Review: Dance Nation

Dance Nation
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
17 March 2019
Red Stitch
to 14 April
redstitch.net

"Dance Nation". Red Stitch. Photo by Teresa Noble

You'll probably never hear a 10-, 11-, 12-, 13-year-old call themselves "prepubescent". It's a word so distant from the experience of being that age that it rarely escapes from text books. It's a time when you feel like a child and look like an adult or feel like an adult and look like a child. And get treated in ways that are embarrassing, inappropriate or ick either way. Dance Nation is about girls in this in-between age, as seen through the memories of women in their 20s to 60s.

USA playwright and actor Clare Barron had her first play produced in 2013 and has since won some significant awards. Dance Nation is her seventh work and this Red Stitch production is its Australian premiere.

It's set in a local USA dance school that's desperate to get to nationals (finals). Their dance teacher (Brett Cousins) knows that their sailor routine isn't up to scratch, so he's developing a work for his six-girl- one-boy troupe about Gandhi. Oh, yes, it's as ridiculous a dance as it sounds, and is made even more wonderful with Holly Durant's choreography, which solves the problem of the tiny stage, and Adrienne Chisholm's glitz-on-a-pocket-money budget gold design and ballet-mom costumes.

All the pre-teens are played by adults (Caroline Lee, Zoe Boesen, Casey Filips, Hannah Fredericksen, Natalie Samsu, Tario Manvondo, Georgina Naidu and Shayne Francis, who also plays all the moms) and all bring the experience of knowing that the adult life you imagine at 12 isn't the life you live. None of which makes the confusion of personal competition contradicting personal friendship less confusing. Or makes the realisation that your body's changing in ways that will keep you on stages or get you off stages, and that your choice may be irrelevant. Or that you will be sexualised or not sexualised no matter what. And that doesn't stop once you're a teenager, adult, older adult or older-still adult.

Maude Davey's direction has the style of a daggy suburban dance competition with a core of sophistication and experience that's inspired by the emerging power girls find at that age. This is power that girls are often told to suppress, but we'd all rather learn the routine that lets all women hold onto that power and ignore anyone who says it's wrong.

Review: Dreamers

Dreamers
fortyfivedownstairs
8 November 2014
fortyfivedownstairs
to 30 November
fortyfivedownstairs.com

Photo by Jeff Busby

I wasn't in Melbourne when the Keene/Taylor project was the darling of this city's independent theatre scene (1997–2002), so it's a joy to see Mary Lou Jelbart's fortyfivedownstairs brings writer Daniel Keene and director Ariette Taylor back together with Dreamers.

Originally written by Keene for French company Tabula Rasa (Keene is loved in France),  Dreamers is about loneliness and the hope that can be found even when the isolation seems impenetrable.

Set in a low-income block of flats in any city, widow Anne (Helen Morse) lives alone and earns her living from sewing consignment garments. She's rarely interrupted, except when she catches the bus to babysit her grandson. At the bus stop she meets fellow residents including building foreman (Marco Chiappi), a former bus driver now ticket inspector (Paul English) and younger new-comer to the city Majid (Yomal Rajasinghe) who's looking for work.

Majid knows that people ignore him and move away because he's black, but Anne doesn't and when he's turned away at their local cafe by the waiter (Jonathan Taylor), she buys him a coffee. When their friendship develops, locals (Natasha Herbert and Nicholas Bell) are disgusted and her daughter (Brigid Gallacher) doesn't understand.

While it's a clear reflection on the many ways people hate each other for no reason, Taylor's direction – and an impeccable cast – never forgets that everyone is a likeable and loved person in their own way. With songs around a pianola and dances around garbage bins, the gentle humour makes it easy to see how hate can surface in the most everyday of places and in the most unsuspecting people.

The design uses the long an difficult fortyfivedownstairs space beautifully. Adrienne Chisholm's design incorporates the supporting poles and lets us see into tiny rooms and the whole block at once, with Andy Turner's lighting defining space.

While there are many angry plays about all the isms and how they are wrong, Dreamers is a gentle work about people; people who can always change how they see the world.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Evolution, Revolution and the Mail Order Bride

Evolution, Revolution and the Mail Order Bride
8 February 2014
fortyfive downstairs
to 16 February
fortyfivedownstairs.com

Performer–composer–singer–writer Zulya Kamalova's Evolution, Revolution and the Mail Order Bride is three stories about three women that explore how the suppression of the feminine affects evolution, a revolution and a mail order bride.

Kamalova is a remarkable talent. Her voice is like an indulgent homemade caramel that no one can say no to, she lets her characters be their unique selves, and her music made me feel a bit like it was the 1920s and she was contemporary of Kurt Weill. Her composition is more personal and broader in style to Weill (and she writes her own lyrics), but he was the first composer I thought of when I heard her four piece orchestra (Erkki Veltheim, Charlotte Jacke, Justin Marshall and Donald Stewart).

Director Maude Davey has brought as much meaning as possible to the piece by working with a complex design (Adrienne Chisholm) that sprawls around the fortyfive downstairs carven like a lost op shop in a forest and creates some mesmerising visuals with projections (Michael Carmody) and lighting (Katie Sfetkidis), but, for all that is beautiful and complex about it, there's little sense of story in the interwoven lives.

Telling us what happened isn't a story. Telling us what you believe isn't a story. This work seems so intent on being a lesson (that's explained on the poster and told to people who are already on side), that it's difficult to find a way to care about and connect to the characters and their lives because their plot is so controlled.

Kamalova enchants with her songs and music, but maybe there's enough character, emotion and heart in every song to share what needs to be told without the explanatory monologues.

Photo by Sarah Walker.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.