ff2006 – Page 5 – Festival Freak

[20060039] Stau

6:00pm, Sat 4 Mar 2006

Score: 10

As soon as I read the description of Stau, I was sold. “Dissolves traditional theatrical boundaries to examine the relationship between audience and performer.” I loved the very idea, the image that was conjured in my mind… like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, but arty.

Prior to entering The Space, the audience was required to remove their shoes, to check all their belongings into the cloak room. There’s hushed giggles from the audience; the sense of expectation is building. But I was disappointed to see that, upon entering The Space, there were three rows of seats arranged on each side of a square in the center of the Space. Bugger, I thought – this doesn’t look very interactive.

How wrong I was.

I sat in the front row, about 3 seats from the corner. After the crowd had assembled, Anouk van Dijk popped in to thank us for attending, and informed us that “Stau” translated as “traffic jam”… lovely. The house lights dropped to an inky blackness. A sound like record player static started repeating at a very slow tempo; some spotlights revealed two dancers in the centre of the square. Slowly – almost imperceptibly, at first – they begin swaying towards, then around each other. It’s the most beautiful, smooth movement; they never touch, and it’s distinctly sensual without being sexual. Suddenly they break out of their synchronised swaying and start dashing around the confines of their square; at intervals, they turn and leer towards the audience, coming face-to-face with the crowd, pausing, then swanning away. It’s mesmerising being so close to them as they perform, seeing the sweat roll down, seeing the strain on their faces.

Then they disappear, crawling underneath the crowd; the static noise loop stops. It’s dark again; faintly, we hear the noise of a mobile phone. One ring; two rings; the exasperation of the crowd grows, and then suddenly the lights are on – the mobile phone is part of the soundtrack. Then they’re back, one having removed her civilian clothing. Nude, she starts lifting her leg in a very balletic motion; there’s a breathless moment as the crowd contemplates the revelation if she extends the movement, but she stops, holding the pose… then disappears.

Suddenly, there’s a commotion behind us – theatre staff have invaded The Space and are removing the seating. Some patrons indignantly relinquish their seat; others leap up and help with the collection. Mere moments later, all trace of the seating and elevation are gone; we are standing in a big, empty room.

With four dancers.

Who are all wearing civvies.

A down-light is switched on from above; people scurry to see what it has illuminated. It’s one of the original dancers; a patron happened to be caught by the spotlight, and she dances around him. Another light comes on, then another, then another; wherever there is light, there is a dancer, and maybe an audience member; if the latter, they are held motionless and incorporated into the performance.

The dancers perform their dance, the light goes off and – they’re gone.

And then you realise why they’re wearing civvies, rather than a costume… they finish their dance, then run (either individually, or as a group) through the crowd to their next mark, their next spotlight. And the audience, themselves moving from place to place to follow the dancers, don’t notice another civvie-clad person moving through the crowd. But when all the lights are off… the audience is lost, unsure where to look, wandering aimlessly across The Space. A light comes on, a dancer illuminated: the crowd move in that direction. Another light goes on, maybe two dancers entwined: the crowd split. Indecision about with light to moth about. And then it hits me – we, the audience, are dancing. We are being nudged in the directions the troupe want us to go in. It’s not a four member troupe – it’s a hundred and twenty four members.

I start drifting outside the obvious lines that people seem to follow… it’s beautiful. Streams of people trotting from one point, to another, to another, few of them realising the patterns they’re helping make. A few others, like me, are breaking out of the pack… but we, too, seem to be congregating in the same points, gravitating to the same locations dictated by optimal sight-lines. We’re another little dance. Within a dance, within a dance.

At one stage, a single light comes on – and we discover the four dancers all wrapped around our esteemed Premier, Mike Rann. The audience cracks up; I later discover that the troupe had no idea why… Rann was just the person who happened to be near the next “mark”.

There’s another odd nude moment, then all dancers are up against the wall, pushing. They drag a quarter of the audience to help them out (whilst the previously nude dancer struggles to dress herself) – and suddenly the performance is over. The applause is rapturous; the hubbub as the audience recollect their shoes is crackling with energy. Smiles are everywhere.

To be honest, I grin like a loon just thinking about this performance. I love the performances which are participatory; it brings to mind First Night from FF2004, where the stage was in your head. But beside the personal involvement, this was so beautiful, so lush, so wonderful… but now I’m dribbling like a jubilant fanboy idiot. I’ll cut it short – this is easily one of the most exhilarating performances I’ve ever seen. Ever.

And I hate to dance.

PHEW

So that’s it – the “worst” of FF2006 is over.

Numerically speaking, of course.

Today was a nasty 6-show road crash, but one cancellation (the von Trolley Quartet apparently thought it was more important to play backing music for the Busking Competition than play for me), and some clever planning, made it bearable. That, and one of the shows was an absolute belter:

Die Roten Punkte.

Worth every penny, worth every morsel of your time.

So – 73 shows down, at least 12 more to go.

And I’m only up to review 38.

Family Fun Day?!?

Mondays are traditionally a dead day during the Fringe; a day when you try to schedule whatever is on, Festival shows… whatever you can squeeze into the day. So imagine my delight when I discovered that most of the Sideshow Paradiso and Garden of Unearthly Delights shows were on that day… lickety-split, I had six shows slotted in on Monday the 13th of March; the last “big” day of FF2006 (numerically speaking), but – due to the physical proximity of the shows, a pretty relaxing day.

Or so I thought.

I just arrived at Paradiso. The place is packed. Choc-a-bloc. Someone figured a Family Fun Day was in order; as a result, there’s thousands of people down here. With their kids.

Oh dear.

This could be the longest ten hours of my life.

[20060038] Lontano Blu

Lontano Blu

Parallelo @ Scott Theatre

4:00pm, Sat 4 Mar 2006

Score: 2

At first, I was startled by the number of people who had gathered for this premiere of Lontano Blu; reading the program, I noticed that this Argentinian/Australian co-production had a big Italian connection. Ah. That’d explain the large numbers of Italians waiting for the performance to begin, then.

It begins with a wonderful bass piece of music, while the background screen cycles through many shades of blue. The bass piece ends, there’s an electronica construction (but was it necessary to perform this live?), and then the performance proper begins.

At first, I thought I’d read the Festival Guide incorrectly – it appeared to be a dance piece. A pretty shabby dance piece, at that. But then the story of a woman and her grandfather appears from nowhere, and the play lurches along as they delve into his lifetime of migration.

All the while, two dancers – the grandfather & his wife at a much earlier age – roam the stage; the bass and electronica performers interject at appropriate times; and various images pertaining to the grandfather’s lifetime are projected onto the screen… it’s very much a mixed media production.

But therein lies its faults – most of the time, there’s too much happening, and none of it (with the exception of the music) is much good. The audio levels were universally poor – music drowning out actors, samples overruling music. The acting performances were stilted; on-stage italian-to-english translations, being laggy, caused much of the audience to lose interest, lose connection with the piece. The dancing was restricted in movement, thoroughly uninteresting, and the movement distracted from the piffly story taking place.

And so you don’t feel like you’ve missed out, here’s the performances’ best line: “Smitten like salami”. Says it all, really.

Maybe Lontano Blu has something to offer; some patrons around me waxed lyrical about it “speaking truly of the migrant”. However, I’m a first-generation migrants son, and this performance completely failed to engage me on any level. A real disappointment.

[20060037] Deep Fried Love

Deep Fried Love

Amy Bodossian @ Lizard Lounge

11:59pm, Fri 3 Mar 2006

Score: 5

Accompanied by a solitary guitarist, Amy Bodossian presents us with a (mostly) one-woman cabaret show comprising song, poetry, and theatrical exploits. For the most part it’s entertaining, without reaching the heady heights of excellence.

Being easy on the eyes and ears, Miss Bodossian covers a lot of bases – her singing is ace, her voice ranging from smokey and sultry through to shrill, as the occasion warrants. Her songwriting, likewise – the “Pussy Cat” song being a show highlight. Her poetry, though, can only be described as “obvious” – it seems simple, always going for the easiest rhyme; the next line nearly always writes itself in your own mind before she has uttered a word.

The rest of the production – an introspective look at Amy’s search for love – is adequate, but not ground-breaking. In all, this was an inoffensive way to spend a late Friday night; unfortunately, the assembled crowd were some of the biggest fuckknuckles I’ve ever shared a venue with. Here’s a tip: if you want to chat with someone, don’t go to a fucking show. Believe it or not, there are likely to be paying patrons who don’t give a flying fuck about your minutiae, and actually get pissed off when you start yelling to give your voice prominence above the performer.

Harrumph.

[20060036] Empire

Empire

Theatre of Decay @ some dingy backstreet in Kent Town

8:00pm, Fri 3 Mar 2006

Score: 9

We meet the Theatre of Decay crew outside the main FringeTix office, replete in their red bandanas. Once the sell-out crowd of 12 (!) was assembled, they led us all on a dark, quiet, expectant stroll across the parklands to some dark, barely lit side-street in Kent Town. The performance, they explained, takes place in a car; two actors in the front, three audience in the back. Four different cars, four different directors, eight different actors.

We get split into groups of three and taken to our cars. We, apparently, had one of the “better” cars, but it was still tight squeeze in the back seat for a fatty like me and my two companions. In the driver’s seat, a man nervously waiting for something. The other actor, we surmised. And so we were waiting too. The tension in the car grew.

Cars occasionally pass us down this quiet back-street. Suddenly, the other man – his step-brother- is in the car with us, and the more overt aspect of the performance begins. It’s tense, it’s moody, it’s rife with racism, tolerance, hatred, compassion, understanding… the two brothers cover a wide range of themes and issues. When the end comes, it’s sudden – and we’re bewildered. It’s difficult to know what to do – the men remain in character, we’re imposing on their world. I wanted to thank them for the performance, but it didn’t feel appropriate. Or even safe to do so, such was the atmosphere in the car.

It’s painful, it’s provoking, it’s powerful – and the fact that there’s a different interpretation of the piece in each of the four cars is compelling. Oh, to have had the opportunity to have seen this again.

(In chatting with my guide for the evening, I learnt that one of the producers spent ages scouting the location of this dim street. And Theatre of Decay’s other work, Empire, has a similar directorial twist – it’s performed entirely in a dark room. If only I’d managed to sneak that in, too…)

Further note: I bumped into Rod Lewis (of ATG) and he mentioned that the four different interpretations were, due to different directorial inclinations, of substantially different lengths. Mine (car 2?) ran for a plump 45 minutes; his (the car with two female actors) was a more svelte 25 minutes.

[20060035] Polaroid

Polaroid

Catriona Gilchrist @ Fowlers Live

6:30pm, Fri 3 Mar 2006

Score: 6

Polariod presents us with four character pieces and a couple of songs. The first piece didn’t raise my hopes much, being an obvious (for those in the industry) look at the proliferation of acronymity and detachment in today’s average office worker’s life. Meh.

The second piece, the representation of an Irish woman espousing truths and interpretations of her children, is a touch better. The third – a junkie – packed a whallop; well constructed, and played with the desperation required.

A short duet (with guitar), and the final piece featuring a socially-challenged fellow in search of… he knows not what. A final solo song – chucklingly off-key, but well handled – and we’re out.

So – a competent performance, earnestly done.

And now we come to one of the worst things about the Fringe. And that’s when you’re in a show where there’s an embarrassingly small crowd. Especially when it’s a crowd of… one.

That’s right – I was the only paying punter at this performance.

Catriona Gilchrist trekked over for the weekend for three performances of this piece, and after one performance she’d had exactly one patron through the doors.

To be honest, she handled it incredibly well; she directed any audience specific stuff directly at me, “ladies and gentlemen” became “sir”, and in general had some fun with what I’d consider to be a heart-breaking situation. I really felt sorry for her, sorry that I was the only person in the audience; conflicting emotions where I felt like apologising for the fact that she actually had to perform because I was there, and apologising for the rest of the city who hadn’t turned up this evening.

Still, she and here crew were confident they’d manage to get a few more people through the doors over the weekend; whilst it wasn’t the most compelling performance of the Fringe, it certainly deserves more than one person spectating.

[20060034] True North

True North

Jigsaw, Neo @ Fowler’s Live

11:00pm, Thu 2 Mar 2006

Score: 8

I was mightily impressed with Neo in 2004, so I pencilled this one in early. The True North collective is a stack of Northern Territory who’ve traveled down for the Fringe, to get noticed, and widen their audience. There’s a different line-up for every True North show; since they don’t appear to be on the Fringe website anywhere, here they are:

26 Feb: Sasha & Leah, Neo, eMDee
1 Mar: Timmy Marten, Neo
2 Mar: Jigsaw, Neo
3 Mar: Neo, Cooperblack
5 Mar: Jigsaw, Sasha & Leah, Neo
12 Mar: Timmy Marten, Neo

First up tonight were Jigsaw. A tight four-piece with a female bassist (is there a single female bass player who isn’t hot?) and Neo’s Jack Tinapple on vocals, they delivered a punchy twenty minute set; all groove, no filler. Really impressive.

The lads from Neo then came on mid-song to launch into another awesome set. Neo really are great, a fabulous funk-tinged band who got the small crowd dancing (except for the tubby guy with the orange Okanuis… ie, me. Hey, I don’t dance). They trotted out couple of new songs (“Waiting For The Bus Blues” was a belter), and dug back into the archives for a few (“I Just Sleep Here” being the most notable).

The only disappointment was that they didn’t play my fave Neo track, “Wrecking Ball”. It would have segued so well into the break-down tail-end of that “Mojo” song; still, it might have busted up the dancing vibe somewhat.

Overall, two hours of killer and not an ounce of filler. Hurrah!

[20060033] Il Cielo che Danza

So I’m walking home from The Bubonic Play and Llysa called; the Simpletons were trekking down to the banks of the Torrens to watch the dress rehearsal of Il Cielo che Danza. I rang Lesley, she packed a bottle of wine or two, and down to the Torrens we went.

Sitting just downhill from the rotunda, we bumped into Monique, and settled in to watch the rest of the spectacle (we rolled up 15 minutes into the first rehearsal). Lots of colourful planets were floating through the air, many of them suspending dancers who span and tumbled as their ground crew towed the planets on their paths. A bevy of bouffanted ballerinas pranced along the southern bank; a clutch of cyclists coursed across the northern bank. A ship sailed skywards from one bank to the center of the lake; boats towed another floating orb over the river; people ran inside further orbs down the surface of the river; and all the while, a stilted voice rang out across the Parklands informing us of the progression of the plot.

The grand finale – a dancer suspended under another floating orb, dragged by four men running full-boar down the southern bank – was pretty spectacular; even more so because there were only two hundred people max there that evening.

Yep, you read that right – two hundred.

The next night, estimates put the crowd between thirty and fifty thousand.

Same with the night after that. And the night after that.

I wandered by, sometimes through, the general vicinity of Elder Park on all three nights to catch a glimpse of those big floaty balls again on all three “performance” nights – it was sheer fucking bedlam. The crowds were stupidly huge, crammed in on top of each other, and there was a fine mist of irritability hanging over everyone.

So I feel pretty blessed to have been able to kick back with acres of personal space, my beverage, my beauty, and great friends, able to watch this spectacle in picniccy comfort.

And then they started the second dress rehearsal for the evening.

Blessed, I tell you.

(A few days later I was waiting to get into Stau; I did my usual evesdropping thing for my own entertainment. Two well-dressed men talking:

Man1: “Yeah, I went to the opening night. Huge crowd.”
Man2: “Right, right… what’d you think?”
Man1: “Well, it was about an hour too long, I reckon. There’s only so much shit you can do when you’re hanging from a balloon.”

Apart from the fact that the performance was only 45 minutes long… what a complete cock Man1 was. Next he’ll be claiming that Shakespeare wasted his time, because we already had a book called “The Dictionary”.

[20060032] The Bubonic Play

The Bubonic Play

Piggy Nero @ The Arch (Holden Street)

7:30pm, Thu 2 Mar 2006

Score: 9

This, quite frankly, was brilliant.

It’s a simple love-triangle tale told based at the height of the bubonic plague’s popularity. It’s played completely for laughs. And the laughs come thick and fast.

From the moment the busty Mathilde (Clare Thomson) starts scrubbing the stage floor – believe me, only a flashing neon sign proclaiming “CLEAVAGE” would be more overt – until the Shakespearean “all fall down” ending, the Piggy Nero crew have us laughing our arses off.

It’s a pretty physical production – the staged sex gymnastics alone would’ve required a bit of muscle. And there’s a tiny bit of puppetry. And penises. The simulated river and the remote-controlled horse-and-cart are locked neck-and-neck in a battle for the “Best Cheap Use Of Props” title. And the sole piece of audience participation… genius. GENIUS. It got milked for the rest of the performance.

Rude and offensive? Hell yes; it’s not a show for the kiddies. But if you’re after a lot of bawdy gut-laughs, you’d be hard-pressed to find something better than The Bubonic Play.

[20060031] -M[O]TH-

-M[O]TH-

People Being Watched @ The Arch (Holden Street)

6:00pm, Thu 2 Mar 2006

Score: 2

Note to the director: in order to maximise the potential enjoyment of your audience, it really really helps if you assist them in being able to see the performance. This entails the following:

Not obscuring the entire cast with smoke, wrapping the audience with same smoke, and then providing no lighting; (as per the opening act)
Try to ensure that the performance takes place below the audience’s sight line;
Don’t have unrepeated actions that are pivotal to the “plot” take place on one side of the stage, obscured by cast members, or in the wings;
Try to keep the performance on the stage, not behind the audience;
Don’t have the majority of your stage lighting at audience eye level, blinding them every time you attempt to highlight the cast;
Don’t create so much smoke that the audience can’t see a fucking thing (as per the closer).

Seriously, the way this performance took place, there wouldn’t be a single member in the audience that could truthfully claim that they saw the whole thing. Which makes it tough, since it’s not the easiest performance to comprehend at the best of times.

Still, there’s some interesting ideas there – the cocoon and red-eye masks were great, when you could see them – but it’s pretty hard to make the audience fight through the obscurity when you make it so hard for them. The guy next to me that nodded off certainly struggled; the piercing screams at the end of the piece sure woke him up, though. And fired off my tinnitus.

The clichéd thing to do would be to take the advertising line “a grotesque fairytale” and make up some witty “nightmare” type statement. But that’d take more effort than this deserves.

[20060030] The Happy Prince

The Happy Prince

University of Wollongong Faculty of Creative Arts @ Star Theatre 2 (Hilton)

11:00am, Thu 2 Mar 2006

Score: 6

So – it’s a musical adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play. That’s that sorted, then.

The cast of four are equally matched by the audience. They’ve got a musician too, so the production is winning in numbers.

Which is a shame, because they were really quite good.

Sure, it’s a little cutesy and twee – but what do you expect when portraying the friendship between a sparrow (the delightful Michaal Monk) and a statue? It’s a beautiful play, competently performed, and criminally under-patronised.

[20060029] Telefunken

Telefunken

Stuart Orr @ Queens Theatre

10:30pm, Wed 1 Mar 2006

Score: 6

One word describes this piece best: dense.

There can be no doubt that Stuart Orr puts in an incredible performance, switching between a multitude of characters based around the deranged musings of an SS deserter in 1945-Berlin, with the Russians at the gate. He leverages a fantastic AV set, a great projection screen that he also uses for shadowy hijinks, as well as providing a sense of claustrophobic foreboding.

But parts of Telefunken are just downright confusing – the timeline drifts between decades, basing itself at the end of World War II, but also taking in the American present, media snippets being sourced from, seemingly, the entire history of television.

To be sure, this is a performance of incredible depth by Orr – but I can’t help feeling that the message is a little blunt. The anti-television, anti-propaganda ranting is rarely hidden; it’s akin to being beaten soundly about the head with it.

(You know what? I can’t really express myself properly on this one. Instead, I’ll point you to this blog post which, though they seemed to enjoy it more than I, seems to cover all the bases. It even has corrections by Orr himself.)

[20060028] Devolution

Devolution

Australian Dance Theatre @ Her Majesty’s Theatre

8:00pm, Wed 1 Mar 2006

Score: 6

It sounds like an unbeatable combination – the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), teaming up with multidisciplinary machinist guru Louis-Philippe Demers, to produce an exploration into the man-machine interface. Alas, the mental images conjured up by this description – for me, at least – far eclipsed the execution; a shame, really, given the ADT’s fantastic collaboration with photographer Lois Greenfield in their 2004 production, Held.

The piece opens in spectacular manner, with a projection of an amorphous blob – no, wait, it’s a collection of limb… no, wait, it’s a melding of people… and now there’s more blobs/people as the “camera” pulls back to yield an ordered grid of these blobs. And then the performers are there – they create a wonderfully staccato field of movement, all twitch and nerve. The music throughout is a cacophony of industrial noise – white noise, screeches, pounding. Rest assured it is not everyone’s cup of tea – think Nine Inch Nails’ “Screaming Slave”, but without the rhythm.

The first appearance of the “robots” is impressive, as three huge suspended light riggings trundle in from the wings, raising and lowering and tipping to illuminate as their programming deems fit. They are soon joined by half-a-dozen ominous looking tower robots at the rear of the stage, which bend and straighten and tilt their spotlight “heads”. Sadly, that is all they do.

And therein lies my problem with Devolution. The robotic elements of the piece, whilst looking impressive, were nowhere near as active, nor fluid in movement, as I expected. The human elements were impressive – the ADT are, as usual, in fine form – and the choreography (of the humans) is wonderful. However, the robots are given far too much freedom in the piece for far too little return – the eight spiders, for example. And the two big robots. In both cases, they’re given the entire stage – but give the audience only stilted limited performance, with crippled hobbling movements.

If you forget most of the mechanical input, it’s still a satisfying piece – but the idea remains much better in my mind than on stage.

[20060027] Low Level Panic

Low Level Panic

Maiden @ Bakehouse Theatre

6:00pm, Wed 1 Mar 2006

Score: 4

Ugh, I hate writing this. Or rather, I hate writing things like this. Where a production has only the best intentions in mind, where it has an important message to put across, but is… well… unenjoyable.

Low Level Panic deals with the pressures placed on women by society, examining the various sources – media, expectations borne of others, and just the very fact of being female. All very noble, to be sure; but the script is a let-down.

The initial back-and-forth banter between two characters over the improbability (and impracticality) of pornography was dry and stilted at best, and the following social conundrums that followed were tedious in the extreme. The re-enacted rape of one of the characters, however, was the kind of powerful, punch-to-the-face theatre that makes one shift to the edge of their seat; surely this would be a turning point to the production?

But then we return to the banality prior to the flashback; whilst we now have more understanding of the characters, it feels like such a theatrical let-down. “Turning point”? More like “sharp spike”.

It’s a shame, really – Maiden are obviously a talented bunch, and the cause is utterly noble and righteous. All the good intentions in the world won’t overcome a limp script, however; and that’s a shame, because that two-minute emotional assault-and-battery in the middle is that good.