tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/melbourne-festival-12445/articlesMelbourne Festival – The Conversation2018-10-19T07:36:12Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1052802018-10-19T07:36:12Z2018-10-19T07:36:12ZWilliam Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance is surprising, amusing, but precise<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241376/original/file-20181019-67185-1kadip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Quiet Evening Of Dance is a program from the "most controversial ballet choreographer in international ballet" </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bill Cooper</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: A Quiet Evening of Dance, Melbourne Festival</em></p>
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<p>The program booklet for William Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance has an entire paragraph in the choreographer’s biography dedicated to listing his lifetime achievement awards – such is the stature of this man. It wasn’t always so. </p>
<p>Forsythe’s work was consistently controversial (particularly in his native United States), from the time he took over the artistic direction of Frankfurt Ballet in the 1984 until well after he left it to run his own, rigorously experimental Forsythe Company. </p>
<p>His choreographies were (and are) difficult, formally experimental to the absolute extreme, breaking both with the pleasing aesthetics of ballet and with the humanist bent of modern dance. The titles of his works are representative of his disinterest in playing by the book: consider In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987); Limb’s Theorem (1990), and One Flat Thing, Reproduced (2008). A <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1991-05-06/entertainment/ca-901_1_william-forsythe">review in LA Times</a> in 1991 referred to him as “arguably the most controversial choreographer in international ballet”. In 2005, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/william-forsythe-on-the-day-the-us-government-threatened-to-arrest-him/">police raided his house</a> after he presented a choreography that critiqued the war in Iraq.</p>
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<span class="caption">Forysthe’s work is contemporary dance that maintains an absolute allegiance to ballet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bill Cooper</span></span>
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<p>The last ten or so years have seen Forsythe’s repertoire of key pieces reappraised with a vengeance. It is not entirely clear how this happened - and even the choreographer himself has spoken in amused tones about it. It is possible that time has lent clarity to his formal brilliance, or that his harsh, techno-cerebral aesthetic seems less unapproachable in the era of backyard drones. Either way, today, Forsythe is considered one of the greats of contemporary dance.</p>
<p>Specifically, of ballet. This is an important and unusual distinction to make, because what we call “ballet” and what we call “contemporary dance” have been in philosophical opposition for at least the past 50-odd years. Contemporary dance has developed as a rebellion against the rigidity of ballet training, techniques and aesthetics, and today the two communities of dancers, institutions, and audiences coexist without a great deal of overlap. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tree-of-codes-wields-dance-music-and-art-to-create-new-spectacle-86051">Tree of Codes wields dance, music and art to create new spectacle</a>
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<p>Contemporary dance training is looser than the absolutely codified positions of ballet: dancers and choreographers come from all backgrounds, including street dance, and late bloomers are not unusual (unlike ballet, in which an early start is still a must). Forsythe, whose work is revered for its innovative and challenging nature, is a rare figure in contemporary dance to have maintained an absolute allegiance to classical ballet institutions, techniques and dancers. He classically trained and danced with Joffrey Ballet and Stuttgart Opera before he became a choreographer; and all but ten years of his long choreographic career have been spent within ballet institutions.</p>
<p>This long preamble is to say: however jagged, industrial and shapeless an evening of Forsythe choreography may seem to an eye used to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Lake">Odette/Odile</a> from Swan Lake, it is always grounded in ballet. “I feel like a native ballet speaker,” the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/apr/11/choreographer-william-forsythe-enb-ballet-voices-of-america">choreographer has said</a>. The vast experimentation with bodily organisation, composition, structure, that animates Forsythe’s work, unfolds through the vocabulary of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positions_of_the_feet_in_ballet">five positions</a>, <a href="https://ballethub.com/ballet-lesson/plie-basics/">pliés</a>, and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marius-Petipa">Petipa</a>.</p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bill Cooper</span></span>
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<p>A Quiet Evening of Dance is a curated program of short pieces that premiered earlier this month at Sadler’s Wells in London and De Singel in Antwerp before coming to Melbourne Festival. Some of the pieces included in the program are old, others are newly created. </p>
<p>Dialogue (DUO2015) was originally an all-female duet created in 1996, re-choreographed in 2015 for Sylvie Gillem’s farewell program, and here re-offered on two male dancers. The impetus for the program was to give a longer shelf life to this virtuosic, but light-hearted choreography that borders on slapstick, in which two men circle each other, mimic each other’s movements, trip, fall, stand up. The delivery is easy: when something is done with great skill, it appears as if it’s done without effort. That’s because it’s done with skill, and not effort.</p>
<p>DUO2015, the centrepiece of the first half of the performance, is prefaced with a tryptich (Prologue-Catalogue-Epilogue). The three short works, performed to not much more than birdsong and silence, serve almost as a primer to the rest of the evening. The first is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pas_de_deux">pas de deux</a> in blacks and long white gloves, drawing all the attention to the dancers’ expressive arms, as if they were mimes. </p>
<p>In the second, Jill Johnson and Christopher Roman, two fantastically skilled and surprisingly mature dancers, provide almost a mechanical sketch of ballet, by systematically performing the folding and unfolding of joints (shoulders, elbows, wrists), pressure points, counterpoint, balance, swivel. It is like a lesson in the mechanics of ballet. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bill Cooper</span></span>
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<p>This becomes significant in the Epilogue, which introduces more complex geometries and human configurations, as well as the equally rigid vocabulary of break-dancing through the appearance of Rauf “Rubber Legz” Yasit, frequent Forsythe collaborator. The juxtaposition foregrounds the similarities of the two systems of movement; but more importantly, it foregrounds their nature as systems, their mathematics.</p>
<p>Act 2 is an entirely new piece, Seventeen / Twenty-One which continues the same break-down of ballet to its most basic constituent elements, through juxtaposition with the movement sequences of break-dancing, but this time to a Baroque composition by Jean-Philippe Rameau. The effect is of a magic trick: the curtain fall and reveal. </p>
<p>Forsythe’s sparse, precise, denim-and-sneakers minimal choreography is now the 17th-century <em>pas de troix</em>, as courtly and codified as the Versailles of the Sun King. In one truly splendid moment, Yasit crosses the stage in a sequence of superbly executed street moves. Two of the ballet dancers look at him, point, turn away elegantly, like fauns in early ballet, only in jeans. The music gives a sense of rhythm, phrasing, tone and emotional narrative to the same choreographic movement that in Act 1 came across as dry, theoretical exercises. It is as if Forsythe has just shown us how it’s all done.</p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bill Cooper</span></span>
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<p>Both ballet lovers and ballet haters tend to associate the form with its Romantic period, Petipa and Tschaikovsky. But the immovable forms of this rigid dancing vocabulary were codified two centuries earlier, in the Baroque period. Pierre Beauchamps, Louis XIV’s dance teacher, codified the five positions of what was then still a dance of kings. Jennifer Homans in her recent book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8268599-apollo-s-angels">Apollo’s Angels</a> refers to this moment as ballet’s “crucial leap from etiquette to art.” </p>
<p>It was the time of the first development of modern science, of modern mechanics, of Voltaire and Descartes, of Enlightenment and of the first modern Constitution, a time that loved maths, structure and harmony. The exceptional longevity of ballet has preserved in its forms the DNA of that time. A Quiet Evening of Dance is Forsythe’s excavation of some of this history – surprising, amusing, but precise.</p>
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<p><em>A Quiet Evening of Dance is being staged as part of the Melbourne Festival until October 20.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105280/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jana Perkovic 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>However jagged, industrial and shapeless an evening of Forsythe choreography may seem to an eye used to Swan Lake, it is always grounded in ballet.Jana Perkovic, Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1045592018-10-08T19:10:12Z2018-10-08T19:10:12ZIn Trustees, Belarus Free Theatre mercilessly demolishes Australia’s cultural debate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239651/original/file-20181008-72127-q83673.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hazem Shammas in Trustees: his powerful incantations towards the end of the production will leave you reeling.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: Trustees, Melbourne International Arts Festival.</em></p>
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<p>The Belarus Free Theatre, exiled from their home nation, have returned to Australia to collaborate with local theatre artists on a new political work, Trustees. The production begins with a hypothetical scenario in which the Australian government has placed a moratorium on public funding for the arts. While this scenario isn’t real, it cuts close to the bone after then-arts minister George Brandis gutted the Australia Council in 2015.</p>
<p>The production stages a public debate hosted by the (made up) Melbourne Trust Forum. It unfolds as part media reportage and part gameshow. The actors take on the roles of charismatic celebrity types, stalking the stage and encouraging the audience to register an online yes or no vote to the question “does government funding for the arts do more harm than good”? Several positions are thrashed out by the four celebrities who embody the spectrum of right-wing and left-wing commentary, in a parody of Australia’s own culture wars.</p>
<p>If not our poets and playwrights, argues one of the members of the trust forum, who or what forces will shape a cohesive and distinct Australian cultural identity today? As if such a thing were possible or even desirable. These arguments are not staged as earnest interventions, but rather as an absurd spectacle. </p>
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<span class="caption">Natasha Herbert.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span>
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<p>This staged debate becomes a decoy for exploring other structures of political disenfranchisement and privilege. For instance, can the debate over the arts be connected to Australia’s dehumanising treatment of refugees and asylum seekers? While a direct link is never explicitly made, it is certainly intimated.</p>
<p>The stage, which until this point has been modelled on a TV studio, with its bright lights and cues for audience applause, is then transformed into a boardroom. Here, the trustees of the Lone Pine Theatre Company gather to elect a new CEO and decide on a survival strategy amid the wreckage of a defunded arts sector. A proposal for a new form of theatre is floated: an immersive playground housed in a multi-storey building. It will host plot-lines and participatory experiences where jingoism might intermingle with a Kardashian style reality TV format: something to really make theatre profitable again.</p>
<p>The absurdity mounts. The trustees brainstorm underground levels where the violence of the Frontier Wars will be re-enacted in a kind of sexed-up colonial “Westworld”. The critique of arts funding driven by cynical interpretations of what counts as innovation and diversity in Australian theatre is certainly not lost here. </p>
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<span class="caption">The boardroom table is not what it seems in this production.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span>
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<p>The increasingly debauched suggestions of the trustees create a tension and sense of complicity in its audience. We laugh at the trustees’ rising absurdity and self-exploitation, yet recognise our role as consumers of their commodifiable identitities: a Palestinian man (Hazem Shammas), an Aboriginal woman (Tammy Anderson), a young Indian woman (Niharika Senapati), and as counter-point, two white characters (Daniel Schlusser and Natasha Herbert).</p>
<p>Then the mood shifts again, to great theatrical effect. Where in the earlier scene the audience was asked to take on the role of adjudicators in a failed debate on arts funding, we now became voyeurs. One of the trustees is to be elected as leader, and a choreographed leadership spill ensues where board members battle it out in a dirty power play.</p>
<p>Bridget Fiske’s movement direction comes to the fore here. Her stylised choreography captures the slow-burn horror of market-driven competitiveness in the arts. The tussle for power is expressed as a violent libidinised tango, intimating that power is not only synonymous with brute physical force but laced with sado-masochistic impulse.</p>
<p>As is to be expected, the white guy (Daniel Schlusser) wins. He mounts the boardroom table to give a terrifying victor’s speech with a recognisable reference to John Howard’s <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/john-howards-acceptance-speech-20041010-gdjw7v.html">2004 acceptance speech</a>. The boardroom is suddenly transformed into a bizarre occultish space where the acceptable violence of Australian political and cultural life bleeds to the surface and the anti-racist platitudes of the liberal left are prodded and deflated.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239657/original/file-20181008-72124-1svcisq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Daniel Schlusser, as the victorious white guy, and Tammy Anderson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolai Khalezin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It provides a surreal platform for the actors as they explore legacies of male anger and violence. The disturbing dynamics of white guilt are played out, political complacency is confessed, and theatrical traditions of exploitation of Indigenous women’s bodies are confronted head-on.</p>
<p>The production avoids the kind of earnestness that imbues much of political theatre. Is it didactic? Yes. But it also cuts through the turgid crust of fraught public debate over the arts and culture to create an atmosphere that verges on gothic horror. Unable to concede to the viewpoint that a distinction between left and right even exists, it asks us to imagine a post-political world. Here, freedom of speech no longer functions as the dignified ideal of democratic institution but is captive to hellish modes of spectacular, and mediatised, presentation.</p>
<p>It asks us to imagine that we live in an oppressive echo chamber that resembles one of the rings of Dante’s Inferno, a purgatorial space of ritualised punishments. The only way out of this impasse of opinion and apathy, it seems, is to invoke chaos. </p>
<p>On this front, Hazem Shammas’ powerful incantations towards the end of the production will leave you reeling. With a kind of terrifying conviction, he speaks the unspeakable into the void of Australia’s political sublimations, jolting us temporarily out of our sense of complacency: “Fuck the Australian dream”, he tells us, “fuck Allah, fuck Christ, fuck white validation, withdraw, stay safe, stay comfortable.”</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/trustees">Trustees</a> is being staged as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival until October 21.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104559/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra D'urso 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>This production, a collaboration with local theatre artists, stages a public debate hosted by the (made up) Melbourne Trust Forum. It unfolds as part media reportage and part gameshow.Sandra D'urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1045552018-10-08T03:25:27Z2018-10-08T03:25:27ZWatt questions being and perception but could have gone further<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239639/original/file-20181008-72117-1t71vun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Barry McGovern in Watt. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: Watt, Melbourne International Arts Festival.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p>It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted. It was in vain that it answered, with unexceptionable adequacy, all the purposes, and performed all the offices, of a pot, it was not a pot. And it was just this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot that so excruciated Watt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This passage from Watt, the novel Samuel Beckett wrote while hiding from the Gestapo during the second world war, describes the title character’s dawning certainty that a pot is not actually a pot. The instability goes beyond language to ontology, or the nature of being.</p>
<p>There is much to like in Barry McGovern’s adaptation of Watt, which presents selections from the text. McGovern is a seasoned performer who spoke Beckett’s repetitive prose beautifully. His quiet delivery brought out the novel’s deadpan qualities; the audience laughed often. And yet, I came away with the feeling that McGovern’s Watt was not quite a pot, which is to say, not quite Watt.</p>
<p>McGovern first adapted Watt for a production at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 2010. In this Melbourne production, with his worn clothing, boots, braces, and pepper-coloured hat, he looked the part of a generic Beckett character. </p>
<p>This was not a bad thing per se, but it did contribute to my sense of seeing the ghost of a Beckett play. It is tempting to attribute this washed-out quality to the difficulty of adapting the novel to the stage. And yet, the problems instantiated by the novel’s narration are well suited to McGovern’s adaptation.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239649/original/file-20181008-72121-10xax0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Beckett’s novel describes Watt’s journey to, within, and away from Mr Knott’s house, where Watt lives for some time as a servant. Upon leaving Mr Knott’s service, Watt travels to an institution, seemingly an asylum, where he tells his story to another inmate, Sam. But the story is told out of order, sometimes in unreadable language, and with fragmentary addenda appended by a fictional editor. </p>
<p>The narrator is not just unreliable, but impossible, or plural: though late in the novel the narrator identifies himself as Sam, who is reporting Watt’s story as Watt told it to him, neither Watt nor Sam were present at the beginning of the novel. These contradictions are not resolved; indeed, they constitute the novel.</p>
<p>McGovern sometimes was Watt while he narrated what happened to Watt. This was especially effective in two scenes. In the first, McGovern demonstrated the extraordinary way in which Watt walks: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Watt’s way of advancing due east, for example, was to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>McGovern spoke the lines while performing the motions, embodying Beckett’s comic repetition and the unexplained inefficiency with which Watt advances.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239642/original/file-20181008-72121-1otyb1s.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>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Worn clothing, boots, braces, and pepper-coloured hat - McGovern looked the part of a generic Beckett character.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>McGovern was likewise effective in a scene where Watt, resting in a ditch that anticipates the one in which <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17716.Waiting_for_Godot?from_search=true">Waiting for Godot</a>’s Estragon sleeps, seems to hear “from afar, from without, yes, really it seemed from without, the voices, indifferent in quality, of a mixed choir.” A recorded choir sang the two verses Beckett supplies (though the music is not printed in all editions), including such lyrics as “Fifty two point two eight five seven one four” and “oh a bun a big fat bun.”</p>
<p>During the first choral verse I was unsure about the choice to include the recording, since it seemed to resolve definitely that the voices came “from without” — a point that Beckett leaves open. But as the second verse was sung, and as McGovern reacted with quiet but increasing perplexity to its nonsense, I changed my mind. </p>
<p>I was with Watt in that moment, but where was I? I could no longer say, in the world of the play, that the choir came from outside him; only that it seemed to, and that its lyrical improbability put pressure on this seeming. In moments such as these, McGovern enacted the instability of the novel’s form and perspective.</p>
<p>At other times McGovern spoke and performed as different figures from the story: as Arsene, the servant who leaves Mr Knott’s establishment as Watt arrives, or as a narrator (Sam in the novel, but nameless in the play) to whom Watt has told his story. Here too the shifts enacted the text’s instabilities in another medium. Who was speaking, and why were they telling us this story? We weren’t to know. In the audience’s laughter I felt an acceptance of skimming along the surface of things.</p>
<p>My dissatisfaction with McGovern’s Watt is not about what he included and excised, though one might object that he made it a bit too coherent. My frustration boils down to his treatment of the pot, one of the production’s few props. At the relevant moment, McGovern produced and unfolded a piece of paper with a picture of a pot on it. In so doing he made a point about representation: an image of a pot is not a pot. But I wanted him to make a point about existence — to produce a solid pot and make me question, or make me think he questioned, whether it was a pot.</p>
<p>Theatre is the perfect medium in which to make an audience see that a pot is not a pot. Stage pots may be real, may even be cooked in, but as props they are also fictional and fictionalizing. Making us feel this could have been a resonant counterpoint to the kinds of ghosting — Marvin Carlson’s term for theatrical elements that appear again and again — that attended McGovern, boots, braces, hat, and ditch.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2018/events/watt/#.W7rLmBMzZBw">Watt</a> is being staged as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival until October 13.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104555/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Balkin 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>Samuel Beckett wrote Watt while hiding from the Gestapo during the second world war. It describes Watt’s journey to, within, and away from Mr Knott’s house, where Watt lives for some time as a servant.Sarah Balkin, Lecturer, English and Theatre Studies, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1045562018-10-08T01:15:14Z2018-10-08T01:15:14ZA Melbourne-flavoured rendition of 16 Lovers Lane celebrates The Go-Betweens’ stellar songs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239612/original/file-20181008-72106-1ypg9w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Romy Vager performs during the concert at Melbourne's State Theatre on Saturday night.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: 16 Lovers Lane, Melbourne Festival.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The Go-Betweens’ 1988 album, 16 Lovers Lane, was a bit of a sleeper when released. Over time, however, it has achieved critical acclaim to the point where the song Streets of Your Town was placed first in a recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/sep/20/go-betweens-streets-of-your-town-takes-out-top-spot-in-songs-of-brisbane-poll">Songs of Brisbane</a> poll conducted by The Guardian.</p>
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<p>Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the album’s release, members of the band have been performing its finely crafted songs in some of Australia’s major cities. On stage in Melbourne, original group members Lindy Morrison, Amanda Brown and John Willsteed were joined by Dan Kelly, Danny Widdicombe and Luke Daniel Peacock.</p>
<p>The presence of some of our very finest songwriters as special guests at this event - including Jen Cloher, Paul Kelly, Dave Graney and Laura Jean - was homage to the regard in which the band’s writers, Robert Forster and the late Grant McLennan, are held. Indeed Paul Kelly spoke about how he had “mined” the duo’s ideas as much as he could. In other fields, such a confession might be regarded with outrage, but for musicians, providing inspiration for others is the highest accolade one can receive.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239616/original/file-20181008-72100-13k81e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239616/original/file-20181008-72100-13k81e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239616/original/file-20181008-72100-13k81e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239616/original/file-20181008-72100-13k81e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239616/original/file-20181008-72100-13k81e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239616/original/file-20181008-72100-13k81e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239616/original/file-20181008-72100-13k81e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Still, the role of the instrumentalists, the incredible constancy of Morrison’s drumming, the multi-instrumental and vocal work of Brown and the fine guitar playing of Willsteed contributed equally to the Go-Betweens’ unique style. Although many describe their work as epitomising the sound of the 1980s, it was always idiosyncratic, with its mix of poetic lyrics and folk/rock sound combined with the vocal edginess spawned by such bands as Talking Heads.</p>
<p>This concert provided an opportunity for greater vocal clarity, allowing the sentiments of song narratives to come to the fore. The impact was heightened by the detailed attention to the instrumental arrangements of each song.</p>
<p>Jen Cloher spoke about her own band’s performance of Love Goes On in various parts of the world where it is often recognised and instantly embraced. it opened the concert and Cloher’s vocal richness combined with the fullness of the band, set the scene for a warm, nostalgic experience.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Jen Cloher performing Love Goes On in 2017.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rob Snarski sang the haunting Quiet Heart and Danny Widdicombe’s beautiful clean lead sound was a standout, as was Snarski’s brief improvisation on mouth organ. </p>
<p>There was something exquisite about Paul Kelly interpreting my favourite song on the album, Was There Anything I Could Do? The lyrics are about a partner who takes off, exploring the world, taking some life punts and engaging in a range of belief systems, while her lover wonders what could have been done to discourage this adventurousness. The answer, of course, is “zip”. Amanda Brown’s fabulous violin forays into the wilderness in response to Kelly’s voice of yearning attested to this fact. It was a lovely interplay.</p>
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<p>Not only were most participants in this feast of an evening songwriters, but many, were also multi-instrumentalists. Laura Jean, like Amanda Brown, is classically trained and plays an array of instruments. She sang Streets of Your Town. The music is up-tempo and has a cyclic feel to it. The shades of lyrical darkness – of battered wives and butcher’s knives get lost in the optimism of the music. Laura’s vocal interpretation was strong and John Willsteed’s intricate acoustic guitar work a standout. </p>
<p>At the time the album was being written, McLennan’s relationship with Brown was ardent and many of his songs explore his feelings. Brown was the subject of The Devil’s Eye, a beautiful love song about being separated by distance. It was poignantly sung at the concert by Brown, and backed with simple, largely acoustic accompaniment sans drums and bass. Dan Kelly and Luke Daniel Peacock, as with many of the performances, worked wonders with finely balanced vocal harmonies.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239613/original/file-20181008-72130-oo1uv.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">Rob Snarski performing at the concert.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prudence Upton</span></span>
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<p>Romy Vager and Rob Snarski’s collaboration on Apology Accepted, with fabulous steel pedal guitar and violin was also a standout. And Dave Graney has a voice which has a greater similarity to Forster’s than others performing, which he used truly on Dive for Your Memory. Clare Moore supported on vibes while Brown reproduced the distinctive oboe riff resplendent on the original.</p>
<p>Though Cattle and Cane is not on the 16 Lovers Lane album, it is a pivotal Go-Betweens song. It is also a deceptively difficult song, but was interpreted superbly by Alex Gow. The sustained complex rhythm demanding so much of Morrison on drums was highly memorable.</p>
<p>The concert ended with John Willsteed taking a photo of the audience who stood as one to applaud the musicians.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>16 Lovers Lane was staged as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104556/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mandy Stefanakis 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>Some of Australia’s finest songwriters joined members of the Go-Betweens to mark the 30th anniversary of a seminal album.Mandy Stefanakis, Sessional lecturer in music education, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/862202017-10-24T05:16:45Z2017-10-24T05:16:45ZBig bang: Germinal creates a universe out of nothing on stage<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191562/original/file-20171024-20375-1leeywf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Performers engage in theatrical world-building in Germinal. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bea Borgers</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In theatre-making, we often talk about world creation. “What is the world of the play?” teachers seriously ask their students, and dramaturgs their directors. This is because the process of making theatre is, in a very fundamental way, a process of building a complete universe in an empty black box: 19th-century Russia; Renaissance Venice in the imagination of the Elizabethan England; the existential wasteland post-WWII; and so on.</p>
<p>These worlds are built with only a few tools: light, costume, humans and their words, sound, a backdrop or relatively spare props; and this world-making with a very reduced palette is, in essence, the magic of theatre. </p>
<p>Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort’s Germinal, staged as part of the Melbourne Festival, takes this world-building concept to the extreme, by making it the central conceit of the show: four performers on an almost bare stage have 80 minutes to build the known world from scratch. Where does one begin? At times mind-boggling, at times absurd, it is a joyous event, light but scintillatingly intelligent. It has enjoyed cult success, premiering at the prestigious Festival d'Avignon in 2013 and following on with seasons across Europe, Canada, the US, including at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Belgium, Public Theater in New York, and PICA in Portland - and for a good reason. </p>
<p>World-making on stage is not just material, but ontological. Light, sound, space and bodies on stage are not merely as an empirical event, but also a closed system of signifying relationships. They might form a world in which a sock is a living creature. A world in which Godot never arrives. A world in which we sing instead of speaking. For the audience, half of the fun of going to theatre is in deciphering the rules of a staged universe.</p>
<p>Ever since the rise of cinema, theatre has increasingly understood its essence to be this cross-stitch of sock puppets and ontology, starting at least with Ionesco, Beckett, and Grotowski. Contemporary performance since the 1990s has been particularly fascinated by experimenting with meaning-making, from British theatre group Forced Entertainment and French choreographer Jerome Bel, via Australian director Daniel Schlusser, and the recent performances of <a href="https://theconversation.com/taylor-mac-makes-history-at-melbourne-festival-opening-85321">Taylor Mac at the Melbourne Festival</a>. It is no longer controversial to ask the audience to see the most glorious worlds created with the most minimalist means; and sometimes, as in the case of Forced Ents or Schlusser, six or seven worlds at once.</p>
<p>However, in recent years, I have noticed an interesting convergence between this theatrical world-making and broader questions around how scientific knowledge is created, and how in turn it lays basis for our reality. They are not naïve, anti-science works, but genuinely engagements with the way observable, empirical facts get progressively shorn of specificity and abstracted into principles. I have written elsewhere on David Weber-Krebs’ <a href="http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue127/11974">Into the Big World</a>, an embodied choreography of this journey of lived fact into scientific principle, performed by two dancers on an almost empty stage to great effect.</p>
<p>Germinal is another passenger on the same bus. According to the artists themselves, it grew out of the process of deciding what the world of their performance would be – what elements would it contain, what rules would apply. Somehow, though, this initial process of dead serious world-making became the entire work, to a hilarious result.</p>
<p>Germinal opens like the Book of Genesis, without light. A single lightbulb illuminates the space in flashes. We see glimpses: four people tinkering at consoles, and not very well. It takes them a while to understand what operates the light. It takes them longer to understand how to form their thoughts as surtitles on the backdrop. It takes them an eternity to develop speech on stage – we take a detour through telepathy, among others. From then on, the four performers go through a kind of accelerated social evolution.</p>
<p>In terms of technology, Halory and Antoine, and their companions Beatriz and Arnaud, are working with what they have: the black walls and stage carpet, a microphone, projector, a laptop (“this book has only two pages!”), an intercom. Their progress is less concerned with engineering invention than with the evolution of thought and consciousness. They set rules - sometimes by discovery, sometimes by agreement - and each rule gives more detail to their world, while also narrowing their options down.</p>
<p>Rather early on, the question of being oneself, separate from others, is raised – and it becomes very pertinent when they are trying to decide how to divide one mic across four performers! At one point, they embark on listing what they know so far and agree that categories would make it easier to remember everything. Laboriously, they agree that things “that go pocpoc” when you hit them are somehow fundamentally different from “things that don’t go pocpoc”, such as light, trouble, and the joy of being together. </p>
<p>Then there is the phone call to a helpdesk to request a world-building starter kit: the customer service operator strongly suggest not to go without their bonus package, the four laws of thermodynamics - as she says, all living organisms use them.</p>
<p>Germinal has the intentional naivete of a long brainstorm, made concrete with stage props, music and projection, but it rumbles through some incredibly sophisticated concepts, and the final reveal exposes the deep architecture of what has been created.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86220/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jana Perkovic 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>Germinal has the intentional naivete of a long brainstorm, made concrete with stage props, music and projection, but it rumbles through some incredibly sophisticated concepts.Jana Perkovic, Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/861322017-10-23T03:43:48Z2017-10-23T03:43:48ZWe Love Arabs: accomplished satire offers food (and hummus) for thought<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191302/original/file-20171023-13955-1khbtf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hummus becomes a "choreographic texture" in We Love Arabs. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gadi Dagon</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We Love Arabs, staged as part of the Melbourne Festival at the Malthouse Theatre, brings together dance and theatre to explore Middle Eastern politics, and is a unique pleasure to watch. Australian audiences might recognise a similar fusion in recent works such as Chunky Move’s <a href="http://chunkymove.com.au/our-works/current-repertoire/complexity-of-belonging/">Complexity of Belonging</a>, and Nicola Gunn’s <a href="http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/piece-for-person-and-ghetto-blaster">Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster</a>. </p>
<p>Devised by Israeli dancer and choreographer Hillel Kogan, the performance opens in silence. A spotlight illuminates Kogan, meditatively poised on one foot. After a moment, he breaks this pose and addresses the audience. “I would like to share with you some thoughts on the challenges I’m having with my creative process.” </p>
<p>From that point on, he barely stops talking, and narrates us through a hilariously tortured attempt at creating an artwork exploring the relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs.</p>
<p>The humour of We Love Arabs is masterful, and works at many levels: one does not need to understand contemporary dance, nor Middle Eastern politics to laugh, but there are treasures here for those who do. At the heart of the comedy is Kogan, who skewers himself in almost every way imaginable, from his identity as an Israeli Jew, to choreographer, dancer, and left-winger. We Love Arabs shows just how far “good intentions” can miss the mark.</p>
<p>The challenge facing Kogan’s creative process, initially, appears in vague terms. There are spaces, he tells us, where his body can “feel the space” - and the space his body - but there is also another space, a space which is “not him”. He ties himself in knots trying to find a way to articulate this “not me”. </p>
<p>At one level, this works by poking fun at dance and dancers. Kogan’s incessant inanities on the rehearsal floor, are all too familiar. This comedy extends throughout the choreography. Many of the jokes actually find their punchlines in gesture and form, allowing even the most unfamiliar audiences to dance an entry point. </p>
<p>Adi Boutrous is enlisted to perform as the “Arab dancer”. The dynamic is established quickly, as Kogan realises that Boutrous does not look like the stereotypical Arab he imagined. They need, Kogan insists, signs for the audience, so he requests Boutrous draw on him the Star of David. Then, on Boutrous’s forehead, he inscribes the Islamic crescent. Boutrous asks: “what did you draw on me?” Kogan replies: “the thing from the Mosque”. Boutrous, a brilliant comic foil, quietly responds: “I am a Christian”.</p>
<p>This exchange is one of many in the performance where the well meaning, left leaning artist reveals his ignorance and prejudice, a point which would seem heavy handed if not so well wrapped in comedy. As the work progresses, Kogan’s narcissism continues to manifest, culminating in the introduction of hummus as a “choreographic texture” that might unite them.</p>
<p>Throughout the performance we hear only a few words from Boutrous, who speaks - and indeed dances - only on the terms dictated by Kogan. The power dynamic depicted here speaks more broadly to issues of inequality. </p>
<p>The piece draws our attention to the problematic “help” provided by the well-intentioned, through 55 minutes of quite enjoyable self-flagellation. There is an issue here in that we might mistake the observation of a problem for the hard work of actually addressing it. Just as a woke-bro mansplaining feminism can recognise inequality while still being part of the problem, We Love Arabs takes an important step, but one that can all too readily fall into self-satisfaction.</p>
<p>The piece concludes with hummus and flat-bread. Boutros holds the bowl while Kogan tears off bits of bread, dips them in hummus and feeds them to the front row of the audience. Whispers ripple through the audience, “it’s the sacrament”, I hear. Indeed, the image is unmistakable, and it’s tempting to walk away with this image of peaceful communion. </p>
<p>But this would be to miss one final joke: the irony that the body of Christ could bring the Jews and Arabs together. If there is a take away here, it is this: you should always question what you’re being fed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86132/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Asher Warren 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>We Love Arabs is a complex satire that blends dance, theatre and hummus to investigate the politics of Israeli Jews and Arabs.Asher Warren, Tutor and Researcher in Theatre and Performance Studies, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/860512017-10-20T05:01:18Z2017-10-20T05:01:18ZTree of Codes wields dance, music and art to create new spectacle<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191148/original/file-20171020-1072-1cv4i7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tree of Codes is less about drama, and more about the technical union of dance, music and art. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stephanie Berger HR</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It would do great disservice to Tree of Codes to consider it in dramatic terms. When it comes to the possible plot, emotions or even themes expressed, your guess is as good as mine. What we are often taught to expect from theatre – a gripping narrative rounded off with emotional catharsis – is a misleading framing for this work. No doubt this is the hidden expectation behind so many complaints of it being a “cold” performance.</p>
<p>Manchester International Festival commissioned Tree of Codes as a collaboration between contemporary ballet choreographer <a href="http://waynemcgregor.com/">Wayne McGregor</a>, installation artist <a href="http://www.olafureliasson.net/">Olafur Eliasson</a> and electronic producer-turned-musician <a href="https://pitchfork.com/artists/29228-jamie-xx/">Jamie xx</a> (of The xx), three artists with distinct, so-far-unrelated practices. The work spins off Jonathan Safran Foer’s lite postmodernist novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9583799-tree-of-codes">Tree of Codes</a>, itself a take on Polish avant-garde writer Bruno Schulz’s 1934 collection of short stories, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244261.The_Street_of_Crocodiles">Street of Crocodiles</a>.</p>
<p>The thread of connections between these artists’ works is tenuous and very light in touch. Foer literally cut up Shulz’s words, all-but-excising the heavily symbolic family narrative. Take the right letters out and “Street of Crocodiles” became “Tree of Codes”. </p>
<p>Jamie xx used an algorithm to turn such cut-up pages, their words and spaces and voices, into vocalisations and rhythmic structures. Centre-stage, Wayne McGregor translated – perhaps – the leap between nature and technology, suggested by the title, into a complex choreography of atomic complication from base elements to fully formed society. </p>
<p>And Olafur Eliasson returned to colour-effect glass, one of his favourite materials, to create a vibrant candy-coloured container for the work, highly attuned to the shifts in the music, but operating on its own dramaturgy of slow reveal and layering.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191145/original/file-20171020-1045-zwlctg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Reflections amplify performers into a whole society.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ravi Deepres</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Very disciplined play with perception is at the heart of each of these artists’ works, but in very different and not necessarily related ways. All the heavy lifting in Tree of Codes is done by McGregor’s excellent dancers. They kick off the performance in pitch dark, as invisible figures with small lights attached, dancing themselves into mesmerising constellations. </p>
<p>From here, another fascinating sequence: a row of performers invisible but for an arm pushed through a mirrored funnel, the choreography refracted and multiplied into something like a fleshy flower, or a supernova. These are phenomenal stage scenes, signalling something like the birth of the universe.</p>
<p>From there on, McGregor leads us through a sequence of movement pieces that take us from a primeval, Adam-and-Eve, flesh-coloured costume sort of innocence to a massing of bodies reminiscent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights">Hieronymus Bosch’s earthly delights</a>. Pointe shoes and coloured costumes are thrown into the mix, alongside choreographies of love and desire, and so on. </p>
<p>McGregor’s choreography has always had the ability to conjure split-second visual references: the elegance of Olympic sports, classical poses from Renaissance paintings, insectoid androids of the future. It can feel like big data crunched into movement. The movement is very distinct, with its absolutely rigid hips and waist, and all the dynamism concentrated in strong kicking legs and shoulders, as well as the flinging – no other way to call it – of female dancers. </p>
<p>They might be the best dancers in the world, and yet there is a flatness that their enormous skill engenders. Watching them contort and twist one another with apparent effortlessness, it is so easy to forget that not all movement requires equal effort, that flinging one’s leg vertical is not as easy as extending an arm horizontally. The effect is machine-like, a set of requirements for the dancing body that in themselves are strenuous and applause-worthy, but lose some of their impact because there is no emotion to it. It is body become (very competent) robot.</p>
<p>Eliasson’s set is, to me, the highlight of the work, due to its exquisite use of reflection to shape movement, and of colour to shape mood. Gradually, a series of one-way mirrored backdrops amplifies the duets and trios into entire societies, painting them yellow for intensity, or blue for fuzzy distance. </p>
<p>Towards the end, as Jamie xx’s music brings about whiffs of German nightclub Berghain, the climax of the piece is generated almost entirely by the set. The glass screen that has descended onto the proscenium, between us and the dancers, opens up two windows slowly spinning round. As they turn, it is revealed that the cold blue light bathing the dancers is an illusion, tinted glass – they are dancing in bold, warm red.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Olafur Eliasson’s sets shape mood with colour.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stephanie Berger HR</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Watching Tree of Codes at times feels like staring into the insides of a Swiss clock. This is why considering it dramatically is of no use. It is a phenomenally well executed show, but its brilliance is entirely in the stagecraft, in the technical accomplishments, the marriage of sound and set, movement and concept, the way it all comes together. How (and whether at all) it relates to early-20th-century modernism, I don’t know – but it is a feat of many-media intertextuality that makes one ponder the expressive use of technology of our time.</p>
<p>Performance mega-projects have been a staple since classical opera and ballet, forms that have been described as the “non-dramatic entertainment spectacle” branch of the performing arts. </p>
<p>But lately, mega-projects have been turning towards popular music and contemporary dance: think <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13974-tomorrow-in-a-year/">Tomorrow, In A Year</a>, an opera on Charles Darwin’s life by Danish performance artists Hotel Pro Forma and Swedish experimental pop group The Knife; or <a href="http://www.nickcave.com/news/shell-shock-opera/">Shell Shock</a> by Nick Cave and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.</p>
<p>Might this nascent form become the opera of the future? If so, we should develop a language to judge its technical prowess, rather than emotional realism.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2017/events/tree-of-codes/#.WelVzxOCxBw">Tree of Codes</a> is showing as part of the Melbourne Festival until October 21.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86051/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jana Perkovic 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>When it comes to plot, emotions or even themes, Tree of Codes is a mystery. But its technical prowess is undeniable.Jana Perkovic, Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/853872017-10-09T04:34:59Z2017-10-09T04:34:59ZCaravan delivers a glimpse of women on the edge with sweet comedy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189315/original/file-20171009-25779-y2au3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nicci Wilks and Susie Dee in Caravan. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tim Grey Photography</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Despite its forays into dark subject matter, Caravan, staged as part of the Melbourne Festival, is a rather sweet comedy. Described as a “darkly comic look at life on the margins”, it is also a curious blend of vaudeville with faint notes of magic-realism. It delivers cheery choreographed sequences set to popular music, rapid-fire comic delivery, while touching on the social realities of gender and class disparity.</p>
<p>The play is staged in a retro caravan, parked in the forecourt of the Malthouse Theatre. The audience looks out onto a distinctly Melbourne skyscape, adorned in the distance by the Arts Centre spire. The sprawling metropolitan horizon, with its lights and multistorey buildings, provides a contrast to the humble and squat form of the caravan where most of the action takes place.</p>
<p>The show follows the fractious relationship between an elderly mother and her daughter living together in a caravan. Donna (Nicci Wilks) cares for her mother Judy (Susie Dee), who lies in a double bed, diva-like, under quilted bedspreads, wearing an incongruous wig. Donna is listless as she negotiates the dreariness of her role as full-time caregiver for Judy. She administers medicines and performs unseemly labours of care, while obsessively searching for potential romantic hook-ups on Tinder.</p>
<p>The script is a work of collaboration drawing on the talents of writers including Angus Cerini, Patricia Cornelius, Wayne Macauley and Melissa Reeves. Over a series of dinners, each of the writers was allocated a prompt for developing the themes of the play, including “the body, death and organ donation”. Unsurprisingly, the dialogue is awash with these fleshy motifs, lending it a visceral quality, as well as a curious sensuality and warmth. </p>
<p>The play runs for about an hour and a half, without traditional scene breaks. Rather, a series of visual gags and stylised movement sequences provide breaks in the dialogue.</p>
<p>The play begins with a monologue by Donna; she appears, cigarette in mouth, having just returned from buying a glistening chunk of liver for dinner from a “stubby-fingered” butcher. She steals a moment outside to check in with her dating app. As she assesses the men on her phone, all the while swiping left, Judy’s voice pierces the night: “Fucken get in ’ere!” Donna begrudgingly abandons Tinder to tend to Judy.</p>
<p>Then, like a cabinet of curiosities, the wall of the caravan lowers, revealing the scene inside. Here, the set and costume design by Mag Horwell comes to life. A kitchenette, complete with cooking stove and implements, is where Donna unceremoniously fries liver; there’s an iconic table and bench seat; lace curtains adorn the windows; a shelf is littered with medication and another is adorned with a blend of kitsch ornaments.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Caravan is staged in a caravan in the Malthouse Theatre’s forecourt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tim Grey Photography</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the play progresses, the dialogue volleys back and forth between the pair, as they negotiate their disappointments and decades-long rivalry. Wilks and Dee deliver energised performances. Wilks’ speech is relentless, rapid-fire, with a distinct Australian wilt to the accent. In contrast, Dee plays on the slower, more rhythmic qualities of the script, which overall dispenses with naturalism.</p>
<p>Judy reveals to Donna the fraught relationship she shared with her own mother, openly stating: “I didn’t like the smell of her.” This lends the play an almost epic quality, placing Donna and Judy’s relationship in a longer historical and narrative arc, in which daughters stage a perennial struggle to escape their domineering mothers.</p>
<p>As she lies in bed, Judy regales Donna with stories of her sexual exploits as a much younger woman, providing the audience rare glimpses into an elderly woman’s sexuality, while inspiring raucous laughter. For instance, Judy describes one lover as having had a “tongue like a hungry beaver, keeping time with my inner clock”. All the while Judy tries to hoodwink Donna into giving her a glass of red, which is strictly against doctor’s orders.</p>
<p>Each scene playfully delves into the pair’s psychosexual dynamic, showing the mother-daughter pair as unabashed, desiring subjects. Judy confesses to Donna, “I fucked in the forest once”, while Donna indulges in sexual fantasies about Mr Wood, her next Tinder date who, she thinks, will smell like “singed hair and animal flesh”.</p>
<p>At about three-quarters in, their fraught relationship finally comes to a head during a heated exchange, when Judy exclaims: “If I had my time again, I’d use a coat-hanger on you!” This prompts Donna to retaliate:
“Nasty, horrible, old bags die alone!” She attempts to leave the caravan but returns to find an ailing Judy collapsed on the floor. The pathos of this scene, handled with aplomb by both Dee and Wilks, threatens to break with the play’s comedic presentation but is ultimately restored by a gag.</p>
<p>The play is a unique two-hander, which puts the lives of marginalised women at the centre of dramatic action. Underneath the comedic overtures, deeper issues bubble to the surface. The pair are mutually bound to each through a need for love but are also stuck with each other because of their economic disenfranchisement. However, far from being social realist, or overtly political, Caravan’s highly stylised dialogue and action have the effect of transforming ordinary, working-class life and lingo into poetry.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2017/events/caravan/#.WdrFfBOCxBw">Caravan</a> will be showing as part of the Melbourne Festival until October 22.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85387/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra D'urso 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>Caravan tells the tale of a mother and daughter who live in a caravan. Staged in the Malthouse Theatre’s forecourt, it is a sweet look at class and gender.Sandra D'urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/853212017-10-06T03:02:42Z2017-10-06T03:02:42ZTaylor Mac makes history at Melbourne Festival opening<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189097/original/file-20171006-15464-1sbdmm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Taylor Mac performs in The Inauguration at the Melbourne Festival. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jim Lee</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Taylor Mac described The Inauguration, which helped launch the 2017 Melbourne Festival, as “a Radical Faerie realness ritual”. The Inauguration was a 90-minute show featuring selections from Mac’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which spans 241 years (1776-2017) of American popular music across 24 hours. In 2016 Mac performed the full 24-hour marathon in New York City.</p>
<p>The durational aspects of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music were necessarily lost in The Inauguration’s whistlestop tour. But Mac’s six headliner performances across 27 hours this October incorporate the festival itself into a durational Radical Faerie realness ritual. I left The Inauguration wanting to attend all 27 hours.</p>
<p>Mac, who uses lowercase “judy” as a gender pronoun, joined performance art, drag, cabaret and audience participation, backed by a five-member onstage band. Song selections, which were not chronological, included the Pete Seeger song (later sung by the Byrds) “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbPl91kTFro">Turn! Turn! Turn</a>”; Tori Amos’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Croz1_USr3U">Precious Things</a>”; the country/western classic “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mynzbmrtp9I">Ghost Riders in the Sky</a>”; Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=355Fk8drgZE">Gloria</a>”; and Irving Berlin’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr29Bfa9JQo">All Alone</a>”. Matt Ray’s beautiful and surprising musical arrangements, which often seemed to position harmonies as melodies, rendered familiar songs strange.</p>
<p>Mac wore gorgeous costumes and headpieces designed by longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle. At some points during the show, Machine Dazzle appeared on stage, also in avant-garde drag, to oversee a costume change. The designer’s presence emphasised collaboration and production: the show is made anew during each performance.</p>
<p>The show is about the ways communities are created from disaster. In line with this aim, Mac’s performance philosophy involves “incorporating the calamity”. For instance, early in the show, Mac fell while descending stairs from the stage to the orchestra. For the next few minutes, Mac worked a series of pratfalls into the performance.</p>
<p>Mac’s most premeditated calamity was audience participation. Over the course of the show we were instructed to applaud an arts administrator, shame each other and ourselves for (and then celebrate) having multiple sexual partners, speak on cue, and dance. Everyone hates audience participation, Mac explained, which was the point: our discomfort and our failures as participants were the disaster from which our community would be built.</p>
<p>A number of audience members were brought up on stage. In one instance, Mac invited the oldest and youngest audience members — a man over 75 and children under 10 — on stage and instructed the children to copy the older man’s dance moves. This moment honoured elders while exploding the idea that a show about queering American history was not for children.</p>
<p>Mac’s rendition of the song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss1CXo8QMi8">The Surrey with the Fringe on Top</a>”, from the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, rendered white supremacy ridiculous by making it cuddly. Mac invited three blonde men on stage and dressed two of them in armbands with swastikas on them. Sitting beside them, with the third man on all fours in front of them playing the surrey-pulling horse, Mac sang. </p>
<p>As the song went on, Mac positioned the blondes so that one was lying in judy’s lap while the other leaned against judy’s shoulder. Mac suggested that we could think back to these cuddly Nazis the next time we were confronted by white supremacists in the news.</p>
<p>A challenge of Mac’s performances in Melbourne is performing a show about American history in an Australian context. Mac was well informed, frequently referencing the same-sex marriage postal survey and the offshore detention of refugees. The audience was receptive and supportive, applauding and sometimes calling out affirmations: it was a left-wing crowd. But, perhaps inevitably, the commentary on Australia struck me as more analogous than integral.</p>
<p>The Inauguration’s final number, a camp appropriation of a homophobic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZnpdomkKAg">Ted Nugent</a> song, exemplified the way Mac framed audience participation as queer ritual. Mac instructed audience members to dance with a person of their same gender during the song (specifying that non-binary and genderqueer people could dance with whomever they wished). Our dance, Mac explained, would metaphorically kill Ted Nugent.</p>
<p>We complied, but there was a great deal of talking and laughing. Mac let this go on for a while and then stopped the music. Mac explained that we’d had our fun and now we were going to dance seriously. Pulling a male audience member up on stage, Mac demonstrated how we should dance: arms around each other, body to body, without speaking.</p>
<p>The audience member moved his hands to Mac’s behind, and Mac issued a gentle correction: “That’s fine if it’s consensual,” but it wasn’t how we were being instructed to dance. Moving the man’s hands up to waist level, Mac told us this was how to be good participants. We danced, holding each other.</p>
<p>Mac’s instruction in queer public intimacy pushed our boundaries while caring for us. For me, this final song felt like a taste of what the durational versions of the performance could do: the first step toward a community built on calamity.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Taylor Mac will perform <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2017/events/a-24-decade-history-of-popular-music/#.WdbeihOCxBw">all 24 hours of the show</a> in four six-hour chapters, and close out the festival with <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2017/events/the-wrap/#.WdbenBOCxBw">The Wrap</a>, a 90-minute reprise of songs from the 24 decades with contributions from local artists.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85321/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Balkin 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>Taylor Mac’s 90-minute version of a 24-hour history of pop music is a hit, determined to forge a renewed sense community with the audience.Sarah Balkin, Lecturer, English and Theatre Studies, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/673792016-10-20T05:52:34Z2016-10-20T05:52:34ZIn 887, Robert Lepage has built a memory palace out of theatre<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142460/original/image-20161020-15067-1c5a1iy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Robert Lepage explores his past, and the notion of memory, in his autobiographical show 887.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Robert Lepage’s autobiographical show at the Melbourne Festival, 887, is named for his childhood apartment building: 887 Avenue Murray in Quebec City. Lepage wrote, designed, directed and performed 887, but to call it a one-man show does not give enough credit to the equal performance of the set. </p>
<p>Through a gloriously intricate series of folding boxes, scale models, and video projections, Lepage and his Ex Machina team presented the apartment building as a material “memory palace”. It’s a mnemonic device bought to life: the rememberer imaginatively “places” pieces of complex information in particular rooms of a familiar place and then mentally “walks” through the place to retrieve the information.</p>
<p>Like a number of recent productions in Melbourne, 887 made prominent use of screens and video projections. This time last year, the UK company Headlong’s Melbourne Festival production of <a href="http://artsreview.com.au/nineteen-eightyfour/">1984</a> included large-scale video projections, making an obvious link to surveillance technologies. </p>
<p>In April-May 2016, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of <a href="http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/live-reviews/review-miss-julie-melbourne-theatre-company">Miss Julie</a> used live projection to extend the logic of stage naturalism as cameras followed the actors beyond the kitchen setting to film action offstage. </p>
<p>And in May-June 2016, Eamon Flack’s production of <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/the-glass-menagerie-review-detail-and-depth-of-genuinely-touching-tennessee-williams-classic-lost-from-row-f-20160520-gozpmy.html">The Glass Menagerie</a> at the Malthouse Theatre (first staged at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre) framed the stage with two screens of live-edited, soft-focused footage.</p>
<p>In 887, as in The Glass Menagerie, video projection was a technology of memory. In the first moments of the show Lepage, holding his mobile phone, reminded the audience to silence ours and went on to discuss how he no longer remembers his own phone number, because so much of what he needs to remember is stored in the phone itself.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Lepage points to 887 Avenue Murray in Quebec City, his childhood apartment building.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By locating his phone number in the mobile rather than his mind, Lepage showed contemporary technology as externalising memory. Lepage projected video from the phone onto a screen at various points during the show, for instance peering into the scale model apartments of 887 Avenue Murray – often with his comparatively gigantic face and fingers visible through the windows or manipulating the tiny furniture and inhabitants.</p>
<p>The externalisation of memory has its pitfalls and limitations, which Lepage played for laughs. In one running gag, Lepage tried to leave his actor friend a voicemail, but he spoke so circuitously that he kept getting cut off before conveying the content of his message. Lepage finally tried to leave his mobile number, only to find that his friend’s mailbox was now full. </p>
<p>I found this gag funny, not least for its obsolescence, since nowadays one needn’t leave one’s phone number when calling a mobile: the phone records it. </p>
<p>Recording technologies also enable forms of memory that predate the events they memorialise. The same friend, once summoned, turns out to be employed reading “cold cuts” – celebrity obituaries recorded in advance of their deaths – for Canadian radio. He has recorded Lepage’s cold cut, which Lepage manages to extract from him on USB. </p>
<p>In the ensuing scene, Lepage listened to his own obituary, reacting with a mix of ambivalence and outrage to the pre-recorded account of his artistic achievements. Lepage listened via headphones plugged into his laptop, so the audience did not hear the obituary; lowered lighting and Lepage’s bland and thunderous expressions suggested his dissatisfaction with the content.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142464/original/image-20161020-15104-l5vch2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Can we externalise memories?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>887 also linked memory to the politics of language. Lepage narrates and then acts out his inability to memorise Québécois writer Michèle Lalonde’s 1968 poem <a href="http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=738881">Speak White</a>, which he has promised to recite live at an event. </p>
<p>“Speak white” is a racist insult aimed at non-English-speaking Canadians, and Lalonde’s poem, written in French, protests linguistic oppression. Lepage said that he was unable to memorise Speak White because only a man as humble as his father, a taxi driver, had the right to speak the poem. But in a climactic scene, Lepage did recite the poem in French with English surtitles. </p>
<p>Scenes of immersive “plot” rather than “memory” – for instance, scenes involving Lepage and his friend, rather than Lepage’s account of his childhood in Quebec – were likewise spoken in French. Was the implication that Lepage had become as humble as his father? I think, instead, it was that Lepage inhabited a version of his father.</p>
<p>Can we mobilise the externalisation of memory to political ends? Can we use it to wear our fathers’ bodies and to speak in voices stronger and more humble than our own? While these questions and the dazzling scenography bring the show beyond memoir, it is memoir that helps Lepage to answer them.</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2016/events/887/#.WAhDTJN97UY">887</a> is showing at the Arts Centre Melbourne until October 22.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67379/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Balkin 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>We all store parts of our memory outside of our head: in our phones, our computers and our friends. In 887, Robert Lepage brings his memory to life in a gloriously intricate one-man production.Sarah Balkin, Lecturer, English and Theatre Studies, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/669862016-10-13T04:45:15Z2016-10-13T04:45:15ZDeath, beauty and poetry come together in Ancient Rain<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141561/original/image-20161013-16217-erhmwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Kelly, Camille O’Sullivan and Feargal Murray marry poetry and music in a compelling performance as part of the Melbourne Festival.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This new concert, or you might say themed performance, opened at the Melbourne Art Centre on Wednesday evening. It gave the big audience lots of pleasure, with occasional puzzlement.</p>
<p>Paul Kelly is well known round here as a serious all-rounder, but especially as a grave song-writer. Now he has turned from Australian topics to those sounded by modern Irish poetry. He is paired with singer <a href="http://www.camilleosullivan.com/">Camille O’Sullivan</a>, dubbed “a shape-shifter”, who has worked with Paul and with pianist <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/how-we-met-feargal-murray-camille-osullivan-8050294.html">Feargal Murray</a> in setting the melange of chosen poems ebulliently to music. She has an instinct for musical narrative.</p>
<p>The poets range agewise from <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1923/yeats-bio.html">W.B. Yeats</a> through to the young <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.ie/en/Exhibitions/Lines_of_Vision/Enda_Wyley.aspx">Enda Wyley</a>. But one has to grant that those who punters would call the favourites – at this racing time of the year – continue to stand out. </p>
<p>Three famous Yeats poems, including a rendition of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/43289">Easter 1916</a>, that great Rebellion lament, were compelling above all on Wednesday night. But then, so was the quietly plangent ending of Joyce’s story <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/958/">The Dead</a>, read here a deux. There is nothing like it in modern fiction.</p>
<p>We tend to think of Ireland as a land continually sprayed by the showers of the Atlantic, or from any nearby waters. “Ancient Rain” is a title as metaphor. Rain like history wears everything down to its present form, that is to say its present fate. The roles of Irish women, soldiers, rebels, parents and of the young dead are all invoked as drenched by that rain.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141566/original/image-20161013-16203-jqtugx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Light, movement and acoustics lent an intimate feel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>How can you draw a dilly-bag of poems together to make an event, an evening? Well, in Chris Drummond’s direction, use was made of the stage’s great depth, as well as of lighting as a form of eloquence.</p>
<p>The poems were rendered with spectacular variation, sometimes deeply moving, if at times distracting from the lyrics.</p>
<p>Sequence matters, so that Seamus Heaney’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47555">Digging</a>, with its fertile sense of national soil, turned poetry up to our immediate attention. What you dig up with the warmest of energy may well end up chill as falling snow, as this program displayed for us. Mind you, in a number of these musical settings, volume was heartily turned up before the last lines were over. Human predicament as climax?</p>
<p>Musical accompaniment was close, four instruments only. Between them Camille often moved rhythmically, articulating space as though alluding to the four provinces of Ireland. It’s a rural land, after all. But city music came frequently to mind as the songs mediated between pub music and concert hall. Yeats’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57311">An Irish Airman Foresees his Death</a>, a proleptic elegy for a close friend’s son, was of neither genre, only its passionate self.</p>
<p>Camille had a key role in presenting Paula Meehan’s piece, turning on <a href="https://apoemforireland.rte.ie/shortlist/the-statue-of-the-virgin-at-granard/">a statue of the Virgin</a>. She was oddly compelling, but the Virgin’s role is not my cup of tea. This item was surely too long, its form straggly, even if its function was to end the first half of our evening. Across the program, however, Camille interacted subtly with Paul again and again, reality coming back at unexpected angles.</p>
<p>Like history itself, Act Two opened with the theme and cost of wars: in a passionate compulsion from the two stringed instruments. These led in turn into another dated poem by Yeats, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57309">September 1913</a> as hot ballad. And what is that date but the eve of the Great War, a monstrous conflict in which many Irish fought and suffered, although they didn’t have to.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘They call me Mary – Blessed, Holy, Virgin.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet in the heart of 1916 Dublin some patriots died who</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wherever green is worn, <br>
Are changed, changed utterly: <br>
A terrible beauty is born.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is the human oxymoron for us all.</p>
<p>Perhaps the emerald isle is always paradox. Yes, it long has been, for six or seven decades, at least. But also deeply poetic and musical, rooted in family life, as Patrick Kavanagh’s two poems reminded us. They were the very opposites of that warlike thrumming that opened Act Two.</p>
<p>I should note that on the night the diction did not always carry to the back of the hall. Well, it was a large auditorium, while some of the songs had a more intimate feel. At least until the accompanists turned up volume and tempo. Then the rafters were lifted.</p>
<p>And quiet voices could also sway us with soft eloquence. As when Camille and Paul finally evoked the falling snow, which </p>
<blockquote>
<p>lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Death can indeed be the mother of beauty.</p>
<p>Perhaps there was a strong meaning to all these contrasts of light and movement, piano and fortissimo. The contagious music of Ireland is no single thing. Neither metropolitan nor village square, it is eloquence above all. And was so, on the night.</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2016/events/ancient-rain/#.V_7QGJN97UY">Ancient Rain</a> is showing at the Melbourne Arts Centre from October 12 to October 15.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66986/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Wallace-Crabbe 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>In a new collaboration, Paul Kelly has joined singer Camille O'Sullivan and pianist Feargal Murray to set 100 years of Irish poetry to music. As the emerald isle is sung into being, the words of Yeats and Joyce still stand out.Christopher Wallace-Crabbe, Honorary Professor, Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/665632016-10-05T06:15:03Z2016-10-05T06:15:03ZVirtual reality film Collisions is part disaster movie, part travelogue and completely immersive<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140412/original/image-20161005-20235-a820j5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Collisions director Lynette Wallworth used drones and 360 degree filming to create a totally immersive experience. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Indigenous elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan’s first contact with Europeans was observing – without context – one of the Maralinga atomic tests. This dramatic first contact forms the focus of Lynette Wallworth’s digital art/documentary Collisions, opening at ACMI tomorrow as part of the Melbourne Festival. </p>
<p>The 17-minute work showcases innovative excellence in virtual reality and 360 degree panoramic photography combined with computer animation, and an ultra-dynamic soundscape. </p>
<p>Set in the Western Desert, it contains elements of the disaster movie, the travelogue, and the nature story; and represents the uniquely personal vision of Nyarri. </p>
<p>Born in the desert near Maralinga, he also witnessed the 1960s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2010/11/09/3061650.htm">Blue Streak Rocket tests</a>. As a child Nyarri was taken to the Jigalong mission, and is now a painter (and expert horseman) of the Martu people, who reclaimed their land in the 1970s in a legal and ethical stand against uranium mining.</p>
<p>Collisions is clearly conceived and imagined by an artist at her peak and an indigenous collaborator with a powerful message. Their vision is engineered by innovation experts and delivered with uberrealism and total immersion; the real world disappears. “Awesome” is the appropriate adjective. In this magical, mediated “place” we exist so real and yet so virtual. We are in the earliest phase of VR evolution and so far, virtual environments are often clunky versions of the “uncanny valley”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.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>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nyarri Nyarri Morgan in Collisions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Piers Mussared</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Enter the neatly designed immersive theatre at ACMI; slip on your headgear and grab a comfy swivel chair – your vehicle for the experience. You arrive in Nyarri’s home turf by air. Get into the act: you are the camera, can glide around, crane up and down and lean into this world. You find points of access inside a seamless image apparently your own creation (there is no screen) that replaces your “real” environment with a new, temporary or virtual reality; the Western Desert.</p>
<p>Science fiction hit movie The Matrix reminds us that virtual reality has a loose relationship with “truth” and can be used to trick us. This ultra-crisp VR immersion allows inspection of several gorgeous landscapes from all angles. We are at liberty to roam within the scope allowed by 360 degree cameras airborne by drones. </p>
<p>The rig at ACMI is driven by proprietary software from Visual Playgrond paired with Oculus Rift headsets and top-shelf headphones. The image is all happening inside the headset, triggered by a master computer. Headsets on, we are THERE, in the matrix as it were.</p>
<p>THERE as we “fly” above a convoy of trucks entering Martu country. We receive our welcome to the land by Nyarri and his grandson Curtis and are THERE by the hill that they are protecting; a hill that holds uranium. After seeing the Maralinga and Blue Streak Rocket tests, Nyarri is sure this spirit should not be unleashed upon a land better served by custodians who will prevent disaster. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140411/original/image-20161005-20230-mqkj6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nyarri Nyarri Morgan first contact with Europeans was witnessing an atomic test.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Piers Mussared</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We are THERE in his space; his home, his paintings of mushroom clouds. THERE with his family as they tend the land “painting with fire” in a controlled burn-off to prevent wildfire and encourage new growth. A powerful metaphor indeed.</p>
<p>The soundtrack, engineered by Lucas Films Skywalk studio, provides a tantalising surround-soundscape that leads us further into the image, around corners of discovery to follow the giggles of children, red dogs, birds and the wind – I swivel around and crane my head to discover unique moments and angles within the larger vision. I tilt my head to discover the moon above by surprise. </p>
<p>Every audience member literally sees a different version of events and there is no way you can cover the full 360 degrees of panoramic possibility; it’s an infinite feast of imagery and locations. The detail is exquisite. I reach out to touch the rocks, every one of which is “known” to Aboriginal caretakers. A dramatic highpoint occurs as we are caught in a nuclear explosion. Somehow kids will love this animated scene; kept “safe” amid destructive, cosmic splendour and reassured by the gently confident narration of our witness, Nyarri.</p>
<p>This brilliant showcase is the brainchild of Australian artist Lynette Wallworth and was produced by US-based producer Nicole Newnham, with support from the Sundance Institute. This is the third of Wallworth’s works located in the desert heart of their community. The artist is invited back because she offers a respectful “deep listening” approach to the messages therein. Her beautiful aesthetics and technical virtuousity invite us to absorb the heartfelt legal and ethical stand that the Martu people make against uranium mining.</p>
<p>Wallworth has shown at the World Economic Forum, Davos, the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, The American Museum of Natural History, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and so on. Her affinity with scientific projects ignites our appetite for spectacle and colour while grounding us in information that raises new questions, new ideas. </p>
<p>Kudos to ACMI, the Adelaide Film Festival and Australia Council for supporting this breakthrough work which marries the emergent tools of virtual reality with new perspectives on Australian cosmology, art, landcare and human rights.</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<p><em>Collisions is showing at the <a href="https://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Events/COLLISIONS.html">Art Gallery of South Australia</a> from October 5 to October 30, at <a href="https://www.acmi.net.au/collisions">ACMI</a> from October 6 to January 15, and at the <a href="http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/homeground/collisions.aspx">Sydney Opera House on October 8 and 9</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>Lynette Wallworth and Indigenous elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan will both give a <a href="https://www.acmi.net.au/collisions">talk at ACMI on October 8 </a>.</em> <em>The ACMI exhibition and talk events are both co-presented by Melbourne Festival.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66563/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Dethridge 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>What if your first contact with the Western world was witnessing an atomic test? This is the story of Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, told in stunning virtual reality in animation/documentary hybrid Collisions.Lisa Dethridge, Coordinator Masters of Media Professional Research; Game Design Research, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/507602015-11-23T23:53:34Z2015-11-23T23:53:34ZCrowded house: how to keep festivals relevant in an oversaturated market<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102747/original/image-20151123-435-147lc6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Festivals can no longer focus solely on their recurring, physical events. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Bella Ann Townes</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ah, festivals. We love ‘em. Around Australia, festivals spring up like mushrooms after rain. But as the cultural sector faces a serious budget squeeze, how can they survive? </p>
<p>Tomorrow, on November 25, this question will be, if not answered, then at least canvassed by a panel of festival head honchos as they discuss the <a href="https://www.vu.edu.au/news-events/events/game-changers-the-future-of-festivals">Future of Festivals</a> as part of Victoria University’s <a href="https://www.vu.edu.au/footscray-university-town/news-events/game-changers-conversation-series">Game Changers</a> conversation series.</p>
<p>As Australia’s festival roster grows ever larger, organisers must grapple with relevance. How does each festival justify its existence, financially and culturally, in what is increasingly a saturated market? </p>
<p>Let’s look at Writers Festivals as an example of this growth. In 1960 the first Australian writing festival, Adelaide Writers Week, featured in that city’s inaugural <a href="http://adelaidefestival.ruciak.net/archive/1960%20Booking%20Guide.pdf">Festival of Arts program</a>.</p>
<p>By by 2012 there were some <a href="http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/writers-festivals">30 literary festivals</a> across the country. That figure has since climbed close to, if not past, <a href="http://www.wheelercentre.com/notes/2e884e271f56">the 100 mark</a> – more than two dozen of those <a href="http://www.literaryfestivals.com.au/literary-festivals-by-state-or-territory/victorian-literary-festivals">in Victoria alone</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102742/original/image-20151123-423-7svhpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Melbourne Writers Festival, 2007.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pat M2007</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Why do we need so many? How can they all justify their position? Sure, there’s an appreciable difference in scale between, say, the <a href="mwf.com.au/">Melbourne Writers Festival</a> and the <a href="http://www.brimbanklibraries.vic.gov.au/index.php/writersfestival">Brimbank Writers and Readers Festival</a>, but they both set out to stage the same kind of event and to attract and serve elements of the same audience.</p>
<h2>On the verge of merging?</h2>
<p>World Vision CEO Tim Costello called last month for charities to <a href="http://www.news-mail.com.au/news/its-merge-or-die-for-qld-charities/2836265/">consider merging</a> or to pool resources in order to survive rather than continue to compete for limited attention and resources. Is it time for festivals to look at a similar model?</p>
<p>It’s not a cure-all, but at the very least the sector can consider synergies and redundancies. In the last week, I’ve spoken with Georgie Meagher, artistic director and CEO of the <a href="nextwave.org.au/">Next Wave Festival</a> and festival and theatre director <a href="http://www.ianpidd.com.au/">Ian Pidd</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102743/original/image-20151123-442-1mnylwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People prepare for a nude sunrise solstice swim as part of Dark Mofo, Hobart, 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Andrew Drummond</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They both agree that the Melbourne festival scene is at or near saturation point. To survive, organisers need to continually investigate who they are serving and why. </p>
<p>Pidd argued that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>it’s important that there are niche art form festivals like <a href="http://dancemassive.com.au">Dance Massive</a>, which is a hot-house environment that generates a conversation focused purely on contemporary dance. But the larger flagship festivals need to ensure they reach out beyond singular arts communities. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>They need to achieve what Jonathan Holloway, artistic director of the <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne">Melbourne Festival</a>, calls “cut-through”: the ability to create spectacle and entertainment, but also define and transform a city or a population through art, celebration and challenge. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.cnymelbourne.com.au/events/east-meets-west-lunar-new-year-festival/">East Meets West Lunar New Year Festival</a> has adopted this self-reflective approach. Originally a cultural bridge-building celebration of the Asian Lunar New year based in Melbourne’s west, this festival has changed and grown with its community. </p>
<p>It now welcomes African, Indian and other more recent migrant populations into its fold. It is still focused on building links between cultures, but its organisers recognise that a simple east-meets-west dichotomy no longer speaks to their entire audience.</p>
<p>The digital disruption is further changing festivals’ relationship to their audiences. It used to be the case that festivals were a lot like circuses: they’d come and go each year offering a few days of glamorous spectacle, leaving behind only memories and a circle of yellowed grass where the big-top was.</p>
<p>Now, according to Holloway, festivals must play a year-round role via “probing, prodding and engaging with community online”. He likens festivals to soccer clubs:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s not just the 90 minutes on the pitch each week, it’s a continual contribution to the promotion of community, health and wellbeing, and social cohesion, ambition and possibility.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, there is still the annual physical event – the festival itself – which offers an engagement with art and entertainment that can’t be replicated online, but festivals can no longer focus solely on that.</p>
<h2>Moving away from the festival</h2>
<p>Marcia Ferguson, artistic director of the <a href="http://bigwest.com.au/festival-2015/">Big West Festival</a>, sees this change in focus as crucial. She argues that in order to stay vibrant and relevant, each festival must reconsider what it delivers, moving away from annual platforms for artistic celebration and display:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What next? How do we ensure that the artists we showcase are introduced to networks and economic pathways that lead to self-employment? How do we help them, outside of the festival, develop strategies that might free them from a reliance on funding bodies for support? Otherwise I ask what is the festival for?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pidd suggests, perhaps controversially, that sometimes the best way to achieve this or to “invigorate the cultural life of a town” might be by eschewing the idea of a festival and investing money in infrastructure instead:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is it better to spend A$2 million each year on a festival, or would it be better to build a recording studio that will still be there in 10 years time, or to refurbish a theatre space or seed an ongoing dance project? </p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, I love festivals, but it’s great to have the opportunity to get together with other festival directors and have this conversation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hopefully the Future of Festivals conversation starts a larger movement of self reflection in Australia’s ever-expanding festival industry.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50760/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Weldon works for Victoria University.</span></em></p>Festivals are a vibrant part of Australian culture but, as arts funding dries up, festival organisers will have to get creative if they want to survive. The recurring, physical event isn’t enough.John Weldon, Lecturer, School of Communication and the Arts, Victoria UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/491372015-10-22T06:15:36Z2015-10-22T06:15:36ZThe Experiment is a musical monodrama to love, hate, or both<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99284/original/image-20151022-7995-kte0wt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Experiment is a musical monodrama that examines the nature of experimentation itself against two key themes: memory and trauma.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shane Reid.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last night, The Experiment – of which I’m part – opened at the Melbourne Festival. The story of its creation began six years ago, and was guided by a series of serendipitous introductions. </p>
<p>In simple terms, The Experiment is just that: a musical monodrama in which our ambition was to look at the very nature of experimentation itself, as well as examine the interplay of two key themes: memory and trauma. It is a musical composition with theatrical elements. Not a theatre work with music.</p>
<p>Here’s how it came about: </p>
<p>In 2009, I met Chilean guitarist <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/mauricio-carrasco/#.Vig8LhArJBw">Mauricio Carrasco</a> in the south of France while I was in residence at Camargo Foundation in Cassis. Despite not having previously written for the guitar, I was struck by his skill and presence as a performer; we instantly agreed to make a work together. </p>
<p>It would feature music, of course, but also electronics, text and video. This last element, we felt, was generally poorly conceived and executed within concert settings; we would do better. </p>
<p>A week later in London, I saw British playwright <a href="http://literature.britishcouncil.org/mark-ravenhill">Mark Ravenhill</a> perform the premiere of his 20-minute monologue <a href="http://www.samuelfrench.com/p/58626/experiment-the">The Experiment</a> at Southwark Theatre. A darkly ingenious reflection on the ambiguity of memory, it was dense, punchy and remarkable. </p>
<p>Ravenhill’s production told the story of Mengele-esque experiments on twin children that may or may not have happened. At its centre was an unreliable narrator who may have been the perpetrator or the victim of these experiments. Or simply have seen them in a horror film or documentary. In his text, with its rare tone, cadence and power, there was rich material to work with. </p>
<p>And so we began work on translating Ravenhill’s monologue into a musical monodrama, a process that involved layering the text with music, light, sound and video. </p>
<p>The provocation for Ravenhill’s text was Peter Singer’s <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/philosophy/ethics/practical-ethics-3rd-edition">Practical Ethics</a> (1979), a contentious text that argues human supremacism lies at the heart of animal experimentation. Singer wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If experimenters are not prepared to use orphaned humans with severe and irreversible brain damage, their readiness to use nonhuman animals seems to discriminate on the basis of species alone … There seems to be no morally relevant characteristic that such humans have which nonhuman animals lack.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The disquiet of this statement triggers primal responses in humans. The disquiet, the fundamental discomfort in knowing something to be true but nonetheless denying it, was an important point of reference as we developed the work and aestheticised Ravenhill’s script. </p>
<p>Our ambition was not to shock the audience – nothing so banal or naive – but rather to create a soporific meditation, in which questions are raised but not resolved, wherein the non-narrative ethical thought bubbles of Ravenhill’s and Singer’s ideas could menacingly float. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99285/original/image-20151022-7989-mvz9yc.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>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Experiment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shane Reid.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At its heart are the blinkered justifications of science at which Singer takes aim, and the collapse of classical witness-as-truth inquiry that Ravenhill is pre-occupied with. These inquiries work in parallel with a succession of reflections on the seductive, temporal and failed nature of gadget culture. </p>
<p>The work’s spoken word is delivered in muted underplayed tones – and by a musician, not an actor. Delivered in a sustained <em>sotto voce</em>, and offset with a dark filigree of muffled sound and musical interludes, this is composer not director thinking. </p>
<p>The work brings together a team of collaborators, among them French painter and video artist <a href="http://maulbox.com/">Emmanuel Bernardoux</a>, production designer <a href="http://gingold.com.au/">Matthew Gingold</a>, dramaturge <a href="http://www.punctum.com.au/punctum">Jude Anderson</a> and production manager Lisa Osborn. Later in the piece we were joined by Argentinian guest composer Fernando Garnero, lighting designer Niklas Pajanti, sound consultants Byron Scullin and Marco Cher-Gibard and artisanal makers Nara Demasson, Benjamin Kolaitis and Anna Conrick. </p>
<p>Our show is a technological <a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/Wunderkammer">wunderkammer</a> in which the audience, seated under 48 speakers, are both the subject and observer of our experimentation. It works for some people. Others not so much. But it has been intriguing to watch this work splinter weird critical opinion in <a href="http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/live-reviews/review-experiment-sydney-festival">Sydney</a> and <a href="http://indaily.com.au/arts-and-culture/2015/03/12/the-experiment-seeks-to-unsettle/">Adelaide</a>. </p>
<p>Fortunately, I like the weird. Not everyone can sit through John Water’s extraordinary camp/dark essay on hysteria <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075936/">Desperate Living</a> (1977), or swallow in one sitting Alejandro Jodorowsky’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071615/">The Holy Mountain</a> (1973). But like these two personal heroes, I prefer to work directly with the abstract immanence of symbols placed in relation to each other. </p>
<p>The myriad of readings that follow is for me far richer than more prescribed direct signposting.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99286/original/image-20151022-7995-1h8wdx0.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>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Experiment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shane Reid.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What you will see and hear will in part be up to you. The Experiment is dark, dense, unrelenting, intentionally emotionally cold (like medical and scientific experimentation itself) and even bleak. But it is definitely not passive. </p>
<p>Like or hate it – or indeed in the case of some critics, both – The Experiment reminds me more and more of <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=lNYGAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Inquisitive Man</a> (1814) by Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov, from which the English expression about the elephant in the room comes. There are many dark elephants in the room we have created. </p>
<p>It remains the task of audiences to decide what from within it they wish to remember, or indeed, perceive at all.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>The Experiment is at Melbourne Festival until October 24, details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/the-experiment/#.VihjGBArJBw">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49137/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Chisholm is currently the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award at University of Melbourne where he is completing a PhD in Music Composition and the Hermeneutics of Collaborative Practice. </span></em></p>The Experiment – showing at the Melbourne Festival – is just that: an experiment. It aims to create a meditation in which disquieting questions can menacingly float. Does it succeed? Well …David Chisholm, Composer, PhD Candidate, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music , The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/480002015-10-20T04:20:35Z2015-10-20T04:20:35ZTwo plus two equals 1984: is this Orwell’s nightmare or a smug satire for the inner party?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98969/original/image-20151020-23275-17me81v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">1984's politics, while tuned for the threat of a different villain at a different time, ring eerily true today.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>First the good news. Headlong Theatre’s <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/1984/#.ViWHdhArKys">1984</a>, currently showing as part of the Melbourne Festival, is competent, skillful and clever. It’s easy to watch and has a pleasant aesthetic that relies on post-war design and long-forgotten standards drifting through the soundscape to generate a sense of comfortable nostalgia. </p>
<p>But the production is burdened by the weight of its forebear. </p>
<p>It employs stagey narrative devices sparsely but authoritatively; an on-stage book-club reading of Orwell’s 1984 is a particularly egregious example of the show’s foregrounding of its bulkiest aspect – the source text.</p>
<p>1984, of course, is a heavily laden text, which turned its author’s name into a byword for authoritarian nightmare. Its politics, while tuned for the threat of a different villain at a different time, ring eerily true today. </p>
<p>Of course, this is evidence more of the systemic persistence of the structures of power than any prescience on the part of original author.</p>
<p><a href="http://headlong.co.uk/">Headlong</a> – which began life in the UK in 1974 as The Oxford Stage Company – has specialised in adaptation, and its work is highly regarded. The company is also responsible for developing works by Lucy Prebble, including The Effect and Enron.</p>
<p>But with 1984 the dramaturgical logic of the production is overburdened. From the first intoning church bell that opens the production, it never escapes its inheritance and becomes a kind of parody of the original. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Headlong Theatre’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our knowing laughter at famously telling lines from the book reveals that, as an audience, we are all Big Brother, watching. It also foregrounds the fact that, in modern times, we each are Big Brother to one another. Through social media we willingly, actively participate in total surveillance culture. </p>
<p>Instead of the ominous shadows Orwell casts over his world, the absurdity of “our” world is perhaps more evocative of Beckett. </p>
<p>And this despite the fact that, as the production itself reminds us, the “never ending war”, “Emmanuel Goldstein” and the “terrorist brotherhood” all really do exist in their own mediated way today.</p>
<h2>Screen time</h2>
<p>It’s worth noting that Headlong’s use of media problematises the role of the female protagonist Julia (Janine Harouni) in interesting ways. At first the use of video screens on stage appears as another unavoidable image. Naturally the world is dominated by the screen – it’s 1984. </p>
<p>The same holds true in our world too, through a proliferation of thousands of little screens as opposed to the lowering big screen that, in Headlong’s handling, has replaced the sky, making the overloaded dramaturgy particularly apparent. </p>
<p>A screen on stage means something different from a screen in a novel or a screen on a screen for that matter – the screen’s “liveness”, in a stage context, is thrown immediately into question. </p>
<p>Until its introduction, everything we’ve seen happen on stage has actually happened; the physical bodies of the actors are present in the room with us, no matter how far away. But when they leave the stage and appear “elsewhere” on the screen, our lived experience of them is severed. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Headlong Theatre’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But two crucial moments of Julia’s interaction with the cameras fundamentally alter her character by introducing potentially new information. When male protagonist Winston (Matthew Spencer) leaves the room for the first time, and Julia is left alone with a snow globe, she moves into the view of a specific camera at a deliberate angle, and then quickly moves out of it again to place the snow globe in view of another camera at another specific angle. </p>
<p>This is done, undoubtedly, to show the audience the snow globe, but it also reveals to us momentarily that Julia knows the cameras are there. She uses the camera to show the snow globe to us, at once the audience and Big Brother. </p>
<p>If she knows where the cameras are, the implication is that Julia is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Police">Thought Police</a> after all, as Winston first suspected. But the force of the original text overwhelms this possibility and reasserts itself in the final scene, as Julia and Winston confess their failures to one another. </p>
<p>An argument could be made that neither this production, nor Orwell, ever show us what actually happened to Julia. So we can’t really know what to believe.</p>
<p>Ultimately Headlong’s 1984 rests on a fairly antiquated notion of truth and the authenticity of the individual and so reaffirms the cultural assumptions of the audience. It thereby serves to strengthen that which it purports to warn us against: the erasure of dissent.</p>
<p>The argument it lays out, about a book that changes you forever as soon as you read it, disappears in an infinite regression of self-referentiality. We are Big Brother. We are the dead. </p>
<p>Is any staged production of 1984 doomed to bear the same burden? </p>
<p>Certainly the dogmas of the past are still insistently present here in Headlong’s attempt but, before it begins, because we already know how it ends, it feels as though an urgent warning to the post war “proles” has been co-opted as slightly smug satire for the inner party.</p>
<p><br>
<em>1984 by Headlong is showing at the Melbourne Festival until October 25. Details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/1984/#.ViWHdhArKys">here</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48000/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Reid 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>Orwell’s 1984 is a heavily laden text, which turned the author’s name into a byword for authoritarian nightmare. So what can we take from the 2015 stage version at the Melbourne Festival?Robert Reid, Lecturer in Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/479992015-10-19T05:11:02Z2015-10-19T05:11:02ZIf I be left behind: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona reminds us too many voices remain unheard<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98768/original/image-20151019-25123-1ngj4if.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rokia Traoré’s poetic lyrics expand the themes of love, jealously and pride in Desdemona.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The tragedy of Shakespeare’s Desdemona haunts the literary canon. Her murder at the hands of her husband Othello, blinded by jealous rage, is no less troubling now than it was in 1603. </p>
<p>In Othello, Desdemona is an idealised woman, as director Peter Sellars notes - “a vision of perfection” – who remains mostly silent. In Desdemona, a collaboration between Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré, and Sellars – currently showing in Melbourne – the voices of women take centre stage. </p>
<p>The stage itself is a sparse graveyard, where Desdemona (Tina Benko) gets to give her side of the story from the afterlife. </p>
<p>Yet her tragedy has often taken a back seat to the difficulty of race in the play. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/apr/07/theatre1">Debate continues</a> about how best to cast Othello — originally played in black-face — in light of the racism of the script and the complex identity that Othello constructs for himself as “assimilated other”. </p>
<p>In the opening scenes, Benko channels a caged restlessness. Her eyes dart around the theatre, her head moves in twitches — she is ill at ease. But her gaze is also defiant, as is her voice. She refuses the role of innocent, tragic bystander and the fate she was born into as a woman. She takes ownership of her life, and the choices she has made.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98775/original/image-20151019-25107-zaceyv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Desdemona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In what becomes the structure of the performance, we move between Morrison’s text and Traoré’s music. The calm and assured presence of Traoré and the four musicians accompanying her is a world apart from Benko’s Desdemona. </p>
<p>The compositions, incorporating voices, guitar, n’goni and kora are beautiful, and Traoré’s voice compelling with its delicate strength and clarity. Most songs are sung in the her native Bambara, spoken in Mali, west Africa, with the lyrics translated and projected. </p>
<p>I couldn’t help feel that absorbing them as text didn’t capture their quality in song, and this is perhaps telling of the difficulty of speaking across cultures and languages.</p>
<p>Yet it also drew attention to the two distinct writers at work. Morrison’s language was powerful and direct, speaking within the story, while Traoré’s more poetic lyrics sought to expand the themes of love, jealously and pride. </p>
<p>In terms of the onerous task of responding to the Bard, it was fitting that each found their own unique language, and Seller’s direction ensured neither voice dominated.</p>
<p>In preparing for this review, I became particularly conscious of my own preconceptions and how they might shape my critical response to the work. The gendered politics of critique have been hotly debated in recent weeks thanks to Jane Griffiths’ <a href="http://performing.artshub.com.au/news-article/opinions-and-analysis/performing-arts/jane-griffiths/what-women-critics-know-that-men-dont-249447">article</a> examining reviews of her production of Antigone. </p>
<p>In the piece, Griffiths analyses such 10 reviews, highlighting the breakdown in response along gender lines. She writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The extraordinary division in gender in the critical response prompts me to analyse the assumptions, misinformation, and downright sexism out there in the critical cultural conversation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Favourable reviews of her work, she writes, were written by female critics; the less favourable were by men.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Men who didn’t like the fact I didn’t write the story they wanted to see, or act the way they thought a woman should be. (Men) who would not engage with the world I was “narrativizing”. In other words, written by male critics who cannot or will not make the act of translation most women have spent their lives perfecting.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I am both white and male. I highlight this, and Griffith’s analysis, because this performance speaks to the subjectivity of both gender and race. From the outset, Desdemona speaks of the various ways that men make the rules. </p>
<p>She describes her lessons in constraint and duty, to lower her eyes as a subservient woman. Her only respite from the stultifying patriarchy was her African maid, who she knew as Barbary (a character fleshed out from the heartbroken Barbara). We hear how Desdemona cherished her, learnt her songs, and the high standards for love she instilled. </p>
<p>As the performance progresses, Desdemona converses with the others who have joined her in the afterlife — Othello and Emilia. All speak <em>through</em> Desdemona, and are voiced by Benko. While her Othello was initially confusing, hearing his story from her mouth built considerable psychological complexity. </p>
<p>Morrison’s Othello is immeasurably monstrous, and the secret brotherhood shared with Iago is painted here as the reason Othello succumbs to Iago’s deceit. </p>
<p>But this monstrosity highlights the strength of Desdeomona’s love, which she gives not in spite of his wrongs, but in addition. Emilia, pitched wonderfully by Benko, is caustic and forthright, challenging Desdemona to consider her own privilege. It shows the development of a more complex Desdemona, growing to perceive the limits of her own understanding.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98776/original/image-20151019-25123-771fzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Desdemona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nowhere is this more clear than in the scene where she finally speaks to Barbary. When Traoré voices the character, she steps between the two texts, speaking across them. </p>
<p>Tellingly, it is the first voice in Morrison’s script that does not emanate from the white actor on stage. When Desdemona says “you were my best friend” the response is unflinching:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was your slave. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The brutal truth is not to apportion blame, but to clarify. And it is from this clarity that they begin to find a common ground. In an otherwise very still performance, they come together, and embrace. There are no easy answers, though. </p>
<p>The characters all have their regrets, and therein lies the beauty of this production: to let them all speak. It is a timely reminder that <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-doesnt-she-just-leave-the-realities-of-escaping-domestic-violence-29537">many voices</a> remain unheard. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Desdemona runs until today as part of the Melbourne Festival. Details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/desdemona/#.ViQ5ORArKys">here</a>. It will be shown in Sydney as part of the Sydney Festival on October 23-25. Details <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/info/desdemona">here</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47999/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Asher Warren 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>The Melbourne Festival production of Desdemona, written by Toni Morrison and with music by Malian songstress Rokia Traore, puts the women of Shakespeare’s Othello centre stage.Asher Warren, PhD Candidate in interactive and participatory art, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/492242015-10-15T19:17:58Z2015-10-15T19:17:58ZToni Morrison’s Desdemona invites us to listen not just hear<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98491/original/image-20151015-27968-rjbg8a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Desdemona is one of several productions at this year's Melbourne Festival that invites its audiences to listen to tragedy and its reverberations.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/desdemona/#.Vh8iXhArJBw">Desdemona</a>, Toni Morrison’s response to Shakespeare’s Othello, which opens today at the Melbourne Festival, we are invited to do something – something it seems we are being invited to do as audiences of tragedy ever more: to listen.</p>
<p>Last year in London, I was bowled over by Euripides’ Medea, adapted for the <a href="http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/medea">National Theatre</a> by Ben Powers.
It opens with the Nurse, caregiver to Medea’s two sons, anticipating their murder by their mother. </p>
<p>At the close of the play, after the deed is done, the Nurse turns back to the audience, to say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I ask you again <br>
You who watch. <br>
How can there ever be any ending than this? <br>
First silence. <br>
Then darkness. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>That warm July week, the brutal inevitability of the infanticide was all the more troubling for “we who watch”. Child death was in the headlines. After three Israeli teenagers had been <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/21/hamas-kidnapping-three-israeli-teenagers-saleh-al-arouri-qassam-brigades">kidnapped and killed</a> by members of Hamas, the Israeli Defence Force launched an operation whose high child casualty rate <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/world/no-safe-place-for-civilians-in-gaza-says-un-as-child-death-toll-reaches-149-20140723-zvvz3.html">drew outrage</a>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, reports on the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28357880">shooting down of flight MH17 over Ukraine</a> focused in particular on the fact that almost a third of the 283 passengers were under 18. Were we, I wondered as I laboured under the weight of the Nurse’s hex, becoming a species that had turned on its own children? </p>
<p>Some 15 months later, those events were superseded by others. Most recently, the so-called “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/10/10-truths-about-europes-refugee-crisis">refugee crisis</a>” has thrown up countless images of displaced individuals of all ages. Then pictures of a three-year old face-down in the surf on a Turkish beach prompted a concerted political response, and made of little <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/refugee-crisis-friends-and-family-fill-in-gaps-behind-harrowing-images">Alan Kurdi</a> a perverse sort of sacrificial necessity. </p>
<p>The Nurse’s rebuke to “you who watch” in Medea is a standing one. In art, tragedy reflects an enduring, inescapable fascination with our own mortality. In the media, it tags event after event in a seemingly endless parade of wretched suffering. Tragedy can be overwhelmingly powerful, or it can turn us into helpless onlookers. Neither reaction is sufficient – but what comes next?</p>
<p>In Desdemona, another nurse character offers to split the difference between the double-whammy of silence and darkness to which Medea’s nurse condemns her audience. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Desdemona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Played by <a href="http://www.rokiatraore.net/bio-english/">Malian singer Rokia Traoré</a> (pictured above), Barbara, the lovelorn maid to Desdemona’s mother who is referred to in Othello, is here reconceived as Barbary, erstwhile nursemaid to Desdemona. In the afterlife, their ghosts tell and sing Morrison’s revisionist stories of the past. </p>
<p>Many of those stories are traumatic, including those of Othello’s experiences as a child soldier, and of the rapes he subsequently committed. But, the performance suggests, while we may find ourselves staring time after time into the abyss, we need not do so in silence. </p>
<p>Desdemona shifts the emphasis of Othello from hubris to history and from looking to listening. A personal stake in history arises, it suggests, from the intimacies of tragic knowledge, which enter the body as stealthily as sound. </p>
<p>Listening? It seems an ineffably fragile thing – precious, even – in the face of the urgent, attention-grabbing challenges of our age. But to cultivate a capacity for listening may, at the very least, complement impulsive sympathy and the well-meaning but often short-lived desire for remedial action. </p>
<p>It is perhaps no coincidence in contemporary culture that “I hear you” is shorthand for “I know what you are saying, but I am not going to alter my position”. </p>
<p>What does it mean to listen, rather than hear? </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/gadamer/">philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer</a> described interpretation as a process of “uninterrupted listening”, requiring attention precisely to what we do not anticipate. He wrote in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213142.Truth_and_Method">Truth and Method</a> (1960):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A person who is trying to understand a text has to keep something at a distance – namely everything that suggests itself, on the basis of his own prejudices, as the meaning expected – as soon as it is rejected by the sense of the text itself. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Gadamer’s emphasis on sustained attention highlights, listening takes time in a way that the visual apprehension of a scene or situation appears not to. Listening as uninterruptedly as possible in our noisy world may better attune us to the ground bass of those tragic events that unfold without fanfare, but instead slowly, persistently, and to devastating effect. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Desdemona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is unsurprising that therapists concerned with the ways transgenerational trauma causes past catastrophes to reverberate through the behaviours of young people advocate “<a href="http://aboriginal.telethonkids.org.au/media/54889/chapter10.pdf">deep listening</a>”: a mode of respectful, non-judgemental attention that can serve to manage group discussions about sensitive topics. </p>
<p>By contrast, one of the most perplexing things about climate change is how much of modern life continues to function at odds with what we are constantly being told about the environmental transformations already underway. </p>
<p>At this point, the transition from such weighty topics to considerations of art easily founders over questions of efficacy – or lack thereof. That said, it is striking to note that Desdemona is far from alone among this year’s Melbourne Festival offerings in inviting audiences to listen to tragedy and its reverberations. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/a-genre-hopping-triumph-the-rabbits-47554">The Rabbits</a>, based on Shaun Tan’s children’s book about the colonisation of Australia, <a href="https://theconversation.com/fly-away-peter-on-the-opera-stage-is-a-masterful-adaptation-38160">Fly Away Peter</a>, a staging of David Malouf’s First World War novel, and <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/the-experiment/#.Vh8moBArJBw">The Experiment</a>, a multi-media interpretation of a monodrama by Mark Ravenhill about the ethics of experiments on children, are all works that have met the challenges of adaptation by turning to musical performance of one form or another. </p>
<p>Given their diversity, one would be hard-pressed to identify a single reason or effect. But the contribution that music can make to the staged recovery of what has been silenced or rendered inarticulate must play a role here. </p>
<p>Taken together, along with Desdemona, we can at least say that Melbourne audiences are this year being invited to participate in a certain kind of attention training. The act of spectating – often characterised as a passive activity – is here reformulated as an opportunity to fall quiet, the better, as the sociologist Les Back wrote in <a href="http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781444118964_sample_579486.pdf">Deep Listening: Researching Music and the Cartographies of Sound</a> (2014), to “think with our ears”.</p>
<p>To what end, though? That the act of listening may itself be a reparative activity: a re-balancing of the sensorium away from visual immediacy, and a qualified challenge to the desire for over-hasty interruption or intervention. The larger trajectory must also encompass what Gerard Goggin, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304310903012636">writing with reference to disability</a>, calls “varieties of listening”, including embodied modes of reception that do not privilege sound.</p>
<p>I have always admired “good listeners”. Lacking the patience or humility, I am all too ready to interject. But <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/after-tragedy-listening/#.Vh8nsxArJBw">on Sunday</a>, I will be keen to hear what panellists Genevieve Grieves, Peter Sellars, Marcia Langton and Mary Luckhurst have to say about questions such as: What comes after tragedy? What social actions and creative responses do such events demand of us? How do we live with death, and not just live but flourish and thrive? </p>
<p>Addressing such questions reminds us that listening can be a valuable precursor to being listened to. </p>
<p>At the beginning of Powers’ Medea, the Nurse says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Listen. <br>
There’s a story that has to be told. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so unfolds the tragedy. Is it possible to change the script? Only if first we listen and then, having done so, newly appreciating the responsibilities of speech and the affective capacities of sound, we take the Nurse’s position, now unburdened by fatalism. </p>
<p>Listen. There’s a story that has to be told. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Desdemona is at Melbourne Festival from October 16-19, details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/desdemona/#.Vh8pABArJBw">here</a>. Paul Rae will chair After Tragedy, Listening: A roundtable response to Toni Morrison’s Desdemona on October 18, details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/after-tragedy-listening/#.Vh8oVxArJBx">here</a>. The production plays in Sydney as part of Sydney Festival from October 23-25, details <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/info/desdemona">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49224/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Rae 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>Tony Morrison’s Desdemona, which opens today in Melbourne, asks many questions of its audience. Perhaps most pressingly: what does it really mean to listen, rather than hear?Paul Rae, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/490412015-10-14T19:33:03Z2015-10-14T19:33:03ZGoodbye to all that: Orwell’s 1984 is a boot stamping on a human face no more<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98339/original/image-20151013-876-1qnjb2t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Every year thousands of students read George Orwell's 1984 and are doubtless convinced that its perspective on language and power is "definitive". Except that it's not; and hasn’t been since at least the 1970s. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The blurb for <a href="http://roberticke.com/reviews/webcv.pdf">Robert Icke</a> and <a href="http://www.duncanmacmillan.co.uk/">Duncan Macmillan</a>’s stage adaption of George Orwell’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5470.1984">1984</a> for the Melbourne Festival, announces that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The definitive book of the 20th century is re-examined in this radical, award-winning adaptation exploring surveillance, identity and why Orwell’s vision of the future is as relevant now as ever.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A blurb is a blurb. But if we wanted to define the 20th century with a book that explores the extremes into which humanity can descend, then one might ask whether 1984 stands up against, say, Primo Levi’s account of surviving Auschwitz, in <a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780349100135?redirected=true&gclid=CO2xn4rOwMgCFZeSvQodoa8Eeg">If This is a Man</a>, printed the year before Orwell’s 1949 book. </p>
<p>The blurb’s position is nonetheless common and every year thousands of schoolkids read it and many are doubtless convinced that its perspective on language and power are indeed “definitive”. Except that it’s not; and hasn’t been since at least the 1970s. And it’s relevance for our future must be near to zero.</p>
<p>1984 is a literary curio, a time-capsule containing – in terms of the functions of language and power in political and cultural life – elements that had already reached their zenith when Orwell published it in 1948. </p>
<p>The book’s dystopian horizon reflected the psychology of Orwell himself, a writer shaped by the traumatic political and economic transformations that post WWI Britain underwent in the 1920s and 1930s. </p>
<p>In this real-world context, Orwell’s social and cultural antennae were directed towards a generalised social domination – by class, by political institutions, by militarism — and 1984 was a projection of such domination taken to extremes. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Orwell’s generational pessimism seemed validated in the totalitarianism of the time and 1984 brilliantly expresses this as a political parable. In 1940 he reviewed Hitler’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54270.Mein_Kampf?from_search=true&search_version=service">Mein Kampf</a> and remarked that Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini had “enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples”. </p>
<p>But physical terror alone has its limits. It must be accompanied, as Orwell saw in Mein Kampf, and in an idea he freighted into 1984, by what Hitler called “the big lie”, <em>die grosse lüge</em>. To repeat a lie as truth endlessly through narrow communication channels that people cannot avoid will convince many, or enough of them, that it is true: 2 + 2 = 5. </p>
<p>Such concentrated communicative power over language, enabled dictators to prevail and for the fictional Big Brother of 1984 to create the control-language of Newspeak. Notwithstanding the book’s projection 36 years hence, Orwell was no futurologist. </p>
<p>Futurology exists as a way of thinking about how things might be different, better or worse, but changed. Orwell saw the anti-utopian expression of his own world as a world that would always be, and the future as “a boot stamping on a human face –forever”.</p>
<p>The period between 1950 and 1970 seemed to underline his vision: a Cold War that appeared permanent, the “big lies” propagated West and East about the superiority of capitalism or communism, and so on. But from the 1970s onwards, two things occurred that would cause Orwell’s message about the nature of language and power to become relics from another age: the rise of free-market neoliberalism (globalisation), and the computer revolution (also globalisation). </p>
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<span class="caption">Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival.</span></span>
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<p>The emergence of networked society has utterly transformed the material forms of communication and, as a consequence, the nature and function of language and power. If we exempt the claims about the wonders of the free market (an immense indemnity, admittedly), then <em>die grosse lüge</em> is no longer possible. </p>
<p>The capacity for mass self-communication has generated uncountable outlets for information-creation and sharing. </p>
<p>It has also meant the capacity for the production of numberless <em>kleine lügen</em>. Networked society is shot-through with lies, half-truths and distortions that make “truth” difficult to find, and the big lie (told again and again for effect) impossible for governments to perpetrate. </p>
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<span class="caption">Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival.</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Indeed, western governments are no longer in the business of “persuasion”, only survival. And mainstream media, or what’s left of it, devotes its efforts to being heard within the noise and distraction of pervasive social media. </p>
<p>When the power of language dissipates, then so too does power itself – atomised to circulate endlessly through the webs of the network, never being able to settle and concentrate for long.</p>
<p>Icke and Macmillan’s 1984 should be judged on its own merits. One of those merits, however, shouldn’t be as a kind of “cautionary tale”, still less as something “relevant” to how the future might be. We’ve become slaves to computer technology, not party ideology. </p>
<p>The postmodern “surveillance state”, such as it is, makes it up as it goes along; responding to computer developments and failing to cope (in our interests or its own) with the challenges of the dissolution of language and power. </p>
<p>Facebook might be the closest thing we have to Big Brother today; but social media’s owners have no interest in you or me beyond extracting as much information as possible. </p>
<p>Truth, lies, it does not matter; it’s the data that matters, not what you think. The future, we might say, then, is a human face staring at a screen – forever.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>1984 is at Melbourne Festival from October 16-25. Details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/1984/#.Vh2meROqpBc">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49041/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Hassan 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>Many still regard George Orwell’s 1984 and its message about the nature of language and power “definitive”. But globalisation has revolutionised how we communicate; 1984 tells us nothing about our future.Robert Hassan, Associate Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/480862015-10-13T01:59:07Z2015-10-13T01:59:07ZMelbourne Festival: the Flemish Wave still ebbs and flows in 32 rue Vandenbranden<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98157/original/image-20151013-17815-1s6f3pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Known as "the Pedro Almodovar of dance theatre", Peeping Tom eschew traditional storytelling in favour of blurred realities in 32 rue Vandenbranden.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Herman Sorgeloos </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last week, Melbourne Festival opened with a production from Belgian dance theatre collective <a href="http://www.peepingtom.be/en">Peeping Tom</a> titled 32 rue Vandenbranden (2009). The company’s founding members, Gabriela Garrizo and Franck Chartier, Argentinian and French respectively, are both a product of the influential <a href="http://www.flanderstoday.eu/living/riding-wave">Flemish Wave</a> of the late 1980s and 90s, a period of theatrical innovation that redefined the performance language on which their collective now builds. </p>
<h2>Challenging theatrical alchemy</h2>
<p>For artists from the Flemish Wave, the medium of theatre presented an opportunity to explore mechanisms of performance and interrogate dominant ideals of the body and representation. </p>
<p>This period saw the physically driven and visually expressive dance theatre work of Alain Platel with <a href="http://www.lesballetscdela.be/en/">C de la B</a>, the energetic and corporeal explosiveness of Wim Vandekeybus with <a href="http://www.ultimavez.com/">Ultima Vez</a>, <a href="http://janfabre.be/en/">Jan Fabre’s</a> contextual and dramatically challenging interdisciplinary theatre work and <a href="http://www.needcompany.org/">Needcompany’s</a> intercultural, multilingual and interdisciplinary projects take over the European theatrical zeitgeist. </p>
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<p>Radical in these works was the anarchic response to the notion of storytelling. There was no meaning or outcome from a semiotic perspective, but the audience was encouraged to develop what German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann described in <a href="https://www.academia.edu/8534986/_Hans-Thies_Lehmann_Postdramatic_Theatre_Book_Fi_org_1_">Postdramatic Theatre</a> (2006) as “a new kind of aesthetic alchemy”, from which the senses, intellect and intuition deftly constructed a subjective position. </p>
<p>Prior to forming the collective Peeping Tom in 2000, Garrizo and Chartier danced in both C de la B and the Needcompany. With Peeping Tom, they have taken their own steps to originality, expanding on narrative possibilities and using heightened visual effects to present extreme characterizations; <a href="http://www.kaaitheater.be/nl/e350/le-sous-sol/">earning them the title</a> “the Pedro Almodovar of dance theatre”.</p>
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<p>Their trilogy Le Jardin (2001), Le Salon (2004) and Sous Sol (2007) presented a voyeuristic look into intimate spaces: a garden, a salon, a basement. In these dance theatre works of hyper realist visuals, Chekhovian nightmares unfold in which performers of all ages tumble, jump and walk on one another as they. Where the early work exposed the dramas and brooding intrigues behind closed doors, the characters in this work seek out the open spaces to expose their personal isolation. </p>
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<h2>The anywhere of 32 rue Vandenbranden</h2>
<p>On a stage covered with snow, set against a broad cloudy sky, a number of shanty caravans nestle in the snow peaks. The title, 32 rue Vandenbranden, suggests that this setting could just as easily be a side street in Brussels as an address in the American small hillside town of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098936/">Twin Peaks</a> (1990-1991), to which this episodic horror story refers. </p>
<p>The sense of mystery and intrigue, perversity and social dysfunction are established in the opening scene. A crying baby, discernible to those in the front rows as having the head of an old man and the tiny limbs of a new born, has been left outside in the snow. Surreptitiously, a heavily pregnant woman covers the baby with snow and pushes it out of earshot under a caravan. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98158/original/image-20151013-17839-vmk59.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">Peeping Tom.</span>
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<p>The brutal act, absurdly funny and irreverent at once, sets the tone. We will be exposed to things we shouldn’t see, and invited to begin a sleuth’s tour of a surrealist horror story. Our peeping tom status is accentuated by a view inside a brightly lit caravan where the performer and singer <a href="http://www.peepingtom.be/en/info/profile/4">Euridike de Beul</a> sits naked, her long grey locks combed by the pregnant <a href="http://www.peepingtom.be/en/info/profile/7">Marie Gyselbrecht</a>, also town whore and baby burier. </p>
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<p>In another window, a man manipulates his adoring wife. Our seeing into the private spaces will not give us more access to the mysteries, however, as explanations are only vaguely suggested in the collection of tragicomic scenes and absurdist moments that follow. Two Beckettesque Asian travellers, appear with a slapstick movement sequence between the caravans. Only moments later they are suckling on the breast of the Grandmother figure (de Beul), as if their outsider status enabled them to fit perfectly in this community of lost souls.</p>
<p>In this tilted universe on the mountaintop the common logic of time and gravity distorts. Two dancers are blown horizontal by the sound of the wind and the Grandmother, ousted from the village, reappears with a stuffed owl on a rooftop singing Pink Floyd’s Shine on You Crazy Diamond. </p>
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<span class="caption">Peeping Tom.</span>
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<p>One of the travellers, <a href="http://www.peepingtom.be/en/info/profile/10">Seoljin Kim</a>, in love but rejected by the pregnant whore/mother, materialises into a dying old man, virtually disintegrating on the spot where the baby disappeared. What plays out in this interdisciplinary work, in which dance, text, sound and imagery are each momentarily and exquisitely highlighted, is an episodic drama in which the suggested narratives never quite crystallise, but rather evaporate into bleak despair. </p>
<p>As the new Flemish Wave subsides, it makes me wonder if the makers of 32 rue Vandenbranden might have done better to follow their predecessors, whose trust in the audience left room to construe the symbolism and metaphors implicit in the dance, image and sound to their own narrative. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>For Melbourne Festival program details, visit <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48086/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anny Mokotow 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>The founders of Belgian dance company Peeping Tom draw their performance language from the influential Flemish Wave movement of the late 1980s and 90s. Their 32 rue Vandenbranden is part of Melbourne Festival.Anny Mokotow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/332542014-10-24T03:56:46Z2014-10-24T03:56:46ZStriking, original theatre: Heiner Goebbels at the Melbourne Festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62687/original/frzzjz5q-1414111713.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Goebbels has a deft hand at creating moments that surprise, turning the surreal and the macabre into exquisite moments of beauty.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Wonge Bergmann, Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/when-the-mountain-changed-its-clothing/#.VEmgu4vLdIs">When the mountain changed its clothing</a>, the Heiner Goebbels-directed show currently on at the Melbourne Festival, is an evasive piece of theatre, but it is through its elusive and mysterious qualities, underpinned by choral music, that it is able to transcend into something that is beautiful and powerful. </p>
<p>This piece, like most of Goebbels’s works, defies simple categorisation, hovering between theatre, installation and a musical concert. </p>
<p>A literal description of the show would be a series of small vignettes woven together exploring ideas about transition, loss and youth. But in this show the sum of the parts work in gestalt to become an immersive experience that is greater than the whole. Ideas echo throughout the performance, recurring and layering upon each other. Goebbels combines striking theatrical images with musical orchestration that draws from a diverse range of sources, from folk songs to indie pop. </p>
<p>But what really drives this show, its emotional engine as it were, is its young ensemble cast of 40 female teenagers from theatre company Carmina Slovenica and the authentic place it creates to explore the concept of youth and meditate on the idea of becoming. And here the show walks the fine line between the heavy manipulating hand of high avant-garde art and something that is genuine and real. </p>
<p>As an audience, we are conscious of watching untrained performers. This is set up from the very first image of the performance in which we witness a mass of somewhat awkward teenagers meander across the stage, all attired in the t-shirts and runners that you might see in a shopping mall. </p>
<p>The real strength of the show comes from the contrast of the fragility of its young performers and the powerful assuredness of their achingly beautiful choral singing. The vocal harmonies of the ensemble create many different textures from the playful to the deeply visceral, generating moments in which the sound becomes a physical presence that at times seems to penetrate you. It is the power of highly skilled choral music that binds this show, giving it licence to be playful and surreal, allowing it to take intellectual segues. </p>
<p>The show is a series of moments of transition that are cleverly orchestrated in front of our eyes. Lights are hoisted into place, chairs and tables arranged, a pulley tugs a scenic backdrop into place. Goebbels uses these transitions to reveal the unexpected, often becoming magic tricks that transcend what we thought was going on, expanding our perception of the reality of the moment. A ball that we have watched being held tight suddenly floats by itself suspended in the air.</p>
<p>The transition of time is a theme that is constantly explored throughout the show. Goebbels often plays with the idea of slow accumulation, letting moments gradually reveal themselves. We watch while a row of smiling faces seems to be held ridiculously too long only to realise that they are glacially morphing into neutral masks on a descent into sadness and anger. </p>
<p>Another theme explored in the piece is the ever presence of Old Europe. Contemporary teen clothing is swapped for dresses and skirts from an older deeper past, alluding to an era before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Eastern European folk art painting creates a backdrop of a field full of clover and a forest becomes the setting for a rhythmic camp song. </p>
<p>The direction carefully uses the large ensemble, often using small gestures that allow us to see similarities and differences between the large cast such as 40 blonde wigs being flicked in unison, or the nervous energy of swaying legs of a young girl repeated by each member of the cast.</p>
<p>Fragments of conversations about death and the dismantling of the social order are woven throughout the piece. </p>
<p>In one scene we are given a small science lesson in how clouds create electrical charge. These short vignettes give us clues to the meaning and intention of the piece. In another scene two girls hold a relentless conversation about growing old and the inevitability of death. But the performance also appears aware of its own ridiculous hyperbole. A girl in a beret and a blue tunic desperately clutches a loaf of bread while delivering us a deadpan speech about being unafraid of atomic annihilation.</p>
<p>Goebbels has a deft hand at creating moments that surprise, turning the surreal and the macabre into exquisite moments of beauty. This duality was present in one of most moving images of the show in which the gutted entrails of a soft toy become serene clouds floating over a lush green hillside, while the ensemble sings a haunting melody that slowly transforms into the resonating harmonics of throat singing. As one of its final images, this moment seemed to summarise the majestic and disturbing experience of the piece.</p>
<p>While this show will no doubt frustrate some audiences that seek a more traditional protagonist-driven narrative, the best moments of this performance are deeply exhilarating, and carry those rare qualities of indelible theatre that are cherished years after the event.</p>
<p><br>
<em>When the mountain changed its clothing is on at the Melbourne Festival until October 26. Details <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/when-the-mountain-changed-its-clothing/#.VEmgu4vLdIs">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33254/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janine Forbes-Rolfe 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>When the mountain changed its clothing, the Heiner Goebbels-directed show currently on at the Melbourne Festival, is an evasive piece of theatre, but it is through its elusive and mysterious qualities…Janine Forbes-Rolfe, Lecturer in Education , Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/332982014-10-22T19:19:25Z2014-10-22T19:19:25ZDesiring the author: Finding Vivian Maier at the Melbourne Festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62426/original/7q522pyh-1413932683.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Chicago photographer Vivian Maier is the subject of a documentary and an exhibition at this year's Melbourne Festival.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Melbourne Festival is running two events dedicated to the recently-discovered American street photographer Vivian Maier. One is the exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/crossing-paths-with-vivian-maier/#.VEblPouUf9M">Crossing Paths with Vivian Maier</a>. The second is John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s documentary <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/finding-vivian-maier/#.VEblgIuUf9M">Finding Vivian Maier</a>, currently screening at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).</p>
<p>Maloof and Siskel’s documentary tells two stories. The first recounts how amateur historian John Maloof “found” a box of Vivian Maier’s photographic negatives completely by accident in 2007. The second details Maloof’s search for Vivian Maier in a figurative sense – that is, his attempt to gain a better understanding of who she was.</p>
<p>Here is a summary of the first story: in 2007, Maloof bought a box of undeveloped negatives at an auction in Chicago for US$380. When he finally got around to scanning the negatives two years later, he discovered a striking collection of 1950s-era photographs. They showed atmospheric city streetscapes and audacious portraits of urban dwellers. Some of them depicted a slightly stern, slightly whimsical looking woman taking self-portraits in mirrors and shop windows. </p>
<p>It took some time to identify the photographer. Finally, receipts inside the box revealed her name: Vivian Maier. When Maloof undertook a Google search in April 2009, he found that <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-04-23/news/0904221452_1_photographer-extraordinaire-special-person-critic">she had died</a> just a few days earlier. </p>
<p>After tracking down and processing Maier’s other negatives, Maloof organised an exhibition of her work at the Chicago Cultural Centre. It was incredibly well-received, and Maier is now internationally recognised as a street photographer.</p>
<p>The second story of Finding Vivian Maier concerns Maloof’s quest to learn more about the mysterious woman who took the photographs. It is this search that takes up the bulk of the documentary. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2o2nBhQ67Zc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Finding Vivian Maier.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By interviewing people who knew Maier when she was alive, Maloof discovered that Vivian was a single woman who worked almost her entire life as a nanny for affluent families from the 1950s onwards. She grew up in France and her chief hobby was photography (she took approximately 100,000 photographs, mostly on a <a href="http://rolleiflex.us/">Rolleiflex</a> camera). She was also an obsessive collector who hoarded hats, receipts and newspapers. She died in poverty at the age of 83.</p>
<p>Finding Vivian Maier is a film animated by a curiosity about the nature of “the artist”. Cinephiles call this phenomenon “auteur desire” — the term describes both our inquisitiveness about authors’ personalities, as well as our habit of looking for evidence of this personality in the artworks they create. </p>
<p>Finding Vivian Maier effortlessly instills such fascination. Maier’s former charges make for charming interview subjects, and their recollections portray their nanny as a truly eccentric individual. </p>
<p>Apparently Maier liked to go on photographic expeditions around the rougher parts of Chicago, dragging the bewildered children along behind her. She had few friends and no known romantic partners or family. She also went by several different names and, according to an expert in linguistics, spoke in a fake French accent. Most of all, she loved taking photographs, but printed virtually none of them.</p>
<p>Siskel and Maloof’s documentary paints a portrait of an undeniably creative individual. The film has a lightness that seems entirely appropriate for a woman who liked to take pictures of construction workers’ muddy backsides (amongst other unconventional things). </p>
<p>But the documentary never really questions its consuming desire to “find” Vivian Maier. Why does her persona matter so much? Why are we compelled to interpret her work through her life story?</p>
<p>Looking at Maier’s photos on display at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, there is certainly a gregariousness and egalitarianism in her work that is easy to interpret as evidence of an underlying personality. Maier’s Rolleiflex camera stares freely at whatever catches its interest: poor men with bulbous noses, well-heeled women in party dresses, and gurning street urchins. </p>
<p>Maier’s photos reveal a disregard for class barriers, as if they were arbitrary rules that affect only the costumes that people wear. Perhaps, as a European-raised woman working for the affluent classes, Maier had an outsider’s appreciation of American society and its pretensions. </p>
<p>But this is only conjecture. Maier did not curate her own body of work. She no longer has the chance to explain herself as artist, and a stranger now holds the rights to her work. Caught up in its tale of a bohemian nanny, Finding Vivian Maier neglects some of these spikier issues.</p>
<p>Also, perhaps Maier’s biography does not even matter that much to her artwork. One of the most arresting moments in Finding Vivian Maier has little to do with the nanny’s life story. At one point Maloof exhibits Maier’s work in her childhood home of Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur. A very elderly woman looks at a photograph of a man in a flat cap, and her middle-aged daughter says: “You recognise him well, right mum? … He was your husband!”. We don’t need to be told that the gentleman is long departed. </p>
<p>Finding Vivian Maier is an intriguing story about a woman who created art compulsively and secretly, never seeking the recognition that Maloof and Siskel cultivate for her. But it is also a film about the creative power of photography. The moment at Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur is a reminder that photographs are extensions of our memory. Sometimes it is the person in front of the lens who matters most.</p>
<p><br>
<em>Crossing Paths with Vivian Maier is on display until October 26. Details <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/crossing-paths-with-vivian-maier/#.VEblPouUf9M">here</a>.</em></p>
<p><br>
<em>Finding Vivian Maier screens at ACMI until October 23. Details <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/finding-vivian-maier/#.VEblgIuUf9M">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janice Loreck 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>The Melbourne Festival is running two events dedicated to the recently-discovered American street photographer Vivian Maier. One is the exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Crossing Paths…Janice Loreck, Teaching Associate in the School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/326192014-10-22T00:51:44Z2014-10-22T00:51:44ZPower, prayer and pleasure: Since I Suppose at the Melbourne Festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62186/original/5b89w498-1413767416.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Since I Suppose, currently playing at the Melbourne Festival, is participatory theatre at its best. Credit: Paul Moir.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As the contemporary debate about surveillance and data-retention rages, it seems there’s little room left for mystery. Since I Suppose, an interactive and immersive artwork at the Melbourne Festival, by local company <a href="http://www.onestepatatimelikethis.com/">One Step at A Time Like This</a>, is an utterly compelling argument for the joys of anonymity.</p>
<h2>Immersive and interactive</h2>
<p>Since I Suppose is a journey for two through public and private Melbourne, using audio, “follow films” and embedded performers. It builds on One Step’s highly successful <a href="http://www.onestepatatimelikethis.com/enroute.html">en route</a>, which received critical acclaim and toured extensively after its first iteration in 2009. </p>
<p>Interactive and participatory artwork has been developing rapidly over the last decade, and there are a number of important formal, aesthetic and conceptual reference points. The UK-based theatre company <a href="http://punchdrunk.com">Punchdrunk</a>, has been enormously successful with its large scale immersive environments. <a href="http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/">Blast Theory</a>, another UK company, pioneered the use of technology to create immersive, augmented-reality works such as <a href="http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/">Can You See Me Now</a> (2001) and <a href="http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/uncle-roy-all-around-you/">Uncle Roy All Around You</a> (2003).</p>
<h2>The world’s a stage</h2>
<p>The show begins with a sense of anticipation, as we wait in the lobby of the Melbourne Grand Hyatt for a phone call. The phone rings, and we’re taken to meet the Duke (wearing cap, moustache and sunglasses) who, with some deft card-tricks, gives an introduction to the story, and an invitation to play. </p>
<p>We’re given a smartphone and headphones, and this technology guides us through the city. The show makes excellent use of the “follow film”, a surprisingly effective illusion where the viewer matches the small screen video up to the real street, and follows the character on the screen.</p>
<p>From the very beginning, the “edges” of the show are carefully obscured, and the line between the play world and the real one becomes difficult to discern. Just like the card-tricks, carefully managed misdirection and sleight of hand create a heightened perception and suspicion – who is in on the trick, and who isn’t? </p>
<p>Cannily, the <em>rules</em> of the game we are invited to play are never clearly stated. Because of this, the everyday streets appear as never before: the world becomes a stage.</p>
<h2>Poetics of interaction</h2>
<p>Since I Suppose achieves an impressive choreography of performances: social, technical, theatrical and even economic performances are interwoven, and there is an immense pleasure in the twists, turns and surprises of the experience. </p>
<p>What makes this show more than a large handful of tricks and novelties is the way the form it fitted to the content of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.</p>
<p>While there have been many notable contemporary visions of Shakespeare’s plays, including Punchdrunk’s <a href="http://sleepnomorenyc.com/#share">Sleep No More</a> (2011), <a href="http://www.tga.nl/en">Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/adelaide-festival-2014-review-roman-tragedies-23819">Roman Tragedies</a> (2007), and of course cinematic adaptations – such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/">Ten Things I Hate About You</a> (1999) – Since I Suppose engages with Measure for Measure on a more <em>experiential</em> level. </p>
<p>Rather than simply transposing the plot in time, it draws out themes of power, religion and pleasure through a number of visceral, intimate and confronting experiences that attempt (generally quite successfully) to provide audiences with a emotional insight into the characters of the play, be it the scandalised Isabella, imprisoned Claudio, or the intimate subterfuge of both Mariana and Angelo. </p>
<p>While aficionados of the text may take umbrage, it has the potential to make the play accessible to a much wider audience. </p>
<h2>Audience agency</h2>
<p>A question in Shakespeare’s text that isn’t addressed, perhaps deliberately, is the question that troubles the Duke. The question of <em>how</em> to govern. </p>
<p>The question translates readily to the interactive and participatory arts: how much freedom and choice do audiences actually have? As the company name suggests (One Step At A Time <em>Like This</em>) there cannot be total freedom, lest, as the Duke fears, “The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart goes all decorum”. </p>
<p>Since I Suppose achieves an excellent balance, creating a tightly choreographed and controlled experience that <em>feels</em> free. There is a high level of craft in the way the audience is given just enough time to think, for imagination to take hold, before being swept up by the next surprise. </p>
<p>It’s hard to know when, exactly, the show ends after two and a half hours of head-tricks and bed-tricks. Only when you receive a text message stating that it’s over are you absolutely sure. Importantly, the message also asks that you keep the secrets of the show to yourself. How apt that a show which deserves to be one of the most talked about of this year’s Melbourne Festival is one that you’re not supposed to talk about. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Since I Suppose is at the Melbourne Festival until October 26. It’s performed as part of the <a href="http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ARTSHOUSE/PROGRAM/Pages/SinceISuppose.aspx">Arts House program</a>. Details <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/since-i-suppose/#.VERmNCmSywE">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32619/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Asher Warren 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>As the contemporary debate about surveillance and data-retention rages, it seems there’s little room left for mystery. Since I Suppose, an interactive and immersive artwork at the Melbourne Festival, by…Asher Warren, PhD Candidate in interactive and participatory art, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/327412014-10-21T04:35:11Z2014-10-21T04:35:11ZOrchestrating wonder: Opus at the Melbourne Festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62169/original/y93yqfdp-1413757033.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In Opus, circus and chamber music collide in an astounding fashion.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Rambunctious, athletic circus with elegant, controlled chamber music. Do opposites collide? Not in <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/opus/#.VEQ6tSmSywE">Opus</a>, an intriguing collaboration between the chamber music Debussy String Quartet from Lyon, France and the Australian circus troupe Circa that was staged at the Melbourne Festival over the weekend. In Opus, they dance. </p>
<p>Shostakovich’s quartets swirl and shift, travelling tumultuous and unpredictable paths as the performers leap and bound across the stage, in equally thrilling measure. The meeting is a fruitful one.</p>
<h2>What is so spectacular about spectacle?</h2>
<p>I’m not usually intrigued by spectacle but Opus is a spectacle that moved even this sceptic. Of course the acrobatics were incredible. But that is not what caught me off guard. </p>
<p>It was the small moments – even more than the undeniably virtuosic and daring feats of gymnastics – that really took my breath away. The sleights of hand, the little surprises. Delicate images created then dismantled. </p>
<p>The beauty of a small, brief embrace after choreographic chaos had been let loose on stage. A laugh that gets caught in your throat. A man running madly from a cloud of smoke or a towering wave of water, created before your eyes with mere fabric and lights. Then, in an instant, with the swell of the strings, the fabric is lifted and 14 performers appear on stage. </p>
<p>How did the performers just appear on stage? Where does one body begin and the other end? </p>
<p>There are a thousand stories in Opus, a thousand moments like these that resonate. There’s a gnawing, clawing frustration, the feeling of being trapped. Standing on a precipice alongside one’s fear and trepidation. A collapse into exhaustion. </p>
<p>As I watched these moments unfold, I was reminded what is so spectacular about this sort of spectacle. There is magic here. You watch as the performers prepare themselves for the next acrobatic feat. You learn what to expect and, as you calculate how this might be possible and prepare yourself for what you’re about to see, you think you may just understand. </p>
<p>You feel smug or at least secure in the powers of your mind. The music builds, you can feel the moment arrive. And then they fall, or they leap, or they are thrown half way across the stage and you cannot help but gasp. </p>
<p>They have made the impossible possible. Or rather they have made the possible seem completely impossible. </p>
<p>There is an expectation that comes with everyday life. An expectation that things will adhere to some internal logic, to the rules of reality. We go to spectacle, we go to the circus to remind ourselves of the possibility that the imagination is stronger than reality. </p>
<h2>Re-investigate – not just collaborate</h2>
<p>The creative potential of interdisciplinary collaboration is no new concept in the art world. The past century has seen distinct artforms and other disciplines collide, collude and combine to create hybrid genres that defy categorisation. So a collaboration between musicians and physical performers is no great feat in and of itself. </p>
<p>Traditionally, in the West at least, when musicians play live in opera, ballet, musical theatre and circus, they are situated most often in the orchestra pit. So called because this space is located below the stage; the audience is thus instructed to ignore the musicians’ presence as much as possible. </p>
<p>Thus, what the Debussy String Quartet and Circa have done in Opus is not only a collaboration between artforms but a re-investigation of the relationships between stage, body, instrument and audience. </p>
<p>When the director and choreographer of Opus, Yaron Lifschitz, places the four musicians not only on stage, but in and among the action of the circus performance, possibilities abound. It becomes a conversation between musician and performer, between sound and shape. The instruments themselves dance, as bows bounce and sway like the limbs of a trapeze artist. </p>
<p>The musicians’ bodies too become part of the image, as they sit, stand, walk blindfolded or are carried through the space. The technical calls of the circus performers do not desecrate the elegance of the music so much as heighten its relevance.</p>
<p>Lifschitz holds no nostalgic adherence to aesthetic symmetry, coherence or linearity. Focus is constantly split. The viola is in the way. A dozen performers run, leap, crash, and flip over the stage, while something very quiet is happening upstage right. Conventions are dispensed with. The performers have their backs to us. The musician is being led off stage but the piece isn’t done yet. Challenges are offered. </p>
<p>Can you forget what you know about circus? About chamber music? About how to see a show? If you can, Opus is a delightful discovery. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Opus was performed at the Melbourne Festival. Details <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/opus/#.VEQ6tSmSywE">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32741/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adva Weinstein 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>Rambunctious, athletic circus with elegant, controlled chamber music. Do opposites collide? Not in Opus, an intriguing collaboration between the chamber music Debussy String Quartet from Lyon, France and…Adva Weinstein, Ph.D Candidate, the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/331772014-10-20T19:12:46Z2014-10-20T19:12:46ZBig hART’s Hipbone Sticking Out: truthful and ambitious theatre<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62172/original/4hcmkqdt-1413759268.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Despite the horrific content of this history – Big hART's triumph is that this is not a story about victims.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/hipbone-sticking-out/#.VERAsSmSywE">Hipbone Sticking Out</a>, the Big hART production now playing at the Melbourne Festival, begins in September 1983. We meet 16-year-old John Pat slowly dying, lying alone in a police cell in Roebourne. </p>
<p>We find ourselves in a scene from Flemish artist Jan Bruegel’s Orpheus in the Underworld, with the Greek God Pluto appearing to ferry the young John into the next world. But he is confronted by John as he would find him in 2014. This John is 47 years old and reluctant to act as a mere symbol within European theatrical conventions that seek to stylise Australia’s sorry record of Indigenous deaths in police custody.</p>
<p>This is our first clue to the complex multi-layered narrative that writer-director Scott Rankin has created in Hipbone Sticking Out. This is a narrative well aware of how a director’s imposition of dominant cultural traditions can mediate our versions of history.</p>
<p>The two Johns convince Pluto to help them travel back in time to understand how their history has ferried them to a prison floor in Roebourne. In doing do, they pare back the westernised theatrical traditions that bring Pluto to us in the first place.</p>
<p>This becomes the main theme of a narrative that traverses greats stretches of time and geography. We begin with the Dutch East India Company’s exploration of Australia in the 1600s. We move through to the disease, massacres and enslavement of the colonial era, which almost annihilated generations of Indigenous Australians. </p>
<p>As the layers of interconnected stories begin to unravel, the audience understands how tangibly this history of injustices perpetrated against generations of Indigenous Australians is linked to the subsequent tragedy of John’s death.</p>
<h2>Multi-layered and ambitious</h2>
<p>Hipbone Sticking Out is tremendously ambitious both theatrically and in terms of narrative. The piece manages to be entertaining and witty, as well as brutally truthful and uncompromising in its political aims.</p>
<p>It would be easy for this story to be didactic. But despite the utterly horrific content of this history – murders, rapes, loss of language and culture dot the narrative – Hipbone’s triumph is that this is not a story about victims. </p>
<p>Hipbone Sticking Out is the English translation of “Murujuga”, the name of the Burrup Peninsula in the Ngayarda languages. The peninsula is probably a place that many Australians have not seen. But it looms large in Hipbone as a kind of centrepoint of a new version of Australian history – one that acknowledges its brutality and injustice, but that also foregrounds the dynamic, living voices of contemporary Indigenous communities. </p>
<p>Using their own voices and story-telling practices, the people of Roebourne unveil their stories of Australia, creating an alternative history to the perception of Indigenous life as “past”. </p>
<p>The narrative is layered with animation that reflects both the iconic rock art of the Burrup Peninsula and urban art practice, and music that ranges from traditional Indigenous song and dance to Britney Spears and burlesque-style prancing across the stage. </p>
<p>Theatrically, the piece is rich. The angled stage is used to good effect and the projections and animations reflect the change of time, geography and cultural impact. The wordplay also deserves mention for its dark – and often hilarious – use of irony and sarcasm as well as unflinching honesty. </p>
<p>These techniques demand the audience acknowledge the importance of Indigenous Australian stories and histories, both brutal and hopeful. More importantly, the cast encourage the audience to “own” this history as “our story”.</p>
<h2>Collaboration key to Hipbone Sticking Out</h2>
<p><a href="http://big%20hart.org">Big hART</a> is a social change arts company, formed by Rankin, which brings marginalised or isolated communities together with artists to tackle social issues. </p>
<p>Established in 1992, Big hART has now worked with 43 communities and has produced 14 touring theatre works. Hipbone Sticking Out has emerged from collaborations forged by Big hART’s <a href="yijalayala.bighart.org">Yijala Yala project</a>, a conservation agreement with the government that highlights and preserves the cultural heritage of the Murujuga and Dampier Archipelago in Western Australia. </p>
<p>While this might seem a project about conserving a history long past, Big hART has been working with traditional custodians and young people in this Pilbara town since 2010. The company has assisted this tiny community to interpret the way they live their cultural heritage through theatre, as well as film and interactive media.</p>
<p>Towards the end of the piece, we hear from the current Roebourne community about the struggles and triumphs of this tiny town. Actors use dialogue from John’s mother in a scene that is particularly arresting. It helps us to gain a better understanding of both John’s life and life in Roebourne today. We are told that if John had lived, he would have been a leader in his community, negotiating with government and industry on behalf of his people. John continues to be a leader even after his death. </p>
<p>As alluded to in the conclusion of Hipbone, John’s death became the catalyst for the 1987 <a href="http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs112.aspx">Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody</a>. While the police officers involved in the fatal altercation with John Pat were ultimately cleared, the Commission went on to make 339 recommendations for change. The Murru Concert and a new campaign, <a href="http://unlockthefuture.org.au">One in Two: Unlock the Future</a>, continue to draw attention to the issue of Indigenous incarceration rates in Australia.</p>
<p>At the conclusion of Hipbone Sticking Out, John tells the audience the story isn’t over and that indigenous incarceration has to be tackled <em>maragutharra</em> - together. With Indigenous incarceration rates doubling since 1991 and more Indigenous deaths in custody reported this year, clearly the story is far from over. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Hipbone Sticking Out plays at the Melbourne Festival until 21 October. Details <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/hipbone-sticking-out/#.VERAsSmSywE">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33177/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Diana Bossio 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>Hipbone Sticking Out, the Big hART production now playing at the Melbourne Festival, begins in September 1983. We meet 16-year-old John Pat slowly dying, lying alone in a police cell in Roebourne. We find…Diana Bossio, Lecturer, Media and Communications, Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/319792014-10-16T19:31:56Z2014-10-16T19:31:56ZCircus training instead of school sports? Now there’s an idea<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/61727/original/mp8fv9my-1413327904.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C105%2C3193%2C2256&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Ninja Circus from Mutitjulu shows the benefits social circus can deliver.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ninja Circus</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What if social policy-makers knew how beneficial circuses were to the community? This was the provocation pitched to circus producers, trainers, performers and academics who met in the Melba Spiegeltent at the Circus Oz precinct in Collingwood last weekend. </p>
<p>Their meeting was the result of the <a href="http://acapta.org.au/whats-on/circus-futures-forum/">Circus Futures Forum</a>, jointly sponsored by the Melbourne Festival, the Australian Circus and Physical Theatre Association, and Circus Oz.</p>
<h2>Pride in the Ninja Circus</h2>
<p>In the Indigenous community of Mutitjulu at Uluru, the local <a href="http://www.npywc.org.au/2014/02/ninja-circus/">Ninja Circus</a> troupe operates under the auspices of the respected NPY Women’s Council. Led since mid-2012 by circus performer and youth worker Ludo Dumas, who addressed the Circus Futures Forum last weekend, the Ninja Circus is credited by community Elders as stemming the substance abuse and petrol sniffing that has <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/indigenous/juggling-ways-to-beat-scourge-of-sniffing/story-fn9hm1pm-1226676200249?nk=5a2116a99dc62369c8122f2661ca4d58">troubled the community’s young people</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/39nWQeeMTbI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Ninja Circus perform at the Mbantua Festival in 2013.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The troupe’s performance in front of a crowd of 85,000 at the AFL’s Dreamtime Round at the MCG in May 2013 was a source of pride for the remote Indigenous community and its young people. </p>
<p>According to Dumas, who also teaches circus skills at the local Nyangatjatjara College, circus training requires practice, constant repetition of the same tricks, and focus. In an interview with me he observed that staff at the college have noticed a significant improvement in the children’s attention span in classes. </p>
<p>Prior to the start of the circus training, students’ attention span was just 10 minutes. Now, students are able to sustain their concentration for up to two hours in English sessions and up to one-and-a-half hours in maths lessons. </p>
<p>Improved self-esteem, respect for one another, and the ability to work together as a team are other results staff at the college attribute to the playful yet focused training in juggling and acrobatic tumbling.</p>
<p>Performing for communities and at arts events in the Central Desert and at <a href="http://vimeo.com/102083940">festivals further afield</a> has also developed the young performers’ social skills and ability to confidently engage with strangers. This is a skill set that Dumas suggests will positively support their future paths. </p>
<p>Barefoot jugglers and acrobatic tumblers in the red sand hills at the base of Uluru – this is Social Circus at work. And it’s about as far from the spectacular collection of Australian and international circus companies appearing at this year’s <a href="https://www.melbournefestival.com.au/opus/#.VD0-VSSW228">Melbourne Festival</a> as it gets. </p>
<h2>Social circus around the world</h2>
<p>Social circus combines an interventionist approach to social ills with the sharing and learning of circus skills. More than simply a recreational pursuit of the circus arts, the term designates the co-opting of circus skills for social change. </p>
<p>Emerging in numerous sites around the globe in the early 1990s (the Melbourne-based <a href="http://womenscircus.org.au/">Women’s Circus</a> was one of the earliest), the processes of Social Circus prioritise the personal and social growth of participants. They aim to encourage the development of self-esteem, the acquisition of social skills, artistic expression, and occupational integration. </p>
<p>Internationally, the <a href="https://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/about/global-citizenship/social-circus/cirque-du-monde.aspx">Cirque du Monde</a> organisation (nested within the Global Citizenship arm of Cirque du Soleil) has been developing and nurturing Social Circus programs in disadvantaged communities in South America, Africa, and North America since 1995.</p>
<p>These expressions of community-based circus activity are the result of a re-purposing of the circus arts outside the production of commercial entertainment. The Queensland Government-sponsored initiative <a href="https://www.qld.gov.au/disability/children-young-people/circus-therapy-experiences/">Unthink the Impossible</a> has trialled circus skills therapy with disabled children in partnership with Flipside Circus. </p>
<p>Melbourne’s <a href="http://acapta.org.au/acapta-directory/performing-older-womens-pow-circus/">Performing Older Women’s Circus</a> has been providing skill development and performance opportunities to over-40s women since 1995. </p>
<p>And every year, thousands of people learn various apparatus skills in “youth” or “social” circus programs offered by more than 60 organisations across Australia. From the remote <a href="http://www.theatrekimberley.org.au/programmes/outreach">Sandfly Circus</a> in Broome that runs outreach programs for Indigenous communities in the Kimberley region, to our longest-running youth circus, the <a href="http://fruitflycircus.com.au/">Flying Fruit Flies</a> in Albury-Wodonga.</p>
<h2>The benefits of community circus</h2>
<p>What’s little known about community circus in Australia is the broad range of social and personal benefits that accrue from prolonged participation. </p>
<p>Parents have explained to me that they have turned to recreational circus to assist their children with the management of a broad spectrum of medical conditions including: scoliosis, ADHD, Autism spectrum disorders, OCD, executive function problems, nervous conditions, learning difficulties, shyness, introversion, borderline intellectual disabilities, and depression. </p>
<p>They explain that the circus environment enables children who are social outsiders (as a result of social, intellectual or medical disorders) to feel they belong to a community. They observe that their children’s new sense of belonging leads in turn to improved self-esteem from which other, positive social and wellbeing changes flow.</p>
<p>So if, after more than three decades of pioneering progress in the field of community circus, Australian parents, young participants, and creative workers in the field staunchly advocate for its capacity to effect positive personal and social change, isn’t it high time for research initiatives and cultural policy to catch up with community experience? </p>
<p>How about circus training, funded as an element of physical and personal development in schools, and as an alternative to sport? Now <em>that’s</em> a provocation for our country’s cultural policy-makers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/31979/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gillian Arrighi is affiliated with ACAPTA, the Australian Circus and Physical Theatre Association</span></em></p>What if social policy-makers knew how beneficial circuses were to the community? This was the provocation pitched to circus producers, trainers, performers and academics who met in the Melba Spiegeltent…Gillian Arrighi, Senior Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.