What Melbourne Loved in 2019, part 3

Today are another three of my favourite people; we'd make a very good lunch foursome. All refuse to accept the blah images that are forced on women and work to encourage and support opinions and voices that are still put in the margins.

And Sometimes Melbourne is always happy to go to other places, like Adelaide.

Write your contibution here.

It can be one moment or lots, or a list or a poem or whatever you want your answer to be.

Bron Batten
Theatre-maker, producer and performer

Bron Batten. Photo by Theresa Harrison

Favourite moments in 2019.
Mine is a rather long list but I saw a lot of great work this year so bear with me. In no particular order I very much enjoyed:

Leah Shelton’s Bitch on Heat, a searing examination of female rage and patriarchal violence.

Gary Abrahams’s epic 33 Variations, featuring a stunning performance from elderly Academy Award–winning Ellen Burstyn, taking up all of the space and eating all of the furniture.

Joshua Ladgrove Presents Melbourne’s Only Bilge Pump Sales Seminar at Melbourne Fringe was the kind of absurd, improvisational and gross brilliance we’ve come to expect from the ex-Neal Portenza.

Lady Example by Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride at Dance Massive proved that contemporary dance can be smart and silly and accomplished all at the same time.

It’s always great to see what Aphids are up to and Mish Grigor’s Exit Strategies at Arts House was no exception.

Back to Back’s The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes at Melbourne International Arts Festival proved why they’re one of the most interesting companies working in Australia at the moment.

Images from Emma Hall’s World Problems have stayed with me since I saw it way back in March.

Recently, I saw Children of the Evolution at Due West Festival and it melted even my cold, cynical heart.

I also had the pleasure of witnessing the evolution of Passenger during the UK premiere of the work at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival in London in June.

Special mention to two of the amazing shows I saw in Edinburgh that aren’t Melbourne based: Belgian company Ontroerend Goed’s Are We Not Drawn Forward To New Era and Sh!t Theatre’s Shit Theatre Drink Rum with Expats. If you get the chance to ever see these two works then please go go go go go.

Looking forward to in 2020.
I’m looking forward to seeing Fun Home again as I wept through the first time I saw it at the Young Vic last year and thus the whole show was rather blurry. I want to finally volunteer to be a part of post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus at Asia TOPA, though I’d also settle for just seeing it again. Oh and Patricia Cornelius’s Do Not Go Gentle... and Stephen Nicolazzo’s Loaded at Malthouse. More big Australian work please.

SM: Bron's Waterloo had its first season at Melbourne Fringe; it's touring next year and if I had any money, I'd follow her like a groupie just to sit in different audiences and see how they react to the show. It's a show about choices and how we judge other people; about being not-as-right-as-we-think-we-are – or as left. Near the end of the night, without any explanation or discussion, she gives the audience a choice to cross a line they would swear they would never cross. Some do. They do it with joy and glee; all it takes is opportunity and silence to cross a line. I'm still thinking about it.

And I'll happily keep seeing Onstage Dating until I see a happy ending.


Claire Glenn
Artistic Director SAYarts, Creative Producer ExpressWay Arts, Theatre Maker, Actor, Lover of theatre and cats.

Claire Glenn. Photo by Sam Oster, Silver Trace

Favourite moments in 2019.
I'm living in Adelaide. I definitely had three favourite theatre moments. The Second Woman: I give endless thanks to Emma Webb for working so hard to bring this to Adelaide. I could only stay for a little over 5 hours but it was EVERYTHING.

Also Femme by Erin Fowler spoke to me on so many levels. Erin is an incredible performer and I loved the honesty of her journey from girlhood to womanhood and what it is to be sexualised in this work. It was so beautiful to be able to spend time with her in the Yurt at the conclusion of the piece.

And £¥€$ by Ontroerend Goed for Oz Asia Festival helped me understand the world of global finance in a way that I don't think I've ever been able to comprehend. Oz Asia in general is my favourite festival in Adelaide and as a whole would be my favourite moment of 2019.

Looking forward to in 2020.
I'm looking forward to the beast that is Adelaide Fringe and finding the gems within the thousands of shows. I'm really looking forward to Rumpus's next season. The 2019 season was so fantastic so I can't wait to see what they program next.

I'm keen for Fire Gardens, Breaking The Waves, Mouth Piece, Dimanche and basically the whole theatre program at Adelaide Festival. I can't wait to see what Oz Asia has lined up. Plus all of the fantastic youth theatre that will created by young people in 2020.

SM: It's sad for us that Claire isn't in Melbourne anymore, but it sure is Adelaide's gain. I still remember her performance in a show back in 2006/07. She now works with young theatre makers in Adelaide and often makes me want to fly over and see the work she's helped create.


Monique Grbec
Sometimes critic, Sometimes Melbournian, Always proud Aboriginal woman

Monique Grbec selfie

Favourite moments in 2019.
Thanks to the absolute privilege of being welcomed into the critic world, I've been fortunate enough to see heaps of incredible theatre this year. So much love and blessings go out to the creative beauties who bared their heart and made me cry and laugh, and see the world from different perspectives.

Five that regularly revisit my thoughts are: Scar Trees, Conversations with the Dead, Gender Euphoria, Blood on the Dance Floor and Barbara and the Camp Dogs.

Special mention to Tales of an Urban Indian, a Canadian show that came out for Yirramboi First Nations Festival. Brutal, ugly and beautiful. Tears still sting when parts of that story re-emerge;  I think it will take me many years to unpack.

Looking forward to in 2020.
My fingers are crossed across my heart with the prospect of heading to Perth for their festival...

SM: I was meant to be with Monique for Tales of an Urban Indian but I had the wrong time in my head; I still regret that. However, she's made sure that I've seen some other amazing shows this year. It may be hard to believe but critics sometimes need to form their own mini community. I read all of her reviews on Witness.

Review: The Book of Loco

The Book of Loco
Malthouse Theatre
17 July 2014
Beckett Theatre
to 2 August
malthousetheatre.com.au

Photo by Pia Johnson

Among walls of tape-sealed cardboard boxes stands a middle-aged man in a suit. He has a beard, an accent and looks like he's going to sweat a lot. And he might be mad and/or mad because he's being searched before boarding an international flight. Boom?

Aliro Zavarce's The Book of Loco won Best Theatre Production at the 2013 Adelaide Fringe. Zavarce was born in Venezuela and moved to Adelaide in the early 90s where he studied drama at Flinders University and has become well known and rightly loved on Adelaide's stages. The Book is an exploration of grief and madness that started when his wife left him on the September 11 2001 and his mother, in South America, became terminally ill.

He kept journals and, working with director Sasha Zahra, created a piece that looks for the lines where grief becomes identity and then moves towards something irrational, and, in turn, sees the rational madness that's everywhere. His own pain and loss is enough to drive anyone loco but what's the excuse of a world that so easily accepts and explains the most crazy of acts, ideas and attitudes?

The trip from the personal to the universal is made even smoother with Jonathon Oxlade's box of boxes design that shows endless hidden and collapsing secrets, truths and lies, and Chris More's animations and graphics that restrict themselves to the edges of the boxes and make it seem like we're looking into the hidden space.

Zavarce is warm and delightfully affable and his story's at its most engaging and moving when he's talking about his personal experiences, especially the end of his marriage and being made to feel like an outsider on a flight home to Australia (in a scene that makes Steve Kilbey singing "Under the Milky Way" sound so ocker). These easy-to-connect-with moments make it easy to accept the earnest madness of explaining the rational madness of a clearly mad world.

But don't get fooled by the earnest rants of a madman, The Book of Loco is funny and loving and ultimately lets the craziness of grief hurt a little less.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

What Melbourne loved in 2013, part Tobias

Some described their favourite moments of 2013 with a mere few sentences, but MKA's Tobias Manderson-Galvin has seen too much long-form theatre this year.

Tobias Manderson-Galvin
Creative Director, MKA

TOBI: Professor Lenore Mandeson gave the opening keynote address at the Australian Theatre Forum (in Canberra) with her colleague, futurist Kristin Alford. It had nothing explicitly to do with theatre and it was wonderful to think about theatre in relation to something else/everything else. One of the highlights was Lenore riffing on Brecht's Threepenny Opera and miming swinging a plastic bag of shit above her head and then throwing said pretend bag in our general direction as a part of her description of conditions in South African slums, but really as a part of a bigger critique of the culture we're more directly a part of.

Also turning up each day to the forum and discovering she and I had worn matching outfits yet again, a sort of superficial confirmation of the synchronicity in having my medical anthropologist mother as the headline act at a peak industry event in my current field. It was like bring your son to work day, which was actually lots of days. If anyone ever wants to know about Giddens or Weber, I've been going to lectures since I was six months old.

Being Dead (Don Quixote) was my favourite show this year, hands down no questions asked. It was Kerith Manderson-Galvin's reworking of a classic book she didn't read via Kathy Acker's reworking of the same text (who knows if she read it or not).

Kerith spearheaded the work but Soma Garner and Amy Lever-Davidson pulled off some design coups. It was only on for two nights in a university, so if you missed it well ok I guess you didn't have much of a chance – but when it returns, make sure you get a ticket or you will be missing one of the most genuinely accomplished works of queer theatre made in years.

I don't know if Kerith'd call it that, but it was that. I've noticed that 2013 was a big year (maybe the last few years even) for calling shows 'queer' or 'feminist' or 'theatre', whether they were any of these things or not. I think this is all them.

A Supple Beauty. When asked, Kerith (from Part 4) also mentioned this as one of her favourite moments and even though Mark (from Part 8) didn't, I'm sure he thought it. MKA went to the Adelaide Fringe and didn't really have the best time audience wise. (We took three shows, one averaged an audience of perhaps 25 a night and the others averaged three to four). So, when I saw there was an anarchic, cabaret/variety night at 3.00 in the afternoon on a Saturday, we were first in line to get on the bill.

The night before the performance Alexis Dubus (aka Marcel Lucont), a burlesque darling (who wishes to remain unnamed) and me were thrown out of the Fringe Club for taking our clothes off on the dance floor to Nelly's "Hot in Here" (a DJ coincidence, as we were getting naked anyway in an effort to promote the event). On the day of the show, Mark Wilson, Kerith and I performed totally naked, save for a leather belt I kept on, and we deconstructed the only State Theatre Company of South Australia show we saw all year.

Kerith did a death scene that went for about 20 minutes. Mark performed a harrowing edited version of the Beethoven inspired Tolstoy novella The Kreutzer Sonata re-written by himself, and I played Chris Brown and Rihanna songs. And why not. Then we spent about six minutes doing a Q&A with ourselves and drinking bottled water. Apologies for not inviting you Geordie Brookman, but, fair warning, we'll be back.

Einstein on the Beach. I saw it two nights in a row. First night, apologies to Andrew Fuhrmann who I went with, I was fidgety and bored. I wanted to be a hero, so I didn't take a break in its 4.5 hours and had a less than great time. Yet, slit my wrists and draw a hot bath, I went back the next night and only left the room for four minutes – because that's how long it takes to take the piss you planned in advance and they know that bit is a little less interesting – but when I realised I'd mistimed and the first ballet had started, I raced back to my seat because this show is in a league (albeit a sort of vintage museum league) of its own. I spent weeks singing "Knee Play 3".

Life and Times. Not only being there, but that they made all the burgers for the audience themselves and we all watched it and it took like 10 hours and Kerith didn't go to her 10-year high school reunion so she could see it (and she went to the most elite girls school in Victoria, not me I went to a public school and even that I got expelled from and then went to another public school, but enough) and Lenore asked Kerith and I to dinner with her and Pat Galvin and also invited Nature Theatre's Pavol and Kelly and wait, omg, I haven't even started telling you about how I got four free VIP tickets and went to a Limp Bizkit concert and got soft tissue damage, tearing my cartilage and ligaments around my spine, sternum and ribs from moshing like I was 17/partying like it was 1999/doing it all for the nookie and that Fred Durst was like "nice jacket dude'" to me and I break danced while I was crowd surfing!!! As in: on people's heads!!! And how when MKA took The Economist to Brisbane Powerhouse for World Theatre Festival there was a girl who came late one night and stood in the back row and was wearing what seemed to be a Norwegian flag as a skirt and she was the perfect image of what I always imagined the lead lady role would be (though it's always been played inimitably by Marcus McKenzie) and then I met her by chance in the basement of the theatre and she had the same name as the character and Kerith didn't believe she even existed and thought maybe I was having another episode but we're friends on Facebook now, so that's as real as it get. And then, oh, working with Shian Law on Psycho for Balletlab was the start of a dream come true – my return to ballet which isn't really theatre, is it?  and this is about theatre isn't it? And also you know Katie Noonan, well she's beautiful isn't she? Have you ever seen her perform? And then there was that time – no I – but maybe that's not what's important now but I don't want to leave anything out in this at all. Not one bit.

SUN from Melbourne Festival was really my favourite theatrical work of 2013. Metal. A dance corps. A pastoral setting. I hadn't seen Political Mother (the companies previous work), so ok some say that was better, whatever, I don't know, this was fuckiing excellent.

And an honourable mention to when Kerith and I snuck into the ska gig at the Festival Club (The Caribs et al) and, to a song called "No More" in which the refrain was "I''ll cry no more tears for you/over you" (or something), the guitarist (about 80 years old) cried throughout. Kerith still isn't sure what ska is and though she does know who Reel Big Fish are, this was a moment of classic half a century old music and a moving performance.

What Tobi is looking forward to in 2014 at issimomag.com.

SM: My moment: proofing/editing the above.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Part 13

Part 14

Part 15

Part 17

2012 part 1, with links to the rest

Little Birdy cheep tix

Tickets should cost money

If I didn't write about theatre, I wouldn't be able to see anywhere near as much theatre as I do.

I don't get paid to review*, but I get tickets, which I'm able to share with friends who mostly work in the arts so also can't afford the luxury of seeing a lot of theatre.

Theatre tickets aren't free because theatre is created by people who deserve to get paid in the same way that your doctor or postie expects to get paid for doing their job. And if you think theatre pays well, take your ticket price and divide it by the number of names on the program, then throw in the costs of front of house staff, venue hire, insurance, cleaning, publicity, rights, printing and the wine and sandwiches for reviewers and friends on opening night.

There's little appreciation of the hours it takes to create any performance by those who don't do it.

I used to work for in local government programming live entertainment for large festivals. I had to stop counting how many very well-paid staff members would ask me if the entertainers would do it for free or for a crap hourly rate because "they'll be seen by people" and  "that's what they want".

I once had a fight with a friend once because she'd figured out a way to sneak into a large Adelaide Fringe venue via a toilet with two doors; she didn't accept my argument that if they don't give you the ticket, it's stealing.

But knowing and supporting that creators deserve to be able to pay their rent doesn't solve the problem of how to support and enjoy theatre when you don't have a pile of ready cash – which is often because you're a creator and spend your free time doing things you don't get any money for.

Then there's the problem of how to get people to love and appreciate your work. Unsold works, posts with no hits and empty seats can hurt.

Little Birdy

Ronnie Fazekas also understands these frustrations.

So she formed Little Birdy Tix to give artists access to new audiences and folk like us access to tickets.

Ronnie says, "My background is in ticketing, managing the ticketing for quite a large number of festivals, venues and events both here and in the UK. I spent a lot of time with upset artists, producers etc who either couldn't afford publicity for their show or simply didn't understand how important new audience members are to the growth of their ticket sales.

"On the flip side, I dealt with thousands of general public members who were overwhelmed by choice and quite possibly were very unfamiliar with seeing live performance in general, often choosing to buy a ticket based on a sold out sticker (buying to another date) or walking away not buying anything.

"I wanted to help both groups!"

And she has.

Audiences

For punters, it costs $55 to join Little Birdy. For this you can have two tickets for shows promoted on the site. This usually makes your membership pay for itself after one show. Ronnie says that in the eight months Little Birdy has been running, some members have used over $1000 worth of tickets. That's gotta be the best deal around.

However, if you can't make it to a show, you have to cancel within two hours of the start or risk losing your membership. Fair enough, I think.

If you join now, you could nab tickets to eleven shows including see Midsumma's Gaybies at the Sumner Theatre, AcidTongue and Dollface at the Owl and the Pussycat, Equus at Revolt and not a very good story at La Mama.

Gaybies (which may have already sold out)

AND if you want to head to SA for the Adelaide Fringe, you can already grab tickets for shows at The Garden of Unearthly Delights. There's enough free shows to fill a few days, which could leave you with enough money to get to Adels, buy beer and spend your change on seeing more Fringe shows.

Promoters

If you have empty seats or want to bring a new audience to your shows, listing your show on Little Birdy is free. FREE!  (That's easier that asking an arts journo to write a story about you.)

Members hear about you through the Little Birdy website, the weekly newsletter, Twitter or Facebook. And members are asked to share the love and create the buzz by sharing on their accounts.

You're not getting ticket income, but if your show is great, the chances of audiences recommending you to their friends and paying to see your next work are pretty good. And they'll probably buy a wine and a program. Regardless, it's always better to have bums on seats and it's amazing what good word of mouth and a couple of full houses does for the rest of your season.

Please join

I think this is one of the best new ventures I've seen.

Little Birdy Tix are joining audiences to shows and artists, while encouraging and helping people to see a lot of theatre.  This can only help to build all audiences and support all companies and venues, and I suspect that it's going to be wonderful during festivals when the choice scares the best of us.

Become a Little Birdy member HERE.

* But if anyone wants to give me a job where I get paid to write about theatre, I'll say yes please and promise to submit on time. And there's a donation button on the right.