MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: Taylor Mac, Chapter II & the G word

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL
A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Chapter II: 1836–1886
Taylor Mac, Pomegranate Arts and Nature's Darlings
13 October 2017
Forum Theatre
www.festival.melbourne

Taylor Mac. Hour 7. Photo by Sarah Walker

Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music Chapter II  included re-enacting the American Civil War, taking the racism out of The Mikado by setting it on Mars, moving all the chairs in the Forum, singing with helium and making even more new best friends. And ping-pong balls; has anyone talked about the ping-pong balls that Melbourne is loving in our own freaky way?

Taylor Mac. Hour 8. Photo by Sarah Walker

Sarah Walker's photos can tell story of Chapter II. She captures the why we're so in love with this show. Look at those smiles!

Hour 11. The balloons were worth catching

But back to Chapter 1. Something happened off stage, while Taylor was flying in a harness: the announcement of the McArthur Foundation Grants, which are incorrectly known as the 'genius' grants. Taylor got one. (As did with playwright Annie Baker, who wrote John that was at the MTC earlier this year.)

Taylor Mac. Hour 9. Photo by Sarah Walker

I first saw Taylor in 2008 in The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac. He had a ukelele, a suitcase full of op-shop drag and a lot of sequins and glitter. He performed to an intimate group at the Famous Spiegeltent next to Arts Centre Melbourne before going to the Feast festival in Adelaide. (Feast was directed by Dan Clarke, who is now working at Arts Centre Melbourne.)

Taylor Mac & Machine Dazzle. Hour 12. Photo by Sarah Walker

I've been a fan ever since, and may have squealed when I found out that the 24-hour show was coming to Melbourne. Judy (Taylor's preferred pronoun; it really is easy to understand) shared work that started from the personal, ignored aesthetic and acceptable ideas of how to story, and connected with people who may never have thought they would connect with the radical idea of being your authentic self and seeing the world through a different gaze.

Many artists affirm how I see myself and my community. That night with Taylor changed how I saw myself in my community.

I left knowing that drag was could be exciting, embracing and subversive in ways that said 'fuck off' to all ridiculous assumptions of masculinity or femininity. And that it didn't have to insult women.

Taylor Mac, Dandy Minions (including Mama Also in the green wig) & audience (including Richard Watts, Tom Halls & Simone French). Hour 10

And I stopped resisting the Q word. My first memories of "queer" was it being re-appropriated as an insult. Re-re-appropriating queer as positive and inclusive has been bloody marvelous.

Mama Alto – one of Melbourne's Dandy Minions: the magnificent locals helping to make the 24-hour show – explains queer and queering rather wonderfully in this piece in The Music. (Or read it in this issue, which includes some very groovy writers.)

The Civil War. Photo by Sarah Walker

Taylor's next trip to Melbourne was The Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook or Comparison is Violence. I left knowing that glitter belongs on every face that wants it and my reviews began looking for more positive than negative.

I'm not surprised that the G word is being thrown around.

But the word also dismisses the work it takes to create works of genius.

Jackie Smith & Moira Finucaine. Photo by Sarah Walker

Maybe being open to those ideas that are usually rejected, finding the people who you want to create with – let's not forget that a team of glorious people are part of the 24-hour show –, and ignoring the NO voices* is always an amazing place to start.

Dan Giovannoni as Yum Yum in The Mikado. Photo by Sarah Walker

* including critics; good writers are not always right.

Also:

Taylor Mac In Conversation on Saturday at 2.30.
www.festival.melbourne

The Wrap: closing night party on Sunday.
www.festival.melbourne

Circus Oz Strong Women. Photo by Sarah Walker

Chanon Judson. Photo by Sarah Walker

Musical Director Matt Ray, who is also on stage for 24 hours. Photo by Sarah Walker

Review: John

John
Melbourne Theatre Company
16 February 2017
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 25 March
mtc.com.au

MTC. John. Photo by Jeff Busby

American playwright Annie Baker won a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for The Flick (seen at Red Stitch) when she was 33. Her writing's won Off-Broadway Obie awards and rightly declares a new Baker as a show to see. The MTC have the Australian premier of her 2015 play, John, and director Sarah Goodes guides a must-see production that revels in the ambiguity, mystery and too-close-for-comfort humour in the writing.

Jenny (Ursula Mills) and Elias (Johnny Carr) are as much trying to stay together as they are trying to break up when they weekend at a B&B in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, run by Mertis (Helen Morse), who wears a fanny pack and a doggy apron when she's working. The tourist area offers Civil War ghost tours, but the real unease come from the gaze of personal ghosts and gods, collectable American Dolls, and, sometimes, Mertis's blind friend Genevieve (Melita Jurisic), who's happy to explain that she's no longer clinically insane.

The heart of Annie Baker's writing is in the subtext: the white space on the page that creates the silences on the stage, the time between scenes, how characters listen and reacts, and the surprises in the design and sound.

Designers Elizabeth Gadsby (set and costume) and Richard Vabre (lighting) make the homely and welcoming B&B feel creepy. At a glance, it looks super naturalistic – in a world where floral carpet, chintz and kitch figurines are expected – but the detail reveals an out-of-time oddness that hints of the supernatural, or an ageing house with quirks. There are too many lights, the grandfather clock ticks but doesn't measure time without help, the flying ducks on the wall light up, the radio is a mini juke box that plays Bach and Vivaldi, and the pianola can't be trusted. The atmosphere is perfected with Russell Goldsmith's sound design of ticking, rustling and music that's as implied as it is heard

Morse and Jurisic perform like Metris and Genevieve  – oh, Genevieve – were written for them. With timing and pacing that define their years of experience and an ability to create character from the centre of their beings, they are as heartbreaking as they are hilarious. Mills and Carr use the silences to show more than "what yelling looks like", and let Jenny and Elias be so unlikeable that the moments when they show their true feelings change everything. All four hold onto the their secrets and let the audience keep guessing, filling in the unsaid through the two intervals, and talking about their own Johns late into the night.

John isn't theatre that explains itself and the temperamental room that Metris talks about might be the one you're sitting in. Baker's writing is as complex as life but she never wants her audience to forget that they are in a theatre. Goode's production lets this conceit pay off again and again, and, as the stories unravel and tangle, we're reminded how theatre can get inside our minds and stay with us like ghosts.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.