A piece by Pina Bausch. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Festival Theatre. 9 Mar 2016
For 34 years we have waited to see the Pina Bausch company perform again in Adelaide. Thank you Arts Project Australia and the Adelaide Festival of Arts, for making it happen. The first time the Wuppertal ensemble performed in the Festival of 1982, we were agog. It was a very lateral and different face of contemporary dance: strange and beautiful gestural motions; dancers speaking aloud; and dancers moving like people in the street. On the spot, it redefined our perception of an art form. That performance was in Thebarton Theatre, playing Kontactof.
Now, minus its remarkable creator, Bausch, who died in 2009, it returns to play upon a vast expanse of pink carnations which carpet the mighty Festival Centre stage, row upon row on their long naked stalks, offset by the dead black of the back wall.
The first dancer who steps upon the stage seems diminutive. But the dancers don't dance into sight. They pick their way slowly and carefully, carrying chairs, and they sit down. Then, one by one, some make their way slowly offstage and into the aisles, select audience members, and escort them silently from the theatre.
The Bausch dancers are many. They are lithe and fit. And, they are diverse. Their ages reach into the 60s. They are tall and small. They are of many nationalities, including three Australians and even one from Adelaide who, having seen the company in 1982, was to run away and join the circus, so to speak, and live her professional life on its stage. Julie Shanahan’s place in the company now is outstanding insofar as she features in a games scene, towering aloft on the shoulders of another dancer, long skirts making her appear a giant. Thus, does she claim power in a scene of strange and tense play, a game of creeping statues which, in Bausch spirit, is edged with cruelty.
Nelken is very much about the unkindness of humanity, about cruelty and compassion, about the fact that groups are made up of individuals and that everyone in a crowd has a story.
Bausch has used the contrast between authority and the individual in the most dramatic way, dressing male dancers in dark suits and having a lead performer who, if anything, is like a Vladimir Putin. She has him confront the passing people and demand to see their passports, creating a relationship of intimidation and in one case, abject humiliation. And a hapless man must scamper four-legged among the flowers barking like a dog. There are real dogs, too; four sleek German Shepherds, once again representing the power of authority. They hint at wars in Europe, the Berlin Wall, and the Iron curtain
Bausch underscores these associations in costume and music. Her women wear long formal satin gowns of 30s style and the music leans to Mancini, Gershwin and Ellington . For much of the two hour performance, the cast wears loose little sunfrocks. Androgynous, they gambol through the carnations, rolling, rabbit hopping, chasing with the innocence of children. But authority is never far away. They are smacked and chased. The harshness of real life is waiting for them.
Individual dancers present vignettes. One girl, after spooning dirt from a bucket and tipping it over her head, comes to a state of howling tears, running in circles pursued by a man with a microphone. Between tears, she chastises herself for crying, like an autistic child's echolalia of parental reproach. Then there is the feeding of the orange, a dancer dutiful slurping and chewing into a microphone. It is not good, she says. The man feeding the girl, firmly cajoles her to just one more piece, bringing it to her mouth like an aeroplane, stuffing its hugeness in. She is left alone centre stage, chewing diligently. Endurance. Survival. Hope also lives in this surreal flowerscape.
Thematic is Gershwin's The Man I Love in which lyrics sung by Sophie Tucker are interpreted through sign language by a lone dancer. Love is the human dream. The song and the dream return at the show's end, somewhat battered as, by now, are the carnations. They have been trampled and rolled upon. They've even had towers of cardboard boxes piled upon them to cushion the falls of sinister besuited stuntmen. Dancers have dashed to and fro carrying the chairs upon which they sit to execute perfect symmetries of chorus-line choreography. Sometimes the chairs are upended.
Always the dancers are on the mark, in absolute tune with each other. They are supplicant. They are desperate. They are fighting back. Sometimes it is a frenzy, exhausting to behold. They speak out. The audience meets them. They are getting tired. One seeks the canteen. One has sore feet. One feels the need to prove that they are proper ballet dancers, after all. Bellowing hoarsely, he performs the great moves of classical ballet, never shutting up as he does so. Is that enough, he challenges.
Sign language is hallmark to the Bausch choreography and it returns triumphant at the production's denouement with the ensemble performing Bausch's elegant signature march, faces in those exquisitely complicit expressions, their arms repeating the signs for summer, winter, autumn and spring. With the 30s music and 30s glamour these ghosts of style from a grand era parade across the stage, cool eyes ever on the audience, the antithesis of the frenzies just moments before.
And thus, two wondrous strange hours are gone, leaving thoughts and images swarming through the mind. Dance genius has touched us again and the late Pina Baush never will die.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 12 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Tiny Bricks. Plants 1 – Bowden. 8 March
Beckett for the internet era?
Phillip Kavanagh’s Deluge, in Director Nescha Jelk’s and Designer Elizabeth Gadsby’s hands profoundly invokes the despair, isolation, hopelessness and intractability of modern life of Samuel Beckett’s era summed up in Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape.
The difference being playwright Kavanagh’s characters are reaching across to, and over, each other in a search for meaning and connection in real life via the digital world, in which their physical selves never move anywhere.
Nothing, seemingly, actually eventuates. Nothing is achieved. Nothing is saved. Nothing is better.
Yet something is going on. What? Information overload, and all of the above.
Deluge, set in Gadsby’s steel-fenced oblong, filled with square blocks of white Styrofoam, above which is set Lighting Designer Chris Petridis’s white/green flickering roof of LED cable, proves the perfect existential expression of the digital world. It is one in which the cast bob up from underneath the Styrofoam blocks to communicate across the sea of white. It is arguably one of the most intense, freeing yet scary spaces capable of nursing, and oppressing the expressions of human feeling and thought imaginable, given it’s very clear in a flash, this is the internet.
A fascinating duality comes into play for an audience. Are these characters real people? Digital archetypes based on ‘reality’? Are their fears, feelings and expressions genuine or mindless spam? Do we really care about any of them?
Amongst the sea of wires are two gamers. There’s a jousting couple’s one night stand, one person who questions everything, a lone soul falling apart, and more. For the audience, it’s a case of quickly creating snap shot digestions of character relations and story lines and hanging on to them as the production veers wildly away under its own criss crossing over and under narratives.
The ensemble of ten is uniformly brilliant in balancing the questioning depths of Kavanagh’s text while eliciting, with effective care, the rich vein of humour flowing through it. Each actor’s work within the small confines of the Styrofoam space is deftly managed with emotional aplomb. Their characterisations wonderfully skirt the boundaries of archetype and full blooded individual personality. They offer a uniform sense of isolation, confusion and loss particular to a character that’s nonetheless fully realised and individually appropriate to character.
Deluge begins a serious inquiry into the ‘other world’ the bricks and mortar one which we physically inhabit now parallels, just as Beckett’s work did the same for his equally far different world.
David O’Brien
When: 8 to 13 March
Where: Plant 1 Bowden (cnr Fifth Street and Park Terrace, Bowden)
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
1927, Salzburg Festival, Theatre de la Ville Paris and Young Vic. Festival Centre - Dunstan Playhouse. 8 Mar 2016
Why is this innovative London-based theatre company, formed in 2005 and dedicated to produce works combining performance, live music and animation, named 1927? Could it have something to do with a breakthrough in motion picture technology, because in that year, the world's first talkie feature film was screened to the world - The Jazz Singer.
For you goys out there, a golem is a mythical (at least I hope it's mythical) Yiddish creature comprised of the earth - say clay - sometimes unable to speak, yet anthropomorphic enough to do the bidding of its owner. In this uncannily creative and busy multimedia production, a golem is a sort of Trojan horse for a mysterious amalgamation of commercial and media interests with designs on your shopping choices and life style. You may have a golem near you right now - in real life it's known as a mobile phone.
The co-ordination between the live (at least I hope they were alive) actors, the animated figures and backdrop movements, chiaroscuro lighting, sound effects and live music was absolute magic. Suzanne Andrade (writer and director) and Paul Barritt (animation and design) seem to employ the cartoon styles of the early animation successes, like Sullivan and Messmer's silent screen star, Felix The Cat, which was followed by Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie in 1928, in keeping with 1927's thematic imperatives. Mickey and Minnie Mouse made history as Disney was dedicated to making the first fully synchronised sound cartoon.
There were several other reflections of style. Some of the highly stylised motions of the characters made me think of Woody Allen in 1973's The Sleeper. And Golem's uniform and an image near the end of the show were eerily familiar to costumes designed by Kazimir Malevich for the Russian futurist opera, Victory Over The Sun, in 1913. Industrial design, useless workshop labour and a sense of insignificance harks back to the German expressionistic and epic science fiction film, Metropolis, made in, guess what year? 1927.
All this great stuff is brought to bear through a painstaking and lengthy workshop process to bring you a fresh fable of a contemporary danger to all of us. The five characters of the Binary Backup Dept are dressed in prints of 1s and 0s. Every detail is thematic. Actors Esme Appleton, Lillian Henley, Rose Robinson, Shamira Turner and Will Close somehow exquisitely balance humanoid quaint and quirky movement and modulated voices with their character's humanity and a yearning for dignity as they are subsumed by the machine. They could be any one of us. Furtively, Lillian Henley and Will Close leave the set to play keyboard and percussion respectively on stage, and then return to the action.
In this Australian premiere season, Golem, no doubt, is a highlight of the 2016 Adelaide Festival. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 8 to 13 Mar
Where: Festival Centre - Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
By Martin Crimp. Stone/Castro. State Opera Studio. 8 Mar 2016
On arrival one finds a very old, virtually derelict home occupying the endless black space of the State Opera Studio. Visible through broken sections of lath and crumbling plaster, much of the interior can be seen from the outside. The hallway walls are lined with damaged millwork to the dado rail. Wallpaper peels from the disintegrating plaster. There are no doors, and indeed, many openings in the exterior walls seem to lead directly outside. A pile of firewood sits stacked against the house; deadwood and dried branches sweeping out into the peripheral. A pebble path lined with oversized river stones winds up to the door-less front door. The inside seems to seamlessly blend with the out; a timber subfloor transitions to grass.
One immediately wonders if anyone could really live in a building of this condition. Let alone with young children! But, perhaps designer David Lampard’s intent was less literal and more metaphorical; perchance a comment on the state of the relationships within this place.
We find a woman wandering the halls of this seeming empty home. She appears at odds with something or someone. It isn’t really clear. Her husband Richard appears and we learn she is Corinne. They relate to each other like a couple whose relationship has long been tested. They are antagonistic; interrogative; sarcastic; cynical.
They have moved here in pursuit of the ‘pastoral myth’; a concept perhaps less relevant to an Australian audience.
Their home is of American construction; their accents however, Australian.
He is a doctor and has brought an unconscious woman home, claiming to have found her collapsed on a track. Corinne doesn’t believe that that is the extent of their relationship and the tension is palpable. Nathan O’Keefe’s Richard is initially reticent; almost enigmatic. He begins in a composed and congenial manner, but as tension is amplified by a call from his boss, Morris, O’Keefe becomes perturbed and rueful.
Corinne attempts to pacify Richard with her sensuality, encouraging him to kiss her, but he rejects her citing a feeling of dirtiness. Jo Stone’s Corinne is brooding, and somewhat despondent to Richard’s actions. Their relationship is disputatious and Crimp writes the characters such that what is said and what is meant rarely correlate.
Listening and watching as intently as one must to the action, Lampard’s set and Director, Paulo Castro’s blocking can occasionally be frustrating – obscuring faces and eyes.
Crimp’s writing can be hard work for an audience. Full of wordplay and moral ambiguity one needs every available cue from the player’s actions and physicality to embellish the story with context.
Daniel Barber’s lighting transforms the scenes when tension and intention shift between the characters. Strobes of light punctuate heightened emotion and changes in colour swiftly shift scenes from congenial falsities to malevolent truths.
When Richard is called away to urgently attend a childbirth, the stage is set for a rude and abrupt meeting of the unconscious woman and Corinne. Now awake, she encircles the home in an attempt to gain her bearings; settling on a bench from where she can see Corinne gazing out the front door.
Her name is Rebecca, and Corinne has discovered her bag containing syringes and painkillers. We have already learned that Richard is a recovering addict.
Natalia Sledz gives Rebecca a sense of provocative indifference. When Corinne initially confronts Rebecca’s accusations of harm at Richard’s hand she attempts to vindicate him and bribe Rebecca from her accusations. But more is yet revealed and Stone quickly descends into vitriol.
Richard’s return shortly after Corinne’s departure signals another shift in Crimp’s emotional intent. The play takes on a dangerous sensuality and desperation that O’Keefe and Sledz are absolutely absorbed in. It is spine-tingling stuff.
The final scene draws the audience even further off the scent and an abrupt ending signals the start of many conversations about intent, motivation and context amongst the audience. Crimp subverts dramatic conventions and leaves us not with a clear narrative but rather a detached and often morally corrupted impression of human nature; in this case depicting middle class infidelity.
The performances and creative vision behind this production are simultaneously intriguing and stunning. Stone/Castro has done it again, and this is surely one of the highlights of the 2016 Adelaide Festival and an absolute standout production by local South Australian talent.
Paul Rodda
When: 7 to 13 Mar
Where: State Opera Studio
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
RCM & Premier Artists. Garden of Unearthly Delights - The Spiegeltent. 5 Mar 2016
Ceberano is a byword for celebration and charisma.
Her curvature is caressed by a shimmering Jean Paul Gaultier-designed kaftan-like dress, and her smile signs an unbridled joy in music and performance, and just plain living. Ceberano charms her audience before every song with flirtatious banter and lusty innuendo. Aided by guitarist James Ryan, and female musical and vocal backing, Ceberano thrills the audience with her repertoire spanning twenty-three albums.
Not only is her voice now iconic in Australian soul, jazz or pop, she was the first woman inducted into the Australian Songwriters Association Hall of Fame. She is a celebration of sensuality, and the years have not wearied her. She wonders why performers like herself - in her 50th year of life - turn their pop tunes into jazz, and "here is one I've done as well."
Always an eye on the spunky new talent, the striking singer and guitarist James Ryan performs some of his own work and complements the others. The hour is fun and spontaneous, like being present in the recording studio. New things are tried, new sounds discovered, some things even repeat after discussion - all with a sense of adventure and love of the craft - and the audience are right along with them. Her presence radiates the room.
Kate and her crew receive the most immediate, the most spontaneous, and heartfelt standing ovation I have seen, that even she seemed taken aback.
There is only one more show and you better go. Double bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 5 and 6 Mar
Where: Garden of Unearthly Delights - The Spiegeltent
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au