tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/sydney-festival-2016-23719/articlesSydney Festival 2016 – The Conversation2016-01-22T05:52:11Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/533002016-01-22T05:52:11Z2016-01-22T05:52:11ZSydney Festival review: All the Sex I’ve Ever Had<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108942/original/image-20160122-441-o84ls7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In All the Sex I've Ever Had six Sydneysiders over 60 talk frankly about love, life and everything in between.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before even entering the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House on the opening night of <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2016/all-the-sex-ive-ever-had">All the Sex I’ve Ever Had</a>, there is curiosity in the air. This is helped by the fact that, unusually, the performers are mingling with the audience in the lobby. </p>
<p>Each of the six performers, ordinary Sydneysiders over 63 who will be revealing intimate details of their lives, have set up a table of memorabilia. There are framed photos, letters, condoms and even a bottle opener in the shape of a yellow penis – or is it a banana? – that has been well chewed by a dog (best not ask!). </p>
<p>There is a slight nervousness in the air too. What will we be forced to endure? Our culture encourages the belief that older people are asexual, that somehow on crossing a certain age, we are stripped of desire. </p>
<p>There is something a little anxiety-inducing about knowingly walking into a closed theatre in which we will have no choice but to listen to the over-60s talk about their sex lives. This isn’t helped by the fact that I am forewarned that there will be questions … and that the audience is expected to answer them!</p>
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<span class="caption">Peter, Jennie, Judith, Ronaldo, Liz and Paul are all prepared to share their lives.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span>
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<p>The stage is set up more like a conference panel than a performance, and the six protagonists take their seats at a long table in front of microphones and glasses of red wine. Alongside them sits sound designer, Steve Toulmin, in front of his laptop. </p>
<p>The five show creators of Canadian-German company <a href="http://mammalian.ca/">Mammalian Diving Reflex</a> introduce themselves and creative producer Eva Verity asks the audience to rise. </p>
<p>If we were worried before, we’re really worried now as we are asked to repeat after her, a pledge that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we Sydneysiders of Sydney promise that everything that is said during All the Sex I’ve Ever Had will stay at All the Sex I’ve Ever Had. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>(The cast changes in each country the show tours to; previous oaths would have sworn Portlanders, Praguers and Singaporians to a similar silence.)</p>
<p>So, if you were hoping that this review would contain any juicy tidbits, I am sorry to disappoint you. You will have to visit <a href="http://mammalian.ca/projects/#all-the-sex-ive-ever-had">one of cities</a> that this unique performance piece will surely be brought to as it continues its successful world tour.</p>
<p>We settle down, and Toulmin announces the year – 1943 – and our six performers sway to Vera Lynn’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqtaoz4QFX8">White Cliffs of Dover</a>. We’ve begun. </p>
<h2>Beginning at birth</h2>
<p>Peter, a 71-year-old retired solicitor announces his birth at Waverley hospital, followed by British-born Jennie, Judith from Sydney, Ronaldo from Glasgow, Liz from Sydney and 63-year-old Paul from Colombo. </p>
<p>From there, we are taken on a journey from their earliest childhood memories to the present day, and even into the technologically-enabled future. The years serve as stepping-stones, both for them and for us, with music from each decade punctuating the memories. </p>
<p>They dance to numbers ranging from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK_LN3XEcnw">Mambo No. 5</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0">Gangnam Style</a> – we sing and clap along. The audience loses its initial nerves, suspends disbelief and becomes emboldened by the radical nature of what these six performers have chosen to undertake. Could we do it? Suddenly, we believe we could. </p>
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<span class="caption">The performers dance to songs from different eras.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span>
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<p>The first question comes and we are asked to raise our hands. Have any of us experienced what Judith has as a young child? Many have and the creators, dotted around the hall with hand-held microphones, encourage them to share their experiences. </p>
<p>A man seated behind me goes out of his way to call director Darren O’Donnell over to share – or over-share, his partner looked like she was thinking – but it seemed he just had to do it. </p>
<p>There is something about the confessional, yet safe, space the show’s creators have constructed with their open – yet unitimidating – approach. Combined with the unabashedness of the performers makes it utterly okay for the audience to share. </p>
<h2>Finding meaning in vulnerability</h2>
<p>The years roll on, and it’s not all innocent. As the programme notes state, following feminist philosopher, <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1131407">Martha Albertson Fineman</a>, “vulnerability defines the very meaning of what it means to be human”.</p>
<p>We learn about these six (extra)ordinary people’s most vulnerable times, times when even those who were supposed to give them unconditional love and care failed them, or times when their trust was abused. Times when their affections were unrequited, and times when the reverse was the case and the consequences had to be dealt with. </p>
<p>Gender and sexual identity and the discovery of what they mean in each individual’s life are deeply significant themes. We discover that they both matter beyond all else and matter very little except when – tragically – they determine whether or not we can live happy, fulfilled lives, and even whether we can continue to live at all.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly, All the Sex I’ve Ever Had tells a partial story. Although none of the six come from particularly privileged backgrounds, they are all an urbane and cultured lot today. While two out of the six are gay men, there were no lesbians or transgender people. Paul is Sri Lankan, but otherwise, as in much of the arts, the full reality of multicultural Australian society was absent. </p>
<p>Sex and sexuality unite us universally but we make assumptions about who can discuss them. What All the Sex I’ve Ever Had reveals is that, in the right conditions, dialogue can be facilitated so that we can reach those points of vulnerability and recognise them in each other, thus learning more about ourselves.</p>
<p><br>
<em>All the Sex I’ve Ever Had is showing as part of the Sydney Festival until January 24. Details <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2016/all-the-sex-ive-ever-had">here</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53300/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alana Lentin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There is something a little anxiety-inducing about knowingly walking into a closed theatre in which we will have no choice but to listen to the over-60s talk about their sex lives.Alana Lentin, Associate Professor in Cultural & Social Analysis, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/526872016-01-11T19:29:15Z2016-01-11T19:29:15ZSpirals within spirals: Vortex Temporum at the Sydney Festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107622/original/image-20160108-14023-meshxv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dancers create spiralling, flowing patterns in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Vortex Temporum at the Sydney Festival. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the Sydney Festival. </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The music-dance relationship has provided the backbone for the development of Western theatre dance and has been the testing ground for most of the creative experiments that have revolutionised the form. </p>
<p>Whether dance follows music, music follows dance, or any other variation between the two, the role played by music has been central to the relatively young art form of contemporary dance. </p>
<p>Flemish choreographer <a href="http://www.rosas.be/en/anne-teresa-de-keersmaeker">Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker</a> continues her explorations at the far side of the music and dance dialogue in <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2016/vortex-temporum">Vortex Temporum</a>, which is part of the 2016 Sydney Festival. </p>
<p>Vortex Temporum, which translates as “the whirlpool of times”, is a performance by seven contemporary dancers, six musicians and a conductor. They are present onstage at different times and in varying combinations throughout the work’s 60-minute duration. </p>
<p>There is a repetition of circles of different scales that “map” the performance space, traced through De Keersmaeker’s signature, simple movements – walking, running, turning and swinging. The energy of the dancers ebbs and flows, and scatters across dancers and the space.</p>
<p>The show works with a 1996 score of the same name by spectral composer <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/mar/18/gerard-grisey-contemporary-music-guide">Gérard Grisey</a>, performed live by Belgian contemporary music ensemble <a href="http://www.ictus.be/">Ictus</a>. </p>
<h2>A slow, deliberate composition</h2>
<p>I was lucky enough to see this work in development in 2013 in Brussels and the delicate work of composition that De Keersmaeker undertakes.</p>
<p>In engaging with Vortex Temporum’s score for piano and five instruments, De Keersmaeker works with the space-time of Grisey’s vortex where a range of temporalities – frenetic, extended, suspended – co-exist, one inside the other.</p>
<p>In their purpose-built dance studio, Rosas (De Keersmaeker’s company) began the day’s work with a “tenor”, or key, phrase of movement in a standing position that worked within a virtual “magic square” from the Chinese divination text, I Ching. The square surrounded the dancers’ bodies and they swivelled with their arms swinging around them to take in all of its points. </p>
<p>From this original phrase, “generations” of movement devised by the dancers began unfolding a complex movement score across bodies, musical instruments, space and time. This traced three layers of circles on the floor and transposed the magic square across these, moving through zones or “houses” mapped across the whole. Spirals within spirals scaffold the work but are present as barely visible forces in the final work.</p>
<p>Each of the seven highly experienced dancers was allocated an instrument – five individual instruments plus a “double” voice for the two hands of the piano – and they moved constantly between the studio floor and a large table to consult Grisey’s manuscript. Progress was incredibly slow as the company unpacked the music and made collective choices. (I was told that one-and-a-half minutes of a 19-minute section took two weeks.)</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">De Keersmarker worked closely with Grisey’s experimental musical score.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the Sydney Festival.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During this process, De Keersmaeker worked with “musical dramaturg” <a href="http://www.bojanacvejic.info/cv/">Bojana Cvejić</a>, with whom she has co-authored her books. Cvejić explained to the company the descriptives in Grisey’s score regarding the experimental use of the instruments required, and what this means in terms of the musicians’ physical performance. There was also much discussion about the place of movement and stillness against the score, being in front of or behind the music, and “spatial flow”.</p>
<h2>Dancing to the un-danceable</h2>
<p>De Keersmaeker’s approach to working with music is unique and radical within the history of contemporary dance, an art form that developed across the 20th century after breaking with classical ballet. </p>
<p>She chooses music that almost defies choreographic interpretation (an approach taken by other radicals such as <a href="http://www.isadoraduncan.org/the-foundation/about-isadora-duncan">Isadora Duncan</a> who was the first to dance to Schubert and Chopin) and gets inside the logic of the music, matching it with her choreographic composition.</p>
<p>Her interest in the polyphonic, discordant “<a href="http://www.wwnorton.com/college/music/concise-history-western-music4/ch/04/outline.aspx">ars subtilior</a>” choral music of the 14th century featured in her works toured to Sydney in 2012, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjB2UCXHo7I">En Atendant</a> (2010) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ_13es56B0">Cesena</a> (2011). The body’s role in producing the music of this vocal form led her to Grisey with his focus on the micro-tonalities of sound itself – its texture, timbre and tone. </p>
<p>These aspects of sound have a materiality (force, energy, weight, depth) that highlights the body in the music and evokes a physicality that dance can respond to. </p>
<p>De Keersmaeker includes the musicians in her choreography, so that they move through and with the dance, suggesting their musical performance is close to De Keersmaeker when she thinks with the score.</p>
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<span class="caption">Six musicians interact closely with the dancers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the Sydney Festival.</span></span>
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<p>De Keersmaeker’s broad interest is between the body or the personal, and the community or structure. A tension between individual expression and the collective binds all of her work together, with compelling solos puncturing the mass movements of her large casts. This theme of De Keersmaeker’s reflects her process; she credits her company in programs – “created with and performed by the dancers”.</p>
<p>Her aesthetic has been pegged as “minimalist” in response to the reduction, utility and repetition that marked her breakthrough works <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2016/fase-four-movements-music-steve-reich">Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich</a> (1982), which is also being presented in the Sydney Festival this January. She has claimed to be most interested in “maximising the minimal”.</p>
<p>However, even in her most ascetic works, the dancers infuse the movement with an emotional charge that is all but absent from other minimalist classics, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CByoefokGrA">Danse (1979) by Lucinda Childs</a>.</p>
<p>Ultimately, through a close attention to the work of the music and the application of formal structures and patterns to movement and stasis, De Keersmaeker approaches a new music-dance relationship beautifully <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9882378&fileId=S0149767715000236">translated by Cvejić</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>by means of what techne [art] does the choreography seem not to choose the music but be chosen by it?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
<strong>Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker joins Erin Brannigan in conversation at Carriageworks in Sydney on on Tuesday, February 12. Entry is free, details <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2016/artist-talk-anne-teresa-de-keersmaeker">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Temporal Vortex opens at the Sydney Festival on Friday, January 15. Details <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2016/vortex-temporum?gclid=CJeawb21oMoCFQyBvQodwmkPHA">here</a>.</strong></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52687/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erin Brannigan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dance and music move together in Anne De Keersmaeker’s new work at the Sydney Festival. Erin Brannigan was able to watch this layered and intricate performance come together in Berlin.Erin Brannigan, Senior Lecturer in Dance, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/526892016-01-06T19:24:25Z2016-01-06T19:24:25ZBarely hanging on: Woyzeck at the Sydney Festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107136/original/image-20160104-11938-5yn4zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">German director Jette Steckel has bought an urgent, vivid and highly phyiscal version of Woyzeck to the Sydney Festival. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Woyzeck, Sydney Festival 2016.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Written in 1836 by German playwright, activist, scientist and medical doctor <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Buchner">Georg Büchner</a>, Woyzeck is generally regarded as the first social drama in German literature. </p>
<p>A dramatic fragment of 31 scenes, it was considered one of the most radical plays of its period in both language and subject matter and it continues to be a challenge for directors, actors, and set designers alike. Set between a kind of hyper-naturalism and delirious pre-expressionism, both the play and the 1925 opera adaption <a href="http://www.britannica.com/topic/Wozzeck">Wozzeck by Alban Berg</a> speak of the desire to live and to love irrespective of social class, and society’s cruel response to that desire. </p>
<p>Woyzeck, a lowly-paid soldier, tries to supplement his meagre income by performing menial jobs for his Captain and by participating in dubious medical experiments conducted by the Doctor. Eating only pea soup prescribed by the Doctor, who is unscrupulously testing the effects of a mono-nutritional diet on Woyzeck, the young man soon develops hallucinations, apocalyptic visions, and signs of malnutrition.</p>
<p>Yet, both the Captain and the Doctor continue to exploit Woyzeck’s body and mind and revel in humiliating him in public, fully aware of the young soldier’s financial dependence upon them. Woyzeck’s additional earnings go to his girlfriend Marie and her child. </p>
<p>When Woyzeck sees Marie dancing with another soldier, fury and jealousy rise in him uncontrollably, and when she starts having an affair with a Drum-major, he begins to hear inner voices that tell him to kill her. </p>
<p>Woyzeck does not have enough money to buy a pistol, so he buys a knife instead and stabs Marie during one of their evening walks at the bank of a lake. Woyzeck is found with blood on his hands and in the final passage of the play, the judge remarks that seldom such a beautiful murder is found. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107120/original/image-20160103-11920-1gb3mb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Woyzeck, Sydney Festival 2016.</span>
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<p>In contrast to the language of classical 19th century German drama, Büchner uses a highly expressive and startlingly modern language well ahead of its time. The dramatists’ short and abrupt sentences are often left incomplete but are rich with colloquialisms and the use of grammar and syntax tailored to the respective social status of his protagonists. </p>
<p>Büchner’s intense, pre-expressionist language is full with exclamations, interjections and ellipses, and acts as a medium to show the disastrous effects of social class and an overriding existential isolation. </p>
<p>Marie’s murder is complexly portrayed as an act of Woyzeck’s mental disturbance, as much as of jealousy and his unloading of aggression against a society (represented by the Doctor, the Captain and the Drum-major) that has systematically destroyed him. </p>
<h2>In search of an ending</h2>
<p>All versions of Woyzeck are different. The script was left unfinished by playwright <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Buchner">Georg Büchner</a>’s death in 1837, so every production imagines its own ending. </p>
<p>This production, which comes to the Sydney Festival via the <a href="http://www.thalia-theater.de/de/">Thalia Theatre Hamburg</a>, reminds us that the social safety net we have come to be accustomed to since the welfare reforms of the late 19th century only carries some, and inevitably lets others fall. Quite literally, there’s no use hanging on. </p>
<p>Director <a href="http://www.goethe.de/kue/the/reg/reg/sz/sec/enindex.htm">Jette Steckel</a>’s production is focused on the social and political mechanisms of seduction (career, money, sex) and what happens when the individual is told to leave the game. This is a Woyzeck that is as exciting, uncompromising and disturbing now as it was when it was first premiered in 1913, some 80 years after the playwright’s early death of typhoid aged 28. It’s a real coup for the Sydney Festival. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107109/original/image-20160103-11938-1wqs6ub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Woyzeck, Sydney Festival 2016.</span>
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<h2>Steckel, Wilson and Waits</h2>
<p>The Sydney Festival production directed by the young German director <a href="http://www.goethe.de/kue/the/reg/reg/sz/sec/enindex.htm">Jette Steckel</a>, shows Woyzeck in the text and music version by Robert Wilson and Tom Waits from 2000. </p>
<p>Steckel has become something of a specialist for German classics in the last years since her graduation from the Hamburg Theatre Academy in 2007, and her analytical yet physical style lends itself to the third version of the Wilson/Waits Woyzeck. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107108/original/image-20160103-11932-1uj2e8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Woyzeck, Sydney Festival 2016.</span>
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</figure>
<p>Yet, where Wilson’s scenography utilised expressionist aesthetics and a highly reduced, anti-psychological choreography and his trademark detailed lighting dramaturgy, Steckel’s production does the opposite. </p>
<p>The young and talented director’s Woyzeck is an edgy and raw reading of the play – often noisy, often irritating, and carried through with high emotions and relentless physical agility by the outstanding cast with Philipp Hochmair as Woyzeck and Franziska Hartmann as Marie. </p>
<p>Set designer Florian Lösche sets the play in a single set design, comprising entirely a large net made of thick ropes hung in a metal frame within the <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/proscenium">proscenium</a>. Throughout the scenes, the net is in motion, being used to precariously divide the stage space, or to be tilted vertically, then horizontally. Lösche’s net may seem a simple, single message by director Jette Steckel, yet is is a highly effective one by demanding of the actors a highly physical language of climbing, hanging on and falling. </p>
<p>In all its consequence, the net is symbolic of the individuals’ fragile position within society. In the end, the two outsiders, Woyzeck and Marie, one barely alive and one dead, have fallen through the net, both physically and symbolically. No use hanging on. </p>
<p><br>
<strong>Woyzeck opens at the Sydney Festival on January 7 and will run until January 12. Details <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2016/woyzeck">here</a>.</strong></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52689/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thea Brejzek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jette Steckel has bought the Sydney Festival a version of Woyzeck that is as exciting, uncompromising and disturbing now as it was when it was first premiered in 1913.Thea Brejzek, Professor for Spatial Theory, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.