Daniel Lammin and Ash Flanders are total SM favourites and have told us what they love since it began. Today one asks:" What’s the fucking point?". The other asks: "Can chronic narcissists be grateful?". Both answer beautifully.
Ash Flanders
40
 |
| Ash Flanders (Easier than the Zoom button that makes you look pretty.) |
What theatre/art/creative experience did you love the most 2021 (or 2020)?
Oh, Lord, what is time? I can’t remember this morning let alone the year. I really enjoyed seeing Fuck Fabulous at Arts Centre Melbourne. I’m a major fangurl of Sarah Ward so it was a thrill to come out of lockdown and see the beautiful, trashy, super-smart, incredibly entertaining, political world she created. But it was the offstage world that stuck with me. The night I attended had such a weird mix of an audience and it felt like none of us knew how to even be in a theatre. But I’ve never felt a crowd so connected to each other as when a performer peed in a glass and held it out to the audience. As soon as one person yelled out DRINK IT – in my mind, a freaked-out guy in a suit who couldn’t believe the words had leapt out of his mouth – we all joined in. We were one puerile collective mind. You’ve never felt the collapse of gatekeeping more than hearing 200+ people in the arts centre chanting for someone to drink their own piss. It was infantile and joyous and when the performer skulled the whole thing it was like Jesus with the loaves and fishes: one jar of piss quenched all our thirst.
Selfishly, I have also loved being able to present SS Metaphor at Malthouse. I’ve always appreciated the production side of things but seeing a whole team of people come together to help execute this thing I wrote was very, very moving. Which begs a larger question – can chronic narcissists be grateful? Yes, yes we can.
What surprised you about finding new ways to make art in locked-down worlds?
I went long on the last question so I’ll just say that I never knew I could write a play from my own wardrobe, but I sure can! I wasn’t surprised that as artists we all found ways to continue our work and problem-solve, but, sadly, I also wasn’t surprised by the lack of government support. Personally, I was most surprised to learn that I really can’t live without writing. And that at 40 I’m still happy to rehearse out of Stephen Nicolazzo’s apartment and use a TV remote as a mic.
What did you do to stay connected to your arts community?
Almost everyone I’m friends with is part of the arts community so a lot of it was just checking in and hanging out whenever we could, either virtually or on long walks. Those long walks were actually my favorite thing about lockdown. Conversation flows so well on a walk, especially if it’s with Richard Higgins and you have a whole graveyard to explore. I also have to say I was lucky enough to get two shows up this year which sounds amazing until you realise Ash Flanders is Nothing only ran for two nights and SS Metaphor could still be sunk by killer bees, another cheeky earthquake, or, I dunno, an asteroid?
What are you looking forward to in 2022?
(Hopefully) Finally getting to do a full season of my show End Of. at Griffin Theatre in Sydney. It might even mean I get to go on a plane, see some friends I haven’t seen in two years and tell a whole new city about my favourite monster, Heather Flanders. I’m also looking forward to getting to see more theatre, doing a little mentoring and hopefully writing more stuff. I think lockdown has really taught me to appreciate any chance I get to do this theatre stuff, so it’s all gravy, baby (ewwww).
SM: My favourite memory of Heather Flanders was 2020 opening night of End Of. It was the day before the Comedy Festival cancelled. A day when we didn't know if theatre kissies would kill us. Heather came in for a hug and, "Well, we've gotta die from something." I so hope Sydney gets to see End Of. END OF.
I've seen less than usual of Ash this year (he didn't ask me to go for a long walk in a graveyard with Richard Higgins), but I went to a preview of SS Metaphor last night the Malthouse. As it's was a preview, it will be different by opening night. But, think "Carry On The Poseidon Adventure" with queer heroes and Ash playing the straight captain in a moustache, and a wannabe who thinks they can save the never-ending cruise with entertainment – and tap dancing, which is now is etched in my soul.
Daniel Lammin
Director, writer, Disney fanatic, film critic
 |
| Daniel Lammin. |
What theatre/art/creative experience did you love the most and how did you stay connected?
I didn’t see a lot of live performance this year. I could use the lockdowns as an excuse, but the truth was that I just... didn’t want to. With the precariousness of the world at the moment, I turned to cinema for artistic need and comfort rather than theatre. As much as nothing gives me greater joy than sitting in the dark and watching a piece of live performance burst into life before my eyes, I find the moments beforehand (congregating in the foyer, small talk, those gross bits of networking we inevitably end up doing) almost too difficult to bear, and that was before we were locked in our houses and both my sense of myself as an introvert and my social anxiety increased. In a year when so much was distressing or confronting, I just didn’t have the nerve or the energy to return to the community again in the same capacity. Frankly, I was too scared, as scared as I always have been, but now all the more aware of how anxiety-inducing the world of a theatre foyer can be for me.
Maybe that’s why I had a great time wandering around Because The Night. I didn’t particularly enjoy it as a piece of theatre, but what I loved was the complete anonymity it gave me. I could fully engage with this work, be part of a collective in the act of experiencing it, and no-one had a fucking clue who I was and I didn’t have a fucking clue who they were. I could be present without any sense of anxiety, and allow myself full permission to observe and to play.
That sense of engagement without the terror of the theatre foyer reached its sublime peak for me
with St Martins’s flat-out wonderful online production Us, created by Katrina Cornwall and Morgan
Rose, who are pretty much my favourite theatre makers in Melbourne. It wasn’t an online work made out of necessity, but one that was actually fucking interested in the digital form. We’ve seen far too many artists treat this form as second-rate, but Kat and Morgan and this remarkable group of young people and their parents fully engaged with its possibilities, looked into every nook and cranny for what could be done and made something so alive and generous and moving and communal. I felt more seen by and connected to these performers than most in-person work I’d seen, and they couldn’t even see that I was there. It gave me that giddy feeling I used to get in the old world before Covid of seeing something special – and god I loved it. There was a generosity of spirit, a joy in the act of creating and sharing, all aspects that are indicative of Kat and Morgan’s work together.
The same can be said of their gorgeous Riot Stage work this year, Everyone is Famous, which was another act of theatrical generosity. That one had the extra power of having seen these young people grow as theatre makers through the many years of Riot Stage work, see their ideas sharpen and their voices get louder. There was no separation of us-and-them, no sense of watching young people as if they were animals in a zoo. In that instance, my agony in the foyer beforehand was worth it for the
magic I saw in the theatre itself.
As well as discovering how much of an introvert I really am through the many lockdowns, the other
unnerving discovery I made was this: I didn’t miss theatre. I didn’t miss making it, and I didn’t miss watching it. As the days ticked on, this didn’t change, and I began to wonder whether I actually really wanted to stick with it. It wasn’t just that it didn’t seem a viable option at the moment, it was the realisation that my career, while it had given me so much, had also taken an awful lot from me, and I wasn’t sure it was worth it. And then I stepped into the tumultuous rehearsal room of Bloomshed’s production of Animal Farm, and it all came flooding back – the chaos, the fights, the blood, the sweat, the fear, the tears, the joy, the insanity, that taste in your mouth and that shiver all over your skin when something special happens. I found it again and I was hungry for it, and I realised I wasn’t ready to give it up. Maybe one day I will, and certainly when it happens, it will be on my own terms and I will be fully at peace with it. But not yet.
So if I have to say what creative experience meant the most to me in 2021, it was making a show
that almost no-one got to see. It breaks my heart that we never got to see it through, but, my god,
there was magic happening in those rehearsals; theatre that was true and honest and passionate. And connected, just as works like Us and Everyone is Famous and even the wandering journey of the audience through Because The Night. Because if theatre isn’t about people and connection and being with one another in a time and a space fashioned from magic and dreams and passion, then what’s the fucking point?
What are you looking forward to in 2022?
And what of 2022? Who knows. It feels foolish to put too much stock in it. I’m very excited for the projects I have lined up, and really hope they don’t end up as unfulfilled dreams like Animal Farm. I can only hope. But maybe it’s time for something new. Something isn’t working, and I don’t know whether that’s to do with me or to do with the industry or maybe a bit of both. There’s a pull at my leg, that restless need for movement. Maybe it’s time to find a new adventure somewhere else. Who knows! But I’m excited to find out.
SM: Animal Farm being cancelled upset me more than losing other shows. It wasn't just because I wouldn't see it; it was everything. It was the goddamedness of going back into lockdown, it was knowing that they'd rehearsed in lockdown and previewed in Geelong. It was ready. It was so the story that was for now. And it was created by some of my favourite makers. Losing this one really really sucked.
Daniel watches film and the two of us must never see films together because our critical reactions to them are so often on opposing ends of the scale. But TV is different. Not long ago, I watched Ted Lasso and saw that Daniel loved it more than I did – and that was saying something. I loved Daniel's love of Ted Lasso.
 |
| The Bloomshed. "Animal Farm". We will see it one day. |
