Final MIAF 2009 thoughts

MIAF 2009
A Reflection. Nah, it's a rant.

 It's the last Saturday evening of the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival and I'm willingly sitting at home at my computer in my trackie daks. Something just isn't right.

This afternoon I saw my last MIAF event, Peter Greenaway's Leonardo's Last Supper, and I liked it.

I don't know what anyone else thought about it though. In fact, I’m not too sure what anyone else (apart from a couple of my friends) thought about this festival, because we're not talking about it. And by ‘we’, I mean Melbourne’s artists, art fanciers and festival junkies (those of us in the age, income, interest and education bracket known as the ‘festival demographic). This year I'm not hearing the opinions and thoughts of all these other like-minded souls. Or drinking with them.

Brett Sheehy holds the artistic reins of the festival for this year and the next. Having hung out (and worked) at arts festivals for many years, I try not to compare Artistic Directors. Each have their own vision and bring us bloody amazing stuff*.

Brett, for letting me see Peeping Tom's Le Salon, thank you, thank you, thank you –  but where's our festival gone? Why aren't we talking? Why isn't this program inspiring us to create? Why doesn’t this festival feel like ours?

Don't get me wrong, the shows I’ve seen has been terrific, but I haven't taken a single risk, I haven't seen anything that has made me re-think how I feel about theatre and I haven't seen anything that I've hated.

Over the four years that Kristy Edmunds created the program, each year had all of these element, with programs that gave us perfected masterpieces and brand new work, and still left room for creativity, which means giving artists the freedom to experiment and perhaps make mistakes.  Her programs gave me a new perspective about why we 'consume' and make art. I found arts forms I had never seen, I discovered artists who changed how I think and I even began to understand and love contemporary dance!

And, more importantly, I’ve seen how these programs have influenced the art created in Melbourne, and not just the local work created for the festival. Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess tentacles are still tickling our independent artists and I'm always glimpsing a Lone Twin shadow.

But tonight I'm not line dancing with strangers in silence outside of the Malthouse, I’m not wondering how many pink drinks until I’m brave enough to talk to someone like Robert Wilson without gushing like a school girl, I’m not wishing that I hadn’t left my program on a table after I’d written review notes that included ‘utter wank’, and ‘who the fuck let these people on a stage’ (I now only write notes in a note book) and I’m not taking a risk and seeing someone I had never heard of. I’m at home and there might even be a good movie on the telly.

If this were last year, I would have left The Last Supper and headed to the Artists Lounge, where I would have ordered a soy latte and a small sultana scroll as I chatted to the barista about the show and they told me what they thought about it. I would have found a quiet corner and typed up a rave about Greenaway and what a pretentious wanker he is and how I love him for being a pretentious wanker and mentioned that no matter what crap he makes, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is so wonderful that nothing else matters. While doing so, I might have discussed with someone I knew and someone I hadn't met before the nature of contemporary Christianity and our how we do or don't value visual art. Then I would have sat outside in the sun, ordered a fizzy pink grapefruit juice while Simon changed my mind and gave me another Festival cocktail, before going to the box office and buying a ticket for whatever show I somehow hadn't seen yet. Seen the art. Then gone back to the lounge, met friends, ordered food, made new friends and despaired that this wonderful event is over for another year.

Seeing the art is such a small part of the experience. Just seeing a show is like sex without the compliments and a cocktail beforehand or a cuddle, a chat and a late night pizza after. I'm not saying that this year's art is like paying a prostitute, but it's feeling like a commodity again. It's something people pay for because it's 'quality'; it's 'Art'. It’s not something that includes those outside of the ‘demographic’, it’s not making us think too hard and it's not giving us the space or the content to make us talk.


*So why couldn't the Adelaide Festival board have trusted Peter Sellars? I know it's been years and it's forgotten – but this may be my only chance to rant.

AND, in case Media Watch are watching, I was one of the lucky folk to work for the 2005 festival. It was a great job, but also the job that made me realise that I didn't want to be an arts manager anymore; that a knack with budgets, a frightening knowledge of risk and an ability to write a tight contract may be worthwhile and admirable skills but they weren't what I was about and were turning me into an uninteresting and miserable person. So now I sit in classes with people half my age and am learning how to write. (I still do bits of the other stuff, but it's no longer what I am.)

Peter Greenaway's Leonardo's Last Supper

MIAF 2009
Peter Greenaway's Leonardo's Last Supper
Melbourne International Arts Festival
24 October 2009
North Melbourne Town Hall

For $10 Peter Greenaway's Leonardo's Last Supper is worth heading to the North Melbourne Town Hall for, and it’s on for another couple of weeks, so there's still time to see it.

It’s a copy of that painting made famous by The Da Vinci Code with some whizz-bang, super-cool lighting FX and the compulsory Nyman-like music. I think it's meant to make us realise that the works of these masters are masterpieces and that the best way to appreciate them is to look at them for a long time until the story and the mastery is revealed. The postcard you get at the gallery shop will never compete with the original...

It's shorter than Greenaway's films, but just as pretentious and arty, so I dug it.

Here's a pretty cool interview with PG talking about cultural arrogance and bringing this incredible experiment to Melbourne.

Le Salon

MIAF 2009
Le Salon
Peeping Tom
Melbourne International Arts Festival
23 October 2009
the Arts Centre, Playhouse

Saturday 24 October

Peeping Tom’s Le Salon is another amazing show from Belgium. It’s my pick of the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival and may yet be my favourite show of the year.

Physical theatre never sounds as arty as dance, but Peeping Tom have melded theatre with music and dance to create something original, intimate and almost excruciatingly personal.

With themes and glimpses of loss and decline in the most ‘normal’ of lives, it maintains a throat-tightening sense of melancholy, whilst offering a parallel sense of dark humour and even hope. From an old man’s botched suicide to the woman who may have lost her baby to a woman who has lost her sexuality, Le Salon is like spying on your friends and seeing their deepest hidden fears and secrets – and remembering why we all leave some things unsaid.

And the dance. Oh my. I’ve not seen anything like it. At times, it seemed inhuman, like broken bodies forced into unnatural positions by malevolent gods, but it was fluid and as controlled as the most prima of ballerinas. And it showed how unnecessary words are. The visceral reaction was as potent as re-living the times when I’d felt or witnessed such despair, fear and loss.

This short season claims to be the last performances of Le Salon, as Peeping Tom develop each new work based on their last. It hurts to know that this won’t be seen for years to come, but how wonderful to know that something new is being created from it. And please bring it to Australia – or I’m coming to Belgium to see it.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Friday 23 October

Festivals rely on careful program reading and planning. With such short runs (and a significant lack of communal Artists Lounges), shows are over by the time those vital word of mouth recommendations get around. So, perhaps its up to word of blog to rave about Le Salon.

2pm and 8pm tomorrow (Saturday 24) are the last two performaces (ever) of this amazing piece of physical theatre. I'm quite devastated that they won't be performing it again, but ecstatic knowing that they will create something else; even if I do have to go to Beligium to see it.

It is hands down my favourite show of the festival (sorry Apocalypse Bear, you've been bumped) and may be my show of the year.

Watching Peeping Tom felt like spying on your friends and seeing them expose those deep, dark fears and secrets that we all keep hidden, and remembering why some things are best left unsaid.

And it's told in a way that just has to be seen. I have never seen dance like this. Almost inhuman in it's expression, the dancers are like broken bodies that still have complete control. The strength and fluidity and originality had me sitting on the edge of my seat, simply gobsmaked.

Arty review will be up tomorrow. But, if you trust anything I've ever said about theatre - SEE THIS.

Pornography

MIAF 2009
Pornography
Melbourne International Arts Festival and
Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg
17 October 2009

If Avenue Q left us with no doubt that the internet is for porn, be assured that the theatre is for Pornography.

Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg’s production of UK playwright Simon Stephens’s Pornography is set in London in July 2005. The city had just won the Olympic bid, Coldplay are so popular that some folk want to kick them in the teeth and some Englishmen are going to get onto public transport with bags of explosives.

It’s only been four years and already I can’t remember the details of the London bombings, let alone who played at Live 8. Pornography is firmly placed in UK social memory, but having the performance in German (with surtitles) distances us enough to concentrate on the story without needing to place ourselves back in July 2005.

With the superficial euphoria about an event that is still in the future and a cultural obsession with a rock concert as the background, seven unrelated stories are told in the lead up to the shattering day. Each are about momentary joy and being forced to break personal boundaries that reveal the obscenity, cruelty, loneliness and sadness that the previous happy had obscured. If you go along hoping for some hot nude action, it may be best to think about what we mean when we use the word pornography.

The content and story are enough to draw us in, but Director Sebastian Nübling and designers Muriel Gerstner and Jean-Marc Desbonnets tell this story though the phenomana of theatre. I wish I’d been brave enough to stop reading the surtitles and just watch.

The cast remain on stage, themselves watching and sometimes participating in the individual stories, while building or destroying a massive image of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. Made from tiles, it’s part mosaic, but more recogniseable as a pixelated screen image that needs a slight squint or distance to reveal its clarity and hide its black hole imperfections and its grid order. We know that tower fell, we know London fell, but we want so much for the comfort of a completed, beautiful image.

This is wanky theatre at it’s best, worthy of much satisfying indulgence.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

And Melbournites, TODAY (Sunday 18)  is your last chance to see Pornography.

And you can get into the Rumpus Room for free today if you have a festival ticket for Saturday or Sunday.  It's not our beloved Artists Lounge, but it still looks kind of cool.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

MIAF 2009
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places
The Store Room and Melbourne International Arts Festival
16 October 2009
Meat Market

Tonight’s television news showed the CCTV footage of a child’s pram blowing under a Melbourne train, with the baby still inside. The baby wasn’t hurt, but anyone who saw the footage will never let a child out of their grasp at a train station again. Melbourne may be known for its iconic trams, but more of us catch trains.

Director Anna Tregloan and sound designer J David Franze spent over a year sitting on trains recording conversations and the resulting The Dictionary of Imaginary Places uses the direct transcripts of these overheard conversations and turns them into something remarkably surprising, unexpectedly funny and curiously beautiful.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places has been created through The Store Room Theatre’s Artistic Associate program, which allows artists a three-year tenure to develop work. If is the first result of this process, I’m looking forward to more.

Tregloan is best known for her stunning theatre design (it’s no secret that I think her designs are wonderful), but when she creates her own work, she shows us the core artist that controls her.

Like Black (2007), The Dictionary of Imaginary Places combines performance art with design, but this time she doesn’t deconstruct an existing narrative, but starts with the most disparate mass of words.

The conversations people have on trains are mundane. They are filtered because they can be heard, but unfiltered because people assume that no one is listening. In this dictionary, these stolen words mean nothing or everything. The words are just sounds and glimpses of what could be. They don’t belong to the characters or the space and tell their own stories away from what we are witnessing, and Franze’s sound design ensures that we also hear them in unexpected ways.

Rows of train-like seats fill the tunnel-like cavern of the Meat Market and four passengers (Heather Bolton, Christopher Brown, Rita Kalnejais and James Wardlow) recreate what the overheard conversations could have been like. Well, make that what you could never have imagined them to be like. Unless you close your eyes and imagine a red-gowned women stuffing MX’s in her dress to give her a large arse or a jazz hands dancer in a blue sequined jacket prancing among the old coffee cups.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is a view of Melbourne that could be imagined by none other that the creators, but still resonates with us who live on train lines, and even those who can only imagine the joys of public transport.

And Anna continues to put the most glorious of gorgeous shoes on display, but that’s just my obsession.


This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

When the Rain Stops Falling

MIAF 2009
When the Rain Stops Falling
Melbourne Theatre Company, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Brink Productions
12 October 2009
Sumner Theatre

When the Rain Stops Falling is already on it’s way to becoming one of those rare productions that will resonate way beyond its seasons and future theatre goers will wish that they were there.

A production opened in London in May this year and another heads to Broadway in March next year. You have the chance to see the original cast and company that created it. If you still talk about seeing or missing Cloudstreet (I missed it) or Nichloas Nickleby (I saw it), you must not miss this opportunity.

When the Rain Stops Falling is for anyone who yearns for someone’s eyes to light up when they enter a room, or known that love is abhorrent, or broken the heart of someone they loved because it was kinder than destroying their soul, or survived, or been broken, or wished for courage, or believed in redemption.

Our commercial theatre companies have a different raison d’être to our independent wonders. They have to please a very large, somewhat conservative audience who are happy to pay a reasonable price for a nice night out. So, sometimes, the rest of us don’t love the fare our big stages give their audiences. If you’re one of those who avoid the MTC, cast aside all preconceptions and see When the Rain Stops Falling (and the Apocalypse Bear Trilogy) this festival.

It might help to know that it was created by Adelaide’s Brink Productions for the 2008 Adelaide Festival of Arts, and it makes me wonder if perhaps the best theatre in this country is being created in the town I no longer live in.

Andrew Bovell (who wrote, among other things, Lantana) let director Chris Drummond coax him back to writing for theatre. Drummond describes Brink’s approach to creation as, “We ask the artists to come with nothing prepared: to come with minimal research, with no preconceptions, no decisions and no solutions ready.” This allows for unexpected symbiotic relationships to develop between creators. Drummond continues that this “requires both confidence in your fellow artist and, more importantly, it requires a deep sense of self-confidence in your own capacity and a lack of ego – both essential qualities for this kind of work.”

The resulting play is ostensibly simple, but is layered with connections and depth and symbolism that no one artist could create on their own. Bovell’s script is beautiful, but its magic realism and non-sequential plot might be almost obvious without Quentin Grant’s music or Hossein Valamanesh’s design.

Neil Pigot will long be remembered for his performance, which at first seems mundane, but draws us into the heart of both his characters. Anna Lise Phillips leaves the audience free to cry, and Paul Blackwell, Michaela Cantwell, Kay Jamieson, Carmel Johnson, Kris McQuade and Yalin Ozucelik are equally as astonishing. They prove that when actors are involved in the creative process and given complex characters who are motivated by their hearts, it is a profession and a craft that can change people.

I don’t want to discuss the story, the plot or the characters. The process of discovery is too lovely and too painful to be pre-empted. Just give it time and trust that the early confusion and repetition will pay off.

Photo by Jeff Busby.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Check out Andrew Bovell talking about writing with courage, as part of the What I Wrote series of DVDs.  

We miss the artists lounge

MIAF 2009
No Artists Bar

We're limping into week two of Melbourne's capital A arty festival. There's been some amazing shows. Has anyone really noticed?

Why aren't we out every night drinking cocktails, scoffing nachos and loudly discussing the theme of disconnection inherent in the bodysuit of a dancer from some country we couldn't place on a map - but now want to live in?

Where's the buzz, the discussion, the excitement and the opportunity to snog dancers from countries we can't place on maps?

Sure it was a bit elitist and a bit wanky, but so are we. The people who go to the Melbourne International Arts Festival loved that arty farty, snobby space where we could get great coffee, cheap cocktails, posh plonk and dishes that included tofu and cous cous.

We loved talking about the Art we saw and running off (artist card in hand) to get tickets to a show that some stranger told us was unmisasable.

I loved sitting with my lap top and a glass of something fizzy, writing reviews as I chatted to people I'd never met, who would tell me what they thought (and often sway my opinion).

And I loved seeing my friends; those people who also spend too much time indoors or at computers, but always come out for a festival.

OK, there's a club in the Forum. But it costs money to get in, it's more than a two-minute walk from the theatres, there's no outside overlooking the river*, there is loud music playing** and that is the place we go to during the FILM festival.

We want the Artists Lounge back.

I've just recieved an invitation to join a Facebook group wanting the same. In recent festivals we went in early for dinner, stayed out late to drink and spent as much time as we could in the Artists Lounge. It was better than home. It was better than our favourite inner-city bar. It was a welcoming oasis of overly intelligent arty poshness. This year we're going home to play on Facebook.

*Where saintly non-smokers can sit with their pariah smoker mates.
**Who may well be great bands, but you can't chat and listen.

Look Mummy I’m Dancing

MIAF 2009
Look Mummy I’m Dancing
Melbourne International Arts Festival and Vanessa/Swanlake
14 October 2009
the Arts Centre, Fairfax Studio

Vanessa Van Durme assures us that, despite her frustration about how men treat women in supermarkets, she isn’t another one of those bitter chicks with penis envy, because she never liked hers and left it in Morocco in 1975.

Created in Ghent, a Belgium city that seems to specialise in making amazing theatre, Look Mummy I’m Dancing is Vanessa’s monologue (which she can perform in four languages) that has toured Europe and the USA.

Very personal, beautifully sad and selectively honest, she reflects on her 60 years and questions if she made the right decision to undergo a sex change operation and choose to make her soul, mind and genitals reflect the same gender. She describes some very traumatic and confronting experiences that accompanied her ‘disorder’ and her choices, but there wasn’t a moment when I thought that she ever regretted her choice, and I’m still not sure if she’s happy.

Vanessa’s story is captivating and I’d happily listen to her for hours or sit down and have a chat about silky petticoats and big cocks, but Look Mummy I’m Dancing is being presented in our international arts festival and, well, I like my arts festivals to show me something that I haven’t seen before.

Theatrically there is nothing spectacular or unique about a woman talking on a sparsely decorated stage. Dramatically, I would have liked to see more of the other characters (the only one I felt we nearly knew was Fatimah the nurse who told Vanessa that she had a lovely little pussy) and more about Vanessa’s relationships with these people.

And, throughout the show, I couldn’t help wondering if any of us would have been there if she was a 60-year-old woman born with a vagina talking about her life – or if she would have been able to create a show in the first place. I admit that my inner-voyeur went along because of curiosity (and a love of gory operation stories); my inner-intellect adored the discussion of gender identification as distinct from sexuality; my ego wished that my tits looked that good; my inner-feminist rolled her eyes when Vanessa told us that the gone penis was large enough for the doctor removing it to be impressed; but my story loving, theatre-snobby, opinion-blabbing self wanted to see something with more balls.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Apocalypse Bear Trilogy

MIAF 2009
Apocalypse Bear Trilogy
MTC and Melbourne International Arts Festival
Friday 9 October 2009
The MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio

If there is any reason why open access festivals, like the Fringe, and independent companies and venues need as much support as we can muster, it is the Apocalypse Bear Trilogy.

Stuck Pigs Squealing have become one of independent Melbourne’s favourite companies and have worked to be presentd by our biggest professional company and earn their much-deserved place in our International Arts Festival.

Lally Katz’s Apocalypse Bear emerged from the woods as a commission for White Whale’s 2007 Melburnalia. The short piece started as a tale about living in far Kew and the congenial and terrifying bear instantly became one of my favourite bears (alongside Pooh, Paddington, the sneezing baby panda on YouTube and friends of mine who drink at the Laird).

Katz is also on my list of bloody-amazing-writers-who-every-other-writer-needs-to-see. The trilogy (The Fag of Zagreb, Back to the Cafeteria and At Last) is about instincts and emotion and the dark, dangerous woods that are as close as one tram stop away, and is so well written that you can’t see the skill for the words. Katz knows that people never say what they mean and creates world of subtext so powerful and raw that a conversation about putting the bins out is as menacing and moving as theatre can be.

It’s not just the writing, the design team of Mel Page (set and costume), Richard Vabre (lighting) and Jethro Woodward (sound) bring this script into the theatre and with co-directors (and performers) Luke Mullins and Brian Lipson, they build tension so gently that we’re only aware of it when it’s released and we realise we’ve been holding our breath.

Mullins and Katherine Tonkin (who were astonishing in SPS’s The Eisteddfod) grasp Katz’s writing like it comes from their hearts. It would be so easy to miss the darkness or the hope that is hidden in Lally’s strange world, but they capture every nuance and never let Sonia or Jeremy act like anything isn’t exactly how it should be. And, for all the wonderful characters Lipson has brought us, he was born to be The Apocalypse Bear.

Reviewing is nothing but subjective opinion, but in mine, The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is best piece of theatre I’ve seen this year.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.


More adventures of The Apocalypse Bear:
Episode # 1 and Episode # 2.