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.

Black

Black
Malthouse Theatre
17 March 2007
The Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse

A post-avant-garde-performance-art-installation is never going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Well, I drink coffee and Anna Tregolan’s Black is as welcome and satisfying as the first strong, aromatic and lovingly-made expresso on a slow Sunday morning.

There is a mixed sense of anticipation and apprehension as we are gradually let into the Tower Theatre. All we know is that the performance runs for three hours, but we can come and go as we please.

Walking down a dark corridor, a small screen with a changing collage is our first clue. Sounds of muffled voices and dropped cutlery begin to filter in as we round the corner and find ourselves above the space we will enter and, perhaps unwittingly, merge with.

Black is the stories of Elizabeth Short, a young Hollywood starlet, whose severed body was found in an empty lot in 1947. Her unsolved murder has created many fictitious, semi-factual and imagined accounts of her demise on screens and in novels, newspapers and gossip mills.

Each performer (Caroline Lee, Moira Finucane, James Wardlaw and Martyn Coutes) represent a facet of the multiple stories. They could be witness, media, detective, victim, friend, family or stranger. All spin web of movement and text that fills the space and draws the audience closer.

The text is designed to be listened to like music, with a four part vocal score of monologue. It’s quite meditative, but separating the parts reveals a poetic and evocative language that was almost unexpected. “The collaging of a body” with “postage stamps of flesh removed”.

The performers are separated by a zigzag wall of perspex. They move through and around the walls, forever changing their position. What makes this work remarkable is that each wall acts as a transparent mirror – we can see through it, and it reflects multiple images around the space.

One performer looks like a conjoined twin from a carnival freak show, whilst simultaneously standing in the audience, looking at another performer, holding her own hand and watching herself. The performers don’t touch or interact but their multiple reflections touch and merge, some morphing like a 90s music video, others walking through each other like ghosts. The effect is stunning, as there are so many versions of the same scene to look at.

As an audience we are allowed to choose if we sit, stand or move. We think we are controlling what we witness and who we see it with. However the reflective walls and changing light take away our control and bring our images into the performance space and the story.

The creation, rehearsal and performance of this complex work is precise and perfect. Design, direction and performance blend to create an experience that is genuinely original, creative, intelligent and brave.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.