MICF: Robot Song

MICF for kids
Robot Song
Theatre Works and Arena Theatre
2 April 2019
Theatre Works
to 13 April
comedyfestival.com.au

Robot Song

Robot Song is all kinds of wonderful and then some. It finishes on Saturday.

Juniper's 11 and doesn't like going to school. She'd rather be at home with her parents or her best friend, who's a skip bin who makes toys and more friends out of rubbish. Juniper (Ashlea Pyke) also likes singing (Nate Gilkes wrote the music) and, with the help of her mum (Jo Abbott) and especially her dad (Phil McInnes), she wants to tell the story about why she stopped going to school and how a robot helped her to see her world differently.

Juniper knows she a bit different from her classmates. She doesn't like this, but she's ok with it because she has an art teacher who knows how creative Juniper is and she has a family who love and understand her. Although it's not discussed in her play, Juniper's story was inspired by the director/writer/designer Joylon James's son, who has autism.

One day Juniper's class give her a letter saying that they don't want her at their school. They call her a robot and the letter is so horrible that, even as an adult, it's hard to accept it as children not understanding the effect of their words.

Juniper can't dismiss it either and refuses to go back to school. Until a robot from a 1980s video she watched with her dad appears in her back yard.

As Juniper is played by an adult, we are always seeing the story from an adult point of view where her trauma is understood and her unconditional love and safety is assured. This allows children to be engrossed in her story, feel her pain and still feel safe.

Robot Song is far more than an insight into to being a child on the autism spectrum. It's a story about  empathy, understanding and creativity and how difference is a way to connect far more than a reason to reject.

What Melbourne loved in 2013, part 5

Today we go from a 45-minute play in the smallness of La Mama to ten hours of happiness at the Arts Centre and music floating through Docklands, with Patricia Cornelius, Bryce Ives, and Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey.

Patricia Cornelius
playwright

PATRICA: A woman in her middle age stands still, so long she stands still in the half light, half turned into the darkness, buried in a heavy winter coat and a grey mane of unkempt hair whispering almost inaudibly. And these snatches of odd and scattered phrases draw us into a world that lasts 45 minutes at the most and it’s called Bunker and it’s at La Mama.

The creative team are Greg Dyson, Trudy Radburn and Charlie Laidlaw. As in the title the world is a bunker, a place away from danger, an internal place, a place not easy to come back from. I left there moved and elated and yet this piece of theatre had been strange and elusive. I loved that it reminded me of what theatre can be, the strange worlds it can take us to and totally unpretentiously.

And just as Bunker is whispers and scattered phrases, They Saw a Thylacine, with its two story tellers (Justine Campbell and Sarah Hamilton) inside a cage, is a feast of intertwined, beautifully written narratives. The stories are rich and fine and entirely captivating. These are two actors who are making their own work and their use of language is a reminder of the best in the tradition of storytelling or yarning.  I loved their evident love of language. And I believe I was witness to the beginning of two actors who may continue to write for themselves for awhile but will go on to be wonderful playwrights.

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

SM: Savages. OMG. This is writing that gets into your guts. I felt this play more than I watched it. It's hard to be made to understand men whom I despised for everything they thought and said about women – ugly women.

Bryce Ives
director

BRYCE: 2013 has been epic.


Life and Times by Nature Theatre of Oklahoma was quite possibly the best ten hours I'll ever spend in a theatre. A monumentally long examination of our struggle to express ourselves and describe what has happened in our past, it was wonderfully fucked and awkward. I was somehow moved, informed, entertained and somewhat changed by this experience.

Richard Murphett doing Richard Foreman with the graduating VCA actors was a surprising highlight. We went to poetry city, with Eddie, and it was strange, surreal, hysterical and disorienting. Richard Murphett allowed the necessary space to ensure the graduating actors somehow commanded this complex text. It was a celebration of Foreman and the New York avant-garde, but also was strangely relevant to this time and the work we are making in Melbourne.


Finally, Daniel Schlusshner (M+M, Mengerie) continues to lead our mob of makers. Within his work are regular moments that transcend and go to some place other, and it’s these moments that inform my own understanding of what is possible in theatre: how we listen, how we see and how we construct sense in a chaotic world.

Honourable mentions: 
The Story of O by The Rabble took me to the uncomfortable and disturbing part of my dream space. Palace of the End, directed by Daniel Clarke, gave us three astonishing performances of stories that must (urgently and regularly) be heard. And, finally, Einstein on the Beach gave everything I hoped and more.


On a personal note, it’s been wonderful working with the artists at Theatre Works under the unrelenting vision of Daniel Clarke, and alongside my continued collaboration with Nate Gilkes and the Present Tense ensemble. We’ve spent the past six months intensively training and considering our own process, often alongside the amazing Leisa Shelton, an artist who enables other artists and performance makers to better articulate and understand their work. Training with Leisa IS the highlight of each week.

SM: Bryce and I sat next to each other at Life and Times. He laughed at the same things I did; what more can you possibly want at the theatre. It was such a wonderful and happy-making experience that we said we may never be able to go to the theatre together again.

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey
sound/music artists, long-term collaborators

Dress rehearsal of 5 Short Blasts

MADELEINE AND TIM: Sitting in the audio booth at the State Theatre with three young people from the St Martins Cross Age Ensemble as they waxed lyrical about their responses and insights  to the Australian Ballet’s production of La Sylphide. Their commentary was heard by a small test group of audience members via audio description headsets. In that booth we experienced a sense of both subversion and the sound of a million possibilities opening.

We also had  the busiest year of our career. The image is from our Dress Rehearsal for 5 Short Blasts: that moment when the imagined becomes real is always extraordinary.

You can see 5 Short Blasts until 25 December. Details here.

SM: My excuse for missing 5 Short Blasts was genuine: I was in hospital (nothing bad) on media day. And, you know, mornings.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13

Part 14

Part 15

Part 16

Part 17

2012 part 1, with links to the rest

FRINGE: FOMO

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2013

FOMO

Present Tense

20 September 2013

Fringe Hub, Upstairs at Errol's

to 5 October

melbournefringe.com.au

A Sauvy B Sunrise is sauvignon blanc, orange juice and raspberry cordial. Zoe Macdonald (who was the best friend in the wonderful Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert) is every character in her show and far more top shelf than the cocktail that I shouldn't judge so harshly before giving it a go.

FOMO is the fear of missing out and from the studio of the Mellow FM radio station, our Sauvy B drinking host has a creamy smooth voice like a Baileys on ice and welcomes the guests and callers to the "Let's be honest" hour.  From a New York researcher to a swearing suburbanite (yes, I mean bogan), there's talk of pubes and vajazzling and a reminder that it's called a vagina, but it all comes back to the one thing they all coincidentally have in common: Zoe Macdonald.

With a fear of ageing, questioning of sexuality and the usual am I too fat and hairy questions, we finally meet the real Zoe, and these moments of reality made me want to see more of her and less of her zany (and wonderfully performed) characters.

I also shared an eye roll with my date as she discussed the fear of turning 30 and turning into a cat lady. Then I remembered my own 30 freak out (and my 40 one), but getting my first cat at 31 was one of the best things I've ever done.

Devised by Zoe and directed by Bryce Ives and Nathan Gilkes (the Margaret Fulton team), FOMO is an hilariously honest look at the Zoe's life and a reminder that the only thing that makes us miss out is the fear that we may miss out.

Review: Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert

Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert
Present Tense and Theatre Works
21 November 2012
Theatre Works
to 1 December
theatreworks.org.au

The Margaret Fulton Cookbook was first published in 1968. I was born in 1968 and in her honour I ensure that I, at least, taste any cake, tart or treat offered to me. Well that's my excuse this week.

Yes, I'm meant to be writing an arty review about Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert, a musical in St Kilda, but I'm reading recipes from her first famous book and want to make some almond cheese rounds or go to St Kilda for cake.

The Margaret Fulton Cookbook taught the last of the Baby Boomers how to cook; it was like Masterchef  but on paper and without cravats or gastronomy.  There wasn't a copy of Margaret's book in my house when I grew up, so I thought garlic and olives were woggy and weird, that a tin of corn in a tuna mornay was a vegetable and a squeeze of lemon on fish and chips was fruit.  Cookbooks taught me how to cook (Charmaine Solomon was my Margaret) and it's easy to forget the impact a good cook book has. If you can't cook, how do you show your family and friends that you don't hate them? 

The show? It's my favourite musical of the year. It's as perfectly delicious as the Chocolate Kooglehoupf at Monarch Cakes in Acland Street, as fresh as new season plum from the St Kilda Farmers Market and reminds us that the secret ingredient of success is a often person who's nothing like the faux fame of their brand.

Based on Fulton's autobiography, I sang for my supper, writer Doug McLeod, composer Yuri Worontschak and directors Bryce Ives and Nathan Gilkes have been developing this musical for a few years. In this time they've crafted a story that embraces a fascinating woman who has as many flaws as the rest of us, filled it with nostalgia, told it with love, placed it firmly in the cultural context of now and told it through the emotion capturing magic of music.

It opens in 1988;  it was the cheesy year of Australia's Bicentenary, but it wasn't the best time for Margaret. The man she loved had died, the bank was at the door because she trusted the wrong person and she'd been made a bloody Living National Treasure.  With her mum and a best friend to talk to, the story heads back to the 40s when teenage Margaret danced with a soldier and moved to Sydney to earn her own living during the war, and shows her career and personal life from Maragret's eyes.

Amy Lehpamer is Margaret and she'd better be resigned to playing this woman for a long time. Amy looks nothing like Margaret, but captures her determined soul with a dry wit that refuses to see the past through rose coloured glasses, but knows that an extra layer of cream or passionfruit can make up for inevitable mistakes.

She's joined by the equally scrumptious Josh Price, Laura Burzacott, Zoy Fangos and Zoe McDonald, and a band and back up singers who are allowed to fantastic.

Margret and her family were at opening night and have been back. This says more than any review. Think of your favourite photos. They're certainly not the ones that make us look hideous, but neither are they the ones photoshopped to perfection. We love reflections that are honest but show us at our best; this is how Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert shows Margaret.

It's celebratory, heart warming and promises to leave you grinning, crying and wanting Pavlova. It's selling out every night, but don't let that stop you seeing if there's tickets left. It's too good to not be back, but there's something special about seeing a first run of a show that's going to become something amazing.

This was on AussieTheatre.com