Enlightenment 

(The Enlightenment of the Siddhartha Gautama Buddha and the Encounter with the Monkey King – Great Sage, Equal of Heaven)
Written by Joe Paradise Lui
Directed by Marcel Dorney
Elbow Room Productions
Perth Studio Underground

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

The late-70s Japanese TV series Monkey is one of my all-time favourite shows. The English-dubbed version was broadcast by the BBC when I was at Cambridge in the early 80s, and I became an instant fan. 

 

Growing up in Lower Flügelhorn I’d been glued to the TV screen after school watching the 60s Japanese historical action series Shintaro and the 70s American East-meets-Western series Kung Fu (both dubbed into German for Austrian TV). Then as a budding teenage cinephile I’d eagerly devoured Hong Kong 70s martial arts movies like Five Fingers of Death and Fist of Fury with German subtitles on weekend excursions to Vienna. 

 

As a nostalgic overseas student at Cambridge, I loved Monkey’s combination of fight scenes, slapstick comedy, Chinese folklore, Buddhist wisdom, and (in the BBC version) rapid-fire dialogue in ‘Asian’ accents by British actors – not to mention the head-banging theme song ‘Monkey Magic’ about the title character (‘the punkiest monkey that ever popped’), which I later covered back in Vienna with my prog rock band The Flying Squirrels. 

 

Later my interest in literature led me to the 16^th century Chinese novel Journey to the West on which Monkey was based – a novel which was in turn inspired by the pilgrimage to India of 7^th century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzhang. Eventually my para-phenomenological researches took me on my own inner journey to the East after having visited India and Nepal with my parents as a 10-year old – see my blog post last year at http://humphreybower.blogspot.com/2022/01/

Perth-based Singaporean-Chinese-Australian theatre-maker Joe Paradise Lui has long been on his own personal, artistic, political and spiritual pilgrimage. A mainstay of the Perth independent and mainstage theatre scene, he's created his own post-dramatic contemporary performance works (many devised in collaboration with other local independent luminaries) for his company Renegade Productions; lent his freelance talents as a lighting and sound designer, director, composer, musician and actor to innumerable productions by other companies and fellow artists; and undoubtedly clocked in more shows at The Blue Room (allegedly two hundred and counting) than any other artist in history. 

 

Even by his own eclectic standards Enlightenment is an unusual addition to the Joe Lui oeuvre because it flexes his muscles as a playwright rather than a contemporary performance maker, and because he’s entrusted its first production to another director and company in a different city: namely, Melbourne-based director Marcel Dorney and his company Elbow Room (though Lui was seemingly unable to resist the temptation of designing the lighting and sound as well). The production premiered in Melbourne at Northcote Town Hall in early 2000 with the intention of transferring to Perth; but events took an unexpected turn with the onset of the pandemic and the closure of state borders; and it took almost two years for the show to hit the road for a cruelly brief four-night season at the Perth Studio Underground.

 

In fact Enlightenment reminds me of another anomalous work in the Lui canon: the confessional solo show Letters Home, which he wrote, directed, designed and performed at The Blue Room in 2015. That show reflected on the journey from his birthplace in the authoritarian city-state of Singapore to his self-imposed exile in Perth: first as an international student and then as a renegade artist, after deciding at the last minute not to go home on the completion of his studies. Despite our very different trajectories I related deeply to that show as a former international student at Cambridge and later self-imposed exile in Perth myself after the formation of the far-right Austrian coalition government in 2000 – an event which now seems to presage the global rise of right-wing populism over the last two decades.

 

Unlike Letters Home the genre of Enlightenment is not confessional. Instead it might be described as a mash-up of mythic/religious epic, social/political satire, erotic/crime thriller, romantic comedy and superhero movie: think Strindberg’s Road to Damascus meets Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan meets Fatal Attraction meets My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Nevertheless, a confessional element is surely present even if in a disguised form. Like Strindberg and Brecht, Lui dons the masks of his dramatis personae in order to wrestle with personal questions about identity, sex, religion, ethics and politics.  

 

In particular, the character-avatars of The Buddha and The Monkey King as they appear in the play seem like dual aspects of a single person (conceivably the playwright himself). As such they’re reminiscent of the way the ‘good’ prostitute Shen Te in The Good Person of Szechuan splits off a part of herself and pretends to be her ‘bad’ male cousin Shui Ta in order to survive in a broken world (a splitting that also arguably reflected Brecht’s own compartmentalised personality).

 

Enlightenment is set in a comic-book-style generic dystopian metropolis that could be Perth, Melbourne, Singapore or Gotham City. The plot concerns an idle rich young Asian princess Sid (played by Alice Qin), a contemporary avatar of the young prince Siddhartha Gautama, who renounced his former life and became the Buddha. Sid hooks up via a dating app with angry young hustler Sage (Merlynn Tong), likewise an avatar of the legendary Monkey King (the title character in Monkey), who called himself ‘great Sage, equal of Heaven’ and was imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, until freed after promising to serve the monk Tang Sanzang in Journey to the West (Tripitaka in the TV series) on his pilgrimage to India. 

 

A sub-plot features two hapless straight White male cops (John Marc Desengano and Conor Gallacher), who I fancied might also be avatars of Tripitaka’s monster-companions Sandy and Pigsy in Monkey and Journey to the West (Sandy was a particular favourite of mine). Like their originals, they provide comic relief as objects of satirical mockery, though things take a somewhat darker turn when Sage gets pulled over for speeding and is recognized as the poster of a viral online video threatening to kill a cop in a violently explicit manner as revenge for a previous harassment. Elbow Room co-artistic director Emily Tomlins played a series of characters including a streetwalker, Sid’s housemaid, a police chief and a narrator-figure who was ultimately revealed (without being explicitly named) as the Buddha himself in his deified form.

 

Enlightenment deftly sutures Eastern and Western high art and pop culture in a way that’s worthy of Monkey itself and the TV shows and movies that followed it, right up to Tarantino’s Kill Bill or more recently (and most brilliantly) the Daniels Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All At Once (easily my film of year for 2022). The production also featured an exhilarating performance by Merlynn Tong as Sage/Monkey, encompassing all the registers of the genre mash-up from slapstick comedy to rom-com cuteness, horror-movie terror, monstrous rage and spiritual angst. 

 

The characters, scenes, dialogue and plot owe more to popular film and TV than to a more rigorous and fleshed-out dramaturgy like Brecht's (at least in his mature work). In short, this is a form of theatre mediated by the screen – big, small and hand-held. As such it assumes a degree of pop-culture literacy on the part of an audience for its shorthand to communicate. Scenes are mostly short and begin or end abruptly; dialogue is relentlessly snappy or self-consciously cheesy (‘You’re so corny!’ is a signature catchcry); and there are holes, jumps and coincidences in the plot that a regular viewer of popular film or TV would easily take in their stride. 

 

The queering of the relationship between Sid and Sage is a refreshing twist on the standard rom-com formula – as well as a nod to the casting of a woman as the monk Tripitaka in the original Monkey TV series (one of that show’s many delights). Admittedly the portrayal of a queer relationship between two women as a ‘safe space’ free of patriarchal and heterosexual norms initially seemed a little idealised (including the orgasmic sex). In any event, their honeymoon period ended when it came to personal and class differences (though such differences were probably a plus when it came to orgasmic sex). 

 

However, the characterisation of both protagonists seemed a little lacking in backstory and motivation (in the case of Sage) or (in the case of Sid) as an avatar of the Buddha, even at the stage of unenlightened Bodhisattva. As a result, the climax of the play (or rather its anti-climax) felt contrived and implausible, with Sid convincing Sage to turn herself in, learning at second-hand from the police about her alleged betrayal, and then betraying and abandoning her in return – a somewhat complicated parallel to the Buddha’s entrapment of Monkey in the original story.

 

The minor characters were more two-dimensional and as such easy targets – especially the clownish cops, who seemed unsuited to their roles when the plot took a more sinister turn. They were also easy targets in a double sense, as Sage’s cop-killing harangue had unfortunate overtones in the light of recent events, which made it hard to laugh despite Tong’s ebullient delivery (a little rewriting here would be an easy fix).

 

Despite her stage presence and acting chops, I found the casting of Tompkins in her series of roles problematic, especially when she was revealed as the Buddha in the final scene. (In fact I was initially unsure ‘who’ she was in this scene, possibly because I’d identified Qin in the role of the Buddha up to that point.) Doubtless having a White actor with platinum blonde hair playing these roles was intended to be ironic. However her final manifestation as the Buddha felt clunky, as did the reduction of the Enlightened One to a variation on Tompkins’s earlier role as the police chief. Perhaps this clunkiness was likewise meant to be ironic, like a deus ex machina in a Greek tragedy. However, it had the retroactive effect of making Tompkins’s cumulative role seem like that of a White puppet-master throughout the play. As such, it left me confused as to the target of the play’s critique: Buddhism; wealth and privilege; or a more generalized notion of power in all its forms. 

To represent these alternatives as isomorphic surely involves a false equivalence. To be sure, we can attribute the emergence of Buddhism to a certain historical moment or class outlook. However, to reduce it to a form of ruling class ideology is as simplistic as reducing Christianity to what Nietzsche called the morality of slaves; and to identify Buddhism with theocracy, patriarchy, heteronormativity or White supremacy is a bit of a stretch. 

 

More broadly, to lump caste, class, race, gender or sexuality together as forms of oppression is to ignore the specificity of each and use a blunt instrument when more specialized tools are needed. Alongside a Nietzschean hammer, a Marxist sickle comes in handy, along with an anti-racist bolt-cutter, a feminist nutcracker, a queer screwdriver, and perhaps even a philosophical or theological torch to shine some light on things. 

As an aside: a common contemporary reading of Nietzsche or my old friend Michel Foucault leads to a similar oversimplification about power and its seeming ineluctability. However, Foucault was always careful to remind people that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ – and therefore the possibility of freedom, which he said was the ontological condition of power and the underlying theme of his work. My old friend Jean-Francois Lyotard’s distinction between pouvoir and puissance (which might be translated as ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ power) also comes in handy here. The distinction helps us to maintain a sense of political optimism, as opposed to pessimism or cynicism (which Nietzsche said are the hallmarks of a slave morality) – but I’m wandering off the track.

 

To return to the play: possibly casting a non-White actor like Desengano (who gave an engaging performance as the more likeable of the two cops) instead of Tompkins in some of these roles would have helped. Alternatively (or additionally) having Qin play the Buddha in the final scene would have developed the relationship between Buddha and Monkey as a qualitative dialectic between alternately attracting and opposing personalities or forces (like Apollo and Dionysus) as well as socio-economic classes (like bourgeois and proletarian or master and servant). Instead, it was reduced to a quantitative difference between power and powerlessness that ultimately appeared to be about colonisation and race.

 

With substitution of a White Buddha in the final scene, Sid’s character-arc was left unfinished – unlike the story of Siddhartha, who leaves his life of privilege and enters a period of asceticism before finding the middle way of enlightenment and becoming the Buddha. Foreshortening this dialectic of enlightenment (to borrow a phrase from my old friends Adorno and Horkheimer) in the case of both characters led to a simple reinforcement of social and psychological structures with no possibility of change.

 

The original story is more complex (even in the TV show). Monkey is tricked and imprisoned by the Buddha, but later released by the Boddhisatva Guanyin; and the golden circlet of restraint placed around Monkey’s head by Guanyin and activated whenever Monkey becomes violent represents the force of conscience rather than oppression – with the promise of liberation once enlightenment is attained. Thus one might argue both Buddha and Monkey undergo a similar journey from excess (of wealth and privilege in the one case, or aggressiveness and the lust for power in the other) to privation (asceticism in the case of the Buddha, imprisonment and servitude in the case of Monkey) before finding the middle way and reaching enlightenment, which ends the cycle of suffering. This spiritual path arguably points the way to a political one as well (see my ‘Buddhism, Critical Theory, Post-Structuralism: Liberation Theology for a Neoliberal Age’ (Buddhismus, Kritische Theorie, Poststrukturalismus: Befreiungstheologie für Ein Neoliberales Zeitalte, translated by Humphrey Bower, unpublished). 

 

However, by foreshortening the dialectic of enlightenment to a vicious circle of entrapment and betrayal, the ending of Enlightenment (at least in this production) left the audience feeling as trapped and betrayed as Sage herself by the prospect of a revolution forever forestalled (a common reading of Adorno and Horkheimer too, by the way, which is just as cynical and pessimistic as the reading of Nietzsche and Foucault mentioned earlier).

 

This feeling of entrapment was reinforced by Cherish Marrington’s otherwise elegant set: a temple-like structure featuring steps rising from the forestage to a platform framed by an architrave of curtains and a roof-shaped banner onto which neon-outlined street-protest or emoji-style illustrations by Chinese dissident cartoonist Badiucao were projected. The whole ensemble was evocative of both ancient and contemporary China, but entrances and exits were made cumbersome by having actors slink behind the curtains and then clamber onto or off the stage – notwithstanding much creative use of fabrics being draped over bodies to ‘conceal’ them while they were having sex or make them ‘appear’ or ‘disappear’ at the beginning or end of scenes. 

 

Similarly, I loved the use of Mandarin surtitles throughout, but their impact was skewed by projecting them onto the bottom right-hand corner of the architrave rather than across the lintel above the action, where the Badiucao projections – while striking – were ultimately little more than decorative distractions. Alternatively, it might have been simpler and more effective (and more Brechtian) to do the whole thing on a bare floor or platform and project the surtitles across the back wall, allowing the space to transform as needed from bedroom to street and the actors to come and go without needing to hide anything.

 

The most disturbing scene (and arguably the turning point) in the play is when Sage is pulled over by the cops and identified, after which things rapidly spiral out of control. This was staged in darkness using voiceover, allowing the audience’s imagination to flesh things out. However, the impact of the scene was reduced by the fact that the cops had previously been played for laughs, and by the close-mic voiceover delivery (both factors made it hard to discern if these were even the same cops). Perhaps if Sage had recorded the event on her phone (like her online harangue at the start of the play) and played it back to Sid onstage, the device would have been more dramatically effective and allowed for more interesting possibilities in terms of the couple’s subsequent choices, as well as making the scene feel less like exploitation/torture-porn.

 

In sum: there’s a great play here about the relationship between Sid and Sage – whether in the fully realised form of a Brechtian parable, thriller, rom-com, superhero movie, or all of the above – waiting to be liberated like a trapped Monkey from beneath the mountain of intertextuality under which Enlightenment currently labours. That play (even in its current avatar-form) awaits a production that would strip away the artistic and cultural baggage of temple-structures and problematic casting to deliver the work’s potentially hilarious, sexy, touching, searing, terrifying and liberating message. The process of liberation might involve the original Monkey and Buddha stories being fully integrated and transcended; the violence of the artist-renegade being tempered by the golden circlet of theatrical discipline; and their artistic and spiritual pilgrimage from East to West and back again being accomplished.

 

Meanwhile, if the heavy-handedness of this critique of the play and production seems like using a hammer to crack a walnut – well, that’s how you crack a walnut, if you want to get to the kernel of things. It’s also a tribute to the thoughtful and thought-provoking nature of the artistic team and their work.

 

*

 

Enlightenment (The Enlightenment Of The Siddhartha Gautama Buddha And The Encounter With The Monkey King – Great Sage, Equal of Heaven) was at The Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA, from December 14 to 17.

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. After leaving Cambridge he spent some years in Paris as Michel Foucault’s barber and personal stylist and as Jean-Francois Lyotard’s personal shopper, in which capacity he is said to have influenced the latter’s move away from libidinal economics towards the theory of language games as well as towards wearing more layers of clothing. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

Return to Seoul

Perth Festival Lotterywest Films

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

When I was a precocious 14-year-old schoolboy in Lower Flügelhorn my parents allowed me (possibly unwisely) to go on a one-year student exchange program to Melbourne, Australia, where I was billeted with the family of my future friend and colleague Humphrey Bower. I didn’t speak English but learned the language and culture immersively. Without realising it at the time I was repeating my mother’s childhood exile from Austria with her parents which took place before the Nazi occupation in 1938. History, as Marx said, repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Later I would continue this pattern by going to Cambridge to study philosophy, and finally by going into voluntary exile from Austria after the election of the far-right coalition government in 2000. 

 

Davy Chou is a Cambodian-French filmmaker whose parents emigrated to Paris before most of their remaining family were killed by the Khmer Rouge. He ‘returned’ to Cambodia for the first time to make Golden Slumbers (2012), a documentary featuring relics and interviews with witnesses from the ‘golden’ era of Cambodian filmmaking that preceded the Khmer Rouge regime under which over 400 films were lost or destroyed and most the artists who worked on them were killed or fled. His subsequent film Diamond Island (2016) featured a cast of young debut actors and dealt with a teenager from a rural province in Cambodia who comes to Phnom Penh to earn money as a construction worker on a half-finished luxury development and is reunited with a long-lost older brother. 

 

Return to Seoul (2022) similarly deals with themes of trauma, loss, migration, reunion, heritage, identity and coming to terms with the past (the original English title was All The People I’ll Never Be). Freddie (a mesmerising debut from Ji Min Park) is a free-spirited but emotionally dissociated 25-year-old French-Korean adoptee who returns to her country of origin for the first time since she was a baby and embarks on a journey of discovery that includes learning the language and culture and eventually seeking out her birth-parents. Chou has explained in interviews that he based Freddie on a French-Korean adoptee-friend who accompanied him to South Korea for the screening of Golden Slumbers in Busan and was reunited with her birth parents; and that the character was further developed in collaboration with Park; but that the film (co-written with Claire Maugendre) also draws on his own life.  

 

Park’s performance drives the film, her alternately radiant or coldly expressionless face in almost every frame, half-filling it in close-up or carefully placed as if almost lost or forgotten in carefully composed wide shots. Her co-star is Seoul itself and other locations in South Korea where most of the film is shot apart from a final scene in Romania, all evocatively captured in luminous colours by cinematographer Thomas Favel and fluidly edited by Dounia Sichov. The city changes mood and identity in the course of the film as dramatically as Freddie herself, who in a series of time-jumps over the ensuing years transforms from casual slacker to glamorous femme fatale to high-class arms dealer and finally globe-wandering backpacker, seeking or offering and then rejecting or withholding affection from random strangers, lovers, friends, colleagues and family along the way.

 

Return to Seoul resists the temptation of psychological, sociological or moral commentary about the ‘issue’ of adoption in favour of a meditation on the elusive nature of identity and belonging, meaning and purpose, being and desire. Freddie ceases to be a case-history and becomes an everywoman perpetually trapped by her own and others’ demands for love. The final shot of her pausing to sight-read Bach’s despairing supplication Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ at a hotel foyer piano in Romania on her birthday before leaving without even checking in – and after learning that an email to her birth mother has bounced – is an exquisite image of existential abandonment and transcendental homelessness. 

 

*

 

Return to Seoul screens at Somerville Auditorium, University of Western Australia, as part of Perth Festival Lotterywest Films from Mon 12 to Sunday 18 December.

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the paraphenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Paraphänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s student and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

D*ck Pics in the Garden of Eden
Written and directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
The Last Great Hunt
Subiaco Theatre Centre

Oil by Ella Hickson
Directed by Adam Mitchell
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Heath Ledger Theatre 

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Last week I saw Black Swan State Theatre Company’s production of Oil by Ella Hickson at the Heath Ledger Theatre and The Last Great Hunt's production of Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s D*ck Pics in the Garden of Eden at the Subiaco Theatre Centre. 

 

That’s what it said on the program: ‘THE LAST GREAT HUNT PRESENTS Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s D*CK PICS in the Garden of Eden’. In the event, I’m relieved to say, I didn’t see Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s or anyone else's d*ck pics in the Garden of Eden or anywhere else. However, there were lots of soft fake d*cks, breasts, nipples and pubic hair on the outside of buffoonish padded body suits worn by the cast and designed by Maeli Cherel, who also designed the appropriately shag-pile-carpeted set. 

 

D*ck Pics and Oil are epic works whose central characters travel through time and space across history. There are other similarities between the two plays and productions. Both are parables, one focussing on gender and sexuality, the other on the oil industry; both tell the intergenerational story of a single family; both hover somewhat uncertainly between allegory and realism; both have unusually large casts for Perth (8 and 10 respectively); both have multiple actors playing the same characters or the same actors playing the same or different characters across multiple generations, with sometimes confusing results; and both use multiracial casting in sometimes problematic ways. Finally, both appear progressive, but I found both surprisingly reactionary in the way they represent the relationships between power, gender, sexuality, race and class. 

 

In fact, despite its multiracial cast and the fact that it's largely set in ‘Suburbia’, D*ck Pics ignores race and class completely, a common oversight in much white middle-class Australian theatre, and one which is not addressed simply by casting more non-white actors. It retells the story of Adam and Eve who appear in various guises played by different actors; their children Cain ‘The Unashamed’ (as his epithet reads in the program) and Lulu ‘The Overshadowed’ (an addition to the Biblical story – there’s no Abel in this version); God and Lucifer; and Adam’s first wife Lilith (who appears in Jewish mythology and may be derived from the dual creation accounts in Genesis); the first scenes are set in the Garden of Eden, and most of the rest of the play is set in ‘Suburbia’. This narrative thread is interwoven with the coming-out story of Dick Dickson, Cain’s high school teacher and a wannabe stand-up comic who has sex with Lilith and later Cain. 

 

Fowler, his fellow creatives and the cast have lots of fun with the early pantomime-like ‘Eden’ scenes, which feature a clueless Adam ‘The First Man’ (David Vickman), an ingenuous Eve ‘Made of Rib’ (Arielle Gray), Lucifer ‘The Serpent’ (Iya Ware) and the rest of the cast as various creatures frolicking around on the carpeted floor, discovering and exploring their fake appendages and each other, and settling into stereotypical gender-based power dynamics. These dynamics get played out with a sharper satirical edge in the subsequent ‘Suburbia’ scenes between Adam ‘The Father’ (Ben Sutton), Eve ‘The Mother’ (Jo Morris), Cain (Tyrone Earl Lraé Robinson), Lulu (Joanna Tu), Dick Dickson (Chris Isaacs), Lilith ‘the Wandering Demon’ (Gray), Lucifer ‘The Fallen’ (Vickman), Lilith ‘The Artist’ (Ware) and God ‘The Misplaced’ (Vickman). 

 

Dickson’s coming-out-story unfolds in a more gently ironic vein of rom-com-gone-wrong. He wears a similarly buffoonish costume and sports a somewhat smaller appendage, but otherwise the two stories seemed to belong to two different plays. In general I found the Dickson scenes more interesting, and the gay male characters in particular more three-dimensional. The Eden/Suburbia scenes and characters were more like cartoons, and the gender stereotypes were a bit reductive and predictable (notwithstanding the best efforts of the actors to flesh them out) in comparison with the ambiguity and mystery of the Bible. Moreover, those stereotypes appeared to be determined by biology or destiny rather than being enforced or learned and were reinforced through persuasion or manipulation rather than being underwritten by physical or economic coercion, despite hints of past sexual violence between Adam and Lilith. The resulting account of heterosexual relationships seemed a bit simplistic and pessimistic. In contrast, the Dickson scenes (especially between the gay characters) were more complex, unpredictable and dramatically credible. Dickson’s lame but evolving stand-up routines were a highlight of the show.

 

However, my favourite piece of writing in the play was the Director’s Statement in the program. This was actually more like a Playwright’s Statement and took the form of a Prologue to the play itself, in the guise of one of Dickson’s stand-up routines, complete with sentences that were crossed out but still legible. These included graphic descriptions of gay sex, references to homophobia, confessions of sexual insecurity and even hints of sexual abuse. I only read it after seeing the play, and it completely reframed my experience, especially of the Dickson scenes, and totally eclipsed the Garden of Eden/Suburbia plot. Now that's a play I'd love to see.

 

I also loved the Playschool-like simplicity of the design and performances, although I felt that the somewhat token use of live video feed in some scenes added little to what was already happening onstage. As for the cast: I thought everyone did sterling work, and applaud the employment of a relatively large cast and a least a few non-white faces (3 out of 8). However, I couldn’t help thinking that the story could have been told more clearly and effectively with a cast of 7 instead of 8, and without all the doubling and role-swapping. I also couldn’t help feeling that the non-white actors had the less developed roles of Cain, Lulu, Lucifer ‘The Serpent’ and Lilith ‘The Artist’. To be sure, there’s a story about race and class in the Bible which begins as soon as Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden and their descendants migrate into Palestine. But that’s another play entirely.

 

*

 

Notwithstanding its laudable ambitions, and the accolades it’s received since it first premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2016, I found Ella Dickson’s Oil even more structurally incoherent, with an even more reductive and cheaply pessimistic reading of history and relationships – not only between women and men but between mothers and daughters. 

 

The play begins in a rural cottage in Cornwall in the 19^th Century. May (a noble performance by Hayley McElhinney) is the pregnant wife of Joss (Michael Abercrombie), who share a household with two other brothers (Will O’Mahony and St John Cowcher) and their wives (Grace Chow and Violette Ayad) presided over by the family matriarch Ma (Polly Lowe). May and Joss have a passionate physical relationship, but she longs for a better life for herself and their unborn child. The arrival of a stranger from the United States (Will Bastow) bearing the Trojan horse of a newly invented kerosene lamp and offering to buy their land provides May with an opportunity to escape – and the rest, apparently, is history. 

 

We next meet May and her mischievous daughter Amy (Abbey Morgan) in a British colonial kitchen in Tehran (which I was interested to learn is located in 'the desert’) in the early 20^th Century, where she is now a domestic servant and single mother. She manages to align her fortunes with the heartless Officer Samuel (Will O’Mahony) who sees a future in colonising and exploiting Persia for its oil deposits. Time-jump to a kitchen in London in the 1970s and the play jumps the shark in one of many increasingly implausible scenes. May has become the head of a British oil company, somewhat improbably living in the left-wing intellectual haven of Hampstead and struggling to control her now rebellious teenage daughter. She has an unexpected and rather unlikely home-visit from an official from Gaddafi’s new government in Libya (Tinashe Mangwana) who wants her to sign off on nationalising 50% of her company’s oil production in that country (such expropriations certainly took place but not as far as I’m aware in kitchens across London). Time-jump to a desert in contemporary Iraq where rebellious daughter Amy has run away and befriended a local woman (Ayad) until May (in an impeccable winter suit) shows up to fetch her home. Final time-jump to a cold dark cottage in Cornwall fifty years in the future where an ageing May and Amy are now living together again and surviving on limited power and heating until another stranger shows up bearing another Trojan Horse. This time it’s a woman from a Chinese company (Grace Chow) with a small domestic nuclear fusion device which will supply all their domestic needs for the small price of a subscription (terms and conditions attached). Throughout the play May is haunted by the Cornish husband she abandoned but still pines for; and thus apparently the whirligig of time brings on its revenges.

 

Just to be clear: I’m all in favour of characters travelling through time and other magic realist devices familiar from novels like Orlando, The Tin Drum or Midnight’s Children and plays like Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine or Top Girls. The problem with the use of time travel and magic realism in Oil is that (unlike those novels and plays) the scenes themselves are (literally) kitchen-sink realist in style and contain no elements no magic or fantasy at all (apart from jarring inaccuracies and implausibilities) with the possible exception of the final scene and the occasional appearance of May’s husband as a time-travelling ghost-narrator. As a result, the genre and tone of the play and production felt confusing: domestic drama, historical epic, social satire, ghost story, wartime adventure and absurdist sci-fi followed one after the other, gears shifting and crunching within scenes and from one scene to the next. Morever, as with D*ck Pics (and unlike the magic realist novels and plays mentioned earlier), I could see no intrinsic connection between the time-travelling mother-daughter or male-female relationships and the historical changes taking place around them. This, both plays seem to be saying, is simply what relationships and history always have been and always will be; if anything, the immutable nature of those relationships is presented as shaping history, rather than the other way around. Oil in particular seems to be saying that history repeats itself from one empire and generation to the next; that social, political, economic and environmental exploitation are the natural and inevitable consequences of scarcity, human needs or desires and technological development rather than the contingent effect of historical forces like capitalism and imperialism; and that women seeking to emancipate themselves have to give up having good sex, become bad mothers and join the ruling class. Surely we’ve moved on from this trope since Caryl Churchill skewered it in the 1980s with Top Girls? If D*ck Pics ignores race and class, and presents a somewhat binary account of gender, I found this preferable to the superficial analysis of class, race and gender in Oil, which features the tired reactionary narrative of a woman who has to be punished for going out on her own, and the exclusive portrayal of non-white characters as clowns, villains, victims, or villain-clowns. 

 

As for the production: again, I applaud the employment of a large cast and at least a few non-white actors (3 out of 10), but I cringed at the way they were used. Most egregious was the casting of Mangwana (a fine actor) who only appeared in one scene as the Libyan official ‘Mr Farouk’. Last time I checked, Libya was in North Africa, the population was almost entirely Arab or Berber, and Gadafi’s coup was part of a pan-Arab revolutionary wave across North Africa and the Middle East, so having a Black actor play a Libyan government official seemed like ignorance at best and racism at worst. To paraphrase ‘Mr Farouk’ himself, Libya may be ‘in Africa’ and ‘not the Middle East’, but at the risk of stating the obvious not all ‘Africans’ are the same. Again, just to be clear: I applaud the practice of cross-racial casting, but Mangwana only played one character, and thus appeared to have been cast specifically to play him, while several other actors (including Ayad and Chow, the other two non-white actors) played multiple roles. For example, he could easily have played May’s London boyfriend and colleague Tom, and/or one of the Cornish brothers in the opening scene, especially as Ayad and Chow played the two other Cornish wives. Conversely, Ayad (a fine actor herself) could easily have played ‘Mr Farouk’, especially as she also played the two Iraqi and Persian characters in the play. Finally, what can one say about the evil-clown Chinese character in the final scene which Chow (another fine actor) was called upon to embody, notwithstanding the comic verve with which she did it? On a similar note, I also cringed at the appropriation of the Midnite Oil song ‘Beds are Burning’ (a song about giving the Pintupi people back their land) for the final curtain call, especially for a play and production without a single Indigenous character or cast member.

 

As for the production design: the marvels of Zoe Atkinson’s smoothly transformative set, the coolness of Matt Marshall’s lighting, and the warmth of Mel Robinson’s yearning score couldn’t disguise the underlying weakness of the play. For me the opening scene in Cornwall was by far the most effective in terms of setting, plot, dialogue, characterisation, complexity, casting and staging; sadly it was all downhill from there. It also had the most effective theatrical image of the entire play and production: a little kerosene lamp flickering to life and illuminating (with a little help from Matt Marshall’s lighting trickling through the gaps in Zoe Atkinson’s rafters) a divided working-class family gathered around a kitchen table, along with all their flickering hopes, fears and desires, like a Georges de La Tour nativity scene. The play could easily have segued from there to the Middle East and then London (and even back to the Middle East and finally Cornwall) without any time-jumps, implausible plotting, wooden dialogue or cardboard characters. I’d be curious to see that play; in the meantime, surely there’s a whole world of vastly superior international and local playwriting for Black Swan State Theatre Company to choose from. 

 

*

 

Oil was at the Heath Ledger Theatre from 5 to 27 November.

 

D*ck Pics in the Garden of Eden was at Subiaco Theatre Centre from 16 November to 3 December.

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the election of the far-right coalition federal government. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

PianoLab

The Lab, Light Square, Adelaide
Thu 17–Sun 20 Nov

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

I was in Adelaide last weekend with my friend and colleague Humphrey Bower for PianoLab, a micro-festival devoted to the art of the piano, which was hosted at The Lab, a venue on Light Square that incorporates LED screens across three walls.

 

The festival was curated by pianist, writer and director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music, Anna Goldsworthy, and featured an eclectic mix of performers and genres, including local music students, scholar-musicians, interstate and international pianists playing repertoire ranging from Mozart to jazz, improvisation and other contemporary idioms. The performances also varied in terms of how they used the LED screens (with visual content provided by resident Lab technicians Allen Macintosh and Frazer ‘the Wizard’ Dempsey). 

 

The first recital I attended at midday on Friday was The (Absolutely) Final Meeting of the Satie Society by composer, performer, writer, critic and Head of Sonic Arts at the Elder Conservatorium, Stephen Whittington. This charmingly illustrated lecture-performance featured pieces by Satie juxtaposed with projections of artworks by his contemporaries the painter Henri Rousseau and the photographer Eugène Atget, as well as related musical items by Mompou, Duchamp, Cage, and living composers Philip Corner, David Kotlowy, Howard Skempton and Whittington himself. The latter delivered unassuming, matter-of-fact, no-nonsense and perfectly judged renditions of the works in question interspersed with similarly deadpan verbal commentaries. My favourite items included some rarely heard pieces from Satie’s ‘Rosecrucian’ period juxtaposed with an equally haunting series of Atget photographs of a vanishing pre-World War I Paris; Whittington’s Custom-Made Waltzes written in homage to Satie and Rousseau and accompanied by vivid projections of Rousseau paintings including The Snake Charmer, The Country Wedding and The Sleeping Gypsy; Mompou’s evocative Jeux d’enfants accompanied by Rousseau’s strangely adult-dwarf-like portraits of children; Duchamp’s Erratum Musical and Cage’s similarly aleatory One accompanied by photos of Duchamp playing musical chess with Cage or smoking a cigar in front of his readymade urinal masterpiece Fountain; more Rousseau paintings featuring out-of-proportion and anthropomorphic dogs and cats accompanied by Satie’s equally bizarre Preludes flasques pour un chien (‘Limp Preludes for a Dog’) and David Kotlowy’s Well-Fed Preludes for a Cat; and Satie’s cartoon-like sketch of himself accompanied by the uncharacteristically maximalist mockery of his Embryons déssechés (‘Dessicated Embryos’). All in all it was an illuminating musical and visual tour of a vintage and variety of French modernism (and its Anglophone aftermath) characterised by calculated naiveté, subversive wit and (in the case of Satie, Rousseau and Atget) a deep vein of melancholy. 

 

That evening at 6pm I was present for Nocturne, a recital by Anna Goldsworthy and Humphrey Bower of Chopin piano works and excerpts from George Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani accompanied by a montage of images from Delacroix’s double portrait of Chopin and Sand. This hybrid multimedia performance was inspired by the artist’s account in his letters of a reading by Sand of the novel-in-progress in the presence of Chopin and Delacroix during which the latter recognised that the novel’s protagonists were based on the composer-musician and his cross-dressing novelist-lover. Herself dressed in a man’s suit, Goldsworthy gave sumptuous renditions of Chopin Nocturnes and Preludes as well as a playfully extemporized Barcarolle, while Bower in a woman’s dress read excerpts from the novel from his iPad. This took things to a level of auto-fictive perversity that even Sand would have baulked at (as perhaps dear reader you do too).

 

Things got progressively queerer and more hybrid later that evening with Pieces for Piano and Body, a recital by pianist and performance-maker Dan Thorpe of contemporary works by women, trans and non-binary composers that involved a more visceral interaction between performer and instrument as well as a more interactive relationship between musical score and onscreen content. NYC-based inti figgis-vizueta’s A Bridge Between Starshine and Clay saw a progression of ascending or expanding and descending or contracting notes/intervals/chords simultaneously translated onscreen into an ever-shifting rainbow of rising, falling and overlapping bands of colour. The graphic-notated scores of British composer Sarah Westwood’s more introspective Of Minerals and Ventricles and Melbourne-based Cat Hope’s brutal Chunk were even more directly represented onscreen by abstract ideogram-like figures from Westwood’s score and a computer-program-generated real-time visual mapping and rendition of Hope’s that looked like a jagged abstract 3D landscape being flown over at high speed. West Australian vocalist/writer Sage Harlow’s Other(ing) was accompanied by a pre-recorded video of the pianist’s hands spanning intervals on a keyboard (as a teenage virtuoso Thorpe like Schumann and Scriabin suffered a self-inflicted hand-injury). Finally Philadelphia-based Sam Erin Erulis’s DIAPHRAGM involved live-feed video coverage from iPhones hastily hand-rigged by Thorpe onstage as well as pre-focused cameras on tripods while the pianist grappled with a score to be ‘played’ while making as little sound as possible, as explained in a short instructional video by the composer that preceded the work. These pieces demanded more and more from Thorpe physically and cognitively; as well as imaginatively and emotionally from those of us who rose to the challenge.

 

The next day I returned to The Lab at 3pm for Dance to the Music, an engaging recital by Melbourne-based pianist, teacher and Associate Professor at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Stephen McIntyre. The program focussed on works associated with nature and dance, featuring alternately robust and tender accounts of Schumann’s Waldszenen (‘Forest Scenes’), scintillating renditions of three waltzes and a polonaise by Chopin, two sultry Brazilian Tangos by Ernesto Nazareth, and a climactic version for solo piano of Ravel’s La Valse which was even more delirious than the orchestral version. The onscreen visuals were more modest than on the previous day, displaying a slide show of digitally rendered artworks featuring picturesque forests, hunting scenes, haunted ruins, dancing and ballrooms. 

 

This was followed at 6pm by Scriabin: Transformation, a chronological survey of the composer’s oeuvre from the early Piano Sonata No. 1 Op.6 to the later Sonata No. 10 op.70 by Adelaide-based Russian pianist and Lecturer in Piano at the Elder Conservatorium Konstantin Shamray, who played entirely from memory and riveted us with his technique and sensitivity as well as delighting us with his humble and almost childlike onstage persona. Lighting by resident Lab technician Oscar Lewis was focused on Shamray’s hands, his long fingers probing and dancing across the keyboard to coax a seemingly endless variety of colours from every note. Background visuals reflected Scriabin’s own interest in synaesthesia and use of stage lighting for his own concert performances. Here the Romantic Chopin-inspired 1^stSonata was illustrated by more figurative digital effects resembling demonic faces, while the later Symbolist and Schoenbergian-sounding works were accompanied by more abstract visual patterns.

 

Finally on Sunday I returned to the Lab for a closing recital by Finnish virtuoso Paavali Jumppanen featuring Mozart’s early Sonata in F Major K.280 followed by Beethoven’s late ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata Op.106. In terms of onscreen content this was relatively conventional, with digitally rendered marble busts of Mozart and Beethoven appearing against backgrounds respectively showing a Viennese concert hall and a stormy landscape. Musically I found the Mozart a little hard-driven, but Jumppanen came into his own with the ‘Hammerklavier’, especially in the final movement with its titanic triple fugue and sense of architectural and tonal disintegration, which eclipsed anything in Dan Thorpe’s recital in terms of the physical and intellectual demands it makes on the performer and the listener. No wonder (as I learned from Jumppanen at the start of the concert) the first documented performance of the work was by Liszt in 1836, almost a decade after Beethoven’s death.  

 

Overall, I was captivated by the format of such a wide-ranging festival devoted entirely to a single instrument (in this case literally a single Steinway), and by the intimate ambience of The Lab itself. As for the use of the LED screens: I’m full of admiration for the Lab technical team and especially the work of Frazer Dempsey; and was intrigued if not always convinced by the content and role of the screens from one recital to the next. The images had a tendency to dominate the music and delimit its meaning, and sometimes I found myself watching a movie and listening to a soundtrack, or alternatively closing my eyes. The happy exceptions were when music and image were in a dialogue of equals, whether in mutual agreement, ironic counterpoint or even outright conflict. On these occasions both became part of a larger and more complex work. It will be interesting to see how the festival and the venue develop in future – and indeed what the future holds for concerts and recitals in general, multimedia or otherwise.

 

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PianoLab was at The Lab, Light Square, Adelaide, from 17–19 November. 

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen) in the late 1970s. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the paraphenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Paraphänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s student and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the election of the far-right coalition federal government. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

 

Situ-8: City

STRUT Dance and Tura New Music
The Liberty Theatre, Perth
Nov 1–11

 

Situ-8 is an annual program of site-specific short dance works co-produced by two of Perth’s most vital arts organisations, STRUT Dance and Tura New Music. Featuring a suite of collaborations by local and interstate choreographers, composers, dancers, musicians and other creatives made for a different non-theatre venue each year, it’s a fantastic opportunity for artists and audiences to access new spaces and make new connections, and to ‘re-situate’ contemporary dance and music in relation to the unique physical and cultural architecture of the city itself. It also gives artists, audiences, artworks and artforms that heightened sense of collective presence in time and space which is essential to all live performance and which site-specific work is especially conducive to.

 

Previous Situ-8 sites have included the Old Perth Girls School, Cyril Jackson Senior College, the entire WA State Theatre Centre (including the courtyard, foyers and staircases) and the foyer, bar, rooms and rooftop of the boutique inner-city Alex Hotel. This year’s Situ-8: City is STRUT’s first production under the new leadership team of James O’Hara and Sofie Burgoyne and is co-curated by Burgoyne and local contemporary performance maker Timothy Green with curatorial assistant Ashleigh White. It takes place in The Liberty Cinema, a long-disused and abandoned cinema on Barrack Street Mall in the Perth CBD. The building hails from the Goldrush era and from the 1950s through to the 90s hosted foreign-language and arthouse films but has been empty over the past 25 years and fallen into a state of spectacular disrepair that heightens its ambience of history and transience. 

 

The curators of Situ–8: City have wisely chosen to keep additional design elements to a minimum and focus on the building itself as a character and ‘work’ in its own right alongside the work of the choreographers, composers and performers. A crucial exception to this austerity is Lucy Birkenshaw’s sensitive and evocative lighting, which deploys carefully chosen, framed and positioned digital lamps and LED strips, overlaid by her characteristically rich use of colours. This (along with consistently well-judged and artful use of music by all the composers ranging from vaporwave or dance beats to ambient and electronic soundscapes) provides a kind of visual-spatial (and musical) dramaturgy which effectively frames and unifies what might otherwise be a somewhat disparate experience in terms of the works themselves, the various parts of the building in which they take place, and the brain-teasing structure of the evening.

 

This structure consists of two overlapping performances for two different audiences, with each performance beginning at a different starting time. Both performances are in two parts separated by an interval, but each performance consists of the same two parts in the opposite order. This means that the first audience experiences the first part of the first performance and then mingles with the second audience (of which I was a member) during the first interval as well as sharing the first part of the second performance (which is also the second part of the first performance). The first audience then leaves during the second interval, and the second audience is left to experience the final part of the second performance (which repeats the initial part of the first performance). For the performers, this means that the entire evening has the form of a triptych, with the first part repeated as the final part (but for a different audience).

 

To make things even more complex, one of the two parts consists of five works which are performed in sequence in five different spaces on two different floors inside the building, concluding in the vast ruined space of the ground floor cinema. The other part features three works performed in sequence in the cinema space, including the raised stage at one end and the upstairs ‘VIP room’ at the other end, the interior of which is visible from the floor of the cinema. (This is the order in which I saw the two parts.) I found the latter part more absorbing and transformative in terms of my relationship with the performers and the space; whereas in the former part I felt somewhat alienated from the works and uncertain about where to be in the building or the room at any given time, whether the overall experience was meant to be self-navigating/immersive or scheduled/promenade, and more generally about my role as a witness or participant. To be fair, this element of uncertainty is a feature of all immersive performance, but in this case it was heightened by my sense of uncertainty about the form itself.

 

As for the individual works: the curatorial brief invited the artists to respond to ‘a key element from a film, reimagining it to speak to the artists’ identities’ in order to examine ‘how stories, bodies, voices and characters have been included and excluded from The Liberty Theatre and the history of cinema’ (I’m quoting from the program). For me the most interesting works were those that interrogated the relationship between live performance and cinema (considered both as a medium and a venue) as well as specifically between film, identity and embodiment; perhaps unsurprisingly all these works were staged in the cinema space. 

 

‘Mercury Bones’ by Olivia Hendry and Kimberley Parkin, which closed the first part of the performance I saw, featured a hauntingly sparse live and pre-recorded score by David Stewart and Nonie Trainor, culminating in thrilling live voice loops generated by Trainor and mixed by Stewart; an energetic and enigmatic solo dance performance by Parkin in a blue veil and body stocking; and a huge video projection by Edwin Sitt across the entire length of one wall. This showed gritty low-fi home-movie-style footage (made even grittier by the delapidated state of the wall) reminiscent of early Warhol/Paul Morrissey films and featuring people from various minority communities (queer, disabled, culturally diverse) disporting themselves in various domestic or outdoor settings and states of dress-up or undress. 

 

At the start of the ‘second’ part, Sarah Aitken’s ‘Demake/Demaster’ had a minimal electronic score by Alice Humphries, while on the stage at one end of the cinema two medium-sized video screens showed found and constructed footage featuring hands, arms, legs and other body segments, while Aitken coolly and deftly inserted herself behind and ‘into’ the footage. Finally, this part of the performance ended with ‘The Melody Haunts My Reverie’, a hilarious and macabre interactive tour de force by Antonio Rinaldi and Celina Hage, in which Hage progressively removed items of clothing while dancing with selected audience members (and finally a white mask and pair of dismembered mannequin arms) across the ground floor of the cinema, while upstairs in the ‘VIP room’ Rinaldi in lipstick, pushed-back hair and a trench-coat interacted with a hapless audience member (delivered to him by Hage) while answering phones and lip-synching snatches of dialogue from classic Hollywood melodramas (including a fabulous sample from Rebecca); this soundscape was stitched together in a heavily processed montage by Eduardo Cossio. Birkenshaw’s saturated monochromatic lighting came into its own during this work, especially as it honed in on the closing image of a reverse-masked Hage dancing topless with the mannequin arms beneath Rinaldi in a bowler hat with a stocking pulled over his face cavorting on the balcony with the audience member frozen in terror beside him.

 

In sum, Situ-8: City is unquestionably the most complex and ambitious iteration I’ve seen in this remarkable series, and a triumph of programming and curatorial vision by Green, Burgoyne and the producing team at STRUT Dance and Tura New Music. Its prevailing sense of liberty is as appropriate to the venue as it is inspirational. As Mrs Danvers whispers to Rebecca: ‘Why don’t you jump? Go on! You know you want to.’

 

 

 

 

Duino Elegies 

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Alison Croggon

Newport Street Books

Rilke's Duino Elegies were begun in a burst of inspiration while the poet was staying at Duino Castle near Trieste in 1912. Walking along the battlements after receiving a difficult letter, he suddenly heard a mysterious voice calling to him from an approaching storm. Their composition was then interrupted by an artistic and personal crisis that lasted until 1922, when he finished them in an even more astonishing afflatus that included the gift of their companion-masterpiece the Sonnets to Orpheus at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland. 

Alison Croggon’s new translation of the Elegies has a physicality, sensuality and even violence that distinguishes her from precursors like J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (who together first introduced Rilke to the English-speaking world in an elegant if somewhat mannered rendition) or Stephen Mitchell (who gives his Rilke a more post-Beat, Zen-like spiritual cast).

Croggon (who is also a theatre writer and critic as well as a novelist and poet) has a sense of dramatic as well as poetic voice which is essential to the Elegies, with their company of stock characters drawn from Rilke’s previous repertoire – angels, saints, puppets, dolls, acrobats, clowns, dancers, musicians, lovers, Gods, heroes and other figures from Greek mythology and the Bible, women (especially betrayed or abandoned), children, animals, cripples, beggars, invalids and those who die young. These characters (apart from the mysterious ‘Laments’ who appear in the final Elegy) are thrown together regardless of provenance to make up a theatrical world that is all the more obviously artificial because of its heterogeneity. They appear (or in the case of the Angel fail to appear, at least when initially prompted) against a backdrop of stage settings (including theatres and circuses) that are furnished with scenery and props such as city streets, facades, statues, doorways, windows, curtains, wardrobes, violins – and even (in the final Elegy) amusement park backlots, fields, valleys, rivers, mountains, ancient monuments, starry skies, bare trees and falling rain. 

Rilke explicitly bares the device of this slightly shop-worn theatricality halfway through the Fourth Elegy in a characteristically apostrophic aside to the reader, who is suddenly cast in the role of audience observing their own lives unfold on stage. In Croggon’s translation: 

Who hasn’t timidly sat before his own heart’s curtain? 

It flings itself up: the scenery is parting.

Easy to understand. The familiar garden 

slightly swaying: then first of all, the dancer.

Not him. Enough. And if he moves too lightly

he’s just disguised, he turns into a bourgeois

passing through the kitchen in his apartment.

 

I’ll not have these half-filled masks, 

rather the puppet. That’s full. I’ll endure

the skin and the wire and its sight

that’s all outlooking. Here. I’m waiting.

Even if the footlights go out, even if they 

say to me, Nothing more – even if the stage 

breathes out grey draughts of void, 

even if none of my silent forebears 

will sit with me, no woman, not even 

the boy with the brown-eyed squint. 

I’ll stay anyway. It’s always a spectacle. 

[…]

Angel and puppet: that’s finally drama.

This sense that people, places and objects have become stage characters, scenery and props – a sense that borders on the psychological phenomenon of derealisation – springs from an underlying mood of abandonment and loss. (The cause of this remains obscure, given the little we know about the 'difficult letter', the arrival of which preceded the 'voice' that dictated the opening lines of the First Elegy, or the precise nature of the crisis that followed soon afterwards, but its effects appear to have been catastrophic in terms of Rilke's creative flow.)

As the poet (or rather, his poetic-dramatic persona) rhetorically asks in Croggon’s translation of the First Elegy’s opening line: ‘Who, if I cry, hears me among the angelic / orders?’ Croggon’s use of the factual conditional present is more direct and active than the counterfactual conditional past of Mitchell’s ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me…’ The latter is grammatically truer to Rilke’s ‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich…’ but lacks his (or Croggon’s) sense of urgency. In Croggon’s version, the poet actually cries out; and that ‘cry’ is the poem itself.

Further down in the same stanza she translates the line ‘Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang’ as ‘For beauty is nothing / but this terrifying beginning’ rather than ‘For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror’ (Mitchell). Once again, the latter is more accurate (‘des Schrecklichen Anfang’ literally means ‘the beginning of the Terrifying’), but Croggon’s grammatical and semantic reversal is more performative and self-referential, as it enacts and points to itself as its own ‘terrifying beginning’.

There’s something deeply playful – in both the ludic and dramatic sense – about Croggon’s approach to translation as a form of interpretation which sometimes privileges rhetorical over literal fidelity. (Here I’m using the term ‘interpretation’ in the performative sense, as when one speaks of a musician or actor ‘interpreting’ a score or text.) For example, in the Ninth Elegy, Rilke’s eulogy for mortality itself – ‘Aber dieses / ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal: / irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar’ – is translated by Croggon as: ‘But this / once was real, even if only once: / earthly and real, shining beyond revocation.’ Here Mitchell’s somewhat contorted version reads: ‘But to have been / this once, completely, even if only once: / to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.’ In Croggon’s version, ‘shining’ is a false cognate for scheint (as she acknowledges in her Afterword), but more concrete and suggestive than ‘seems’; and the whole passage is more striking for being rendered in the simple past, and with fewer words.

In terms of prosody, Croggon more or less follows Rilke’s own fairly loose adaptation of the rising and falling dactylic hexameters and pentameters of classical Greek and Roman elegies, as well as the similarly alternating longer and shorter lines and irregular accentual rhythms of the Biblical Lamentations. She also exploits the natural affinity of the Elegies with the rhythms of colloquial English to evoke a more direct and conversational tone than the somewhat formal language of Leishman and Spender, or the more deadpan and at times enigmatic approach of Mitchell. Her stronger sense of rhythmic propulsion is heightened by adopting Rilke’s use of alliteration, in a way that harks back to the common origins of Old English and Old High German, and evokes those early medieval Anglo-Saxon laments of loneliness and exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. 

The term ‘elegy’ comes from the Greek term elegos, which originally referred to a lamentation performed on behalf of the dead so that they can complete their final journey rather than being endlessly reborn. These lamentations were performed as part of the Orphic mysteries, so-called because the mythical figure of Orpheus is supposed to have founded them and to have written and sung the Orphic Hymns. In this light one might read the Elegies like the Sonnets to Orpheus as contemporary ‘Orphic Hymns’, with Orpheus as a character-mask for Rilke himself.

This sense of the Elegies as a form of Orphic rite is strongly suggested by the final Elegy, which introduces a new group of characters to the list of dramatis personae. These are a strange species, class or family of beings (the German word Geschlecht covers all of these, but Croggon opts for ‘family’) called ‘the Laments’ (‘die Klage’) who appear in the fields behind a tawdry amusement park on the outskirts of ‘the city of pain’. A young female ‘Lament’ leads a newly dead young man into a ‘landscape of Lament’ that mirrors the familiar world, but also seems timeless. However, the word Klage is also a German translation of the Greek word elegos. Thus the ‘Laments’ could also be read as personifications of the Elegies themselves. This would imply that ultimately Rilke’s poem-cycle is addressed to the dead as a kind of linguistic offering, in order to lead and welcome them home. 

Two brief stanzas at the end of the final Elegy return us to ourselves and the land of the living. The penultimate stanza presents the wintry images of ‘catkins hanging / from empty hazels’ and ‘rain falling on dark earth’. Croggon asserts at the end of her Afterword that these lines encapsulate the radical immanence of the whole poem; and the following stanza certainly reinforces this sense of a bruising fall to earth: ‘And we, who think of happiness / climbing, would feel the emotion / which almost confounds us / when happiness falls.’ However, the closing lines also suggest the rhythm of rising and falling that animates elegaic (and possibly all) language (and certainly all breath) – as well as the rising and falling of stage scenery or curtains. This rhythm of rising and falling maintains the tension between immanence and transcendence, presence and absence, body and soul, puppet and angel – a tension which is also, in the words of the Fourth Elegy, ‘finally drama’.

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This review is a somewhat rewritten and more substantial version of the one that appeared in Australian Book Review in July 2022 under the title: 'This Terrifying Beginning: A New Translation of Rilke's Masterpiece.'