Review: Dance Nation

Dance Nation
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
17 March 2019
Red Stitch
to 14 April
redstitch.net

"Dance Nation". Red Stitch. Photo by Teresa Noble

You'll probably never hear a 10-, 11-, 12-, 13-year-old call themselves "prepubescent". It's a word so distant from the experience of being that age that it rarely escapes from text books. It's a time when you feel like a child and look like an adult or feel like an adult and look like a child. And get treated in ways that are embarrassing, inappropriate or ick either way. Dance Nation is about girls in this in-between age, as seen through the memories of women in their 20s to 60s.

USA playwright and actor Clare Barron had her first play produced in 2013 and has since won some significant awards. Dance Nation is her seventh work and this Red Stitch production is its Australian premiere.

It's set in a local USA dance school that's desperate to get to nationals (finals). Their dance teacher (Brett Cousins) knows that their sailor routine isn't up to scratch, so he's developing a work for his six-girl- one-boy troupe about Gandhi. Oh, yes, it's as ridiculous a dance as it sounds, and is made even more wonderful with Holly Durant's choreography, which solves the problem of the tiny stage, and Adrienne Chisholm's glitz-on-a-pocket-money budget gold design and ballet-mom costumes.

All the pre-teens are played by adults (Caroline Lee, Zoe Boesen, Casey Filips, Hannah Fredericksen, Natalie Samsu, Tario Manvondo, Georgina Naidu and Shayne Francis, who also plays all the moms) and all bring the experience of knowing that the adult life you imagine at 12 isn't the life you live. None of which makes the confusion of personal competition contradicting personal friendship less confusing. Or makes the realisation that your body's changing in ways that will keep you on stages or get you off stages, and that your choice may be irrelevant. Or that you will be sexualised or not sexualised no matter what. And that doesn't stop once you're a teenager, adult, older adult or older-still adult.

Maude Davey's direction has the style of a daggy suburban dance competition with a core of sophistication and experience that's inspired by the emerging power girls find at that age. This is power that girls are often told to suppress, but we'd all rather learn the routine that lets all women hold onto that power and ignore anyone who says it's wrong.

Review: A lie of the mind

A lie of the mind
5 September 2014
The Grange pop up theatre
to 13 September
lieofthemind.com

With an ambitious and successful Pozible fundraising campaign, an empty amazing space in the CBD and the determination to move a class exercise to a professional production, A lie of the mind opens The Grange, a pop-up theatre and bar.

Firstly, who knew that there was a huge empty warehouse in the city of Melbourne! Hidden near Victoria and La Trobe streets, it shows its age but holds a bar and theatre that love the space and welcome its signs of disintegration.

The bar is warm with heaters, spicy hot drinks and welcoming staff. There are covered hay bales to sit on, tables for lengthy conversations and buttery popcorn for snacks. It's great.

The performance space in the opposite corner of the huge room is, which is sadly cold (but rugs provided) and has bum-numbing chairs. I'd love to see the spaces become one. It felt odd to have a traditional(ish) theatre space tucked in the corner of a room that was begging to be used and explored. (And multiple performance space would have solved some awkward scene changes.)

American Sam Shepard's play A lie of the mind was first seen off-Broadway in 1985 with a cast that included Harvey Keitel and Aidan Quinn. Set in the USA mid-west in the early 1980s, it's the story of two very broken families connected through a marriage that ends at the play's beginning when the husband bashes his wife to the point that he thinks she's dead. With a realism voice that slips into violent poetry and brushes the edges of magic realism, it's a powerful look at Shepherd's world and the American culture that will protect its own flag and the idea of America before looking at itself.

It's a wonderful play, but I don't know what this production is saying about us and now and how the world on the stage is reflecting on the people who come to share in it. There's a disconnect between production and space and between performers and audience, making it a story about "them" rather than a story about "us".

While some of the cast grasp the tone of the script better than others, every performance (Alex Duncan, Zack Anthony Curran, Lauren-Anne Kempster, Shayne Francis, Alice Cavanagh, Ashley McKenzie, Peter Hardy and Kaarin Fairfax) is heartfelt and excellent. Still there's a showcase feeling of actors trying so hard to give their best performance that the overall story also feels disconnected from the people telling it and there are some empty relationship spaces between the characters. All are actors who don't have to try to be astonishing and are never let down by their their characters.

Quibbles aside, these are creators and artists who want to make theatre and perform great plays, so they raised the money to create a wonderful space and perform a great play – and I'll be first in line for their for their next show.

A lie of the mind is on all next week and to make theatre accessible, Tuesday and Wednesday nights are "pay what you can" nights (hey, every other theatre and company in town, please give this a try) and if you look at their Facebook page, there might be some more rush ticket offers.

PS. If you want to go in spoiler-free, don't read the synopsis on the website.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.