It’s funny the way things happen. Lives as travelling musicians were never a future envisaged by the members of Las Cafeteras. It all began with happenstance: social conscience and a commonality as the children of migrant parents.
Las Cafeteras is a musical group of Mexican Americans who became friends as students in Los Angeles. As the all-singing, dancing, and multi instrument-playing Denise Carlos tells it, they met when they were learning Son Jarocho music. This is described as a musical style which unites Mexico and the USA and which emerged from Veracruz. It has a particular vitality and a very special cultural significance for America’s Mexican community.
But Las Cafeteras has taken it further. This lively group has evolved into what is described as a “genre-bending” ensemble, incorporating Afro-American sounds, “a mishmash of punk, hip-hop, beat music, cumbia, and rock.”
Of course, it is perfect material for WOMADelaide, especially considering that it has a strong socio-political bent in a time when America has been in administrative lockdown precisely because of its relationship with Mexican immigrants.
Carlos, one of the founding members of the group, is emphatic that while the group is acknowledged as political, its political message is carried via a universality of music, music being the great common denominator, the great communicator.
For some, she admits, things feel politically tough now in the USA.
While the Las Cafeteras members were all born in the USA and have the advantage of sophisticated educations (Carlos has a Masters degree in clinical social work), it is their immigrant parents to whom she looks and, in particular, her father.
“He says that things have not really changed since the 70s when he came to the US, He says it’s been tough. It will continue to be tough. But we can’t throw in the towel.”
There has been a background for many immigrants of "finding yourself living in a country where you are not welcome". Thus many migrant parents, her own included, have been part of a generation, she says, which "stayed quiet to be safe”.
Carlos speaks rapidly and passionately. These are issues which have underscored her life and also the lives of the other members of Las Cafeteras. In the Carlos way of thinking, the struggle goes on but with it comes strength and joy in the communities. While the president is pouting about his wall and discriminating against immigrants, the Mexicans of Las Cafeteras' ilk are reflecting not on the inequalities of immigrant life but on the power and beauty of immigrant community.
Mexicans are not alone. “Identity matters, experience matters, that’s the message; not that the leader is not good enough,” says Carlos.
She also is a dancer, an exponent of zapateado and member of the Ballet Folklorico de Los Angeles, albeit she is just recovering from foot surgery. She expects to be healed well enough to go on with the joyful foot stomping of Las Cafeteras' music when they hit WOMADelaide.
The group tells stories of America’s migrant children and their exuberant music, infused with Afro-Mexican sounds, is an eclectic mix from assorted folkloric traditions, mainly sung in Spanish.
“We sing in Spanish but we talk to each other in English,” says Carlos.
One of the advantages of migrant children is that they are bilingual and they have two sets of culture and tradition.
Then again, Carlos also plays the glockenspiel, a very non-Mexican instrument. She took it up because she wanted to hear a sweet "twinkling of the stars" sound in some of the group’s music. They tried the triangle but it was not right.
“Then my roommate who is a teacher had all these toys and among them was a glockenspiel; and there it was, the only thing that made the sound.”
A donkey jaw bone is also among the instruments of Las Cafeteras. Ironically, it is usually played by Leah Rose Gallepos who is a vegan and is always at pains to explain that it is a traditional instrument and no donkey was killed for their music.
In fact, says Carlos, one of the interesting sound elements of the donkey jaw is the rattling of its teeth. But Leah will not be coming on the trip to Australia. "She has just had a baby and her husband is doing a PhD so she will be staying home", explains Carlos.
Las Cafeteras is now about a decade old and it has become its own family.
She calls them “young, brown, working class.”
“Like every family, we agree and agree to disagree,” laughs Carlos.
But, as a group, as native and migrant children born in America, they have also the power of America’s First Amendment: freedom of speech.
“We are saying what we want to say.”
In a joy of lively rhythms and voices, we shall hear it onstage at WOMADelaide on Friday at 7pm on the Novatech Stage and on Sunday at 2pm on Stage 2.
Just for cultural good measure, on Saturday at 6pm in the Taste-The-World tent they’ll do a Mexican cooking demonstration.
Follow this link for a teaser of their music
Samela Harris
When: 8 to 11 Mar
Where: WOMADelaide, Botanic Park
Bookings: womadelaide.com.au
Malian singer songwriter Fatoumata Diawara will once again grace Australia’s shores when she takes the stage at WOMADelaide 2019 in Botanic Park. But it is not her first time in the country.
“My last time was 6 or 7 years ago” she recalls.
A working visit for a show in Sydney, Diawara didn’t make it to any other states, but loved what she saw. “I have a good memory of this trip, it was amazing!” she says.
WOMADelaide won’t be her first World Of Music And Dance gig either, having already performed for audiences at WOMAD Charlton Park, England.
The Mali born singer now lives in France. “I am based in Paris…” she explains, “But I have three houses actually, I’m a child of the world." And she is not wrong. Her touring schedule alone this year will take in several countries in Western Europe, as well as Australia, Canada, and the United States all in the first six months.
Diawara writes and sings in her native language, Bambará, which is the lingua franca of Mali and spoken by and estimated 80% of the Malinese population.
“I am lucky to have my traditional vocal” Diawara begins, “When I try to write a song or compose, this is like my ancestors who tell me how to speak this language” she says.
“But at the same time I have been in France for such a long time, since I was 18 or 19 years old… so I have [had] a chance to work with the piano and with many artists in jazz [and] pop, like Bobby Womack and Roberto Fonseca and [to] listen to different types of music... so I try to mix all those experiences into my music.”
Diawara’s songs have traditional roots, but the instrumentation is modern.
“Musically you will realise that I don’t have a traditional instrument in my band” she says.
“The only traditional instrument in my band is my vocal. It is the voice that brings the tradition… because I use my voice as an instrument. I don’t see my voice as technical, I don’t like [that] perfection… I am more like an instrument.”
Diawara describes her style as “One foot in traditional music and one foot in modern music” and “Traditional music mixed with different experiences.”
Representing her African roots and representing as a woman are also driving forces.
“I like to represent the African language because [it is] so beautiful, the continents are very beautiful and [it] can heal people too” she says. “It’s [also] important to keep the African woman on stage. There are only a few woman being representatives of African female artists - being an African ‘mamma’ - like Miriam Makeba, Angélique Kidjo, [and] Oumou Sangaré, they are getting older now and we need to follow them, we need a new generation to work hard like them doing the true music.”
Diawara is all about sharing and collaboration, about bringing herself to the writing process, and about mixing that with modern elements and energy.
“I’m lucky that I come from Mali where the base of our music is the Blues” she explains, “Blues music can be added to any type of music; Jazz, Rock, Pop, Funk… it is really easy for Malian people to have a real mix.”
Her African heroes stand as examples for her musical trajectory. She works hard to adapt her music to the moment, but it is all underpinned by a desire to follow those “African mammas”.
“It is necessary to have a representative of African woman on stage” she says. “In the same time I am representing all women, because my audience is very diverse. It’s important.”
Diawara will be alongside one such hero in the Artist in Conversation session at WOMADelaide on the 9th of March. She will be joined by Angélique Kidjo.
“She’s [like] my mum, I love this woman, she’s so charming” Diawara gushes.
“When sometimes I am very tired I look at her, and Nina Simone and I say ‘OK, don’t give up baby! You didn’t even start yet!’ Compared to her I say ‘OK, c’mon, wake up and go to work, you cannot say that you are tired.’
She’s still strong. She’s amazing. She’s incredible. She’s my energy, my example, the best example in the world! She is doing it still you know, she is very strong. I love this woman!”
Diawara’s social activism and campaigns against the trafficking and sale of black migrants in Libyan slave markets has also put her in the spotlight. Her song Djonya literally translates to ‘slavery’ in Bambará
“A Couple of years ago we had a big problem with this in the North of Africa,” Diawara begins,
“And times up! For me it should not happen. You must be stupid… to think you are more important than somebody else. I was angry. I went to my studio and I wrote the song, and did the video in two days. It’s important for me. It was a message to say I am the next African mamma, and I need to talk to the next African generation, to say you are not stupid, you are all on social media, and this is my message. Focus your mind on something else, time is up for slavery, lets fight for something else, it’s stupid, that’s it!”
Her passion and her frustration are evident, and she has made it her mission to carry that torch.
“As a woman and as an African mamma it’s the way it should be, I have to take my place, I have to be the voice, they know that I love them, it’s all about love.”
“Let’s talk”, she pleads, “Let’s have a conversation. Life is already complicated, life is already heavy, let’s be light!”
Fatoumata Diawara will perform at the WOMADelaide Festival in Botanic park on Friday the 8th and Sunday the 10th, as well as speaking at Artist in Conversation on the Saturday.
Don’t miss it.
Paul Rodda
When: 8 to 11 March
Where: WOMADelaide, Botanic Park
Booking: womadelaide.com.au
As if we don’t get thrills enough from the vitality of Adelaide theatre life, we’re now faced with what director Adrian Barnes describes as “theatre on steroids."
It comes in the form of a mini festival called 24.two which is the sequel to 24.one and is so supremely challenging and surprising that it has bounced right out of the city and into the sprawling neo-metropolis of Mount Barker.
It’s an intensive gathering of theatre people, a beehive of creativity in which all the arts and skills of the stage are carefully collected and then thrown wildly into the air in unbridled imaginative spontaneity.
The theatre people, writers, directors, and performers get just 24 hours to create a whole new piece of theatre. Six times.
That sounds confusing. It isn’t really. But it is wildly dangerous.
One of six directors involved in 24.two, Adrian Barnes, explains it thus:
"Friday night six directors will take to the stage. They will draw names of the writers from a hat. The title of the show to be written will be chosen at random from bits of paper stuck around the set and, similarly, the director will select about three of these to find out who the cast will be. Then the fun begins.”
As the Tasmanian originators of this demanding little festival have said, the whole idea is to create an event in which theatre people not only talk but “panic together”, and seek “to find an answer to the ultimate theatrical quandary, ‘can it be done?’”
So it comes to pass that the chosen writers have until 6.30 am the next morning to write a short play based on the title randomly selected on Friday night.
7am: Cast, director and crew get copies of the script and get to work.
7.30pm: Audience seated. Curtain up.
"It is a whirlwind of a rehearsal process, blocking, rehearsing, costuming, finding appropriate music; then watching the collaborative creation of a group of strangers come to life”, says Barnes.
"I was fortunate enough to do this last year and am about to experience again the thrills and spills of the Play24 project.
"As a creative artist, it is one of the most exciting events of the year (and by far the scariest). You just never know what you will be working on, who you will be working with and how much fun you can have in 24 hours with your clothes on! It's better than drugs!"
Audiences are invited to be present at the assignment process as well as for the performance.
There will be six little plays, about 20 minutes each.
And it’s a pretty distinguished assortment of talent. It might be a game, but it is a very serious high-improvisational-art game through which some gems of theatre work will emerge. It may also be very funny.
Among those directing along with Barnes are Lisa Waite, Craig McArdle, Joh Hartog, Tony Knight, and Jo O’Callaghan.
Those writing will be Rob Lewis, Kristen Doherty, Cameron Roberts, Allanah Avalon, Michael Fazackerley and the general public.
The actors will include John R. Sabine, Ella Anderson, Hugo Fielke, Stefanie Rossi, Boo Dwyer, Marc Clement, Yasmin Martin, Lisa Lanzi, Margaret McColl, Sarika Young, Henry Solomon, Emily Liu, Tom Liddell, Tim Edhouse, Gail Morrison, Carole Lawton, Mark Healey, Justin Groves and Adam D’Apice, with Rachael Williams presiding over all as the creative director.
Six teams with six plays in 24 hours presented by Play.Every.Day.
Samela Harris
Launch: 6.30pm, 12 Oct
Show: 8pm, 13 Oct
Location: Atelier Theatre, Mount Barker
Bookings: trybooking.com
It was back in the vivid Adelaide theatre days of the 1980s that the great Australian playwright Stephen Sewell seared his name into the cultural landscape with world premieres in Adelaide.
If it was a Sewell play, it was going to be challenging, controversial, political, and ground-breaking.
And it still is.
Now comes a new generation of producers and directors to thrill to the master’s works and to keep them coming back to audiences new and old.
Charles Sanders’ directorial and entrepreneurial talents shot to attention the moment the Canberra performer broke onto the Adelaide theatre scene with his Early Worx company in 2010. It generated instantaneous rave reviews and an Emerging Artist award from the Adelaide Critics Circle.
In intervening years, Sanders has been away directing, writing, producing and honing those early talents at NIDA where, as apt chance would have it, the eminent Stephen Sewell has been teaching the art of writing plays.
Sanders, who now has the House of Sand production company, was en route to Berlin as part of his NIDA Masters in Directing when Sewell’s Welcome The Bright World leapt out at him. He was reading it in its original 1982 draft form. But he was mainly reading it because it was about Berlin.
“It is my habit to take a bunch of books and plays set in the place I’m visiting” he explains.
Not only did the play and its subject matter shine forth for Sanders but also the revelation that the then student actor Terry Crawford had played the principal role of Max in a NIDA student production of 1984.
Sanders began liaising with Sewell.
Now, after three years in tweaking and adaptation by author and director, the play is about to hit the stage in Adelaide - starring Terry Crawford, these many long years since that early student show.
This production brings the House of Sand together with the State Theatre Company of South Australia which has been responsible for some of the significant Sewell premieres and productions of the past, most memorably, Dreams in an Empty City in 1986. Other Adelaide premiers of Sewell plays included The Blind Giant is Dancing, Miranda, King Golgrutha, Dust, Identity By Helen Demidenko, and Hate.
Hence has Australia’s most celebrated and provocative playwright continued what has been a particularly significant relationship with Adelaide.
Welcome The Bright World is set in 1980 in Germany but Sanders believes that neither time nor geography impedes the immediacy and relevancy of the play’s themes or characters.
Conversely, recent happenings on the world political and technological scene have underscored effectively the contents of the play.
The play is about identity politics, says Sanders, interestingly dealing with aspects of the characters of Judaism.
It centres upon two Jewish scientists close to discovering a truth which could change the world.
“If we had any doubts about its relevance, a series of political events in 2016 really sparked our planning, political events which made us sure,” says Sanders.
He lists the phenomena: the rise of populist politics, the lack of trust in information, metadata, the Russian hacking scandal, the concept of truth versus alternative facts.
“On the first day of rehearsals, there was Rudy Giuliani saying truth isn’t truth,” he exclaims.
There’s a strangely prophetic quality to this work, perhaps spooky in its way.
Like some sort of premonition, it looks into fact and what is fact.
"So, it is incredibly relevant to the world today,” reiterates Sanders.
"And it is a beautiful story. It is a story about families trying to navigate conflicts.”
In precis, it tells of Max, a mathematician, and his friend Sebastian, a physicist who surmise that they have discovered a quark which reveals the truth of the world. But what is truth? How pliable is it? The scientists obsess and the families and friends are drawn into the drama which, perchance, may have a greater impact on the political world than they imagine.
“Audiences will easily relate to the characters because, although it is in Berlin 30 years ago, they are middle class people, professional people who will resonate strongly,” explains Sanders.
Sewell’s plays remain popular among Australian theatre companies large and small and Sewell, now 65 and a screenwriter, novelist and playwright, and a man who describes himself as a pessimist, has become a revered figure in the Australian cultural landscape.
Sanders cites Sewell’s style of depicting intelligent, urbane characters as one of his favourite facets of the playwright’s creations. He particularly appreciates that Sewell draws his Australian identities thus and not, as so often in the past representations of the Australian character, as somewhat laconic and defeated.
“One of the reasons I feel a close affinity to Sewell and his work is that one of his central aims as a writer is to think of Australians as global citizens,” he says. "He paints them as large characters in a way rare in the old Australian canon. His characters are big, politically activated and middle class. They are intelligent and emotional Australians. And, his plays are about cities. I can relate to this. I am from the city. I am middle class.”
This perception of the Australian identity is important to Sanders and, he says, it is central to his own work in the theatre.
That this play’s characters are German is incidental to their class and their understandings of the world. These are common threads, as much Australian as German in Sanders’ eyes.
Stephen Sewell is known to keep a close relationship with his works in production and this trait continues. Not only has there been extensive pre-planning of this play and its production but also the playwright will join the director and the cast for the final weeks of rehearsal.
Apart from the distinguished Terence Crawford in the lead, the production brags a cast of very interesting actors , among them Jo Stone, Anna Cheney, Georgia Stanley, Patrick Frost, Max Garcia-Underwood and Roman Vaculik. And, with design by Karla Urizar, it is being staged in the Old Queen’s Theatre - from September 20 to October 6.
Samela Harris
When: 20 Sep to 6 Oct
Where: Queens Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Still, after all these years, most white Australians know pitifully little about Aboriginal culture.
But, says actor Lisa Maza, the theatre is breaking that impasse and taking white Australians into the lives and loves and domestic worlds of our original inhabitants.
And, it is thanks to a new generation of Aboriginal playwrights such as Nathan Maynard who are making the experience as much fun as it is culturally enriching.
Maza is talking about Maynard’s play, The Season, which is spring-boarding out of Noarlunga on tour with the Country Arts Trust. She describes it as a rollicking play about a big, noisy, chaotic, loving Aboriginal family.
Maza simply can’t quell her delight in the gorgeousness of this play even though, she says, the language is a bit on the rough side and some of the subject matter is a bit on the gruesome side.
She was rapt from the moment she read the script and now she enthuses that her role in it as Auntie Marlene is the favourite role of her career.
Maza’s career is distinguished. She is 51, Melbourne-based with a Queensland Meriam/Yidindji/Dutch background and 20 years of professional work behind her in the theatre as an actress and singer. Corrugation Road, Stolen, Radiance, The Sapphires, Yanagai! Yanagai! and Gronks are among the productions adorning her CV and amid roles in film, television and commercials, she also co-wrote and performed the theatre shows Sisters of Gelam and Glorious Bastards.
Now, in The Season, she thrills to “this big, juicy role in which I get to be an extreme person which is not myself”.
“It’s about big families,” she says. “I can relate to that. Mine is a big family. My father had nine children.
“This play is about a particular family and they are going mutton-birding. Just as when families get together, there’s drama, tension, fighting; it’s a roller coaster of family, and it is full of love.”
It is not Maza’s family the play centres around. It is a fictional one drawn from the many tales told over the years by the family of the playwright. Maynard is a descendant of the Chief of the Trawlwoolway Clan and hence of the Tasmanian Indigenous people of the North East of the State. He has been much celebrated in Tasmania with countless awards to his credit. He was this year’s NAIDOC Awards Aboriginal Tasmanian Person of the Year. The Season is Maynard’s first full-length play and it won the 2017 Green Room Award for the Best New Writing.
Maza has been impressed at the way this play and others of the contemporary Aboriginal theatre are “normalising” the depiction of Aboriginal people.
“I’m always thrilled to see modern works,” she says. “And there are more Aboriginal writers coming up, others, like Jada Alberts.”
“This play shows blackfellers as we know them, a family the same as everyone else. It is neither idolising blackfelllers nor showing them as drunks. It is just as family. Normalising.
"A lot of people don’t know blackfellers. This is a good place to show them as they are. I love the way this play is normalising the blackfeller.”
Not that going mutton-birding is normal to a lot of Aboriginal people. It is specific to six weeks on Dog Island off Tasmania’s north coast when the mutton birds come in to roost. The play centres on the fictional Duncan family who have been mutton-birding there for generations.
Maza is a vegetarian so she has never eaten mutton birds let alone gone mutton-birding in real life. Neither, she says, has the rest of the cast which includes the legendary Trevor Jamieson along with Matthew Cooper, Nazaree Dickerson, Della Rae Morrison, Maitland Schnaars and James Slee.
But now, thanks to the play, they are all deeply familiar with the mutton-birding tradition.
“I’m not sure I’d ever put my hand down those holes,” exclaims Maza in horror.
“It’s mainly done by the young boys. The women are in the shed cleaning and pulling the guts out.
“It’s dirty, stinking work. And such hard work.
“Not many are doing it now.
“It’s cold and windy, they work all day long and the birds are heavy. Forty they have to carry on poles called spiffs. They have to carry the birds back to the bin. It is very hard work. Then you have to dip the birds in hot water and get the feathers, it is gruesome.
“But it is a tradition. Families like this one have been doing it long before us. And that’s what it’s about. Human beings and family.
“Oh, and it is a comedy!”
Directed by Isaac Drandic, The Season, a Tasmania Performs production, is heading off on a South Australian regional tour, starting at the Hopgood Theatre, Noarlunga, on Tuesday August 14 and thence to:
Mount Gambier, Sir Robert Helpmann, Saturday August 18
Port Pirie, Northern Festival Centre, Wednesday September 5
Whyalla, MIddleback Arts Centre, Saturday September 8
Full details and bookings: www.countryarts.org.au
Samela Harris