Postcard # 1 from Adelaide Festival 2020

Turning up the Heat: Dance into Images, Music into Dance

Cold Blood/Lyon Opera Ballet

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The phrase ‘cold blood’ has associations with physical death, emotional detachment, and animals like reptiles, fish, amphibians and insects that can survive for long periods without food because (unlike warm-blooded creatures) they don’t maintain a constant body temperature, and thus require less energy.

Belgian company Kiss & Cry Collective’s Cold Blood is certainly a show about death, detachment and resourcefulness, but it also deals with love, chance and ephemerality. There’s even a certain ‘cold-bloodedness’ in its form of expression and means of production; as well as in its content – including some of the characters, events, and even the settings in which they take place. However I found the cumulative effect of the show surprisingly ‘warm’ – lyrical, funny, moving, beautiful, awe-inspiring and even profound.

The genre of the show is a unique hybrid of micro-dance theatre, bricolage-object theatre and live-feed video. Co-directed by dancer-choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey and film-maker Jaco Van Dormael, it features three dancers (De Mey, Grégory Grosjean and Grabriella Iacono) and six set/object/lighting manipulators (Van Dormael, Ivan Fox, Bruno Olivier, Stefano Serra, Julien Lambert and Aurélie Leporcq) – two of whom (Lambert and Leporcq) also double as Steadicam operators.

The set (designed by Sylvie Olivé) consists of a collection of domestic objects, tables, chairs and light-sources (lighting designed by Nicolas Olivier), surmounted by a huge projection screen (featuring live-feed and live-edited cinematography by Dormael and Lambert) that hovers just above the performers’ heads. The entire apparatus is a kind of split-level, parallel-reality dance-theatre stage/cinema, the moving parts of which can be observed either one at a time or as a simultaneous but contradictory totality in which any formal hierarchy is effectively abolished. As Van Dormael remarks in a program note: ‘We were looking for something where the dance was not serving the cinema, and the cinema was not serving the dance.’

The choreography (by De Mey and Grosjean) mostly involves the dancers’ hands, and sometimes extends to their entire bodies. The performers are clad in basic black (costumes by Béa Pendesini and Sarah Duvert), but occasionally more flesh is revealed; and their movement repertoire is drawn from a wide range of styles and sources (De Mey is a contemporary and colleague of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and hails from the generation of Belgian contemporary dance makers who came to prominence in the 80s and 90s).

However everything seems to emanate from or culminate in the hands, which are the principle focus of the images, both as these appear onstage and (in very different form) on-screen. As De Mey remarks in a program note: ‘The camera sees what the audience’s eyes can’t see, and the audience’s eyes see what the camera doesn’t see. It’s very much the idea of a story within a story within a story.’

In fact the work’s ambiguous visual and narrative framing recalls the recursive art of Escher or the nested stories of the 1001 Nights. The deliberately unresolved conflict for ontological primacy between flesh and technology also gives Cold Blood a special place in the contemporary field of multi-platform performance, as well situating it in a literary and cinematic sci-fi tradition that goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and the most significant 20^thcentury avatar of which is arguably 2001 (indeed Kubrick’s film is directly referenced in the show).

The effect is one of deliberate disorientation or even de-differentiation, in which sophisticated theatre and cinema techniques ‘regress’ to a more basic stem-cell-like level of functioning, and are then recombined to induce a kind of oneiric delirium. In fact the work also belongs to a very French and even more specifically Belgian tradition of surrealism in literature, painting, photography and cinema, from Buñuel and Dalì’s, Un Chien Andalou to Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad to the paintings of Magritte and Delvaux – especially former’s visual paradoxes, and the latter’s dream-like images of women, architecture and nocturnal landscapes.

Dreaming, hypnosis and the inducement of a hypnagogic or ‘twilight’ state of consciousness are all explicitly invoked by the text, which is written by Belgian author Thomas Gunzig, and delivered in voiceover by actor Toby Regbo. Text and delivery are disarmingly yet deceptively droll; in fact this artful narrative framework – the hallucinatory style and content of which resembles a short story by Murakami – is crucial to the dramaturgy of the work, which might otherwise dissolve into a series of superficially textural and gimmicky technical effects.

The text takes the form of second-person monologue, and begins with a classic hypnotist’s incantation before counting backwards and telling us: ‘You are asleep.’ What follows are seven stories of death by misadventure – each leading to a last memory-image before the final extinction of consciousness – which we are invited to experience as a kind of transmigratory journey (‘You are becoming someone else’).

These bizarre, unforseeable and/or otherwise ‘stupid’ deaths recall the pre-title sequences that used to begin each episode of the HBO series Six Feet Under, and are similarly detached and even ‘cold-blooded’ in tone. The sole survivor of a plane crash (a toy plane suspended in a jar of cloudy liquid) wanders through a snowbound forest and freezes to death; the driver of a car forgets to roll up the windows while going through an automated carwash (feather dusters attached to cordless drills) and is bludgeoned to death (the image is suffused by red lighting-gels); a restaurant patron dies of an allergy to mashed potatoes; the patron of a gentlemen’s club chokes on a bra-clasp (the pole-dancer is an index and middle finger sliding up and down a metal stick); a man-eating serial cannibal commits suicide by taking an overdose (a dancer’s body writhing supine is filmed from above through a window-frame while the image tilts and rotates onscreen); and an astronaut asphyxiates in space. 

An equally surreal succession of landscapes, settings and images includes clouds, forests, a frozen lake (on which one hand dances with another in the guise of its own impossibly independent shadow), six pairs of hands plucking invisible strings and fluttering like butterflies, forlorn highways, a drive-in movie screen, a bombed-out city on fire in wartime, an aerial view of nocturnal apartment blocks, and a rocket blasting off into space (a vibrating hair-dryer, two forks and three lamps against a background constellation of fairy lights).

Choreographic tributes include a Fred and Ginger routine (two hands with thimbles tap-dancing on a crystal tray); an Esther Williams synchronised swimming extravaganza (a kaleidoscopic fractal image of multiple hands); and an astonishing recreation of Maurice Béjart’s choreography to Ravel’s Bolero danced by six hands on a miniature model stage and covered by a 180-degree tracking shot until finally the actual house lights go up and the audience is revealed to itself onscreen. There are also playful cinema-history references to Lost Highway, Black Swan, 1930s Hollywood musicals, and of course 2001.

All this is accompanied by an alternately ironic and sublime continuous playlist-soundtrack (sound design by Boris Cekevda) that mixes classical tracks by the likes of Ravel, Ligeti, Arvo Pärt and the Adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet with popular classics like Doris Day, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed’s It’s Such A Perfect Day and David Bowie’s Space Oddity. 

The overall production aesthetic is both domestic and exotic, miniature and spectacular at the same time. As Van Dormael says in the program, he and De Mey began by asking themselves: ‘Is it possible to make a feature film here on the table on our kitchen? And is it possible to dance only with the hands?’

The answer, resoundingly, is yes. And perhaps this has something to do with the nature of hands themselves – as opposed to the objects or artefacts that are the substance of so much visual theatre (as well as Kubrick’s anti-humanism in 2001). 

As organs, hands (as opposed to paws) are unique to human beings and other primates (as even tools are not). They are also uniquely articulated (having more bones than any other organ in the body), mobile and tactile, as well as cognitive and communicative (think of counting and sign-language). As choreographed by De Mey and filmed by Van Dermael, they also possess an incredible degree of expressiveness. As the latter commented in an interview in The Guardian earlier this year: ‘When you film the hands, it’s the face and body at the same time.’ 

The success of Cold Blood ultimately attests to the relationship between its co-creators: a choreographer and filmmaker who are also life-partners. Their mutual embrace of dance and cinema – and beyond this, their collaborative transcendence of the opposition between the body and technology – also points to a ‘trans-humanism’ beyond ‘anti-humanism’. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, the image of two hands touching each other – and the exchange between them as they alternate between touching and being touched – testifies to a reversibility of ‘the flesh’ that situates us as living beings within the living, breathing context of something greater than ourselves.

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In comparison with Cold Blood, the Lyon Opera Ballet’s Trios Grandes Fugues was at least on the face of it a more rigorous exercise in ‘pure’ contemporary dance. However if what we mean by ‘pure’ dance is that it’s ‘uncontaminated’ by reference to anything else, then the evening was ‘impure’ in the sense that each of the three pieces it comprised was created in reference to a single work of music (Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge), and that therefore in that context they also referred to each other. 

It should also be noted that arguably not all three works might best be described as ‘contemporary dance’, since the opening piece by Lucinda Childs could also be characterised as a kind of postmodern ballet, while the closing piece by Maguy Marin is perhaps more a work of dance theatre. Nevertheless because of their common point of reference, and even more so by programming them as a set of ‘variations’ in response to it, Trois Grandes Fugues became a satisfyingly integrated work in its own right, much like the great sets of musical variations by that composer (in particular the ‘Diabelli’ Variations and the last movement of his final Piano Sonata, which were composed during the same period as the Grosse Fuge towards the end of his life).

The evening also followed an interesting musical and dramaturgical journey in terms of instrumental and choreographic forces. Three different recordings of the Grosse Fuge were used – the first an orchestral version, the other two played by two very different string quartets; and the ensemble of dancers used by each choreographer was progressively reduced in number, while the style and intensity of the choreography and dancing became progressively heightened.

Most importantly (and in common with the Grosse Fuge itself, as well as the other works by Beethoven just mentioned), Trois Grandes Fugues is no mere academic or intellectual exercise. In terms of physical and emotional intensity as well as aesthetic form, there’s a progression from coolness and even coldness to warmth and finally searing heat. As such it has some similarities with Cold Blood (though it goes much further). Thus both works considered together provide an opportunity to reflect on the nature of that journey and these qualities in relation to any work of performance.

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Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is an eccentric outcrop even amidst the craggy mountain range of the composer’s oeuvre. Originally conceived as the final movement of the late String Quartet No. 13 Op. 130 in B flat major, it’s longer than all five other movements put together (and usually takes about 16 minutes to perform). Widely reviled by his contemporary critics, and met with incomprehension by colleagues and friends (as well as dismay by his publisher), he eventually consented to replace it with a ‘tamer’ finale. 

The work is now regarded as one of his towering masterpieces. Interestingly in the context of dance, no less than Stravinsky (one of the greatest ballet composers in the history of music) described it as ‘an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever’. It’s thus no surprise that contemporary choreographers have been drawn to it and attempted to meet it at least halfway  – as any interpretative artist must with any work (the greater the work, the greater the challenge). 

As its title indicates, the work is a ‘grand fugue’, which like many of Beethoven’s late works engages in a characteristically titanic struggle to integrate baroque forms (such as the fugue itself) and even earlier Renaissance and medieval elements (such as polyphony and modal tonalities) with the classical style – as well as Romanticism (and even arguably prefiguring Expressionism and atonality). Once again, in Beethoven’s case this struggle was no mere academic or intellectual exercise, but an immense emotional and spiritual undertaking. It can even be understood as political, for example if we regard Beethoven’s ‘religion’ as what Furtwangler called a ‘religion of humanity’, or in less overtly theological or humanist terms recognise with Adorno that music and art always have social content.

Formally this struggle takes the form of a perpetual oscillation between order and chaos – or what Nietzsche termed Apollo and Dionysus in relation to Greek Tragedy and the work of Wagner (who again interestingly in this context referred to Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony as ‘the apotheosis of dance’). Musically this takes the form of a conflict between dissonance and harmony, and reflects the inherently fugal characteristic of counterpoint, as well as Beethoven’s own increasing preoccupation with cross-rhythms (all of which contribute to the work’s fiendish technical difficulties in performance, both for the musicians and in this case the choreographer and dancers). 

In terms of its reception by the listener (or in the case of dance, the spectator), this is experienced as a struggle between mind and body, intellect and emotions – registered physically by violent shifts in intensity between noise to silence (or movement and stillness); and emotionally by violent changes of mood from anguish, rage, grief, despair and resignation, to playfulness, humour, joy, thanksgiving and reconciliation (musical as well as emotional).

In sum: the music makes substantial demands, to which the three choreographers in question made varying responses, and in turn placed different demands on the dancers – and on us.

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First cab off the rank was also the most recent work on the program, created for Lyon Opera Ballet itself in 2016 by American postmodern conceptual minimalist Lucinda Childs. This involved 12 dancers – 6 men and 6 women – dancing in opposite-sex couples. The choreography was characteristically cool and detached, even airy, involving a postmodern-ironic use of classical steps, along with the choreographer’s trademark gestural and spatial patterns and repetitions.

Set lighting and costumes designed by Dominique Drillot were restricted to shades of silver and grey. The dancers were clad in soft, loose tops and pants, and the choreography was arranged against a freestanding background structure made of some kind of filigree lace material that cast shadows against the backdrop and was reminiscent of an Arabic ornamental window screen or Indonesian shadow puppetry.

The music was recorded by the Lyon Opera Orchestra in 2016 – presumably for the work’s premiere. It was a luscious, rich, romantic reading, somewhat like a movie soundtrack, although undeniably in ironic counterpoint with the choreography. However, the combined effect was one of formalism, and even traditionalism.

In sum: the work felt to me like something of a museum piece, and seemed to engage with the Beethoven on a somewhat superficial level. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help admiring the technical ingenuity of the work, and the grace of the dancers. Their faces, however, seemed frozen in forward-looking fake smiles, and their bodies and emotions seemed disconnected from the work and each other – one dancer in particular (as my companion at the performance pointed out) even switching off completely every time they stopped moving.

In the context of the evening, however, this opener turned out to be a palate-cleanser. The best was yet to come.

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After a short interval came a much more substantial, delightful and fascinating work: Belgian contemporary dance maker Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s setting of the Grosse Fuge, created for her own Rosas Company in 1992. 

For this performance, the recording of the Beethoven was by the Debussy Quartet in 2006. This was an ardent, earthy and joyous rendition of the score, in total contrast with the preceding orchestral version. (I’d be curious to know which recording the work was originally made in response to, but I’d wager it was something similar in terms of energy and mood, as the choreography seemed to respond to it with such sensitivity and precision.)

De Keersmaeker makes dance in response to music (and text) that’s not necessarily written to be danced to. As someone who studied music prior to dance, she does this in a uniquely rigorous and original way. For example her choreography inspired by Bach’s Cello Suites (which I saw a couple of years ago) involves taking the musical language of the dance-movements that comprise the suites (which themselves were not written to be danced to, but rather to translate dance into music) and ‘re-translating’ that language back into her own choreography. This process of translation even includes the text of the score, for example by rendering the dance-term ‘Allemande’ in the form of actual walking.

Here the choreography involved 8 dancers (6 men and 2 women), identically dressed non-gender-specifically in black suits, open white shirts over t-shirts or singlets, and ‘sensible’ shoes black (costumes designed by the Rosas Company); the women had their hair tied back, and were gender-identifiable only by their body shapes. However their neat outfits became increasingly and randomly dishevelled, shirts becoming untucked or being casually tucked back in, unbuttoned or discarded as some of the dancers stripped down to t-shirts or singlets. Set and lighting by Jan Joris Lamers were similarly ‘neutral’ and informal, with the exception of a horizontal strip of light across the forestage, which the dancers moved in and out of in various ways.

Like the costumes, the choreography was similarly androgynous but individualised, with dancers frequently taking turns to dance in various groupings, or standing, sitting or reclining on the floor to observe each other. The movement had the appearance of being spontaneous, but (as one would expect from De Keeersmaeker) was meticulously responsive to the score and even the mood of the recording, being full of unfeigned exuberance and enjoyment. The dancers were physically grounded, and used multiple levels (including floor-rolls) and a variety of dance and movement languages (including folk dance and martial arts moves)

I loved this work, and found it a revelation in terms of the Beethoven, which is frequently interpreted as heavy and full of struggle, but here shone with all the composer’s capacity for lightness and joy – surely essential components for any revolution worthy of the name.

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This was immediately followed by the final version of the Grosse Fuge for the evening by French dance theatre maker Maguy Marin, whose work is characterised by heightened emotion and grotesque theatricality, inspired by Samuel Beckett and fairy tales – as well as by her political philosophy, which might be summed up by her statement on receiving the Scripps Award for modern dance in 2003: ‘I don’t accept this world as it is.’ As such of all three choreographers under consideration she has perhaps the most in common with Beethoven himself. 

The work in question was created for the Maguy Marin Company in 2001. It was danced to an intense, incisive, even abrasive recording by the Quartetto Italiano from 1968 (the date itself is indicative of the recording’s revolutionary spirit, as well as the crushing reaction that followed). The choreography involved 4 female dancers, variously dressed in red skirts and tops (designed by Chantal Cloupet), on a bare stage starkly lit by Francois Renard.

In a program note Marin herself invokes ‘the rising life-force of the female being’ in response to music that simultaneously produces a ‘state of enthusiasm and despair’. This ‘bipolar’ quality in Beethoven’s music (and perhaps temperament) was here met by something wild, ferocious and even furious, involving huge leaps, ecstatic faces and outstretched arms, but also bent heads, hunched torsos, crooked legs and shuffling, almost crippled feet (fiercely embodied by the four extraordinary dancers, Julia Carnicer, Coralie Levieux, Merel van Heeswijk, and Elsa Monguillot de Mirman, on the matinee performance I saw).

In Nietzschean and Wagnerian terms, this was certainly the Dionysian apotheosis of the evening. Musically and choreographically it possessed an almost Stravinskian primitivism, and affirmed that composer’s remark about the ‘absolutely contemporary’ nature of Beethoven’s work. I was reminded simultaneously of the Bacchae, and of the current political moment we’re living through, especially in terms of gender. At the curtain call, the dancers looked as if they were awakening from a trance, and surprised to find themselves still alive.

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Cold Blood was at the Ridley Centre, Adelaide Showgrounds, 5–8 March; I saw the performance on 6 March.

Lyon Opera Ballet was at the Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 6–7 March; I saw the matinee on 7 March.

Postcard from Perth Festival 5

Women and Power

Bryony Kimmings, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch/Beethoven, Fidelio

In counterpoint with the theme of Indigenous and First Nations identity that’s been such a pervasive leitmotif in this year’s Perth Festival have been the subjects of gender and sexuality. Both were prominent at Kabarett Haus in the concerts by Meow Meow and Rufus Wainwright (and Amanda Palmer as well).

Among the First Nations theatre works in the program, Hecate invoked the role of matriarchy in traditional Noongar culture; two powerful contemporary matriarchs did battle in Black Ties (while a Takapui trans woman was a crucial force of chaos and liberation in the unfolding of events); and a maternal deus ex machina also played a decisive role in the resolution of Bran Nue Dae. Even in Anthem, key female figures included the Indigenous busker and the rage-filled working-class mother who both disrupted the fragile order of things on the commuter train.

In this Postcard I want to look at two other works of theatre and opera in the Festival that tackled head-on the issue of women’s experiences and struggles in what is still predominantly a man’s world.

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British feminist theatre artist Bryony Kimmings has carved out a unique path in contemporary performance which is every bit as distinctive and dangerous as that of Meow Meow in the field of contemporary cabaret. I saw two previous shows of hers – Sex Idiot and Fake It Till You Make It – at Perth Fringe World in 2015. One involved contacting former lovers after being diagnosed with an STD; the other was about her partner’s clinical depression, and featured him in the show. I reviewed both somewhat unkindly at the time, because I felt that - while highly entertaining and even moving -their intentions (and perhaps even their ethics) were slightly unclear. To be honest, I felt that the undeniably hugely talented artist’s ego sometimes got in the way of her concern for social justice, even in the case of her research subjects. 

In saying this I’m mindful of sounding like the archetypical middle-aged white middle-class male critic who features in I’m A Phoenix, Bitch as a persecutory voice in Kimmings’s head and accuses her of self-indulgence – an archetype hilariously embodied by Kimmings herself in the show by speaking into a head-mike and using voice-changer software to alter the pitch. However for the purposes of this review, and as a sometime ‘confessional’ theatre maker myself, I’m more than happy to check my privilege and wear the accusation.

Moreover, none of the aforementioned reservations apply to I’m A Phoenix, Bitch, which for me is a game-changer in terms of her work and confessional theatre generally. Like its precursors, it’s a multi-platform performance work; but in comparison with the previous shows of hers I’ve seen, it’s conceived and realised on a vastly expanded scale, using monologue and songs (written and performed by Kimmings), music (composed by Tom Parkinson), atmospheric sound and lighting (by Lewis Gibson and Johanne Jensen), live-stream and pre-prepared video projection (designed by Will Duke and associate Hayley Egan), and an extensive array of props, costumes and set design components (some of which are made by Kimmings herself, but all of which are integrated into an over-arching aesthetic by art director David Curtis-Ring). 

All these elements are progressively employed and (in the case of the set design) dramatically revealed during the show, which is co-directed by Kimmings and Kirsty Housley, with additional input from dramaturg Nina Steiger, creative associate Michal Keamo and choreographer Sarah Blanc. This sense of expanded dramaturgy also applies to the emotional content, which takes us (and her) on a rollercoaster from comedy and satire to heartbreak and illness, mental and physical – and finally a kind of recovery that’s in no way sentimental, but intelligently thought-through and brutally hard-won.

All of Kimmings’s work is designed to provoke social change. This provocation typically takes the form of a meta-theatrical and autobiographical ‘social experiment’ conducted (with a greater or lesser degree of control) on herself (and to a greater or lesser extent on others as well). In fact, for better or worse, the notion of ‘control’ in every sense of the word – artistic, scientific, social and personal – is crucial to understanding her work. Other shows for example have involved being observed by scientists while drunk for seven days to explore the relationship between alcohol and creativity, or becoming a pop star invented by a nine-year-old.

However while Sex Idiot and Fake It Till You Make It sometimes felt over-controlled (or perhaps over-controlling, for example in the case of her creative and stage relationship with her partner in the latter show), it might be more accurate to describe I’m A Phoenix, Bitch as a highly controlled work about being out of control – primarily in relation to herself, but in a way that speaks to all women – especially when it comes to relationships, including motherhood; and more generally, when it comes to women’s relationships with their bodies, their psyches, and their careers. As the title of the show indicates, it’s also a show about personal and artistic as well as social change. 

In brief: this is a show about making a show, in response to events that (in this case) happen largely outside of her control. Falling in and out of love, falling pregnant, falling ill, and the fallout from all of these, are all paradigmatic examples of this loss of control, much as we like to deceive ourselves otherwise – a lesson that all of us learn sooner or later, depending on how addicted we’ve become to control in the course of our lives. (Beyond the sphere of the personal, it’s arguably also a lesson that entire societies and civilisations have to learn as well.)

In the case of artists, this addiction often takes the form of obsession, in relation to their work, and even their lives, conceived as material. I’m A Phoenix, Bitch thus speaks beyond its putative subject matter (Kimmings herself, female experience, relationships, motherhood, illness, and the making of art) to everyone in the audience, and to the world in which we live.

In a sense the show is a kind of sequel to Fake It Till You Make It, in that it deals with ‘what happened next’ in the story of Kimmings’s relationship with her partner. However it digs much deeper into the foundations of that relationship – including a hilariously staged account (using song and live-feed video) of how she ‘captured’ him – and exposes much more about her own psychological weaknesses and flaws. 

These come home to roost when the couple rent a charming but isolated and (it turns out) perilously situated cottage in the countryside on the edge of a stream. The cottage itself becomes a major character in the show, represented by a fantastically detailed model created by Kimmings herself, which manages to evoke not only a sense of rural quaintness but also something more sinister that increasingly takes on the features of a Victorian Gothic fairy tale illustrated by Arthur Rackham, a twisted version of Howard’s End, or a Tobe Hooper horror film. 

Suffice to say that things do indeed go horribly wrong – as they sometimes do. There was a first-time pregnant woman and her partner in the front row of the audience on the night I saw the show, and Kimmings generously took the time to embrace and reassure them before the going really got tough. In this case however, ‘going wrong’ meant not only of the physical travails of childbirth (‘I miss my old vagina!’), but severe post-natal illness on the part of their child; total relationship breakdown; and perhaps most crucially psychological breakdown on the part of Kimmings (rather than her emotionally unstable partner as might have been expected), in the form not simply of post-natal depression, but psychosis – including an episode of full-blown paranoia, hallucinations and near-drowning.

This was spectacularly and terrifyingly realised using all the previously mentioned design elements but taking them literally to another level. As a result the physical and psychological landscape of the work took on the dimensions of a surreal nightmare – or perhaps a multi-platform staging of the storm scene from King Lear. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so close to the experience of madness in the theatre as I did watching this sequence – and was totally (and appropriately) unprepared for it, despite all the warning signs that had come before. 

The latter part of the show shifts again in terms of genre – if one can speak of genre without sounding callous in the case of an autobiographical work– and becomes more of a medical drama, as Kimmings contends not only with the process of her own recovery, but also with the progress of her son’s worsening condition, which is diagnosed as rare form of epilepsy that leads to encroaching brain damage. Personally I found this part of the show slightly less well-integrated, but nonetheless harrowing. The final part of the show however involves one more dramatic reveal in terms of the staging and narrative, when Kimmings is encouraged by her therapist to go back to the cottage and face her demons.

I’m A Phoenix, Bitch is a monumental achievement that transcends all of the theatrical, narrative and thematic categories that it invokes, sheds and finally – triumphantly – leaves behind. It’s still unmistakeably a Bryony Kimmings show, with all the playful humour and feminist satire that’s part of her unique performance-style and personality. Nonetheless it also has the primordial quality of myths like Orpheus or Persephone, or fables and fairy tales like Psyche or The Snow Queen – all of which tell similar tales of physical and spiritual loss and recovery, death and rebirth, descent and return. As such, it has surprisingly much in common with a work like Beethoven’s Fidelio, to which I now turn.

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Beethoven notoriously struggled with the composition, production and reception of his only opera. He began work on it in 1804 (after the onset of his deafness), and it was first produced in Vienna in 1805, a few days after the city had been invaded and occupied by Napoleon’s troops. Most of the audience were French officers, who were possibly not very receptive to a work about the struggle for freedom from tyranny.

In fact the work was based on a French play written in 1798 called Leonora, or Conjugal Love that was based on actual events that occurred in France during the Terror. For obvious reasons the setting for Beethoven’s opera had to be relocated to Spain, but the work’s underlying intentions must have been clear enough. 

The score and original libretto were extensively revised in subsequent years in collaboration with different librettists: Beethoven wrote no less than four versions of the overture, and the opera was remounted as a two-act version in 1806, and again with further revisions in 1814, each time with more success. The final version was conducted (with the aid of an ‘assistant’) by the almost totally deaf composer himself.

Beethoven himself described the work as his ‘problem child’, and acknowledged in a letter to its third and final librettist: ‘This opera will win me a martyr’s crown. You have by your co-operation salvaged what is best from the shipwreck.’

Even in its final form, it’s an opera more honoured in the breach than the observance by the world’s major opera houses. Nevertheless it has a performance history that has continued to be intertwined with politics. The 1814 performances celebrated the defeat of Napoleon; Toscanini conducted annual performances in Salzburg between 1935 and 1937 as a protest against Nazism; it was the first opera staged in Berlin after the end of Nazi rule; and a performance in Dresden in 1989 that coincided with demonstrations against the communist regime featured the Chorus of Prisoners in contemporary street clothes and was interrupted by prolonged applause after their Hymn to Freedom in Act One.

As well as its complex relationship with history and politics, Fidelio bears the traces of Beethoven’s lifelong personal struggles. The central figure of the political prisoner Florestan – incarcerated in solitude and rescued by his wife Leonore – is arguably a representative of Beethoven himself, increasingly isolated by his deafness and yearning for his ‘immortal beloved’ (most likely the aristocratic widow Josephine Brunswick), whom he was unable to marry because of his social inferiority. 

The development of the score also reflects the composer’s evolving musical style. The first version was composed at the height of his so-called ‘heroic’ middle period, while the final version was completed during his ‘late’ period of increasingly radical formal experimentation (a period also marked by the encroachment of almost total deafness and increasing social isolation).

Technically the so-called opera is actually a Singspiel with spoken dialogue between the musical numbers. In form and content the obvious precursor is Mozart’s Magic Flute (which Beethoven greatly admired, and whose librettist Schikaneder actually commissioned Beethoven to write what eventually became the first version of Fidelio). 

Like the Flute (and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice before it) Fidelio belongs to the genre of ‘rescue opera’ – with the twist that in Fidelio it’s a woman who does the rescuing, venturing into the ‘underworld’ (in this case a dungeon) in order to liberate her husband. In a further twist, she does this by disguising herself as a man (‘Fidelio’) – a device more typically associated with the typically comic mode of opera buffa. 

The most prominent example of this device (which would have loomed as large in Beethoven’s mind as The Magic Flute) is the role of Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. The latter is a ‘trouser’ role played by a female singer, who in truly reverse-Shakespearian fashion also performs the recursive feat of ‘disguising’ themselves as a woman in the final Act of that opera. However, Beethoven further complicates the degree of sexual as well as gender inversion by having the gaoler’s daughter Marzelline fall in love with Leonore while the latter is disguised as a man – her father’s new apprentice Fidelio. 

Fidelio is thus an intentionally transgressive work in terms of its structure, genre, mood and even sexual politics. Musically like all of Beethoven’s output it also shatters the boundaries of conventional form. Unsurprisingly given the native inclinations of the composer’s genius, the work is scored ‘symphonically’ in terms of form and orchestrationl. Moreover, the notoriously difficult vocal lines are primarily expressive of verbal sense and meaning rather than melodic beauty (as such it breaks decisively with Mozart, and in some respects anticipates Wagner, who admired the work and its composer greatly). Finally, in terms of dramatic and musical structure, the work arguably resembles an oratorio more than an opera; Furtwangler described it as a ‘Mass’ preaching ‘the religion of humanity’.

Despite its noble history, Fidelio remains a problematic and often misunderstood work. In particular, what might now be termed its trans/queer romantic sub-plot is often treated as inferior, unrelated or even superfluous to the ‘main’ political plot, although the former arguably reflects the latter in an inverted form, as a complex elaboration (albeit in ironic mode) of the opera’s principal theme of liberty and its inherently paradoxical nature. The ‘impossibility’ of a mutual erotic attraction between the two women is rarely taken seriously in productions, but is irresistibly communicated by the ravishing beauty of Beethoven’s music (especially the sublime ‘Canon’ Quartet in Act 1, ‘A wondrous feeling fills me’) and immediately audible to anyone with the ears to listen. Dramatically it resembles the love triangle between Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve and Heinz Bennent as her Jewish husband (who is hiding in the cellar from the Nazis) in Truffaut’s The Last Metro; while thematically it refracts the political contradiction between the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ definitions of freedom (freedom ‘from’ restrictions versus freedom ‘to’ pursue one’s interests and pleasures) in the form of a romantic conflict between marital fidelity, sexual preference and gender identity in the sphere of ‘conjugal love’. As such it constitutes an ironic (and typically Beethovenian) musical variation on the original title of the opera (Leonore, or the Triumph of Marital Love).

In fact the libretto as a whole is all-too-frequently dismissed in comparison with Beethoven’s score. However perhaps we should not be too hasty to reduce the work’s problematic nature. After all, similar judgements are often levelled at The Magic Flute, but that doesn’t necessarily mean either opera should be performed without the libretto, or that the latter needs to be replaced. As with Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, one is inclined to suspect that Beethoven knew what he was doing or at least give him the benefit of the doubt; and attempts to second-guess him or ‘improve’ the work from a contemporary perspective risk exposing their own limitations by falling into the trap of historicism. 

Unfortunately the ‘concert-version’ adaptation of Fidelio co-presented by the WA Symphony Orchestra, the WA Opera and Perth Festival fell into precisely this trap, notwithstanding its many musical felicities. 

Among the latter were the thrilling energy and structural grasp brought to the work by the orchestra’s chief conductor Asher Fisch; the sumptuous and committed playing of the orchestra; some heroic singing from the WASO chorus; and some magnificent soloists. Chief among these was Berlin-born soprano Christiane Libor as Leonore/Fidelio, whose colossal voice and heartfelt acting gave the role tremendous warmth and pathos. Fellow German soprano Felcitas Fuchas also lent the role of Marzelline a delightful delicacy and grace. There were also fine performances from Samoan-New Zealand bass Jonathan Lemalu as Marzelline’s father the kindly but corrupt gaoler Rocco; and Australian tenor Andrew Goodwin as Rocco’s assistant (and Marzelline’s hapless would-be fiancé) Jaquino. All four voices blended together in divine harmony for the ‘Canon’ Quartet to musically reconcile their otherwise irreducibly conflicting perspectives on Marzelline’s love for Fidelio.

In other key roles, Australian baritone Warwick Fyfe gave a swaggering and sneering interpretation of the prison governor Don Pizarro, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the current President of the United States in personality, deportment and physique. Finally Australian bass baritone Adrian Tamburini gave a solid rendition of the king’s minister (and deus ex machina) Don Fernando, who arrives at the last minute to wave the liberal magic wand pardoning the prisoners, incarcerating Don Pizarro in their stead, and reuniting the principle couple, while the hapless Marzelline and Jaquino are left to pick up the pieces in the final and deliberately forced musical and dramatic resolution (which resembles similarly forced endings in Shakespeare and Mozart): ‘He who has gained a wife like this, join in our rejoicing!’

Croatian tenor Tomslav Mužek in the crucial role of Leonore’s husband the political prisoner Florestan was vocally and dramatically a little constrained. Nevertheless he made a deeply moving entrance at the start of Act Two with his heartrending aria in solitary confinement (so redolent of Beethoven’s deafness): ‘Oh God, how dark it is! How terrible this silence!’ At other times one couldn’t help thinking of the plight of a contemporary victim of political persecution like Julian Assange (‘I dared to speak the truth and these chains are my reward’). The comparison was also evoked earlier in the opera when Leonore (at this stage still unaware of that the mysterious prisoner is her husband) speculates: ‘He must be a great criminal’; to which Rocco wryly rejoins: ‘Or he must have great enemies.’

Sadly all this musical and dramatic richness and complexity was ill-matched by the ‘adaptation’, which entirely replaced the dialogue between the musical numbers with narration, in the form of a monologue written by poet and critic Alison Croggon, performed by Erin Jean Norville and directed by Clair Watson.

To present the opera in the form of a concert performance is by no means inherently unsatisfying (as WASO and Asher Fisch demonstrated in 2018 with their magnificent concert performance of Tristan Und Isolde). In fact there are considerable musical gains to be made by liberating the orchestra from the confines of the pit (especially in the glorious acoustic of the Perth Concert Hall); the vocal lines become even more like audible threads in the sonic tapestry; and the admittedly somewhat static action is freed from the demands of having to be staged, and is given free rein to take shape in the listener’s mind. 

However there’s no intrinsic reason why the singers couldn’t have spoken the original dialogue (in either German or English); indeed they gave a convincing demonstration of this in Act Two, when some of the dialogue is underscored. Instead we were treated to a valiant attempt by Norville to ‘tell the story’ between the musical numbers, while the orchestra, singers and conductor waited patiently. Musically and dramatically this necessitated a constant shifting of gears; even aurally one had to continually readjust from the sound of the orchestra and singers to that of an actor’s voice speaking into a head-mike and echoing around the hall.

Dramaturgically Croggon’s text also shuttled awkwardly between modes. These included a kind of pedantic lecture-commentary; arch passages of exposition (which continually signalled that the plot was not to be taken seriously); pointed references to contemporary gender politics (which often missed the point or reduced the complexity of the original); flowery descriptions of stage action (which sometimes sounded as if written for a vision-impaired audience); and nostalgic passages of trans-historical reflection evoking a mythical ‘garden’ of freedom. The latter was the most effective, at least in terms of actual writing; but its sentimentality seemed at entirely odds with Beethoven’s hard-headed sense of political, practical and psychological struggle, as well as his earthy sensuality – all which are palpable in his music.

In short: I would venture to say that Fidelio in its original form (including the libretto) is a much more radically ‘contemporary’ artistic, political and even feminist work than it was here given credit for, notwithstanding the adaptation’s occasional coy references to current global politics or the Me Too movement. Interested readers should look at Deborah Warner’s gripping contemporary staging at La Scala in 2014, conducted by Daniel Barenboim (and freely available in a televised version on YouTube). Failing a similar level of theatrical conception (and resources) – or the dramaturgical vision to meet Beethoven halfway – I would have preferred a straight concert version to this half-baked adaptation. 

Nevertheless, in this 250^th anniversary year of his birth, Beethoven still looms large, speaking to us of the enduring revolutionary ideals of freedom, justice and solidarity – along with their bosom companion and soul-mate, joy – like no other composer across the centuries. In Fidelio especially these ideals are yoked to a vision of Woman – admittedly as seen through male eyes, and in the idealised form of an ‘immortal beloved’ – which the work shares with an entire epoch, if not an entire form of civilisation (one which we have perhaps yet to entirely leave behind). Yet even this reading of femininity can perhaps be redeemed as an allegory of love, in the form of a physical, psychological, spiritual and even political force. As the gender-fluid figure of Leonore/Fidelio sings in the final chorus: ‘Love it was that gave me strength to free you from your chains.’ 

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I’m a Phoenix Bitch was in the Studio Underground at the State Theatre Centre of WA from February 26 to March 3. 

Fidelio was at Perth Concert Hall on February 28 and March 1.

Postcard from Perth Festival 4

Meow Meow, Rufus Wainwright

The word ‘cabaret’ originally refers to the ‘little room’ – typically a pub, café, restaurant or nightclub – in which the genre blossomed in 19^th century Paris. Performances usually took place on a small stage for an audience seated at tables while eating and drinking, and included song, dance, theatre, recitations and other ‘acts’ with decidedly underground ‘adult’/erotic and/or political-satirical tendencies.

In a nod to the genre’s Parisian origins, Perth Festival Director Iain Grandage renamed Perth Concert Hall and its precincts the ‘City of Lights’ for the duration of the Festival. The venue was transformed into a kind of antipodean Brutalist mini-Montmartre, with a variety of Asian hawker-style street-food and drinks available inside and outside, and an even greater variety of music and music-based events (ticketed and free) taking place on the Concert Hall main stage, in the ground-floor bar, and on two temporary outdoor stages collectively called the Chevron Lighthouse. The latter was cleverly situated on the monumental stairway-entrance to the venue that overlooks the Swan River; and the layout took full advantage of the spectacular architecture and location. 

Grandage commissioned international ‘kamikaze cabaret’ artiste and longstanding collaborator Meow Meow (the self-creation of Australian singer-dancer-actor and performance artist Melissa Madden Gray) to curate a season entitled Kabarett Haus on the Concert Hall main stage. The title invokes the tradition of Kabarett that flourished in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and invested the genre with a somewhat darker sense of humour and cutting political edge (as celebrated by Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and later immortalised on Broadway and onscreen by the musical Cabaret). 

Meow Meow described the intended atmosphere of the season in the Festival program notes as one of ‘epic intimacy’, and this deliberate oxymoron applied both to the scale and mood of the venue and the performances. The 1,700-odd capacity auditorium was festooned with naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling above the stage and the audience, and the front rows of seating were removed to make room for cabaret-style tables and chairs (patrons could also bring drinks into the venue). 

As for the performances: these consisted of three nights with three different solo artists – Meow Meow herself, American-Canadian singer-songwriter and cover-artist Rufus Wainwight, and American post-punk performer and writer Amanda Palmer – each presenting material that was distinctively personal in terms of style and content. 

Nonetheless the concerts were undeniably large-scale in terms of the venue and audience – not to mention musical forces in the case of Meow Meow (whose show Pandemonium involved the WA Symphony Orchestra conducted by Grandage, along with Meow Meow’s regular accompanist Thomas M Lauderdale) and even duration (Palmer’s This Concert Has No Interval went for four hours). 

Regretfully I didn’t make it to Palmer’s show on the final evening of the season  – nor to Meow Meow ‘in conversation’ with Grandage that afternoon, which apparently showcased them in typical spontaneous collaboration-mode with Grandage on the piano. However I did see Pandemonium on the Thursday night, followed by Wainwright’s Down Solo Wainwright on the Friday. 

Both concerts offered a rich and diverse feast musically and in terms of performance. There was also a heightened sense of occasion on both nights – enhanced by the unfamiliar look and feel of the Concert Hall, as well as the unique sense of pride in the Festival and the venue which is shared by local audiences in this most isolated of cities. This sense of occasion and pride was especially strong at Pandemonium on opening night, with Grandage appearing in top hat and frock coat decorated with Sergeant Pepper-style epaulettes to direct the orchestra in which he was once a member of the cello section; while Madden Gray was making a something of a triumphant return to Perth in her ‘post-post-modern diva’ guise, having once upon a time trained in music theatre at WAAPA. 

Regardless of whatever influence that training (or her previous degree from the University of Melbourne, majoring in Fine Arts and German) may have had on her, she’s a super-talented and highly sophisticated performer. Her alter-ego Meow Meow is a dazzling and complex creation that sometimes appears to be as autonomous or even out-of-control as Michael Redgrave’s ambiguously mad or possessed ventriloquist doll in Dead of Night. 

I first saw her in action (with Grandage at the piano) in the Famous Spiegeltent at the Melbourne Festival in 2005. The next time was in her first full-scale theatre show Vamp, directed by Michael Kantor at The Malthouse in 2008 (with Grandage as co-composer and musical director as well as on keyboards). 

In her earlier manifestations Meow Meow was a provocative and even polarising sex-starved femme fatale, ravaged by alcohol and driven by the need for affirmation, who passively or aggressively manipulated the audience (especially the men) and rarely finished or even got beyond the first few bars of a song. At times it was hard to distinguish persona from performer, satire from self-indulgence, or a coherent cabaret act from a form of performance art that threatened to replicate the very stereotypes of female oppression it claimed to dissect; but perhaps that was the whole point. Nonetheless, in ongoing collaboration with Grandage, and with Kantor’s input as director (as well as Maryanne Lynch as resident Malthouse dramaturg), her shows became more substantial, and her tragicomic material and repertoire began to evolve.

A decade down the track, things have shifted gear in spectacular fashion. Her shtick has become less desperate, less sexualised, less aggressive, less dependent on alcohol or approval, more self-reliant and self-knowing; audience members are collaborators rather than targets of seduction or abuse; songs are sung all the way through and more fully inhabited; and her considerable vocal range and acting talents are on generous display. She’s no longer the downwardly spiralling ingénue, but the established (if slightly washed up) grande dame. Overall there’s a more delicate balance between chanteuse and clown, to the benefit of both.

All in all for me this was by far the most satisfying Meow Meow show I’ve seen – even if some of her more intentionally problematic layers have been shed, possibly in deference to a more mainstream (or at least less underground) performance context (the show debuted last year at the Sydney Opera House and played more recently at the Royal Festival Hall in London with the London Philharmonic Orchestra). Or maybe we’ve just all gotten older and wiser. Probably all of the above.

The repertoire ranged from up-tempo Latin numbers like Piazzolla’s pounding tango ‘Rinasceró’ and Maria Luz Casal’s flamenco-style ‘Un año de amor’, to more sombre French chansons like Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’ or (darker still) German songs like Kurt Weil’s bitter ‘Surabaya Johnny’ from Happy End. Other highlights included the less well-known Russian Jewish composer Spoliansky’s strident Berlin cabaret gem ‘Ich bin ein Vamp’ (also recently revived by another great exponent of the repertoire, Ute Lemper); and two surreal and apocalyptic pieces written by Meow Meow herself in collaboration with Grandage (with the latter briefly replacing Lauderdale on the piano), ‘In This City’ and ‘Tear Down the Stars’. 

There was also a surprise guest appearance by Rufus Wainwright, who revealed that it was Meow Meow’s birthday and invited us and the orchestra to join him in singing ‘Happy Birthday’, before lending his voice to a playful duet with hers on Michel Emer’s insouciant ‘À quoi ça sert l’amour’ (originally made famous by Edith Piaf and Théo Sarapo).

The two most poignant songs for me however were both contemporary covers. The first was Radiohead’s sublime ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, which I first heard her sing as the closing number of Vamp, but was here swooningly re-orchestrated by Grandage – and which Meow Meow has now made comprehensively her own, as a hauntingly ironic self-reflection on the nature of desire. The second was Patty Griffin’s aching country-folk ode to emotional vulnerability ‘Be Careful’, which she sang as a closing number while self-lit only by a hand-held torch, before exiting through the auditorium to the foyer (‘to sell CDs’). 

Other antics including storming off in a simulated huff after the opening number, before returning to hand out roses for the audience to throw at her (‘Not in my face!’) while she repeated the song; selecting hapless male audience members to come onstage and ‘support’ her; crowd-surfing to the distant rear stalls of the Concert Hall and back again; and being progressively stripped of ‘borrowed’ costume items in the course of the evening by an apologetic wardrobe mistress (‘Budget cuts!’). 

There’s always been an element of orchestrated chaos in Meow Meow’s performances – though this was somewhat held in check in Pandemonium by the presence of an actual orchestra. Nonetheless even the latter broke into some choreographed chaos of their own during the ‘avant garde’ iteration of Itsy Bitsie Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini (which was given several other equally appalling variations in multiple languages, musical and verbal as well as physical).

The most striking image of the night, however, was when she wheeled on a mannequin replica of herself from the wings (complete with dress and wig, but humiliatingly ‘taller and thinner’), which remained onstage like a haunting doppelgänger for ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and the last few songs. 

In a sense Meow Meow herself is a kind of replica – one might almost say a replicant, in the language of Blade Runner. At times it’s all gloriously camp, like a female impersonation of a female impersonator in exponentially squared drag  – including the Joan Collins wig, false eyelashes and deep cut-glass voice. At other times the intent feels more serious. If all gender and sexuality is performed, and even involves a kind of masquerade, then the script is all-too-cruelly prescribed – and all too often it’s women who pay the price. 

*

Rufus Wainwright’s solo show at the Concert Hall the following night was in many ways a more stripped back affair – musically and theatrically at least, as it featured him in true solo mode (apart from a couple of surprise guests) accompanying himself on piano and acoustic guitar. As a result his personal and political feelings were all the more laid bare. 

In fact the show had even more sting than Pandemonium when it came to gaily defying social scripts about sexuality, love, marriage, parenthood and masculinity. This defiance included charming references and dedications to his husband and their daughter, as well as more pointed remarks about his father (the folk singer Louden Wainwright III) – not to mention the current President of the United States.

Despite its apparent artlessness, the performance was also deceptively structured, with a musical and dramatic arc that took us from disarming diffidence to an increasingly heightened level of emotion and command (Wainwright has after all composed two operas, as well as orchestral settings of five Shakespeare Sonnets, and many of his songs are effectively character-based monologues). He even twice stopped and corrected himself during the opening song – the shimmering ballad ‘The Art Teacher’ – before confessing that he was feeling ‘a little scared’. 

However this was no feigned Meow Meow-style routine. Unlike Madden Gray, Wainwright is always himself onstage – even when channelling Judy Garland; and even if the nature of that self is (like all selves) multi-layered and contradictory beneath the apparently smooth and transparent surface. Like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, two other great fellow Canadian singer-songwriters that he is inspired by or covers, many of his self-penned songs are semi-autobiographical; and even his covers are vehicles for self-reflection.

After the yearning torch song ‘My Phone’s On Vibrate for You’ came the heartbreaking lament ‘The Maker Makes’ from the soundtrack to Brokeback Mountain – introduced with a wryly self-deprecating anecdote about unwittingly swimming with Heath Ledger’s ashes in the Indian ocean offshore from Perth. This was appropriately followed by the macabre Tom Waites-style burlesque of Matinee Idol. 

Things shifted gear when Wainwright strapped on the guitar and delivered raunchy acoustic versions of ‘Out of the Game’ and the swaggering ‘Jericho’, before dedicating ‘Peaceful Afternoon’ – a beautiful and complex tribute to thirteen years of married life – to his husband (who was in the audience). 

The mood changed again when he returned to the piano for the charming Jean Renoir chanson ‘La complainte de la butte’ (immortalised in Moulin Rouge), followed by the remorseful hangover cabaret song ‘Early Morning Madness’, and the wise and witty Sondheim-esque show-tune ‘Poses’.

At this point he was joined by Meow Meow’s accompanist Thomas M Lauderdale, and the concert went to another level, with a series of covers showcasing Wainwright’s vocal and emotional range as well as Lauderdale’s dazzling and sensitive skills as a backing pianist. First came the Irving Berlin classic ‘How Deep is the Ocean’, which Wainwright declared to be his favourite song. Next came a moving tribute to Wainwright’s mother the folk singer Kate McGarrigle (who died in 2010) with the hymn-like ‘Kitty Come Home’, written by her sister Anna to encourage Kate to return to the family after breaking up with Wainwright’s father. 

Another mood change followed with the Judy Garland swing number ‘Zing Go The Strings of My Heart!’ from Wainwright’s tribute tour and live album Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall (in which he reincarnated Garland’s legendary – if sadly temporary – comeback from drug addiction in 1961). This was no impersonation, but a deeper and more complex form of identification, as became even more apparent with his sublime rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow (backlit by a simple but evocative rainbow from the footlights behind him). 

In between these two numbers he was joined by Meow Meow for two duets: the bitter Brecht/Weil ‘Tango Ballad’ from Threepenny Opera (with Wainwright singing in English and Meow Meow in German); and a playfully contrapuntal interweaving of ‘Get Happy’ and ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ (a medley made famous by Garland and Barbara Streisand in a hilarious and touching TV co-appearance on The Judy Garland Show which I recommend checking out on YouTube).

The rest of the show saw Wainwright in solo mode again, accompanying himself on more original songs and covers. The former included (on guitar) the poignant evocation of the 9/11 attacks ‘11:11’ and the moving anthem ‘Only the People That Love’. Returning the piano again, he delivered the Philip Glass-y message to his daughter ‘Montauk’; the more ambivalent missive to his father ‘Dinner at Eight’; the rueful reflection on addiction ‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk’; and the sadly still all-too relevant jeremiad against injustice, mendacity and hatred in George W. Bush’s America ‘Going to a Town’. 

Finally there were two Leonard Cohen covers: a rollicking version of ‘So Long Marianne’ on guitar (the song’s many ironies underscored by the fact that Cohen was the grandfather of Wainwright’s daughter); and a closing rendition of ‘Halleluja’ at the piano, in which Wainwright’s velvet tones temporarily eclipsed even the famously ethereal version by Jeff Buckley. 

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Both concerts demonstrated that cabaret in whatever form – French, German or Broadway inspired, epic or intimate – still speaks to us eloquently today, especially in the hands of two of its finest contemporary exponents. 

As Brecht wrote in the late 1930s:

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes there will also be singing

About the dark times.

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Meow Meow’s Pandemonium and Rufus Wainwright’s Down Solo Wainwright were at Perth Concert Hall on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 February.