Writers Weekend: Steadfast As The Stars

Perth Festival

Fremantle Arts Centre

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

In celestial harmony with the 2023 Perth Festival theme of Djinda, this year’s Writers Weekend bore the Shakespearian-sounding subtitle: ‘Steadfast As The Stars’. Curated by Perth-based South African author Sisonke Msimang (who's also Head of Storytelling at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge), the weekend was hosted by Fremantle Arts Centre, and sessions were dispersed across the front garden, lawns and inner courtyard of that imposing complex of colonial gothic architecture, which was built using convict labour and originally served as the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum – and later as ‘housing’ for homeless and ‘delinquent’ women. It’s now a place of tranquil beauty and a hive of artistic activity, but like so many convict-era sites it’s also steeped in a history of sadness and torment. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, there's no monument to culture which isn't also a monument to barbarity. I felt the same way the first time I visited Melk, a popular tourist destination in my native land of Lower Austria, with its beautiful baroque monastery overlooking the Danube, and noticed a small memorial plaque to the forced labour camp of Mauthausen-Melk with its gas chamber and crematorium, the entrance to which faced directly onto one of the main roads, much like Fremantle Arts Centre. As such the latter was an appropriate setting for the constellation of thoughtful lectures, conversations and readings I attended, with the twin themes of social justice and cultural democracy emerging as a discernible pattern to guide me through the weekend.

 

I started my journey in the Inner Courtyard with Perth poet and performance maker Andrew Sutherland’s Randolph Stow Memorial Lecture. Sutherland’s recently published debut collection Paradise (points of transmission) is a brilliant and mordant series of poetic reflections on his ongoing experience as someone who identifies as a Queer-Poz PLHIV (person living with HIV), and who divides his time between Perth and Singapore. His perspective and writing style provided a fascinating prism through which to review Stow’s work as well as (by implication at least) his life as a gay man from an earlier (and more 'silent') generation who struggled not only sexually but also culturally and geographically with his ongoing search for a place to belong. As the scion of a White settler family who (like Sutherland) grew up in Geraldton and the Mid West, Stow spent time living and working on an Aboriginal mission in the Kimberley and as an anthropologist’s assistant and patrol officer in the Trobriand Islands before relocating to his ancestral homeland in Suffolk and finally settling in Harwich – all of which provided the background material for his novels and poetry. For his part, Sutherland mobilised tropes of virality, invasion, colonisation, appropriation, exile, blood and transmission – as well as identity and desire – in order to read Stow against the grain and talk back to him. His lecture was in effect a kind of ‘infected tissue’ of quotations and original text, in which the borderlines between prose, poetry, Stow and Sutherland became effectively indeterminable. The entire performance inspired me to reread Stow (and Sutherland), in the happy certitude that I’ll never read either of them the same way again. As Stow writes at the end of his poem ‘Portrait of Luke’: ‘and the dolphins of his thought cannot obscure / (look down) the coral bones of all our ancestors.’

 

After this I relocated to the Front Garden for a conversation between Don Watson and Carmen Lawrence about Watson’s most recent book The Passion of Private White, which recounts the travails of his lifelong friend the anthropologist and Vietnam veteran Neville White, who has lived worked for many years alongside other former members of his platoon in a remote Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land. Watson’s characteristically self-mocking sense of humour unflinchingly identified patriarchy as the root cause of many problems shared by Settler and First Nations societies – at one point wryly opining that the only solution might be for men to die out, with the proviso that this mass extinction be deferred for about twenty more years. More seriously, he could scarcely conceal his underlying contempt for the bureaucratic inefficiency (and patronising racism) that continues to afflict Aboriginal people (and well-meaning allies like his friend White). Not for the last time in the sessions I attended, the question of an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament was raised and tentatively affirmed (with cautious reservations) as a possible circuit-breaker, if not indeed a ‘solution’ (a word which both Watson and Lawrence were rightly wary of). I also noted with approval Watson’s preference for ‘sympathy’ in place of the much-overused (and perhaps over-rated) term ‘empathy’; to my mind at least, the former implies a form of understanding that also acknowledges difference rather than simply feeling (or claiming to feel) someone else’s pain.

 

I concluded my afternoon on Saturday back in the Inner Courtyard with Msimang and Egyptian-Danish-Australian journalist, photographer and fiction author Massoud Morsi in conversation with Tongan-Australian writer Winnie Dunn, who has edited a new anthology including stories by both of them and collectively titled Another Australia. Msimang and Morsi read extracts from their stories and were refreshingly candid about the challenges of being in interracial partnerships with multiracial children, and the complications of family life that ensue when issues of race (and racism) inevitably enter the picture. Love – it became apparent from their stories and anecdotes – is an ever-fixed star that looks on tempests and is never shaken (as some dead White male poet once wrote), but it’s no more of a ‘solution’ than sympathy or a Voice to Parliament. Msimang also voiced her own qualified support for a Voice, alongside a treaty and a process of truth-telling – with the proviso that based on her own experience in relation to post-apartheid South Africa as well as with friends and acquaintances in Australia, White people also need to give an account of their historical and personal complicity with racism, rather than Black people doing most of the work of remembering and reckoning with the past.

 

I began Sunday morning on the South Lawn listening to Msimang in conversation with political reporter Amy Remeikis discussing the latter’s book On Reckoning about sexual assault and harassment in the corridors of power and elsewhere. Remeikis movingly shared her own story of assault and was passionately articulate about male dismissiveness of women’s anger – a discussion to which Msimang added complexity by raising the spectre of the ‘angry Black woman’ and the ways in which racism further divides and polices ‘acceptable’ behaviour. In her capacity as a storytelling mentor who frequently works with migrant women, Msimang also reflected on the need to speak or write about one’s scars, but not necessarily about one’s wounds, at least while they’re still raw. I couldn’t help thinking about the applicability of this remark to the way the criminal justice system currently handles allegations of rape and sexual abuse, and the harm it typically does to the victim regardless of the legal outcome.

 

Back in the Inner Courtyard, Future Tense was a panel discussion about how Australia might be changing (or failing to change) as a nation with specific reference to racial justice but also the environment and climate change. The panel included Noongar elder and organisational leader Carol Innes; two White female elders (and Professors Emeritus in their respective fields of Psychology, and Media and Culture) Carmen Lawrence and Julianne Schultz; and journalist and broadcaster Tabarak Al Jrood. The discussion was facilitated by fellow journalist Antoinette Lattouf, and all the panellists were clear-eyed and incisive about the work that still needs to be done. I was left with an overriding sense of urgency about restorative justice for First Nations people – with a yes-vote for the Voice again being affirmed by all on the panel – as well as the principle of Indigenous sovereignty and care for country as a precondition for any possible reversal of environmental and climate catastrophe. 

 

The last session I attended (also in the Inner Courtyard) was a heartening return to the reading and discussion of poetry – albeit with an edge of social and cultural critique. Dead Poets Society was an exploration of poetic influences, once again featuring Sutherland alongside fellow WA-resident poets Tineke Van der Eecken and Nadia Rhook, and Noongar writer, editor and educator Casey Mulder, facilitated by another Perth-based writer and poet Elizabeth Lewis. Belgian-born Van der Eecken nominated Jacques Brel, and read samples of her own multilingual poetry, including the self-reflexive ‘On Language’ – inspired by Brel’s song ‘Le plat pays’ and containing untranslated lines in Flemish and French that were a delight to surrender oneself to – followed by a playful ‘Ode to Jacques Brel’, containing a host of references to other Brel songs for anyone with ears to hear them. Sutherland spoke next, invoking the shades of precursors who had died of AIDS-related complications, including Malaysian-Singaporean-American poet and performance artist Justin Chin (who once famously proclaimed that ‘every work of art that works as art is a critique’); he then read his own hilarious and heart-rending poem ‘afterwards, bring me back as Tom Cruise’s wig in Interview with the Vampire’. Rhook ironically cited Dorothy Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ in order to reiterate the notion of ‘speaking back’ to the Anglo-Celtic colonial canon (much as Sutherland had done with Stow), before reading two poems from her own recent collection Second Fleet Baby that juxtaposed her own convict ancestry with her experience of becoming a ‘pandemic parent’, during which (as she writes in the closing lines of her poem ‘I offered advice’) she ‘read enough / experts / on / freedom / to understand that / it is the opposite to breath it / starts in / the mind then / travels / along / melodies / ancestors / out through the / mouth’. Finally Mulder spoke of overcoming her sense of imposter syndrome at being appointed First Nations Editor for Westerly Magazine, and encouraged other Indigenous writers to seize the power of the spoken and written word – as well as exhorting us Wadjellas to do our own research and stop asking her who were the latest Blak authors we should be reading in order to count ourselves as allies.

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic 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). 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.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Equations Of A Falling Body/Everywhen

Perth Studio Underground/PICA
Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

As Perth Festival rolls into its second week, two relatively low-budget avant-garde works of contemporary dance and music are a welcome extension to the festival’s predominant focus on works of scale and popular appeal. It’s a bold act of programming that demonstrates how Festival director Iain Grandage’s personal ethos of cultural democracy includes works that demand more of audiences, ask less in terms of resources and offer local and independent artists fresh opportunities.

 

Perth choreographer and director Laura Boynes’s new work Equations Of A Falling Body is a Perth Festival commission. The title alludes to the festival theme of Djinda – the stars and the cosmos – but it does so in a more abstract, process-oriented, comical and anxious way than other works in the festival program. 

 

In fact comedy and anxiety are states of mind (and body) that this work arouses in (and imposes on) its three performers ­– dancers James O’Hara and Ella-Rose Trewe and actor/physical performer Tim Green. Each of them has a distinctive movement style and stage persona – O’Hara more loosely expressive, Trewe more tautly contained, and Green more flexible and clown-like. However, all three swap functional roles in the course of the show and progressively develop their sense of individual and collective engagement as they spontaneously interpret the sequence of enigmatic instructions they're given via earpieces by Boynes, who sits at one side of the stage whispering into a head-mic. 

 

Their interpretations are often hilarious but also result in images of beauty and sadness. The process reminded me of the surrealist game of ‘exquisite corpse’ in which each player adds to the contribution of his or her predecessor without knowing what comes next, so that a kind of spontaneous visual logic and poetry unfolds without any apparent overarching plan or divine intervention – apart from the tasks and structures put in place by the director-choreographer, who also appears to be responding spontaneously to the work of the performers.

 

There’s a strong sense of agency – and urgency – but also of inevitable failure and even powerlessness on the part of the performers in the face of the ongoing stream of instructions. I felt like I was watching a trio of hapless fools attempting to handle and deal with some kind of historical catastrophe, and was reminded of Beckett's words: ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’

 

The motif of ‘falling bodies’ is repeatedly invoked, along with acts of hiding and revealing, denial, frustration, anxiety, desperation, surrender and resignation, counterbalanced by an ongoing sense of mutual trust, support and care. Beneath it all I felt a growing sense of helplessness and even grief that I couldn’t help associating with the era we’re living through, as clumsy and vulnerable beings in a broken world that we’ve been given the seemingly impossible task of putting right.

 

The overall form of the work could only sporadically be described as ‘dance’, though there’s undeniably dance and movement in the work. It’s more like a kind of bricolage, with the performers also acting as their own stagehands, dragging onstage and manipulating a collection of large and often unwieldy objects and materials such as giant industrial fans, lengths of green carpeting or rolls of silver reflective covering typically fitted inside car windscreens as a sunshield, as well as technical gadgets like headtorches and loudhailers.

 

Bruce McKinven’s evolving set and costumes are similarly practical and utilitarian: the black curtains, walls and floor of the venue, black clothes and underwear, knee pads, gloves, tape, earpieces and battery pacs. Matt Marshall’s elegant lighting is similarly minimal and mostly monochrome.

 

Initially – and perhaps inevitably given the task-based improvisatory form – there were some uneven and bumpy moments, deliberately underlined by abrupt blackouts followed by house lights snapping up. However the performance gradually revealed itself to have an underlying sense of unity, no doubt due to the deep layer of collaboration between the performers, the ceaseless flow of inspiration coming from Boynes, the overarching functional aesthetic of McKinven’s and Marshall’s visual designs, and the carefully structured emotional progression of Felicity Groom and Tristan Parr’s music and sound design, culminating in a heart-stopping sequence choreographed/improvised to Saint-Saëns’ “Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix” (“My heart opens to your voice”) from Samson et Dalila – the title of the aria perfectly encapsulating the work’s methodology and underlying ethos.

 

The work of the performers was astonishing in its openness, honesty, fearlessness and tenderness, and required a similar spirit from the audience – to laugh, to accept, to wonder and to grieve. It’s rare to see something as daring and risky as this, especially in a Festival setting, and I applaud everyone involved – but especially Boynes, for having the courage and vision to expose and embrace the unknown, in all its nakedness and terror. 

 

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Everywhen is a solo performance by Melbourne-based composer and percussionist Matthias Schack-Arnott. Essentially it’s a kind of sonic and visual meditation or mandala, involving a rotating structure of concentric circles like a kind of musical Hills Hoist or Alexander Calder mobile that hangs from the lighting grid, from which a collection of roughly hundred sound objects – ranging from cymbals, chimes, bells and marimba keys to found objects like branches, bunches of dried seeds or strings of shells – are suspended on counterweighted strings. 

 

While the structure rotates, Schack-Arnott walks on his own narrow circular path between the objects – either in the same or the opposite direction – while raising or lowering them using the counterweights so that they scrape along the floor, which has variously corrugated, smooth or tiled surfaces that are also arranged in concentric circles. Whenever the structure briefly pauses and comes to rest, he detaches some of the objects from the strings, enters the inner circle – like the inner shrine of a Buddhist temple – and arranges them on the floor, where he scrapes or plays them with sticks more rhythmically and intricately, as well as ‘playing’ the tiles on the floor, and striking the objects still hanging on the structure when it resumes its rotation around him. Objects also swing and collide with each other, and the strings of shells also vibrate and shake, almost as if they had minds of their own.

 

This one-person percussion orchestra is augmented by small shotgun mics which are placed on the floor around the mandala, as was pointed out to me afterwards by a helpful venue technician and further explained by a knowledgeable colleague. These crucially pick up harmonics and overtones and feed them back to a sound desk behind the audience, where they’re remixed and fed back into the auditorium, generating an ambient soundscape of shifting tones and textures that sometimes reminded me of the music of the spheres, and at one point sounded like rain.

 

Finally the entire apparatus is side-lit by theatre lights on tree-stands so that the surfaces and shapes of the objects as they move – especially the metallic instruments – serendipitously refract and change the overall lighting state as it subtly fades up and down. This visual effect, as well as the overall sense of a revolving microcosm, also echoes the Festival theme of Dinjda.

 

Everywhen is a deeply meditative work of sound art, visual art and contemporary performance. It’s also a work of haunting beauty and – in its own way – absorbing drama. Schack-Arnott’s state of relaxed yet heightened attention – which is essential for him to effectively navigate and become part of the work – inspires a similar state in the audience as we watch, listen and notice things. Fifty minutes flew past, and I left the theatre in silence and at peace with the universe.

 

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 Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic 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. 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), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. 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.  

Cyrano

Melbourne Theatre Company, Perth Festival, Heath Ledger Theatre

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

It’s been an invigorating experience seeing two major theatre productions from the eastern States (which also happen to be literary adaptations) back-to-back as part of Perth Festival. MTC’s Cyrano and STC’s Jekyll and Hyde are two wildly different shows; I’m tempted to say, one plays Jekyll to the other’s Hyde. However, both have a level of artistic and technical finesse (and, it has to be said, budgets) that Perth audiences aren't used to seeing, at least on our main stages. It also has to be said that I had conceptual issues with both shows (see my previous review of Jekyll and Hyde), but I couldn't fault the expertise with which they were delivered.

 

Virginia Gay’s contemporary adaptation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac follows in the footsteps of previous popular film versions of the play, including the Steve Martin/Daryl Hannah vehicle Roxanne; The Truth About Cats and Dogs (which gender-swapped all three main characters); and most recently the similarly titled Cyrano (based on the Broadway musical and starring Peter Dinklage as a short-statured actor in the title role). 

 

The most notable recent English-language stage version by British playwright Martin Crimp (directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring the incongruously good-looking James McAvoy) brilliantly translated the play’s original French classical Alexandrines into uneven hip-hop-like rhyming couplets – a device which Lloyd’s production took further by putting the actors in contemporary street clothes, giving them hand-held microphones and transposing the Act One swordfight into a spoken-word duel. 

 

Gay’s adaptation emphasises the fact that Cyrano is also a playwright (played by Gay herself), who in collaboration with her fellow actor-characters appears to rewrite the original text as she goes along in order to make it more ‘positive’. In effect this means that Rostand’s 19^th century romantic tragedy becomes a 21^st century queer romantic comedy – which in some ways is not such a stretch, as the original already has farcical elements, and Cyrano’s nose already sets him apart as an outsider.

 

In this version, Gay’s female Cyrano falls hopelessly in love with Roxane, who's in lust with the handsome but inarticulate Christian (or ‘Yan’, as he prefers to call himself). Like McAvoy, Gay also dispenses with Cyrano’s famously big (and usually false) nose – which is the ostensible reason for the character’s sense of romantic despair in the original play – while still (somewhat bewilderingly) referring to it in the text. If in McAvoy’s case this had the effect of making Cyrano’s problem seem more to do with neurotic inhibition than actual deformity, in Gay’s version Cyrano’s ‘obstacle’ initially appears to be her gender and sexuality – although it’s eventually revealed to be more a case of mutual misunderstanding and fear of rejection (like all good rom-coms). 

 

Meanwhile a three-person Chorus in the form of a troupe of travelling players take the place of Cyrano’s friends and fellow soldiers in the original play. They also sing, dance and provide musical underscoring, as well as embodying snippets of other characters from the original, like the poet/pastry chef Ragueneau or the villainous De Guiche (though these characters seem largely irrelevant without the context of the original plot).

 

Gay’s adaptation also highlights the ‘toxic’ nature of Cyrano’s ‘betrayal’ of Roxane by impersonating Christian and verbally seducing her on his behalf. This act of ‘catfishing’ is duly called out as such by Roxane, but Cyrano’s last-minute apology leads (somewhat implausibly) to forgiveness. True love prevails, and Roxane and Cyrano end up together (no one gets killed in this version), while ‘Yan’ conveniently hooks up with ‘Charlotte’/Chorus Member 3. 

 

All this might sound a bit half-baked and over-sweetened (like one of Rageneau’s less successful pastries). Fortunately, the dialogue is sparkling, and Gay has the rockstar acting chops to deliver the goods in the title role – both of which are essential for a play about a famous real-life poet and wit. 

 

Director Sarah Goodes and her design team also deliver a knock-out production in terms of the staging. Instead of a huge fake nose, there’s a huge fake proscenium arch – somewhat battered and broken – opening onto a bare stage with a fake back wall, loading bay, exit doors and fluorescent work lights. (All of this cleverly invokes the opening Act of Rostand’s original play, which is likewise set in a theatre.)

 

The actors wear rehearsal-style clothes, unload props from road cases, and perform all the songs and most of the music live (in fact the show is practically a musical, in form as well as substance). However – perhaps inevitably for a mainstage production – the sense that we’re watching poor theatre is an illusion, as there’s also an elaborate sound and lighting design (including haze), as well as some spectacular stage tricks that are pulled out of the hat in order to get the show's somewhat corny ending over the line. 

 

To be honest I felt a bit confused at times about the rules of the metatheatrical world that we were being asked to believe in, and as a result the dramatic stakes weren’t always entirely clear. In this regard I found myself missing the all-important action-plot – involving duels, mob violence and war – that grounds the central relationship story in the original play. In comparison the implied context of contemporary culture wars felt a bit insubstantial, and the whole thing started to feel like a series of comedy routines with progressive moral lessons attached about being affirmative and telling the truth.

 

Consequently, despite the best efforts of the actors, Roxane and Christian felt even more like two-dimensional props for Cyrano’s fantasies than they do in the original, with Roxane seeming like an immature student of life who doesn’t yet know herself but learns to 'speak her truth', while ‘Yan’ came across as a borderline misogynist frat-boy jock who eventually embraces his inner dork.  

As for Cyrano herself: despite Gay’s bad-girl charisma and irresistible sense of complicity with the audience, there was arguably still something a little creepy about her fixation with Roxane – as there is in the original, the key difference being that in Rostand’s play their love remains unconsummated (and indeed undeclared until the end when they’re about to be parted by death).

 

Cyrano has always been a crowd-pleaser, and this version shares that popularise spirit. There’s a great sense of celebration at the end, and some terrific performances (especially from Gay, but also Holly Austin as ‘Charlotte’/Chorus Member 3) and moments of staging along the way. 

 

It doesn’t entirely free itself from the some of the original play’s complications – and arguably gets itself even more entangled by trying to do so. Regardless of our gender or sexuality, or even what century we live in, we’ve all been Cyrano (or Roxane, or Christian) at some point in our lives. Perhaps that’s why the play still has such a hold on us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Sydney Theatre Company, His Majesty's Theatre, Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flüglehorn

 

I felt especially fortunate to be seeing Kip Williams’s dazzling adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Perth framed by the Edwardian grandeur of His Majesty’s Theatre, with its sumptuous blood-red carpets, curtains, seats and walls, and its beautifully restored ambience haunted by theatre ghosts. 

 

In fact the production could hardly have been put on elsewhere in the city because of the vast space required in terms of the dimensions of the stage – initially almost bare apart from a diagonal line of streetlamps and a continuous drift of stage fog – not to mention the capacious wings and especially the fly-tower. 

 

Inside the frame of the proscenium arch, two actors – Ewen Leslie and Matthew Backer – play Hyde and Seek in an ever-changing hall of mirrors. Adaptor-director Williams’s self-described hybrid form of ‘cine-theatre’ is a kind of infernal machine with continuously moving parts. 

 

Huge flats rapidly descend and reascend from the flies to serve as projection screens, displaying a seamless mix of live-feed and pre-edited video footage with which the two actors (equally seamlessly) interact; in a more traditionally theatrical way, the flats also provide temporary screens for them to hide behind for the purpose of quick costume changes. 

 

Meanwhile a crack team of technical and stage crew hurtle around the stage with Steadicams or scenery on wheels including building facades, doors, rooms, inner walls and staircases, as well as props and costumes like tables, chairs, portraits, looking-glasses, glasses of wine, writing materials, laboratory equipment, walking sticks, hats, coats, wigs and facial hair. 

 

This Heath-Robinson-like assemblage reflects the convoluted structure of Stevenson’s novella, with its nested stories, time jumps, plot twists and continual changes in narrative form and perspective; its enigmatic urban geography, maze-like streets and puzzling architecture; its locked doors, desk drawers and safety-deposit boxes; and its sealed envelopes-within-envelopes containing legal documents and letters. 

 

Williams’s previous adaptation of Wilde’s similarly Victorian Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (which I reviewed in an earlier blog post when it was at the Adelaide Festival last year) used screen technology to present a brilliantly superficial world of simulation and hypervisibility. Jekyll and Hyde employs the same devices to investigate a darker realm of dissimulation and concealment (as the name ‘Hyde’ suggests). In both cases the Victorian preoccupation with thresholds and portals – mysterious doors, portraits, potions, looking-glasses, rabbit holes – leads us into a labyrinth from which there is no escape. 

 

If Eryn-Jean Norvill’s solo portrayal of all the characters in Dorian Gray gleefully (if tragically) emphasized that novel’s underlying theme of narcissism, then Backer and Leslie’s hand-in-glove double-act in Jekyll and Hyde evokes the typically Victorian Gothic figure of the doppelganger. The effect is heightened by the fact that the two actors physically resemble each other onstage; it’s reinforced by the use of costume as a form of disguise; as well as the blocking, where they frequently mirror each other; and the screens, where they’re reduplicated by multiple versions of themselves (and in the case of Leslie sometimes play multiple characters simultaneously).

 

Backer plays Jekyll’s taciturn but tolerant lawyer-friend and confidante Utterson; the name is also surely a joke, as he listens but rarely speaks to Jekyll, while maintaining the role of protagonist and narrator-in chief to the audience. He also becomes a prototypical detective in the ‘strange case’ that unfolds. Meanwhile Leslie plays Jekyll and Hyde as well as all the other characters in an astonishing tour-de-force of virtuosity and sustained intensity. 

As far as I could tell, the text seemed remarkably faithful to the words of the original; Williams’s edits or interpolations were as difficult to detect as the transitions from live to pre-edited footage. The most significant departure from the novella – and the turning point of the show – occurs in the final section when Utterson reads Jekyll’s confession and ‘full statement of the case’. At this point both actors repeatedly drink the transformative potion, while the soundtrack transitions from a Bernard Hermann-style classically themed score to pounding techno, and the entire production slides into a kind of drug-fuelled gay-nightclub rave/delirium (this was my favourite part of the show). At the same time, the images on the screens – which have hitherto been in black-and-white, using dreamlike Expressionist or Surrealist-inspired dissolves and superimpositions that recall Rouben Mamoulian’s 1930s film version – explode into colour, invoking The Wizard of Oz (complete with footage of Backer as Dorothy and Leslie as the Cowardly Lion), while the two actors join hands and run off into the maze of screens, finally reappearing at the front of the stage wearing dresses and dance the can-can. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

A queer sub-text is certainly implied in Stevenson’s novella, but its narrative and thematic concerns lie elsewhere. Jekyll’s problem is one of compartmentalisation or splitting; the effect of the potion is to further dissociate the two aspects of his personality rather than reconciling them in a rainbow coalition of peace and love (it’s probably more like ice or crack than weed or LSD). His addiction to the drug (and the psychical fragmentation that results) facilitates the release of unchecked aggressivity and the death-drive, including the enactment of sadistic, destructive, misogynistic, homophobic, murderous and suicidal fantasies of domination and control over his victims (and ultimately himself). In this regard he arguably embodies the forces of right-wing reactionary populism or fascism more than sexual or political liberation.

Williams is less interested in Hyde’s more properly horrifying and monstrous attributes. Instead, the unspoken theme of queerness is heightened – especially in the final section, which almost feels like the raison d’être of the whole show. Consequently the allegory goes beyond the theme of duality – good and evil, Freudian ego and id, Jungian persona and shadow self – and becomes a prophetic celebration of contemporary theories and practices of multiplicity, non-binary ways of thinking and being, and even trans-identity. It’s a laudable aim, even if it feels like a bit of a stretch (I felt like Williams’s and Norvill’s gender-queering of Dorian Gray was closer to the mark).

For all the ingenious perversity of Williams’s adaptation and the razzle-dazzle, smoke-and-mirrors magic of his cine-theatre, the heart and soul of the production (as always) lies with the actors (as it did with Norvill in Dorian Gray). Backer’s Utterson conveys a touching vulnerability beneath his veneer of impassive stiffness and is wonderfully liberated when he finds his inner Dorothy in the final section. Leslie resembles John Barrymore in the silent film version both as Jekyll and when he transforms into Hyde with minimal changes in costume, makeup or special effects. While there’s a certain calculated and almost brittle coldness to his Jekyll – a quality which extends to all the other characters he plays, almost as if it were something inherent in the façade of Victorian masculinity itself – this is counterbalanced by his demonic Hyde, whose scuttling, cowering figure is dressed in a too-large overcoat and long, unkempt wig, and who addresses his interlocutors (and the camera) with glowering eyes, leering smile and rasping voice. Leslie manages to imbue this figure with the uncanny yet indefinable malevolence and repulsiveness required by the story (and which arguably exceeds the symbolic framework of Williams’s interpretation), while simultaneously embodying something abject and even pitiable, both monster and child.

All of this is captured and amplified by the astonishing video design and camerawork, especially by the team of Steadycam operators, who in one sequence chase the actors around the perimeter of the stage like paparazzi, while an expertly framed and (presumably) live-edited tracking shot follows them on the screens.

At times however I found myself longing for some relief from the predominantly mediated nature of my contact with the actors, as my eyes were continually drawn to the screens and away from was happening on the stage. It’s almost as if in cine-theatre ‘onstage’ has become a form of ‘backstage’ to which the audience is allowed access in the form of endless voyeuristic ‘sneak-peaks’.

Perhaps one could argue that in a Brechtian fashion the devices of cine-theatre expose the artifice of theatre and cinema – and potentially the hidden mechanics of capitalism and exploitation or the psychodynamics of repression and the unconscious – that normally occur ‘behind the scenes’. However, the effect is still predominantly to ‘cinematize’ the theatrical experience, framing everything for the benefit of the camera as a lure for the spectator’s gaze.

Clemence Williams’s thrilling but relentless score also emphasised the cinematic aspect of the show, imposing a hypnotic mood that risked becoming monotonous. The actors’ continuously rapid-fire delivery of non-stop text had a similarly relentless and hypnotic effect. This was exacerbated by their amplified voices being mixed into the soundtrack and dispersed around the auditorium with use of body-mics and surround-sound speakers, with the inevitable slight delay and echo that attends the use of live-feed audio and cinema-style sound equipment in a resonant theatre space. All of this made it hard for us to connect their voices to their bodies or to what was happening onstage (or even onscreen), or even at times to follow what they were saying. 

In sum, I couldn't help feeling that there's a strange Jekyll-and-Hyde-like quality to the form of cine-theatre itself, with the cinematic elements devouring the theatrical ones, like a parasite devouring its host. At times I almost wished I could watch the two actors perform the show ‘unplugged’. 

 

In a way, the whole cine-theatrical apparatus made me think of a hermetically sealed lab experiment, with the cine-stage as a space-time-compression chamber inducing a heightened version of what my friend and colleague the philosopher and architect Paul Virilio calls ‘speed-space’ – with the actors as experimental subjects, the adaptor-director and his fellow creatives as scientists, the crew as their assistants, and the audience as observers. Perhaps it’s a demonstration of the fact that we’re all Jekyll-and-Hydes now, addicted to the drug of digital technology, and trapped in our fragmented and compartmentalised performative identities and virtual worlds. 

 

That said, it’s an amazing creation flawlessly executed, and the virtuoso performances by the actors and technical crew carry all before them. Williams is one of the most interesting directors working in theatre today; and Leslie is one of the most charismatic actors currently working onstage and onscreen.

*

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic 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.  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.  

 

Music of the Spheres 

Perth Concert Hall, Perth Festival 

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

In keeping with this year’s Perth Festival theme Djilda (stars), Music of the Spheres was a program of early, classical and contemporary music with explicitly sidereal references. It was performed at Perth Concert Hall, which as well as being one of my favourite classical music venues because of its wonderful acoustics is also a masterpiece of brutalist architecture and poured concrete.

 

In fact the title-phrase doesn’t refer to the stars at all, but to the ancient Greek theory (which persisted into the Renaissance) that the movements, positions and dimensions of the sun, moon and planets were related to each other in mathematical proportions that not only resembled but actually generated a form of music that could be ‘felt’ by the soul. It’s a beautiful theory even if it isn’t true; and – at least when understood metaphorically rather than literally – a promising idea for a concert program. 

 

The problem for me was that the works in question were chosen simply because they’re all settings of texts that literally refer to the stars. Not only did this reduce the texts themselves to a kind of repetitive blandness (an impression reinforced by having the English translations projected as surtitles on a huge screen above the concert platform); it also lumped together works that had little in common in terms of their musical language or the musical forces required – an incongruity made even more jarring by hearing them performed continuously one after the other without allowing breaks for applause (though the audience attempted valiantly to do). Consequently, masterpieces by Tallis, Palestrina, Purcell, Monteverdi, Handel, Mahler and Strauss became more like a series of musical ‘treats’ than windows into the composers’ souls (as is the case with the Mahler and Strauss songs); their dramatic personae (as with arias like Handel’s ‘Total Eclipse’ from Samson or Dvořák’s ‘Song to the Moon’ from Rusalka); or the religious beliefs that they shared with their era (in the case of Tallis or Palestrina).

 

That said, there were some wonderful performances, notably by soprano Samantha Clarke in luminous versions of ‘Song to the Moon’ and Strauss’s Morgen, both richly accompanied by WASO under the thoughtful baton of Richard Mills; tenor Shanul Sharma in a sensitive rendition of ‘Total Eclipse’; and the small bespoke ten-person choir, who shone in the short sacred pieces by Tallis, Palestrina, Monteverdi, and the latter’s lesser-known Spanish contemporary Juan Esquivel de Barahona, as well as a haunting piece by contemporary American composer Morten Lauridsen called ‘O Nata Lux’. The latter shared the same text as the Tallis, and nicely rounded out the choral thread of the program, which (appropriately expanded) could easily have provided the basis for an entire concert, or at least an entire first half; just as the Dvořák, Mahler and Strauss works could have been part of a separate program – conceivably after interval – of Romantic and Late Romantic music for voice and orchestra (perhaps with a little Wagner and some more Mahler and Strauss to flesh things out). 

 

Gumbaynggirr/Yamatji singer-songwriter Emma Donovan’s contemporary creation song about the night sky ‘Yira Djinang’ was sung with great nobility by Donovan as an opening number, using a mic and backed by WASO and Mills in a skilful and imaginative orchestral arrangement by Grandage. However, to my ears the arrangement underscored the musical stretch involved in yoking together what was essentially a folk-pop ballad – which would normally be accompanied by a guitar or a backing band – with those musical forces or the repertoire that followed. While I applauded the inclusiveness of the programming, the song felt like something of an outlier as the only piece written or performed by a First Nations artist, especially as Donovan didn’t appear in any of the other works, unlike any of the other artists. Perhaps the inclusion of at least one other First Nations work – such as a more traditional creation song or a more demanding contemporary work by a composer-musician like William Barton – would have provided more context.

 

I was also unconvinced by the inclusion of Mills’s ‘Glimpses and Dialogues’ from Galileo, a Festival co-commission (perhaps as an opera or oratorio?) that was performed after interval by all the singers and musicians from the first half of the concert (except Donovan), once again conducted by Mills. I found the pieces musically intriguing but difficult to connect with, as they seemed more like a series of fragments from a larger (perhaps unfinished?) work, and as such once again lacked context – apart from being about 'the stars'. 

 

In sum: Music of the Spheres was a musically accomplished evening that felt a little forced to me in terms of its conception and execution, notwithstanding the stellar contributions of all the artists involved.

*

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic 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. 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.  

 

  

Stephanie Lake Company: Manifesto

Perth Festival, Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA

STRUT Dance: Perth Moves/10 Duets on a Theme of Rescue

Perth Festival, State Theatre Centre of WA Courtyard

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto is the opening in-theatre show of Iain Grandage’s 2023 Perth Festival. It’s a big, bold, brash work; and a bold choice for a festival opener. 

 

Lake’s gutsy, accessible style of choreography and staging is a perfect match for Grandage’s own heart-on-his-sleeve, openly popularist aesthetic as a festival director, and the opening night audience seemed to eagerly devour it – spontaneously clapping and cheering during the show and giving it a standing ovation at the end.

 

Nine dancers – five women, four men – are initially revealed onstage lounging on chairs and wearing neat white pants and tops with black trimmings and bare feet. Above them nine drummers ­– with a similar gender-mix including at least one non-binary performer – sit dressed in black behind black rock’n’roll drum kits on a tiered platform with pink drapes descending to the floor. 

 

Charles Davis’s set, Paula Levis’s costumes and Bosco Shaw’s lighting all explicitly invoke the look and feel of a classic 1930s Depression-era Busby Berkley Hollywood musical. The prevailing mood of Lake’s choreography and Robin Fox’s score is for the most part similarly upbeat, upfront and shamelessly free of pretensions to deeper content or significance.

 

Manifesto was conceived by Lake and Fox over the past two years of the pandemic during the seemingly endless series of lockdowns in Melbourne, and the sense of relief, joy and (literally) tongue-poking defiance is palpable (and must have been even more so when it was first performed there in 2022 after debuting in Adelaide earlier that year). Lake describes the work as a ‘A Tattoo to Optimism’, and there’s a demonstrative and even regimented quality to the exuberance of the movement, music and staging that reminded me of cheerleading or ritualized military display. 

 

This sense of regimentation mercifully breaks down (and breaks out) into more freewheeling and individually expressive sequences, including trios, duets and solos by both the dancers and drummers (there are some explosive drum solos, call-and-response sections and chain-reactions). The dancers change costumes twice, their outfits becoming more dressed-down and then more personalised, leading to a final outburst of collective celebration, with hair loosened, items of clothing discarded, furniture attacked, and even the odd outbreak of that uniquely Australian (and much missed) form of protest, streaking (bring it back, I say). 

 

The technical virtuosity and evident sense of enjoyment shared by the dancers and drummers was palpable, and the audience duly responded in kind, but I felt more ambivalent.

 

Much of the choreography and music – most notably in the opening section – took the form of jarring, unpredictable stop-start freeze-frames and ‘samples’ of suddenly erupting and immediately arrested movement and sound (the two seemed to be so conjoined that it was impossible to say which was leading or following the other). This form of image and music-making reminded me of the jarring, unpredictable rhythm of the lockdowns themselves, especially in Melbourne, as well as the stop-start freeze-framing and sampling associated with video and hip hop, and the accelerated expansion of digital media into every aspect of our lives during the pandemic – including the increasing colonisation and even replacement of live performance by the internet and the small screen. 

At least it felt like an act of resistance to see this embodied onstage by the dancers and drummers, rather than invading the stage with cameras and screens or bombarding it with pre-recorded sound. In terms of movement, it's a contemporary-dance trope that’s almost become a cliché, but as a form of group spectacle I’ve never seen it taken to such extremes. 

 

In keeping with this sense of traumatised fragmentation I also felt there was a (possibly deliberate) absence of overall structure in the choreography and music, despite the impressive creation of stage pictures and the dazzling execution. In a way the whole show was more like a circus or cabaret consisting of a series of disjointed routines or ‘acts’ than a fully integrated work, which perhaps accounts for the strange sense of anticlimax I was left with at the end. 

 

Again, perhaps this lack of formal architecture was itself a refusal to abide by traditional forms of progression or integration, or a statement that such forms have been irrevocably shattered or are no longer relevant. As such, the work could be read as an aesthetic ‘manifesto’ as well as a physical and emotional one.

 

At times however I felt an urge to resist the insistent sense of mass appeal and the relentless if unspoken barrage of injunctions (‘Stop! Go! Enjoy!’). After all, the pandemic is not yet over; and the social, political and environmental problems that preceded it are still in train, perhaps more catastrophically than ever. 

 

That said, the show was at least a welcome distraction and invitation to put those problems out of mind for a while – much like the effect of watching a Busby Berkeley musical, in fact.

 

*

 

Outside in the State Theatre Centre Courtyard something more subtle and complex (and arguably more interesting) is afoot. 

 

STRUT Dance have programmed five days and nights of free activities and performances under the collective title: ‘Perth Moves’. The program includes meditation and yoga sessions, dance classes (Afro-Fusion, Hip Hop, Latin Social, House and contemporary dance are all covered, as well as classes for beginners and older or less experienced movers like yours truly), dance battles, late night DJ sets, open-access cast warmups, and free performances twice nightly of Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s 10 Duets on a Theme of Rescue. Appropriately for this year’s Festival theme of Djinda (stars), it all takes place under the night sky, and is a shining example of what a Festival can deliver to enliven a community.

 

STRUT has been running workshops with Pite’s company Kidd Pivot over the past five years, and now long-term Pite collaborator and Kidd Pivot member Cindy Welik-Salgado is restaging 10 Duets with a team of ten local, interstate and New Zealand dancers. The work was originally made for Cedar Lake in New York in 2008, and is performed by five dancers who take turns to inhabit the duets in a series of continuously and seamlessly shifting and changing partnerships (I’m assuming two groups of dancers alternate between the two performances each night). 

 

The energy and pace of the work also shifts and changes, but the mood is predominantly dark. The duets themselves are intimate, tender and full of unresolved conflict. This requires a sense of deep interiority as well as physical strength, lightness and dexterity on the part of the dancers, who effectively become actors as well, albeit silent ones – a silence that only intensifies the yearning in their fleeting exchanges.

 

The sense of intimacy is supported by the elegantly minimalist costumes – designed by Linda Chow and realised for this production by Nicole Marrington – and the even more minimalist set and lighting. The dancers wear non-gender-specific casual indoor clothing, including socks rather than bare feet or shoes, all of which adds to the sense of domesticity. It’s as if we’re in series of rooms, even though there’s no furniture or carpeting – an effect that’s ironically heightened by staging the work outdoors. 

 

Lighting is provided by floodlights on stands which are initially positioned in an arc upstage and then moved around peripherally by the dancers while fading up or down (these lights are augmented by overheads on the rear balcony of the Courtyard that become barely noticeable once the work begins). The effect is subtle but adds to the sense of shifting and changing energy and partnerships.

 

The overall atmosphere of melancholy is underscored by the use of ambient music by Cliff Martinez from the soundtrack to the film Solaris (the Stephen Soderberg version, not the Tarkovsky), with its mournful sheen of synthesized strings and soft tuned percussion, which adds another layer of continuity to the work, gently taking us ‘elsewhere’ than the Courtyard, and inside the heads and bodies of the dancers.

 

Pite is evidently interested in the physical and emotional connections and disconnections between as well as within human beings. The dancers’ movements, gestures, and postures – pushing, pulling, grasping, hugging, holding, releasing, falling, rising, standing, walking, crawling and even sitting at the edge of the stage with their backs to us – express a vast range of possible scenarios involving physical or emotional rescue as well as loss, its inevitable counterpart. In fact this overarching ‘duet’ between rescue and loss is arguably the theme of the entire work.

 

Ten Duets lasts for about fifteen minutes but has more content and coherence than most hour-long dance manifestos. 

See it if you can.

 

 *

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic 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. 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), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary dance incorporating elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. 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.