Anzac Day and Black Diggers

NGV, St Kilda Road

There are two performances of Black Diggers on Anzac Day. I hope that there isn't an empty seat in the house because these are stories that should be told on Anzac Day and need to become part of the greater Anzac story.

I saw it on Wednesday night. Walking back to cars, a friend and I stopped to look at the Anzac Day projections on the walls of the NGV. The size alone demands attention but it was pictures of graves and lists of names that made us watch. We talked about how neither of us have a (known) family connection to the First World War, or an ANZAC, and we talked about stories and who can or should tell them.

Then I remembered by great aunt. I can tell something of her story.

As a child in the 1970s and 80s, I didn't think twice about the old aunt who talked about "her boys", marched in the Anzac Day march and gave me a velvet uniform button that I kept because I thought it was pretty and have passed from jewellery box to jewellery box ever since. I remember we'd turn on the tv to watch her in the march because we might see her on telly, not because of why she was marching. I don't think anyone from our family went with her.

She never married or had children and was the definition of a grumpy and opinionated spinster aunt. She had an opinion about everything and everyone and was happy to share it loudly. She died slowly in her 90s and dementia stole her memories. I wish I'd listened more when I had the chance. I know there would have been many opinions in her memories that I didn't like, but I still wish I knew more.

She was a nurse, a lieutenant, in the Second World War. She was nearly 30 when she enlisted in 1941 and served in Egypt and Papua New Guinea. She would have seen things that she'd never have had the opportunity to see and things that no one should ever have to see. She would've had respect and freedom for the first time in her life and I suspect that there was sex and drinking and everything that was frowned upon and shocking when she returned to the straight jacket of life in conservative Adelaide.

No wonder she was always a bit angry.

Black Diggers

Queensland Theatre Company, Sydney Festival

22 April 2015

Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne

to 26 April

artscentremelbourne.com.au

Black Diggers. Photo by Jamie Williams

The National Gallery of Victoria is next to Arts Centre Melbourne. At night, the gallery's long grey brick walls share an Anzac story in a series of projections. It's beautiful and huge and well worth spending some time watching. Until Sunday, there's another Anzac story being shared in the Arts Centre. Black Diggers is beautiful, human and affecting theatre that tells some of the Anzac stories that must never be lost in the grey.

The projections include paintings of the First World War, photos of the war, mass graves and stone and poppy memorials to the lost – memorials that are a short walk from the NGV. One of most powerful is a photo of Anzac Cove: a small bay with a nice beach that's flanked by cliffs that'd leave you prepared to swim out rather than climb. It tells an all encompassing story that's so important in Australia that it has a public holiday to remember it (and a brilliant biscuit).

NGV, St Kilda Road

Black Diggers tells some of the stories that are lost in the encompassing hugeness of the Anzac story.
Developed by the Queensland Theatre Company and supported by the Sydney Festival, it's on a too-short tour around the country.

In 1914, Australia's population was less than five million (not much more than Melbourne's 100 years later). During the war, 416, 809 men enlisted; 1300 of those men (400 from Melbourne) were Indigenous. Many had family who could remember a time before the European invasion, they weren't citizens and it was difficult to enlist when you weren't at least "substantially European". But they were also young men who couldn't resist the adventure of a lifetime and the promise of being paid.

Told by nine men, young and Elders, this story starts in the early 1900s and moves through enlistment  the war, their return and their legacy. The stories are based on real people and experiences but have been fictionalised to tell the bigger story and connect to a truth that's greater than the personal.

The bunker design (Stephen Curtis) has with an eternal flame or campfire burning in a tin barrel and black walls covered with unreadable white graffiti. As those who have gone before tried to make their mark and tell their story, the men in Black Diggers use white ash to paint names, dates and places.

Directed by Wesley Enoch and written by Tom Wright, the stories don't judge or preach; they just tell. They tell us the heartbreaking and shameful and the uplifting and hopeful. And by sharing them with us, these stories become more than the stories of those black Diggers, they become our stories.

There are two performances of Black Diggers on Anzac Day, this Saturday. I hope that there isn't an empty seat.

This was on  AussieTheatre.com .

We loved NEON!

The What Melbourne Loveds are past the halfway mark, but today's favourites aren't up because I'm reading a lot of responses to an article based on Wesley Enoch's 2013 NSW Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture.

From the Sisters Grimm's The Sovereign Wife.

Here's the article. It was written before Enoch's gave his speech yesterday.

The article focuses on Enoch's criticism of funded companies like the MTC for not paying performers in their independent company programs, like the NEON festival.

The same NEON that is already being mentioned as something that Melbourne theatre makers loved a lot this year.

I'm with them. NEON was brilliant.

From the Daniel Schlusser Ensemble's Menagerie

Here's Enoch's full speech: "I don't do it for the money". Please don't comment on the newspaper piece without reading the full speech.

This is the quote that's causing the most comment: "I think it is immoral for people on full time salaries in companies and venues with multi-million dollar turnovers to be asking artists to do work for free or less than the agreed award."

The MTC responded to the newspaper story immediately with a media release. Executive Director Virginia Lovett said, "Wesley Enoch's ill-informed  comments  and  media  stunts  do  not  add to  the  debate.  They  divide.  Wesley  at  no  stage  approached  MTC  to  discuss  or  understand  the  NEON  model,  its  long-­term structure or the positive impact it has had on artists in the Victorian community."

If I believe Facebook, Enoch's criticism is being supported.

I want to support NEON.

The MTC isn't the bravest of programmers. If a new David Williamson play sells well, why not keep programming him?

NEON is risk.

The MTC found a way to support independent companies to create whatever they wanted to without the worry about venue, marketing and opening night drink costs: all those costs that wipe out the profit in most profit-share shows. They had a $7500 budget to use how they liked and they got the box office.

That's the best deal in town.

From Fraught Outfit's On the bodily education of young girls

But the actors weren't paid MEAA award rates. Enoch says that's immoral.

Let's imagine a NEON season that's based on paying the creators as they do in a mainstage show. Each show would have 1 director, 1 designer, maybe 5 actors, perhaps 10 days rehearsal and a small design budget. They wouldn't get their box office.

Would Menagerie, On the bodily education of young girls, By their own hands, Story of O or The Sovereign Wife ever have existed in this constrained model?

I don't want an arts world without The Sovereign Wife. I don't a world without The Sovereign Wife.

And what about the forums and workshops that were part of the festival?

From The Rabble's Story of O

MTC's Artistic Director Brett Sheehy said "NEON was deliberately set up so that the artists involved were free to present whatever they pleased and that every Box Office dollar would go directly to these independent companies. We wanted to support the authentic expression of astonishing art being created by Melbourne’s independent theatre scene, rather than just present five smaller scale MTC productions."

Let's criticise the MTC for being boring and supporting dull art, but let's cheer and love them for taking a risk and doing something positive to support independent companies.

Yes, artists are undervalued in society. We regularly don't get paid for what we do. (Ever wondered if the arts writer you're talking to or asking to review your show gets paid?). This sucks. This sucks a lot. And we have to continue to fight for our value.

But is it immoral? If I start listing what I think is immoral, I'll be writing a lot before I get to "paying artists award rates".

Criticising NEON is shooting ourselves in the foot.

If NEON gets dropped because it doesn't pay, we're back to David Williamson plays, expensive tickets and complaining that we don't see diversity or independent artists on the MTC stage.

Review: Magpie Blues

MIAF 2010

Magpie Blues

Ursula Yovich

Melbourne International Arts Festival

12 October 2010

the Forum Theatre

to 13 October

www.melbournefestival.com.au

In Magpie Blues, singer and storyteller Ursula Yovich fills the Forum theatre with her voice and her heart.

With a four-piece band, her smooth soul voice and open soul bring life to song choices that are a bit classic fm radio, but it does mean that her audience (including myself) know them and can safely hum along. There's safety and comfort in her song choices, but she doesn't hold back with her story.

A magpie is a black and white gorgeous singing bird and Ursula's totem animal. Brought up in Darwin, she's a self-proclaimed Serborigine with an Arnhem Land mother and Serbian father. Ursula didn't think there was anything different about this until she was placed in an ESL class in primary school because she spoke English with a Serbian accent. Between songs she tells evocative stories like fossicking for gold in Humpty Doo and only finding old Coke cans, singing Bony M songs with her mum in Burada, one of the Maningrida family of languages, and receiving letters from her Serbian grandmother with the handprints of her cousins.

It wasn't a straight road from singing in her bedroom to winning Helpmann Awards. Her mum left when she and her siblings were young and much of the second half of the show is about Ursula's re-connection with her Aboriginal culture, prompted when she was called a white fella in Maningrida, where she was born.  Speaking three languages, Ursuala knows how quickly connection to language can be lost and how this is connected to loss of culture.

Having experienced far too many young deaths in her immediate family, Ursula openly and bravely talks about the suicide of her young niece and how there is no stronger sign of damaged culture than young people killing themselves. An old Maningrida aunty told her that is didn't used to be like this, that young people used to be proud of their strong culture.

Guided by director Wesley Enoch, Ursula reminds us how important it is to tell our stories; those from our childhood living rooms and those of our most far-reaching families. Without these real and lived stories, memories and cultures will continue to disappear and we become a much lesser society for that.

This review appears on AussieThearte.com

Photo by Peter Collie

One Night the Moon

One Night the Moon
Malthouse Theatre
16 September 2009
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse

Yesterday I read a Facebook status that said “one night the moon sucked the big one’. It’s not quite the phrase I’d use (in print), but you can’t deny its honesty or the passion and disappointment behind its expression. This show bored the bejesus out of my FB friend and her spontaneous review may be more honest than any of those written by us who willingly give our wordy opinions.

I had been looking forward to One Night the Moon, Malthouse’s stage adaption of the 2001 musically told film. It isn’t a perfect film, but its naïve charm, fable-like story and gut-wrenching sense of despair make it memorable.

In 1932, a young girl disappears from her settler homestead. Her distraught parents reject the help of the ‘blackfella’ tracker and Dad organises a grid search with his fellow settlers, while Mum eventually (and secretly) seeks the tracker’s help.

Director Wesley Enoch and his team naturally wanted to re-tell this story for the theatre and they created a world far removed from the screen world. The beautiful opening, with a smoking ceremony, shadow puppets and a how-cool-was-that burning of painting whetted our anticipation for something amazing.

There were some lovely moments, but it didn’t capture the heart or emotion of the film. In their determination to tell the story differently, this version loses the story.

It’s a story about loss and grief that destroys the lives of those left behind. As an audience, we didn’t have the option to fully experience that loss, because we were never given a sense of Emily, the child who goes missing.

“One night the moon came a wandering by”: this gentle lyrical lullaby by Paul Kelly is still in my head from seeing the film eight years ago. With daughter, mother and father singing it together, it established the heart of the story and set the audience up for the loss. On stage, this song accompanied the stunning opening – which was wonderful – but it denied us a sense of Emily. She was sung by an offstage and clearly adult voice and her only presence was a tiny shadow silhouette. We didn’t see the love between the parents and their child. Of course, we can assume it (and their reactions let us imply that they loved her), but we also know there are stories of parents who don’t love their children or of children who run away for good reason. On a more basic story-telling level, without a sense of Emily at the beginning, the audience can never believe that she will return. The telling of this story needs that hope or there is no story to tell. And a pillow wrapped in a blanket does not create an illusion of a child; all it does is distract.

Emily is the heart of the story, and its soul is the land. The emotionally honest songs of Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody scream the importance of place, land and space: “This land is mine/This land is me” (which was ironically sung inside). On the empty stage, I felt no sense of space, of heat, cold, land, danger, home or comfort – or any differentiation between the settler’s ‘owned’ land or the tracker's land.

So, again, I’m looking at Anna Cordingley’s design. Yes, it is remarkably beautiful. Yes, it is intelligent. Yes, it shows that she has an original and unique vision. But, again, it distracts from the story and its telling. Even someone as strong as Mark Seymour belting out an anguished song is diminished by a projection of giant hands playing with sand – with the added distraction of wanting to watch the person sculpting the sand. And there are famous paintings. If I hadn’t read the program (with all its explanations), I wouldn’t have had a clue that some of the visuals were from famous paintings of the Grampians (or even that the story had been moved to the Grampians). So, how did they help tell the story? They confused me about where we were and where lost Emily was, and they reinforced an artificial sense of land and space.

One Night the Moon is an Australian story. It’s our story. Our stories know that the white invasion of this country caused unimaginable suffering. We know that white pricks were vile to the Indigenous owners of our county – and still are. But we can tell a much better story than white guy bad/black guy good. We can tell gutsy stories about complex people.

The settler’s child is missing. Given his knowledge and his experience, he makes the best decision he possibly can and organises the grid search. Sure, he is a racist bastard, but racism is ignorance and fear and, as humans, we know that we are scared of things we don’t understand. He doesn’t refuse the tracker’s help because the guy is black. He refuses his help because he believes he is doing the best thing possible to find his child.

If faced with the same situation, I’m sure that many of us would make that same decision today. It’s not such a black and white issue.

Oh, and yeah – I too was bored and disappointed.

This review originally appeared on AussieThearte.com.
Photo by Jeff Busby

Mark Seymour wrote a terrific essay about playing Jim. I so wish I had seen all of this thought and opinion on the stage.

It's not directly relevant, but here's someone else who also sculpts sand.

Yibiyung

Yibiyung
Company B and Malthouse Thearte
1 November 2008
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

The telling of stories is how we remember, grow and learn.  Yibiyung tells the story of writer Dallas Winmar’s Nan who lived at a time when, “You just did things because it was all you knew.”

I think I can safely say that the key demographics of the Malthouse audience are: liberal, middle class, over-educated, fond of Sauvignon Blanc and own “Sorry” t-shirts. So I wonder if “we” are the right audience for this story.

Yibiyung the most traditional “play” I’ve seen at the Malthouse in a long while. Its dramatic telling was predictable, the characters could do with some fleshing out and complexity, it followed a well-worn structural path, and told a well known story. Those unfamiliar with this story may have found it more compelling. It may actually be clear and bland enough for the likes of Little Johnny H to understand. (He’s got some free time now, but I’m guessing he still chose to watch “Dancing with the Stars” instead of going to that theatre.)

I wanted a more complex and ambiguous story, but I came back to director Wesley Enoch’s program notes.  “At the heart of every story lies the reason for telling it. Sometimes these reasons are personal and therapeutic, and sometimes the story takes on a social/political role – a national metaphor – and is told for the benefit of many. The stories of the Stolen Generation are like that.”

If Yibiyung was fiction, it would be a different story. Winmar is telling us her Nan’s story and has chosen to tell it with love, respect and honesty. Louise Gough’s dramaturgy crafted its telling, but never let Winmar’s voice become secondary. And it is Winmar’s story that is being shared with us, including the letters and official correspondence about Yibiyung (thanks to the Freedom of Information Act) and the Noongar language of Western Australia spoken without unnecessary translation.

Enoch concludes, “In a post-apology world the need to tell these stories has not evaporated.” Yibiyung is a story that needs to be told, but there’s room in the telling for some new layers.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com