What Melbourne Loved in 2018, part 4

It's more trickle than flood this year. Here's the form; tell us about those theatre and art moments in 2018 that made you happy.

Today, we keep celebrating independent makers and companies, and celebrate all those challenges to boring assumptions made about art, makers and audiences.

Sonya Suares
Artistic Director, Watch This

Sonya Suares in Contest. 
(I was a GS in my primary school church team; I wasn't good.)

Favourite moments in 2018
Both of mine were sitting in the Beckett Theatre this year: tears running down my face as Dalara Williams performed the inciting monologue in Blackie Blackie Brown and nearly wetting myself moments later, just as I did during Michelle Lee’s Going Down.

If I am permitted a moment that is not simply as an disinterested audient, then I must say truthfully watching Nadine Garner nail "Send in the Clowns" at every performance of A Little Night Music during the run was one of the highlights of my year. I mean, Every. Single. Time.

Looking forward to in 2019
I'm looking forward to sending everyone I know to the return season Blackie Blackie Brown and, because I'm a big boffin/child-of-the-90s, to seeing Shakespeare in Love. Or you know, being in it if Simon Phillips decides to give me a spin!

And personally, I'm looking forward to performing Fleur Kilpatrick's Max Afford award-winning play Whale with a group of incredible womens. It's gonna be a ripper.

SM: Sonya is the driving force behind Watch This. Putting on musicals is expensive and difficult. Putting on Sondheim musicals multiplies the difficulty considerably. Watch This do it, anyway.  Without Watch This, we would see far less Sondheim in Melbourne. Without them we wouldn't see some some of out best performers in Sondheim musicals. If I had a magic funding wand, Watch This would get the money they need to become an ongoing professional company. As for my favourite moment with Sonya this year, it's her moving and powerful performance in Contest by Emilie Collyer.

Vidya Makan & Nick Simpson-Deeks in next year's Watch This show.
Co-directed by Sonya with Dean Drieberg.
Sondheim fans don’t need a title.

Mama Alto
Jazz singer, cabaret artiste and gender transcendent diva

Mama Also. Photo by Alexis Desaulniers-Lea

Favourite moments in 2018
Mojo Juju's "Native Tongue". One of the most important new Australian works right now and, I suspect, for many years to come. Revelatory, extraordinary, damning, tender, groundbreaking, truth telling and part of a highly necessary reckoning of the national identity.

Honourable mentions. Willow Sizer's theatrical cabaret Death of a Demi Diva was a revelation. She gave a tour-de-force performance that set the hairs on the back of my neck on edge. Paul Capsis as Quentin Crisp in Resident Alien (return season). Magnificent, eccentric, and in many ways so close to home for all of our inner anxieties, foibles and paranoias.

Honourable mentions for things I saw interstate (naughty, I know). The View Upstairs (Hayes Theatre, Sydney) and An Evening with Constantina Bush (Spirit Festival, Adelaide).

Looking forward to in 2019
I'm eagerly keeping my eye on new works and projects from leading thinkers, powerful performers and those who speak back to imbalance. Anything and everything from Candy Bowers, Jean Tong, and Yana Alana. Midsumma 2019's theatre, cabaret and burlesque offerings look extraordinary. And, as always, I anticipate with relish the as yet unannounced surprises that will pop up underground in salons, dens, cabarets and dives across Melbourne. What delights await us at Hares & Hyenas, The Butterfly Club, The Melba Spiegeltent, and where else?

SM: Every moment with Mama Also is the best. She's exquisite. I think my favourite moment was sending interstate friends along to a show she was performing at. When they got back, all they could do was tell about this amazing performer called Mama Alto.

Booking my ticket for The Seventh Annual Mama Alto Holiday Special now. Join us.

Chris Wenn
Noise maker and overthinker

Chris Wenn. Photo by Ezekiel Rodofili

Favourite moments in 2018
There's no single moment that excited me quite as much as the feeling that we've reached a tipping point of invention and fertility within the independent sector . There was such an incredible amount and range of work presented by independent artists and companies in 2019. There was tremendous work to see from new, emerging,and established creators, and from sectors of our community that have gone unrecognised for too long. In the world outside of the major performing arts companies, we have had to build a level of resilience and self-sufficiency that can stand against the inconstancy of grant schemes. The Brandis 'reforms' and Fifield 'restoration' have only proved that we are, and always will be, a target for cuts and culture war. I am immensely proud of the way our community supports each other: through fundraising, crowdfunding, donations of time and material and effort, and a myriad other ways. Can't stop, won't stop.

Looking forward to in 2019
I'm looking forward to more work! More work by and for children and young people, more work by and for Indigenous people, more work by and for queer and non-binary people, more work by and for migrants and non-English speaking audiences. I want to see more work that challenges conventions and assumptions and what it means to make and witness art. I want to see work that reflects the strength and diversity of this global city, that engages audiences in new ways, that deploys technology and creativity in new spaces and old.

SM: Sound designers are such an important part of a design team and we don't talk about them any where near enough. Next year, I will listen to shows more. Chris was part of an amazing design team for Colder at Red Stitch. I mentioned the stage and the lighting designer and not Chris – but as I think back on the show, I can still hear it.

What Melbourne loved in 2014, part 9

And with Bon Batten, Rhys Auteri and me, it's time to farewell Melbourne's favourite moments for 2014.

What I Loved in 2014 will be up on Monday.

Bron Batten
I don't know how to describe what she does, but it's fucking awesome

Bron: There was heaps of stuff I loved this year (contrary to the popular belief that I hate everything), Green Screen as a part of Neon, Oedipus Schmoedipus at Belvoir, Calpurnia Descending  at The Malthouse and Have I No Mouth at the Melbourne Festival.

Credible, Likeable, Superstar, Role model at Theatre Works was bloody astounding and I left the show feeling like I'd been kicked in the chest. Touching, funny, real and relevant.

Other good stuff was Tessa Waters's Womanz, Trygve Wakenshaw’s Kraken at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Dr Professor Neal Portenza makes me laugh a lot and watching Adrienne Truscott's Asking for It and Zoe Coombs Marr's remount of Dave kicking the comedy world in the balls.

And witnessing a small, balding David Sedaris sell out Hamer Hall by literally reading from an A4 piece of paper made me really happy because you just can't predict what people are going to like.

SM: There was the anaconda at Last Tuesday Society's YouTube Comment Orchestra, the look on her face when I told her that I liked Marzo, but it has to be the moment in the Use Your Illusion (NO, not "that" moment) when we realised that the hypnotist was an actor.

Rhys Auteri
writer, musician, possum

Rhys: I wrote a first draft of this and it was far too long, going into too many shows – even after seeing under 50 shows for the year, my lowest attendance for many years. As such, I’ve heard of at least half a dozen shows that sounded like I missed something special, but oh well.

Sisters Grimm’s Calpurnia Descending  again made me suspect that they write their scripts in bold and underline, possibly scrawled in lipstick and adorned with stickers. Hilarious and razor sharp, clever, it indulged in its own delightful vacuity to find surprising moments of emotion and revelation. Its use of live video and other media was brilliantly executed and helped the Sisters Grimm continue to develop the theatricality of their work to match their pointed writing and perfectly over-pitched performances. The image of Paul Capsis climbing a staircase to nowhere, draped in a green screen of lost possibilities was mesmerising.

My highlight of the Melbourne Festival was Circa’s fantastic Opus. Their ability to transform the skills of circus into a touching and vast language of dance was revelatory and brought an array of new ideas to an ancient craft. There were lots of tumbles and lifting and jumping, but these spectacles of strength were presented not for their own sake but pitted towards a higher visual aesthetic of movement. Basically I felt pretty fat and unfit after watching this – I’m not entirely sure this wasn’t their whole plan.

Nicola Gunn once again delighted with Green Screen – playful, engaging, maddening, confusing and crystal clear all at once. Gunn is fearless in her exploration and use of theatrical language to say what cannot be put merely into words. A teacher of mine once commented that great theatre was like a dream, an intense unforgettable experience that nonetheless proves difficult to explain to those who were not present. The image of Gunn riding a slowly deflating thrown of air mattresses seemed at once courageous, ridiculous and omnipotent.

I was fortunate enough to catch Jono Wants a Wife at the Fringe. It was an unassuming piece that really delivered. Jonathan Burns’s confessional solo piece gave a rare glimpse of the vulnerable male journeying from awkward adolescence to heartbreak and often self-loathing – romantic, inept, confused, ashamed and predatory. The woman I saw it with found it a revelatory insight into the male of the species:  “I didn’t realise that men think like that” (or something to that effect). It was a brave, warts-and-all performance, perfect “poor theatre” storytelling.

Melbourne favourites Blue Grassy Knoll premiered their new score to Buster Keaton’s The General. Their ability to transform the crowd into a raucous mess of cheers and boos transport you back to the days and spirit of silent cinema. If you think you might like to get into Keaton – this is the way to do it.

And finally, I caught a few hours of the 52 hours straight improfest that was Little Soap on the Prairie. This completely improvised durational saga featured fantastic character work and storytelling that ran the gamut from absurd and silly to heartbreaking and poignant. It’s easy to dismiss a work like this as somehow “lesser” than similar durational works by “serious” theatre groups like Lone Twin, Forced Entertainment or Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. But this was not merely an exercise of self-indulgent theatre games. The ability of the performers to plumb the depths of fascinating characters, while creating an epic and engaging story was pretty magical. I will always remember the murder of Constance (played by Jenny Lovell) in the final hours of the show. As her murderer crept towards her – hands outstretched to make a gun - you could sense the tension in the performers and the audience. There were actual gasps as the murderer shouted ‘bang, bang’ and pulled the trigger. This moment was about as simple as playing on stage gets, yet it was one of the most powerful things I witnessed this year.

Other shows I loved this year included Therese Raquin, Applespiel Make a Band and Take on the Recording Industry, The Government Inspector, Neighbourhood Watch, Single White Slut, Sex Idiot and Marzo.

SM: The first time the possum hissed in Bucket's List.

Anne-Marie Peard
writer

Photo by Sarah Collins

A-M: Some of my favourite moments this year were in Live Art experiences. There was the small group experience of Yana Alana snuggling into my chest, with six of us on her bed, in In Bed With Yana Alana; asking a stranger if I could stick a label on her and take her photo in Take the Call;  the unexpected joy of making a band with Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites; and writing a very bad poem in bed with my cat for A Day Like Every Other.

But the one I'll never forget is The Rest is Silence: the 4 am encounter at The 24-Hour Experience. I wasn't well and I was so close to going home at 5 pm, but I wanted to go to the forensic morgue. There were no actors: it was just the staff running through what they do when a body comes into the Homicide Room (crime and accident victims) and then showing us how they harvest tissue. And the staff then sat and talked to some of us – at 5 am – about their jobs. It was the most real, fascinating and honest encounter I had seeing arts events this year.

2103 Favourites

2012 Favourites

What Melbourne loved in 2013, part 8

Today, while Mark Wilson is swanning around Europe seeing Shakespeares, Karin Muiznieks talks about finding creative identity as a young woman, and John Paul Fischbach reminds us how wonderful it was to see Yana Alana's gorgeous blue crack.

Mark Wilson

actor

MARK: At time of writing, there are another 25 days in which to see stuff in 2013 – and given how much I've seen this past fortnight in the pleasure garden that is Berlin, this feels a little premature.

Nevertheless:

Firstly, the NEON festival gave the MTC a vibe I’ve never known it to have – so, so alive – which was really fucking wonderful.

But my total number one experience so far for 2013 happened just last week. European efforts at Shakespeare have resulted in the two worst professional productions of Macbeth I have ever seen, one mediocre and one interesting Much Ado, one great Hamlet, one average Hamlet, and the BEST  ROMEO AND JULIET I HAVE EVER SEEN! Schaubuhne, director Lars Eidinger. It was good.

SM: Was it the moment of penetration, the drooling foreplay or the withdrawal? Or maybe pulling the condom off with his teeth? The Adelaide Fringe crowd didn't get Mark's Unsex Me (MKA), but the Melbourne Fringe mob couldn't get enough of it. I saw it twice. 

The first was a pre-Adelaide preview. When Mark put the microphone in his mouth, I scribbled a note: "Go further, we've seen this, shock me". That note was torn to shreds. He went further, I hadn't seen that and I shrieked in shock. 

The next time I saw it, I was in the front row and saw things that made me laugh so much that I had to drink Krupnikas afterwards. 

Karin Danger Muiznieks
cabaret artist

KARIN: I adored so many productions this year, especially 2 Pound Parlour (Revolt), Palace of the End (Theatre Works), They Saw a Thylacine (at Melbourne Fringe) and Summertime in the Garden Of Eden (Sisters Grimm, Theatre Works).

But the biggest moment of artistic clarity for me came from the VCA Masters of Directing graduate showcase. Peta Hanrahan directed and dramaturged an exquisite stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own. With a focus on women and the creative process, it explored issues of identity, history and female influence in the arts.

I haven't stopped thinking about the show since. It can be very tricky for a young woman to find her own strong creative identity in a world whose values have been decided by generations of men. Peta's work challenged the perception that women need to become like men in order to succeed in the arts, which really shook me up. I wish I'd seen this before I shaved my head!

SM: It's all about Karin's Hot Box. This is the show where I finally saw Karin instead of character. Her characters are great, but it's the personal that makes this show so strong. When you tell your story, it's amazing how many of your audience find that you're also telling theirs.

See what Karin's looking forward to in 2014 at issimomag.com.

John Paul Fischbach
CEO, Auspicious Arts Incubator 

Photo by Susan Schoch Gates

JOHN PAUL: My favourite moment was sitting in the audience of Between the Cracks, Yana Alana's cabaret show at fortyfivedownstairs. I felt I was sharing an experience of being with a true international star on the rise.  She is a national treasure!

SM: Is it wrong that my favourite JP moment was getting a perfect and short answer? This guy helps  artists to understand the business side of "the business"; that is brilliant.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6
Part 7
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

Review: Between the Cracks

MELBOURNE CABARET FESTIVAL
Between the Cracks
Yana Alana
6 July 2013
45downstairs
to 7 July

How could Between the Cracks slip through my review cracks?! Perhaps because I adored it so much that words are irrelevant. Or because its story is so important that it needs more than a dull quotable about hilarious, positive and sexy politics or how gorgeous the performer is.

Yana Alana started grabbing attention at the 2007 Melbourne Fringe when her outraged feminist poetry and show Bite Me won Best Cabaret and went on to snare some Green Room Awards, rave reviews and sold out shows.

Between the Cracks, which has the best song ever written about anal sex, was first seen at the Midsumma festival and this Cabaret Festival season quickly sold out.  

Yana has dumped her backing band of Pirana's and taken her over-sexed self-involvement to a level that ensures that no one, not even her creator Sarah Ward, can share the attention. Even if the magnificent voice and I-dare-you-to-not-want-to-fuck-me body belong to Sarah, Yana's determined to take every bit of credit and adoring love from her audience.

Naked, except for colbalt blue body paint and a spectacular bedazzling of gems, Yana insists on unblinking attention. Her sexuality is all about her and there's never a question that she'd ever doubt her sexual power.

Yana's nakedness isn't about approval or a statement about body size that doesn't conform to an impossible Barbie shape; it's all about Yana and, for all her negativity, Yana's all about positive sexuality. Even grumpy people can and should have plenty of great sex.

Director Anni Davey, who also directed Maude Davey's My Life in the Nude, gives Yana plenty of space, while ensuring she doesn't lose the love of her adoring fans by keeping the pain behind Yana's anger in reach. Not that she ever lets anyone feel sorry for Yana, because Yana would never allow such condescension.

Yana's fans are so on her side that there's little she can say that isn't supported and cheered. There's little chance of her getting the Bolt, Sanderland and Jones supporters that troll any woman who speaks her mind along to her show, but if you're a woman who's ever wasted too much of her day worried about your body or a judging gaze, or given in and silenced your opinion because you've been accused of playing the gender card or put in the ugly ranting feminist box, Yana will remind you that it's all bullshit and that every woman should believe in a world where they can walk around naked, blue and bedazzled.

Maybe it's this kind of queer eye for the straight girl that's going to help change attitudes that create the need for more and more work like this.

I saw Between the Cracks on its last Saturday night and it was so sold out that reviews were meaningless, but you there are four more chances to see Sarah and Yana in Finucane and Smith's dead-set-wonder Glory Box Paradise. Her next and last performances are 1–4 August. I feel sorry for anyone who misses it.

Photo by Peter Leslie

Review: Glory Box Paradise

Glory Box Paradise
Finucane and Smith
13 July 2013
fortyfivedownstairs
to 11 August
fortyfivedownstairs

"Art is fueled by passion, liquor and unrealistic expectations." Welcome to Glory Box Paradise and the ninth year of Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith's subversive and celebratory burlesque where the passion is as potent as any cocktail and unrealistic expectations are turned into exquisite beauty.

Is there anything left to be said about Finucane and Smith's Burlesque Hour shows? I've run out of passionate adjectives to shout about how damn amazing this work continues to be.

Nine years ago, the first Burlesque Hour performed to an in-the-know audience at fortyfivedownstairs and later in the Speigeltent. I'd heard about it and bought a ticket for the tent. Here was something we hadn't seen before and so wanted to see so much more of.

Over 125,000 people have seen versions of The Burlesque Hour – that's more than a full MCG. Artists have come and gone and come back, it's had 50 sell-out seasons all over the world, won awards and collected multi-wordgasm reviews from critics who only disagree about the the degree of superlative.

There's a lot of burlesque in theatres and clubs, but no one is doing anything like this. So what makes this burlesque so different?

Rarely do naked women on display make other women feel good about themselves. Whether it's designed to attract a straight male gaze (that really doesn't attract all straight men) or simply because it's rare for women to publicly de-robe unless they fit an image that was created by applying good lighting, a flattering position and Photoshop.

In her current show, My Life in the Nude at La Mama (finishing this weekend), Maude Davey, who has appeared in many Burlesque Hour shows, talks about her realisation that burlesque is about declaring that you are beautiful are worthy of the audience's gaze.

"I am beautiful and worthy of your gaze" is a magnificent beginning for the many women (and men) doing weekend burlesque classes and sewing sequins on undies for their graduation show, but Glory Box Paradise leaps beyond this premise.

On a Finucane and Smith stage, nakedness has nothing to do with a boring flash of boob. With bodies that don't conform to young, spray-tanned, waxed, enhanced and starved images of female naked perfection, there's never doubt that the women performing know their own beauty – and they don't give a hoot if anyone thinks differently.

There are well over 20, 30 and 40. They have body fat and muscle and scars and marks that declare their bodies as so much more than something to gaze upon. (Moira even refuses to uses a hair straightener and goes frizzy!) And they perform work that's as sexy and powerful as it gets.

These are women who are sexual but are never sexualised. Women whose sexual power has nothing to do with control. Women whose sex lives are shameless. Women who don't support any image or idea that going to repress, disapprove or hurt.  And this may be why every act is greeted with cheers.

The gaze of anyone is welcome, but this is performance that's not about earning the approval of the watcher, but about celebrating the performer and her view of the world. A view that's positive instead of critical and one that joyfully leans to the queer side of the spectrum while welcoming anyone who sits anywhere else.

And if you think you've seen it all before, this year is mostly new material, with a couple of old favourites.

Yumi Umiumare is back with genre re-defining punk Butoh, and dancer Holly Durant joined by new performer Lily Paskas. Melbourne favourite Jess Love (The Candy Butchers) is living in London these days, but is back home with some amazing and hilariously off-centre hoop and skipping routines. She also comes with Ursula Martinez. Ursula continues to treat with her disappearing red hanky and her sex change quick change number with Jess is pure joy (with a hint of raunchy goodness).

New to the Box is Sarah Ward and her alter ego Yana Alana. Yana's naked blue real-women-look-like-this gorgeousness thrilled audiences last week in her own show Between the Cracks, but Yana's lets Sarah out to play. In a mesmerising hologram silver corset, her duet of "Candy" with Moira's drag king is a highlight. The only one who nearly overshadows Sarah is Yana, whose cat-suited song about cats has left me singing "pussy wussy wussy" to my cat.

And there's Moira. There's no one like her. As an artist she creates work that is so from her heart and self that no one will ever be able to recreate it. It's gutsy and lusty and masculine and feminine and  refuses to be anything that isn't Moira Finucane.

Photos by Carla Gottgens.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Photos: Yana Alana Between the Cracks

MIDSUMMA 2013
Between the Cracks
Yana Alana and the Paranas

I KNOW I should have seen Yana Alana's Between the Cracks.

I've adored her for years and this show looks like it would have left me weeping. When I got this review from Joanna Bowen I wondered if I should skip the opening of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Yep.

It was a two-night should-have-been-there Midsumma delight, and I'll be at the opening night of its next run.

In the meantime, Peter Leslie (peterleslie.com.au) took some wonderful photos.

The Facebook-friendly album is here.

The rest are here.