldn’t have mattered if the discordance had been deliberate, or even consistent, but once again I felt that the style of the work fell somewhat uneasily between community theatre and fully fledged music-drama.

Finally I couldn’t help wondering about the ethics of the whole exercise. The image of the white man in his expensive car paying the black man to tell his story – while in doing so the latter was evidently exposed to mortal danger – in order to turn it into a book (and then a play) made me feel uncomfortable, and the word ‘exploitation’ came to mind. This discomfort was amplified by the fact that the retelling of the story – first by Steinberg and then by the company (no playwright is acknowledged in the program) – seemed to oversimplify it in terms of its political and ethno-cultural complexities (quite apart from the limitations imposed by Asad’s own perspective or version of events); and this oversimplification seemed to reinforce generalised notions about ‘Africa’ or ‘tribalism’ for a white (and especially international) readership or audience.

In fact Steinberg acknowledges apparently without irony in the program and the play that Asad refused to read the manuscript when it was finished because he declared that the story was ‘too sad’. Steinberg concludes: ‘The story is not for him; it is for others.’ One is tempted to ask: for whom, then? And to what end?

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I found myself asking similar questions of Manus, an Iranian verbatim theatre work about Iranian asylum seekers held in indefinite detention on Manus Island and Nauru.

This is a complex work to describe in terms of its making, and even more difficult to judge as a work of theatre, reportage or political advocacy – let alone in terms of its ethics. (I should state at the outset that my own position on mandatory indefinite offshore detention is that it is morally indefensible – even as a deterrent that ostensibly ‘saves lives’ by preventing deaths at sea – because of the suffering, death, and trauma inflicted on people who have risked their lives but committed no crime.)

According to the program, the production was ‘researched and directed’ by Nazanin Sahamizadeh, and first performed in Tehran by Verbatim Theatre Group, a company she established in 2013. The ‘play’ – as it is described in the program, but perhaps ‘performance-text’ would be more accurate – was written by ‘verbatim playwrights’ Leila Hekmatnia and Kelvan Sarreshteh, and based on interviews with eight asylum seekers who have been on Manus and Nauru for over five years. According to the education resources kit that accompanied the production, another former detainee on Manus who ‘volunteered’ to return to Iran in 2013 ‘helped organise’ the interviews. I’m not sure exactly how or where this happened, but am guessing it was done via mobile phone.

The text is spoken in Persian by eight Iranian actors who ‘play’ the eight detainees, with English surtitles projected onto a screen behind them. One of the detainees is Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani, who has become something of a hero since his reports from Manus began being published by the Guardian and elsewhere, and whose book No Friend But The Mountains (which was tapped out on his mobile phone and sent as text messages) won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction in January 2019. Boochani was apparently a key collaborator in the creation of the work, which ends with a long and impassioned speech from him, delivered directly to the audience.

Basically this is stand-and-deliver protest theatre, with all the strengths and weaknesses that the form entails. The set consists of a pile of red petrol cans, which are disassembled, moved around the stage and then reassembled at the end. Video footage from Manus and Nauru (also presumably shot on mobile phones) is projected onto the screen and the rest of the stage, showing images of the camps and detainees (including women and children on Nauru), as well as riots and suicide attempts. The climax of the work is a detailed account of the riot on Manus in 2014 that led to the murder of Reza Barati, but there are also horrifying accounts of other acts of violence and self-harm.

It’s impossible not to be moved by the content of the work, at least on a certain level, and up to a certain point. However most of the performances remained on a sustained note of anguish, despair or rage. This was understandable, but had the effect of reducing the individuality of the detainees, much like the regime of detention itself. This effect was increased by the dramaturgy, which intercut the eight different stories in a way that made them seem indistinguishable from each other; and the repetition and accumulation of horror eventually led to outrage-fatigue.

Moreover (especially with some of the less skilled actors) it was not always easy to distinguish the emotions of the performers from those of the people they were representing. This (again, understandable) artistic and emotional confusion had the effect of sentimentalizing the suffering of the detainees (as well as the cast) and risking bathos instead of pathos so that they became like characters and actors in a Hollywood movie .

Aristotle famously observed that tragedy arouses pity and terror. More precisely, he argued that we feel compassion towards someone who is distant (but not too distant) from us, but that compassion becomes fear if the person is closer to us (for example, in the case of a friend or child), most clearly in the case of fear for ourselves. Emotional and aesthetic distance is also politically important for Brecht, who famously criticized excessive emotion, identification or empathy with the character, on the part of the audience or the actor. Brecht regarding these as the hallmark of bourgeois, consumerist or ‘culinary’ theatre, which treats emotions as commodities, and prefers to 'bathe’ in feelings, as opposed to critical reflection and political action.

One might argue that Brecht was not criticising emotion or identification as such (which are surely necessary conditions in theatre and life), but sentimentality and over-identification. The German word for empathy – Einfühling– literally means ‘feeling-as-one’, as opposed to Milted (sympathy or compassion), which means ‘suffering-with’. Here one might make a critical distinction between empathy and sympathy – a distinction based not merely on degrees of emotion, but (following Aristotle) degrees of proximity. As actors, audiences and indeed social beings we need to be ‘close but not too close’ to the character (and to other people); in other words, we need to see them and ourselves as ‘the same but different’. Some degree of separation is an emotional, aesthetic, ethical and political imperative. 

Another problem emerged with the video footage, which succumbed to the fate of all such images in news reports on TV or online, which is that suffering becomes a spectacle, and our reactions pass from horror to indifference. The problem of sentimentality and bathos became acute in the final part of the work, which included stage-smoke, fake rain, and finally Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata as a soundtrack for Boochani’s final speech. I was reminded of my father’s refusal to see Schindler’s List because he didn’t want to see Spielberg reduce the Holocaust to Hollywood schmaltz.

In short: in terms of people, stories, acting, images and staging, less would have been more, at least in emotional effect. The question remains, as with A Man of Good Hope, but even more uncomfortably: for whose benefit, and to what end? 

To be sure, the work was originally performed in Tehran, for an audience who were presumably less familiar with the material; and theatrical conditions – including artistic and audience expectations, as well as the risk of censorship and repercussions – are presumably very different there too; though Tehran is apparently a more liberal and cosmopolitan city than elsewhere in Iran, and certainly boasts a highly sophisticated film culture, from Kiarostami to Asghar Farhadi. Perhaps the original production was intended to move the audience or the Iranian government to action – though one wonders about the consequences of doing so, given that most of the refugees are fleeing political or ethnic persecution.

But the question also needs to be asked when it comes to presenting the work here: to what end? The stories themselves were sadly familiar; and even more sadly I learned nothing new from what I heard or saw. Having seen (and been involved with) what has become a sub-genre of ‘refugee theatre’ over the past twenty years, I fear that such work has achieved nothing except preach to the choir, make the audience ‘feel’ things, and potentially re-traumatize refugees themselves.

To write poetry after (or even about) Auschwitz may not necessarily be barbaric (to qualify Adorno’s famous provocation), as the poetry of Paul Celan and the novels of Primo Levi attest; but perhaps there's a risk of barbarism in this kind of theatre. For writers like Celan or Levi – or even Boochani – who are also victims and (at least temporary) survivors, writing may be the only option they have; certainly no-one (least of all Adorno) would take away their right to bear witness to what they've endured; but this should surely be at their own initiative, on their own behalf, and under their own creative control. Sadly I suspect that none of these conditions obtained for these men and women (except to a limited degree Boochani himself), much like Asad in A Man of Good Hope. 

For the rest of us well-meaning artists and citizens, with regard to the ongoing atrocity of offshore detention, perhaps it’s time for a different kind of action – and certainly a different kind of theatre.

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This leads me to La Reprise, Swiss director Milo Rau’s documentary theatre production investigating a gay hate murder that took place in Liège in 2012. It’s worth noting however that the full title is La Reprise: Histoire(s) du theatre (1). The French term reprisemeans (among other things) to repeat or return to something, as in a musical ‘reprise’, or an actor ‘reprising’ a role; perhaps an appropriate English title might be ‘the re-enactment’. The word histoireon the other hand means both ‘history’ and ‘story’; and the possessive de(‘of’) is also ambiguous, since it can be subjective or objective; so the subtitle might be translated as ‘a theatrical story/theatrical stories’ or even ‘the story/history of theatre (Part 1)’. This would seem to suggest that the subject matter is not so much the incident being investigated, or even gay hate crimes or violence in general, but the nature of theatre, history and truth.

Recently appointed Artistic Director of NTGent, Rau trained in sociology and literary studies, and has worked as a journalist and filmmaker as well as a theatre director. He also runs a theatre and film production company called The International Institute of Political Murder. His documentary theatre productions include The Last Days of the Ceaucescus, The Congo Tribunal (which staged a mock trial in the Democratic Republic of Congoto investigate the complicity of mining companies in massacres) and Five Easy Pieces, about a Belgian paedophile and murderer, in which the actors were children. His inaugural production for NTGentwas Lam Gods, which was based on Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece ‘The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’, in which he cast the real-life mother of an Islamic State jihadi as the Virgin Mary. 

Rau is obviously not afraid of controversy, and has stated that he has a particular interest in violence as a social phenomenon. Since he took over NTGent, he’s published a 10-point ‘Ghent Manifesto’ on the company website. Point One states: ‘It’s not just about portraying the world anymore. It's about changing it. The aim is not to depict the real, but to make the representation itself real.’ Other points include: ‘The literal adaptation of classics on stage is forbidden’; ‘At least a quarter of the rehearsal time must take place outside a theatre’; ‘At least two different languages must be spoken on stage in each production’; ‘At least two of the actors on stage must not be professional actors’; ‘The total volume of the stage set must be able to be contained in a van that can be driven with a normal driving licence’; and ‘At least one production per season must be rehearsed or performed in a conflict or war zone’. In short: the Manifesto is a declaration of political and artistic intent, and apart from the first philosophical Point (which is inspired by the last of Marx’s eleven Theses on Feuerbach) all the others are practical commitments about how work is to be made and shown.

La Reprise is the first production by Rau and the NTGent to follow the Manifesto. Like his previous work, it’s a new piece of documentary theatre that investigates violence; three languages are spoken onstage (French, Flemish and Arabic – all translated into English surtitles); two of the actors are non-professional; and the set (designed by Anton Lukas) is minimal (though the ‘props’ include a car). A key element is a large video screen, on which the surtitles are projected, alongside titles for each of the play’s ‘Acts’, and close-up video footage of what happens onstage, which is filmed (or ostensibly filmed) by an onstage camera operator and projected simultaneously. I say ‘ostensibly’ because some of the footage appears to be live-feed, but some of it is obviously pre-recorded, as there are noticeable discrepancies between what happens onstage and onscreen, such as the presence onscreen of extra performers (including a dog).

The ‘story’ concerns the murder of a young gay Muslim man, Ihsane Jarfi, who got into a car with four other men outside a bar, and was subsequently beaten and left to die on the edge of a wood outside Liège; his naked body was found a week later. However this is framed by a meta-narrative about the creation of the show itself, which involved the cast conducting their own investigation in Liège and interviewing people connected with the crime (some of whom they later play), as well as auditioning two local non-actors to be in the show.

This audition scene is re-enacted (or ‘reprised’), with the cast of actors and non-actors playing themselves. Suzy Cocco is an unemployed dog-sitter, who plays herself and Jarfi’s mother. Fabian Leenders is a warehouse worker and DJ, who plays himself and one of the killers, with whom it turns out in the audition he had several things in common, including suffering from the same back injury (which led to them both losing their jobs) and driving the same model and colour of car.

The rest of the cast are professional actors, who likewise play themselves as well as characters in the story. Tom Adjhibi (who also auditions) plays himself and Jarfi. During his audition he delivers a zinger about being typecast because of his race: ‘If you’re Black, either you play a Black character, or you act in a political play where you denounce this…or you dance.’ Sabri Saad El Hamus (who conducts the auditions) plays himself and Jarfi’s father. He opens the show with a droll monologue about acting – ‘An actor is like a pizza-deliverer: it’s about the pizza, not the deliverer!’ – which leads to a dramatic recital of the Ghost’s speech in Hamlet (cue stage-fog to roll across the set). Sebastian Foucault plays himself and one of the killers; he also reveals during the audition scene that he became obsessed with the murder while studying in Liège. Finally Kristien De Proost plays herself, a girl in the bar on the night Jarfi was killed, and another of the killers. She also delivers a monologue in the final ‘Act’ about an interview with Jarif’s grief-stricken boyfriend, before reciting the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s ‘Theatre Impressions’. The poem is about the ‘sixth Act’ of a tragedy, when all the actors who play dead characters ‘come back to life’ for the curtain call before preparing to ‘reprise’ their roles the next evening. 

The show ends with Adjhibi singing Purcell’s setting of Dryden’s ‘The Cold Song’ from King Arthur– a song made famous in alt-pop culture by 80s gay icon Klaus Nomi shortly before he died of AIDS – in which the phrase ‘Let me freeze again to death’ is repeatedly ‘reprised’. This leads to an anecdote about an actor who once put a noose around his neck, climbed on a chair and invited someone from the audience to help him down. A real noose then descends from the lighting grid, and Adhibi physically ‘reprises’ the content of the story (without appearing to wear a safety harness); the show ends in a blackout before anyone can intervene.

As this summary suggests, the dramaturgy of La Reprise is highly sophisticated. The production is also flawlessly realised, and the performances (professional and amateur) are superbly understated. Rau’s approach is obviously inspired by Brecht: the non-identification of the actors with their roles, the ‘baring of the device’ (especially in the use of video) and the emotional and aesthetic distance and coolness of the work are all very unlike Manus, and all promote critical thought and (at least potentially) action. A more specific (if unacknowledged) debt is to The Laramie Project, Moises Kaufmann’s 2000 play about the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in a small town in Wyoming, which used interviews conducted by the actors with inhabitants of the town, news reports and the actor’s own journal entries, and in which the actors played themselves as well as the people they interviewed or saw on the news. 

The key difference between La Reprise and either Brecht or Laramieis not simply the use of video and non-actors but the interrogation of theatre itself in order to question history and truth. Rau writes in the program that ‘a testimony, a memory or a plea does not express historical truth…they recollect it according to their respective – for the most part unconscious – intentions’. This in itself rather banal observation – which owes more to Nietzsche or Freud than Marx or Brecht – has broader implications in a ‘post-truth’ world saturated by images, opinions and ‘fake news’ disseminated via social media, and the aestheticization, exploitation and mobilization of emotions and violence that proliferates globally as a result. In short, to paraphrase The Wizard of Oz( the original purveyor of fake news): we’re not in Laramie any more.

The problem for me lies in what might be called the social dramaturgy of the La Reprise – in other words, its ethics. The trouble begins after the audition-scene, with the subsequent ‘reprisal’ of events surrounding and including the murder at which the performers themselves weren’t present, as well as the use of video in those scenes. The first is a scene in which El Hamus and Cocco ‘reprise’ a conversation between Jarfi’s parents. The dialogue is possibly based on a joint interview with them, but they perform the scene naked, sitting on a bed, as if in a deeply private conversation. In the course of the scene they disagree about how to talk about the crime: Jarfi’s father wants go public and make his son’s death meaningful in the cause of gay rights in order to deal with his anger and grief; his wife says she feels emotionally numb and wants to keep things private. The scene is also filmed by the onstage cameraman, and simultaneously ‘reprised’ on the screen as a live-feed. The intention may be ironic, but to me the effect is deeply disrespectful and humiliating for everyone concerned – the actors (one of whom is a non-professional) as well as the people they are playing and Jarfi himself – and comes across as a power-trip on the part of Rau as director.

The next ‘re-enactment’ takes place in the bar on the night Jarfi was killed, and ‘reprises’ a friendly and possibly flirtatious conversation between Jarfi (played by Adjhibi) and one of the men (played by Foucault) who subsequently abducted and killed him. It’s hard to know what this is based on; possibly an interview with the man; possibly a witness; or possibly the imagination of the actors; but the effect is to perpetuate notions that victims of hate-crimes are somehow ‘responsible’. Leenders acts as a DJ for this scene, as if he were present at the club on the night (which he wasn’t). The scene is also filmed and projected in close-up, but the footage is obviously pre-recorded, as there are ‘extras’ dancing in the club onscreen who aren’t onstage. Again, the intention may be to underline the ‘fakeness’ of the scenario, but this doesn’t detract from the implication that this is what led to Jarfi being killed.

Another scene in this sequence (also filmed and projected in close-up) involves one of the men in the car (this time played by Leeders) awkwardly kissing and attempting to have sex with a woman (De Proost) but being repeatedly rejected. Again, it’s hard to know what this scene is based on, or to what purpose, except to perpetuate sexist explanations of ‘incel’ violence; and again, the primary effect is to humiliate the actors (one of whom, again, is a non-professional).

The final ‘re-enactment’ is a prolonged and excruciating ‘reprisal’ of the murder itself, entitled ‘The Banality of Evil’ (a rather heavy-handed reference to Hannah Arendt’s coverage of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem). A real car is pushed onstage, four of the actors (Adjhibi, Foucault, Leenders and De Proost) get in, and Jarfi’s abduction, torture and killing is ‘reprised’, more or less in ‘real time’ (though again, it’s hard to know what this is based on, other than surmise, or witness accounts). The other actors (El Hamus and Cocco) move around outside the car creating fake rain-effects and fake reflections on the windshield of passing streetlamps and headlights using torches. The onstage action inside the car (and finally outside it) is deliberately clumsy (including obvious stage-combat punching and kicking and the use of stage-blood); on the screen it looks ‘real’ (at least, according to the codes of ‘realism’ in cinema). Adjhibi/Jarfi is finally stripped naked and left lying ‘dead’ in the middle of the stage before the final ‘Act’ of theatrical ‘resurrection’ begins.

In Rau’s defence it might be claimed that the production draws attention to its own complicity with exploitation and aestheticization, and that this is the most we can do as good postmodernist artists and citizens. This however feels a little like defending the use of racist, sexist or homophobic ‘memes’ on social media on the basis that they’re ‘just memes’, and that anyone ‘unsophisticated’ enough not to recognise this just needs to ‘deal with it’ – which ignores the fact that words and images have real consequences.

The problem is that in ‘making the representation real’ Rau’s staging enacts the very violence, homophobia, racism, exploitation and aestheticization it purports to investigate. The murder sequence in particular aroused in me a mixture of fascination, horror and finally boredom that recalled Aristotle’s definition of horror as the loss of compassion that occurs when suffering (or its representation) becomes ‘too close’. Mind you, I was sitting in the front row. However I’ve also never been the victim of a hate-crime; and I wondered how someone who had been (even potentially) might feel. It made me think of the word ‘obscene’, and its origins in the Greek compound ob scene, literally meaning ‘offstage’. Perhaps, like all acts of unrepresentable obscenity, that was where this scene belonged.

The issue of exploitation also extends to the casting and content of the other scenes. The actors seem cast according to stereotype, or rather thin personal connections or coincidences with the people they play. Adjhibi jokes about being racially typecast, but is typecast by Rau in exactly the same way. Leenders and Cocco identify as working-class unemployed in a post-industrial regional town, and Rau even has Leenders gratuitously driving a fork-lift around the set at one point, but the gesture seems sentimental and tokenistic, and the implied identification with the unemployed working-class status of the killers seems simplistic and far-fetched. In general, the treatment of violence, homophobia and racism smacks of a lazy armchair-Marxist analysis of these phenomena (along with the contemporary rise of fascism around the world) purely in terms of social class (or the backlash against neo-liberalism), which ignores the fact that there are plenty of working-class people who don’t commit such crimes or harbour such feelings (or vote for Trump, Bolsanaro or Brexit), as well as plenty of non-working class people who do.

In fact, for a sociologist, Rau’s on-the-ground research (at least on the evidence of the script) and his theoretical analysis of violence, homophobia, racism, post-industrial capitalism and ‘the society of the spectacle’ are astonishingly shallow. In terms of research, there’s no evidence of any detailed investigation into the personality or background of Jarfi or his killers, or any significant immersion in or understanding of Liège as a place or community, beyond the sheltered sphere of the audition-process, a few indirectly reported interviews, the re-imagined conversation between Jarfi’s parents, and the re-imagined scenes surrounding the murder. The Laramie Project in contrast drew on hundreds of interviews, the eight actors portrayed more than sixty characters, and the production was rigorous in the fidelity of its representation to what was actually seen and heard by the actors. Of course, Rau does not believe in fidelity but only in the ‘reality’ of representation ‘itself’, but this is to unmoor representation from its ethical as well as epistemological responsibilities.

There’s also no attempt to analyse violence, homophobia or racism as social or psychological phenomena, beyond the limited class-analysis already outlined. And finally there’s no attempt to go beyond the ‘simulacrum’ of appearances in order to establish the truth. On the contrary, like many postmodernist thinkers and artists Rau seems all-too-ready to be seduced by or capitulate to the power of the image, and in particular digital technology. Once again Rau claims not to be interested in ‘historical truth’, ‘portraying the world’ or ‘depicting the real’, but simply in ‘making the representation itself real’. In itself this is a fine-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase, unless it means ‘the truth is what I say it is’– which is either idealism, or fascism, pure and simple.

Finally, in his opening and closing ‘Acts’, Rau exploits acting and theatre in a way which made me feel ashamed as an actor and theatre maker. In particular the invocation of Szymborska’s great poem about actors ‘dying’ and ‘coming back to life’ (a poem which is surely about survival under totalitarianism as much as it is about theatre) – and the final conceit of an actor pretending to risk their life and asking the audience to ‘save’ them – seemed cheap and even tasteless, especially after the horror of Jarfi’s very literal torture and death. Kant observed of taste as an aesthetic faculty that it has to do with the fitness or congruency of sensations and judgments, from one mind to another, between art and nature, and ultimately between our minds and the cosmos. If so, how much more tasteful and fitting an end would have been Adjhibi’s haunting rendition of Purcell’s ‘The Cold Song’ – and how much wiser to heed Dryden’s final words:

What power art thou
Who from below
Hast made me rise
Unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow

See'st thou not how stiff
And wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold
I can scarcely move
Or draw my breath

Let me, let me,
Let me freeze again
Let me, let me
Freeze again to death
Let me, let me, let me
Freeze again to death...

* 

Humph’s next Postcard will be an overview of the more intimate text-based theatre works in the Adelaide Festival.

Postcard from Adelaide Festival #1

Music, Dance, Physical and Visual Theatre

Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Seraphim Trio, Alice Keith, Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds; Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Mozart/Schubert/Bruckner; Robyn Archer, Picaresque; Meryl Tankard, Two Feet; Johan Inger/Semperoper Ballett Dresden, Carmen; Luciano Rosso/Alfonso Barón, Un Poyo Rojo; Gravity and Other Myths, Out of Chaos; Meryl Tankard/Restless Dance Theatre, Zizanie; Compagnie Non Nova, Foehn; Hofesh Shechter, Grand Finale.

*

Coming to Adelaide directly from Perth Festival, certain themes emerged for me more starkly at AF than they did at PF: masculinity, racism and tribalism; displacement and exile; death and loss; trauma and memory; and the nature of theatre and performance.

Perhaps this is a reflection of the zeitgeist both in contemporary performance and in my own consciousness. #MeToo and other revelations of sexual abuse, the resurgence of nationalism, the slow creep of authoritarianism, and the global refugee crisis, all seem to be dominant topics in the news cycle. Toxic masculinity, racism and tribalism, death and loss, trauma and (in a ghastly way) the nature of performance were reinforced on the last weekend with the news of the massacre in Christchurch, which made for a horrifying end to the festivities.

*

None of these themes, it has to be said, were particularly prominent in the music events I saw.

Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds is a co-commission by AF and PF of a new work by singer-songwriter Paul Kelly with co-composer James Ledger, the Seraphim Trio and multi-instrumentalist and singer Alice Keath. It’s a setting of thirteen bird-poems by English, Australian and North American poets, from Keats, Hardy, Yeats and Hopkins to Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood and A.D. Hope. 

The title of course refers to Wallace Stephens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, which in the event wasn’t included (possibly because an Australian setting by Peggy Glanville-Hicks already exists). This is a shame, as the terseness and ambiguity of Stephens’s haiku-inspired poem would have made for a more suitable song lyric than the more elaborate language of many of the poems featured.

Kelly is a singer-songwriter and folk-rock-star icon in the Dylan/Cohen tradition with a musical style and stage presence all his own. He has a vocal timbre you either love or loathe, depending on taste, repertoire and possibly dosage. There’s no doubt he commanded the stage and most of the audience, and was supported by refined and sensitive playing from the Anna Goldsworthy (piano), Helen Ayres (violin) and Tim Nankervis (cello). Alice Keith provided extra vocals as well as augmenting the folk aspects of the sound world on banjo, autoharp, glockenspiel, bass-drum and synthesizer, and Ledger gave added support on electric guitar and synth. 

Ledger deftly bridges the gap between classical and popular music by letting Kelly take the lead in the more folk-pop-style settings; in others, the score speaks in a more jazzy language, or evokes the late-romantic nationalist impressionism of English, North American and Anglo-Celtic Australian nature-inspired art-music from Delius to Copland or Sculthorpe. Keith provides another bridge, with her soaring vocals and the addition of folk-instrumental textures; as does Ledger with his (mostly fairly demure) excursions on electric guitar; and the Seraphim Trio shifts idioms effortlessly.

However I felt that the fit between folk-pop, jazz and classical genres, and between Kelly and the more classically trained musicians, wasn’t an entirely comfortable one. More seriously, Kelly has a limited range as singer and an actor, and hearing him tackle Keats or Hopkins was simply a bridge too far. A surprisingly large amount of text was spoken (with musical backing) rather than sung. Kelly seemed out of his depth reciting ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ or ‘The Windhover’ (as well as being difficult to understand against the music, especially in the resonant but slightly muddy acoustic of the Adelaide Town Hall). Monumental poems like these – or for that matter Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’, Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’, Judith Wright’s ‘Black Cockatoos’ or A.D. Hope’s ‘Death of a Bird’ – have a density and music of their own that clashes with all but the most sophisticated settings. The great German Lieder, French mélodies or English-language art-song cycles of Britten have highly flexible vocal lines that are woven into the fabric of the accompaniment, and are of course meant to be sung by highly trained actor-singers, the texture of whose voices is consistent with that of the instrumentation. 

The most successful song for me was Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is the Thing with Feathers’, because the regularity of form, simplicity of language and ambiguity of meaning (like the best lyrics of Dylan or Cohen) fitted surprisingly well with Kelly’s almost anthem-like setting and delivery. Ballads like Gwen Harwood’s ‘Barn Owl’ or Denis Glover’s ‘The Magpies’ also fared better, because they were closer in content to Kelly’s natural folk-idiom; while the post-Rimbaud free verse of Robert Adamson’s ‘Eurydice and the Tawny Frogmouth’ (given as an encore) also suited Kelly’s style and persona.

These songs achieved a kind of coherence, but in general I felt that forces and material were mismatched. Mixed-genre works may look good on paper and sell tickets, especially with a celebrity at the helm; but when Kelly Met Keats, neither emerged from the collision intact.

*

None of these reservations applied to my experience of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding in the same venue the following weekend. The orchestra is a floating ensemble of virtuoso musicians from orchestras around the world, and specializes in the core classical and romantic repertoire. The two concerts I saw featured the last three symphonies of Mozart in a single concert, and a second program of Schubert’s 3^rdand Bruckner’s 4^th. The warm acoustics and gilded faux-marble décor of the Town Hall’s classic 19^thcentury shoe-box auditorium (reminiscent of the Vienna Musikverein) were ideally suited to the occasion.

The orchestra was founded by the players, and has its roots in the democratic principles of Claudio Abbado, who famously used few words in rehearsals but instructed his players to ‘listen’ to each other. Daniel Harding has been with conductor-laureate with the orchestra for 20 years, and his sense of rapport and control with them is evident. As an organization in which democracy goes hand-in-hand with expertise and leadership, the orchestra is a model for performance ensembles generally.

The autonomy and skill of the players (who are effectively soloists in their own right) means that they have impeccable intonation, a laser-like focus, and are highly responsive to the conductor (as well as each other); unlike many permanent orchestras, there are no time-servers in any of the seats. In other words, they are a chamber orchestra not only in size, but also in the sense of being an ensemble of equals like a string quartet; and as with the best chamber groups one has the feeling that they are playing as much for themselves as for an audience. 

A great orchestra like the Berlin Philharmonic is distinguished above all by a particular sound (for example in the strings or the brass), which has been cultivated over generations of permanent players. Here what is distinctive is not so much sonic colour (though the individual players have this in spades) but dynamic and rhythmic agility. This makes them especially suited to the classical and early romantic repertoire, where clarity and contrast is all. 

Harding configured the orchestra with the violins split antiphonally between the left and right hand edges of the stage, and the double basses, cellos and violas spread left to right in the centre. This heightened the conversational quality of the writing for the upper strings in the Mozart symphonies especially, and placed the lower strings in the heart and guts of the orchestra, as it were, which was particularly effective in the Bruckner.

I saw the concerts in reverse order, as I particularly wanted to hear the Bruckner and Schubert symphonies (which are less frequently played), but was so blown away that I bought a ticket to the Mozart marathon, which was repeated the following day. I’m glad I did, because on the Sunday afternoon they played the E-flat major and G minor Symphonies without a break before a single interval, which apparently was not the case on the Friday night. They also played all the repeats, which made for an epic experience, especially during the slow movements. As a colleague remarked afterwards, you got to hear your favourite bits all over again. For me it also introduced an element of surprise and unpredictability, as I was more familiar with performances that typically ignore the repeats, so that paradoxically I heard the music as if for the first time. Along with some distinctive interpretations by the conductor (especially in rhythm and dynamics), and the heightened listening and responsiveness of the players, the contingency of the transitions gave the performance and the work a feeling of spontaneity, almost as if it were being composed in front of me.

As appropriate with these symphonies, this was big, bold, ballsy Mozart, full of drama and anguish (especially in the G minor symphony), with especially plangent playing from the woodwinds. The repertoire may be familiar, but the performance was powerful reminder of why these works are such masterpieces. 

These qualities were even more in evidence in the Schubert and Bruckner symphonies I heard the night before. The Schubert is a relatively minor work, but has some unexpected modulations and portents of tragedy in the slow introduction, which like the Mozart symphonies were invested with extra drama. This was followed by some beefy Beethovenian heroics and more typically gentle Schubertian lyricism, including some folk-dance-like themes given delicious Viennese accents by the woodwinds. 

The Bruckner however was (and is) of another order entirely, despite the lyricism and landscape-like qualities that the composer shares with Schubert. Bruckner’s symphonies are often perceived as long, repetitive and ‘strange’, at least in comparison with previous composers (though Beethoven’s 9^th is an obvious precursor in terms of length and ‘strangeness’). He was notoriously misunderstood in his lifetime, and revised his works continually; even after his revival in the 20th century, performances are often marred either by undue caution or excessive bombast, or else unnecessarily cosmeticized, instead of allowing the works to be themselves. 

Here the relatively reduced forces and the precision of the playing meant that the symphony was uncompromisingly revealed in all its glory, terror and beauty. Programmatic analogies are risky, but the sense of inevitability on the journey reminded me of hiking in Bruckner’s homeland of Upper Austria, when verdant valleys are succeeded by arid ridges and then more valleys in a progression that never seems to end, and one has to patiently surrender to the rigours of the terrain. 

The emotional substance of Bruckner can sometimes seem melodramatic or sentimental, especially if overwrought by a large orchestra or special pleading from the conductor. In contrast, Harding and the MCO brought out Bruckner’s almost obsessive preoccupation with architectural form – and especially with repetition by inversion, augmentation and diminution. These reflect the composer’s career as a church organist (and famously gifted improviser) and hark back to Bach and early music, as well as forward to the meditative and even hypnotic or trance-like techniques employed by 20^thcentury minimalism. 

The organ-like quality of Bruckner’s orchestration was also brought out in the long monologues by the semi-autonomous orchestral sections – including Bruckner’s famous ‘choral’ brass passages, and some thrilling horn solos. This was Bruckner played as chamber music – and a fitting climax to this traversal of core Viennese (or perhaps more broadly Austrian) classical and romantic repertoire.

*

The third music show I saw at AF was Robyn Archer’s Picaresque. It was staged in the grandly titled but humbly equipped and somewhat featureless Banquet Room of the Adelaide Festival Centre. 

In form and content it’s essentially a travelling show, and the performance was graced by the occasional sounds of catering staff at work through the thin partition walls, which lent the show an appropriately provisional sense of being on tour – or perhaps on a cruise ship. 

Robyn is a veteran of Australian cabaret as well as being one of our leading cultural elders. Here she traversed a lifetime on the road, singing mostly well-known English, Italian, German, French and American songs from her repertoire. She was accompanied by her friend and longstanding performance partner George Butrumlis on the piano accordion (George also sang one Greek song accompanying himself on the bazouki). 

The songs were interspersed with some jovial patter about the music and the places she’s visited. These were also represented by a charming landscape of cardboard maquettes of city landmarks Robyn has collected over the years and assembled especially for the show (designed and beautifully lit by Geoff Cobham). There was also an exhibition (designed by Wendy Todd) featuring a huge collection of travel memorabilia, from train tickets and boarding passes to hotel towels, bathrobes and slippers. 

I found this show a captivating trip down memory lane. Robyn has a long and deeply personal relationship with this repertoire – from English music-hall to American protest songs, by way of Italian communist anthems, French chansonsby Piaf and Brel, and especially the bitter-sweet social-realist and Marxist songs of Brecht/Weil and Brecht/Eisler – and she still delivers them in a clear, ringing voice, with a dryness that’s both appropriate to the material and uniquely Australian. 

In particular there was a telling juxtaposition of Brecht/Eisler’s ‘Children’s Song’ (written after WW2 in an attempt to reclaim German patriotism from the legacy of fascism) with Caroline Carleton’s ‘Song of Australia’, which Robyn wryly remarked she to sing at school in Adelaide. Neither became the national anthem, perhaps because of their egalitarian values. Both however spoke of the need to affirm a love of country without invoking the darker perils of nationalism.

My favourite number of the night however was a stirring (but not shaken) reclamation of the Nancy Sinatra/John Barry theme-song to You Only Live Twice, which perfectly summed up the spirit of the show.

*

Turning now from music to dance – and leaving aside the major opera of the Festival, Barrie Kosky’s The Magic Flute (reviewed in a previous Postcard from Perth Festival) – I found the revival of Meryl Tankard’s Two Feet at the Dunstan Playhouse on the opening weekend a difficult experience.  

The show was originally created and danced by Tankard herself in 1988 as a solo dance-theatre work that focused on the life, career and mental breakdown of legendary early 20th-century Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva, juxtaposed with the experiences of a fictional young Australian dancer called Mepsi (based on Tankard’s own experiences of training as a dancer). 

Spessivtzeva was particularly famous for her interpretation of ballet’s most famous ‘mad scene’ as Giselle. While on tour to Australia in 1934 she was found wandering along a road outside Sydney; and she spent her final years in a mental hospital in the United States. Tankard’s own career took a very different route, from the Australian Ballet to Pina Bausch’s Wuppertaler Tanztheater, after which she returned to Australia and created her own style of dance theatre, first with the Merlyn Tankard Company in Canberra, and then as Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide (as well as many other projects in dance, opera and film). 

Two Feet is thus a deeply personal work, as well as a critique of ballet itself. Footage on Youtube confirms that Tankard’s own performance was central to the original production. Her lanky body, expressive face and unique qualities not only as a dancer but also as an actor and clown made her an ideal performer with Pina Bausch; and in Two Feet she clearly invested her heart and soul in what must have once been a provocative and confronting work.

None of this is evident in the revival, which casts contemporary Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova (who is billed as ‘the greatest contemporary Giselle’) in the dual roles of Olga and a revised version of Mepsi called ‘Natasha’ (based on Osipova’s own childhood and training). Spessivtzeva may be a fine ballerina, but she has none of the Tankard’s gifts as an actor or clown. Consequently the show comes across as a celebration rather than a subversion of ballet – a confusion evident at the performance I attended, when the audience clapped (with diminishing enthusiasm) at the end of each scene.

The show takes the form of a series of vignettes focussing either on Olga or Mepsi/Natasha, and includes excerpts from ballets (including Giselle and The Rite of Spring), more skittish or hallucinatory episodes, and projections of archival photos, film footage and video landscapes by visual designer Regis Lansac onto a vast upstage scrim. Once again, YouTube footage reveals an emotional and generic range to the vignettes which was totally lacking in the revival. The comic sketches fell resoundingly flat; the ballet-class sequences felt effortless rather than agonising; Tankard’s more stylised choreography was robbed of its strangeness; and the tragic scenes of breakdown and madness felt mimed rather than inhabited.

Moreover, the relentlessness of the rhythm – nineteen scenes of similar length spread across two Acts for two hours, with each scene ending in an awkward exit and/or a blackout, followed by a lumbering pause – might have worked in the more subversive dance-theatre context of the original production, but here it quickly became its own kind of deadly torture. The sequence culminates in a spectacular flooding of the stage, with Lansac’s projection of the ‘haunted forest’ from Giselle reflected in the water, where Olga/Natasha as a ragged spirit dances and finally collapses; but the execution was technically creaky, and as a coup de theatre it was a long time coming.

*

As a critique of the treatment of women in ballet (both as ballerinas and female characters), Two Feet can arguably be seen as a work of second-wave feminism, insofar as the latter tended to focus on the construction and deconstruction of femininity, in comparison with third-wave feminism, which has more squarely targeted masculinity, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement. 

This brings me to Carmen, a new contemporary ballet version of Bizet’s opera created by Swedish choreographer Johan Inger and originally commissioned by the Compana Nacional de Danza in Madrid, which I saw at the Festival Theatre the following weekend in a production by Semperoper Ballett Dresden.

Inger was a dancer with the Netherlands Dance Theatre under Jiri Kylian for ten years. Carmen shows the influence of Kylian as a work of contemporary ballet in that broadly speaking it tells a story (although at times this departs from the original or literal narrative and becomes more allusive or symbolic) and employs classical ballet techniques, while augmenting and disrupting these with other forms of movement. As such it’s more accessible and inclusive work than, say, a work of contemporary or postmodern dance by Cunningham or Forsythe, or even the Tanzteater of Pina Bausch (though it has arguably has more in common with the ‘dance theatre’ of Meryl Tankard). 

Inger uses the Carmen Suite by Russian composer Rodion Schedrin, a condensed version of Bizet’s original score in a hard-edged and cool-textured rearrangement for strings and percussion, which was originally composed for a one-act Carmen ballet by Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso in 1967. This is interspersed (particularly in the more dreamlike sequences) with original minimalist techno music by Marc Álvarez, which gives the work a more contemporary feel.

Inger retains the outline of the original plot, but sets it in a contemporary, globalised and semi-abstract world. Carmen still wears her red dress (with a zip down the front), but is (I think not accidentally) played by an East Asian dancer (Duosi Zhu on the performance I saw); she and her fellow cigarerras are more or less explicitly prostitutes hanging around a featureless industrial or corporate site. Don José (Francesco Pio Ricci) and his boss Zuniga (Joseph Hernandez) are security guards; Escamillo (Joseph Gray) becomes simply the ‘Toreador’, a nameless celebrity and narcissistic club-dance-floor sensation in a glittering disco costume; all the other roles in the opera are eliminated. 

A key addition is the role of the Little Boy (played by a female dancer Nastazia Philippou), who observes the action throughout, as if fascinated by both Don José and Carmen and learning from them how to be a subject (and object) of gender and desire. She/he also occasionally joins in the dream-sequences, most touchingly in a fantasy trio with Don José and Carmen as a kind of imaginary nuclear family, during which s/he holds a small Carmen-like doll in a red dress (which s/he destroys at the end of the opera). 

A female and male ensemble of fourteen play the other cigarreras and guards, as well as (in Inger’s other significant addition) a black-clad and masked team of ‘Smelling Dogs’ who collectively represent Death, Fate and (in this production) the deadly fate of toxic masculinity (one of them offers the Little Boy a basketball at the start of Act One – an offer he/she decisively rejects when it is repeated at the start of Act Two).  

The set (designed by Curt Allen Wilmer) consists of a bare stage with a series of towering mobile ‘walls’ which can be moved around by the ensemble, and which each have three faces: one solid with a kind of changing-room door, one containing a light-box covered by Venetian-style slatted blinds, and one with a huge mirror. The effect is of a nightmarish labyrinth which shifts from the exterior to the interior of the factory and then the nightclub, as well as other more abstract exterior (or psychically interior) locations. Dramatic lighting by Tom Visser (who also lit Hofesh Schechter’s Grand Finale – see below) adds to the expressionist film-noir atmosphere of menace, especially in Act Two with the increasing use of the blinds and vertical wires which descend across one half of the stage like prison-cell bars. 

Despite a riveting performance from Duosi Zhu as Carmen – with provocatively sexual choreography featuring a lot of semi-undressing, physical contact, floor-work and wide-open legs – the focus of the work is on Don José, a sympathetically small-framed but simmering and finally explosive figure, whose choreography is deliberately stiff and contained, except when he is left alone onstage – when his movements becomes more jerky and anguished – or in the fantasy duets with Carmen, when they become more fluid (just as hers become more tender and loving). Here the chemistry between Zhu and Ricci was touching, and it was a welcome relief (and perhaps a political choice) to see them kiss and hug each other in the curtain call after the work’s violent dénouement. The characters of Zuniga and the Toreador were less complex and cruder; but Philippou gave a convincing three-dimensionality and ambivalence to the figure of the Little Boy. Finally the ensemble lent a degree of individuality to their roles as cigarreras and guards, as well as a necessary air of ambiguity and menace as the Smelling Dogs. 

*

On a more intimate scale, Un Poyo Rojo is a wordless two-hander from Argentina that also deconstructs and mocks masculinity – this time in the context of a competitive locker-room relationship between two alpha males. 

The show began as a sketch created by dancer-choreographers Luciano Rosso and Nicolás Poggi in Buenos Aires, and then expanded into a full-length work directed by Hermes Guaido. The current version is performed by Rosso (who is also a lip-synch star on YouTube) with Alfonso Barón, an actor-dancer-physical performer who is also a former sports star. The skills and celebrity of the performers (including Baron’s sporting and acting credentials) – as well as their traditionally macho Latin heritage – lend added heft to the critique of masculinity (and in particular male sexuality) that the show delivers with such lightness yet to such devastating effect.

They wear tiny shorts, singlets, knee-pads and trainers; the set consists of two adjacent metal sports lockers and a wooden bench; and the major props comprise a portable radio (which is tuned and retuned by the performers to live local radio – with some hilarious results – and provides most of the soundtrack), a packet of cigarettes (which are variously inserted but never lit) and two water bottles. 

The show is extremely funny, physically relentless, and incorporates dance, physical theatre, acrobatics, wrestling and (most importantly) clowning. Clocking in at just under an hour, possibly it goes on a tad too long and remains pretty much at the same manic pace and in the same hysterical register; but then again, much the same can be said of toxic masculinity itself. 

I particularly enjoyed watching these two men watch each other with inscrutable faces that spoke volumes, as well as seeing them get up close and sweaty in paroxysms of conflict (inscrutable faces in equally inscrutable crotches); and the closing kiss (immediately disclaimed in the curtain-call) was a delicious final image. 

*

Local Adelaide contemporary circus troupe Gravity and Other Myths have received ongoing support from the Adelaide Festival, who co-commissioned their previous show Backbone, and now their latest work Out of Chaos.

The eight young acrobats have an exhilarating sense of ensemble offset by a rough-hewn individuality and raw honesty – all of which (along with the lo-fi production design) are immensely refreshing in an era of somewhat mass-produced, hi-end ‘new circus’. 

Geoff Cobham has created a remarkable minimalist visual design mostly involving hand-held lighting such as torches or single lamps that are carried around the stage or fixed into dangling overhead cables (sometimes as part of the acrobatics). In general, the show uses darkness in a way I’ve never seen before in circus, though there’s plenty of inner lightness from the performers. This adds to the sense of cosmic and artistic creation evoked by the title. 

Even more remarkable is the minimalist score. This is also hand-held and largely generated and mixed onstage by Sydney-based Turkish-Australian composer-performer Ekrem Phoenix, who roams the stage like an elfin demiurge armed with an iPad, triggering the lighting changes and creating loops using his own voice – which ranges from whispered and muttered words to haunting wordless falsetto melodies overlaid in modal harmonies reminiscent of Turkish, Persian and Arabic music – as well as hand-held instruments like the melodica (a small keyboard reed harmonium with a flexible mouth-tube though which the player blows air) and occasional electronic sounds and beats. He also samples and loops the voices of the acrobats themselves in random snatches of self-talk – most notably when they are preparing or performing death-defying feats of acrobatics. Most spectacular of all is the climax of the show, when Phoenix himself becomes one of the acrobats while continuing to sing and mix the score, until he finally topples backward from the top of a three-person stack (still singing) and plunges into a blackout.

Personally I found it a relief to see a work of physical theatre that allowed its performers to play to their strengths and be themselves rather than trying to act; that used language honestly and revealingly; that didn’t attempt to create a fictional world or tell a story (apart from that of its own creation – and perhaps Creation itself); and that used such simple means to such spectacular ends. To be sure, it didn’t preach any moral or political sermons; but it certainly practised gender equity, empowered its performers and demonstrated (as the best acrobatics can) than – in art as in democracy – collaboration, trust and being there for others is all. 

*

Zizanie is a new work created by Meryl Tankard for Restless Dance Theatre, an Adelaide company also working with young people with (and without) disabilities. 

I found this work very beautiful visually but increasingly problematic in content and tone. It began with a hallucinatory opening sequence involving the performers (who for some reason were not named in the program, but who mostly seemed to have Down Syndrome) entering from the wings wearing animal masks and teetering sideways to and fro across the otherwise empty stage (set and costume design by Jonathon Oxlade) while making small nervous hand and head movements against a vast brightly coloured video projection of flowers flickering and wavering in a luminous field (videography once again by Tankard’s regular collaborator Regis Lansac). 

Unfortunately the animal masks and personas then disappeared (as inexplicably as they had been introduced) and a formulaic narrative (and more sentimental aesthetic) took over. This was a story based on a children’s book called The Fun Funnel by Robbie Cameron, which more or less follows the outlines of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’ (but without the latter’s tragic ending). Apparently Cameron’s book is intended for children aged three to seven, and has also been enjoyed by children with special needs. However I felt deeply uncomfortable about watching young (but not very young) disabled performers playing children – especially in demeaning storybook costumes vaguely reminiscent of Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland – while the only adult (and villain) in the piece appeared to be played by the only non-disabled performer. 

Things became even more kitsch with a prolonged routine set to the saccharine 50s classic ‘If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked A Cake’, which the audience sang along with karaoke-style, while the performers endlessly entered and exited cheekily from the wings and a video was projected of them forming human pyramids on the floor. There were lots of cute ooh’s and ah’s from the audience, and the cast seemed to be enjoying themselves, but I felt like I was watching something that’s been banned from circuses and sideshows for decades. 

I’ve seen a lot of highly sophisticated physical and text-based theatre in recent years involving disabled and particularly Down Syndrome performers, including Melbourne’s Rawcus, Back to Back in Geelong, Black Swan’s You Know We Belong Together and Jerome Bel’s more confrontational work Disabled Theatre (the last three all previously reviewed here). In comparison, I found Zizanie simplistic and fundamentally disempowering.

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The other ‘family’ show I saw in the Festival – French Compagnie Non Nova’sFoehn –had me enchanted, amazed, delighted and (in a final twist) surprisingly disturbed. 

The German title refers to a warm wind in the lee of a mountain range – and is also a German word for a hairdryer. In this case, the wind is generated by a circle of domestic fans. The performance takes place inside the circle, and involves a single performer/puppeteer (Silvano Nogueira), a collection of plastic shopping bags, and a soundtrack which consists largely of extracts from Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Nocturnes and La Mer. 

Foehn is a work of puppetry/object/visual theatre, but it’s also a dance work. In fact my young companion described it afterward as ‘a ballet for plastic bags’. Essentially the Debussy functions as a ballet score (as it did for Njinsky); the bags become dancers, with bodies and souls, thanks to the air from the fans and minimal manipulation from the puppeteer. The latter begins the work by making a small, simple human figure out of three plastic bags using a pair of scissors and some sticky tape. He then crumples the figure on the floor, turns on the fans, and leaves the space; and magic ensues.

Pierre Boulez described the opening flute solo of Debussy’s Preludeas bringing ‘new breath to the art of music’. Here the wind from the fans becomes the breath that brings the plastic bag to life. Once animated, it performs autonomously: unfolding, taking shape, standing, turning, spinning, leaping, flying, dancing in mid-air and landing again; all while remaining within the circle of fans, and largely without intervention. The puppeteer returns, with more plastic bags; and soon the stage becomes a teeming world.

The illusion of life, consciousness and free will is astonishing, and had me reflecting on the nature of all three, as well as the concepts of air, wind and breath in religious, metaphysical and scientific thought. Like the composer-performer in Out of Chaos, here the puppeteer-performer becomes a kind of demiurge. At one point the bag-puppets flock to him and shelter under the wing of his cloak, an image recalling that of the Virgin of Mercy in Christian art. 

I was also struck by how little it takes for us to see characters or create a story. This became even more apparent in the second half of the show, when a new and slightly more elaborate but still largely featureless puppet is introduced, in the form of a folded concertina of golden paper, which unfolds in the wind like a serpent or dragon before rising, taking off and spiralling into the air. A kind of ‘battle’ then ensued between one of the bag-people and the dragon, which had me reflecting once again on the archetypal nature of this and other primordial stories.

The show ended with a cascade of more basic and slightly larger black plastic bags, which invaded the space from a funnel upstage and finally overwhelmed the remaining pink plastic-bag person and the puppeteer-demiurge. I found this quite a bleak ending; and once again, found myself irresistibly finding meaning and telling stories: cosmic entropy, environmental catastrophe, and even (to my horror and shame) certain paranoid fascist political fantasies. I can only hope that my young companion didn't have the same associations.

*

This leads me to the final dance work I saw on the closing weekend of the Festival: Grand Finale, directed and choreographed by London-based Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter and his eponymous company. 

The ten dancers (who come from all over the world) are all remarkable, but to some extent Shechter’s choreography deliberately strips them of individuality. Most of the movement is as an ensemble (even if individual dancers invest it with different degrees of intensity), occasionally splitting into smaller groups or duos. Much of it occurs in looped repetition, sometimes over long periods; shoulders and hips are loose; mouths repeatedly open in silent screams; and there is a lot of falling, rolling, crawling and collapsing. A repeated motif involves dancers being dragged around the stage like corpses, or lifted and shaken like rag-dolls.

Like Carmen, the show has a dramatic and architectural lighting design by Tom Vissler, involving sudden blackouts and reveals, spatial fragmentation and thick shafts of light visible through the permanent haze. The set design (by Tom Scutt) also resembles Carmen in that it involves a collection of movable walls, though these are even more abstract and featureless; they reminded me of towers or chimneys, or perhaps even the concrete slabs or ‘stellae’ of Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Costumes (also by Scutt) are contemporary and minimal, consisting of street-clothes comprising various tops, pants and socks (indiscriminately worn by both genders).

The music consists of an electronic and heavily percussive score by Shechter (who composes most of the music for his shows), but also (as with Out of Chaos) involves the presence of live musicians: in this case, a quintet in evening-wear playing fragments of Tchaikovsky, Lehar and other folk-derived music. Shechter writes in the program that he wanted to invoke a sense of disaster and even apocalypse; the musicians in evening wear obviously recall the Titanic; and there is a general ambience of a last waltz or danse macabre. 

Violence and beauty, despair and hope, nihilism and sentimentality go hand in hand in a manner that at times becomes almost obscene. At the end of Act One, in an image of pure schmaltz, soap-bubbles descend from above, sparkling in the light, and burst on the floor, while the love-waltz from The Merry Widow plays; then the curtain comes down, leaving a dancer alone on the forestage slumped in a chair like a corpse, with a handwritten sign around his neck saying: ‘Interval.’ When we come back for Act Two, the same sign reads: ‘Karma’; the musicians return and cajole us into clapping and whistling along with them while they play folk tunes; then the curtain goes up again, and the dance-party resumes, gradually becoming a frenzied rave, and finally subsiding into a series of brief motionless frescoes featuring individual dancers facing away from us and pressed against the walls. 

I found this work riveting and devastating, even if at times I felt as if I (and the dancers) were being treated in an almost totalitarian way. 

*

Next week Humph reviews the text-based theatre works at the Adelaide Festival.