Jessie McKinlay. The Adina Treasury Apartments. 5 Mar 16
The Isabetta Project is based on a 14th Century tale by mediaeval writer and Italian renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio. While production notes don’t specify the story, the production’s content points towards Lisabetta and the Pot of Basil (1351) from his The Decameron as being the inspiration. This tale recounts the tragic love affair between Lisabetta and her lover, Lorenzo.
Choreographer Jessie McKinlay spell-binds the limited size audience with a remarkably intimate, emotionally poetic and deeply personal, rarefied experience.
The Isabetta Project takes place within the tunnels of the Adina Treasury Apartments, providing a perfect, stripped back backdrop suggesting ancient places, in which equally ancient rituals of courtship and emotion unfold. As the production unfolds the audience takes a journey through four rooms; four different stages of a relationship.
Dancers Madeline Edwards and Samuel Harnett-Welk execute choreography of rich light and dark emotion with a firm, formally expressed, tenderness. McKinlay successfully fuses elements of mediaeval dance and contemporary gesture in the long tunnel-like first room in such a way as to imitate the framing of figures in art of mediaeval times. The mood is light, joyous, and emotionally passionate. Delicate moments of piano tingle over phrases of movement.
This is continued in the next room, in which the couple dance behind two separate wreaths of basil on the floor, white hand cloths, a pot of rose petal filled water, and two glass containers of chocolates. Being close to such a personal, ceremonial moment is special. Like a marriage ceremony in which vows are spoken in motion, brought to union and sanctified by the slapping of handfuls of basil on the body, filling the air with such a clean, sweet scent of seeming holiness.
In the context of Boccaccio’s tale, this particular phrase is lucid in its beauty and a remarkable expression of the greater symbolism within it.
At the moment the relationship fractures and changes, so does the accent of the choreography. In a small dark room, floor covered with oranges, Edwards intently reaches for Harnett-Welk, his back to her, but he does not respond. She works the floor in emotional pain, her legs slash the air with concerted effort, and she sweeps in loss, until both dancers draw the audience to the final room, where the darkness of loss becomes fully real.
The Isabetta Project is a magnificent achievement from such a young choreographer. It is a richly inventive contemporary work greatly powered by deeply literate, emotionally open comprehension of the mediaeval world.
David O’Brien
When: 29 Feb to 7 March
Where: Adina Apartment Hotel Adelaide Treasury
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Animals of Distinction. The Holy Body Tattoo & Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Festival Theatre. 4 Mar 16
Take the monument from monumental, and you begin to gain some comprehension of the extraordinary achievement Holy Body Tattoo’s Monumental is as commentary on surviving life in the 21st Century.
Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras’s choreography, remounted by Sarah Williams for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, is one which ‘fractures’ the ensemble into separate units standing on block pedestals arranged in a sophisticated depth of field as to suggest an array of living statues.
The ensemble strike motions alike to singing in the round, then in unison. The total effect is like a sharp series of stop motion film images. Fight. Pain. Weariness. Resignation. Surge forward. Repeat.
The impact is mesmerising for its stark beauty buoyed on, and further empowered by, the soaring, majestic live score played by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, sitting on a raised stage, extreme upstage.
The surround sound power of the score, with lightest nuances of percussion audible over god-thunder bass and trilling violin embellishes the performance like a 24 carat white gold lie. One senses these human ‘statues’, and their stressed, strained, anger-edged poses, are in fact not ones of oppression or fear (of course they are) but statements of glorious heroism in the face stark odds.
To take the question to a greater depth, projected text by Jenny Holzer poses some very hard and dark observations on human life and interaction, which feed directly into a choreography as physically punishing as it is emotionally razor sharp.
Monumental effectively works to strip away any sense of ‘heroic strength’, by pushing the boundaries of what’s considered ‘heroic’. The ensemble members slowly but surely find themselves pushed off the pedestals, where they stood, onto the floor; then suddenly they are at war with each other.
Are you tough enough? Are you, monumental?
David O’Brien
When: 4 & 5 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
A Working Hypothesis. Joanne Hartstone in co-production with Greenwich Theatre. The Queens - The Red Queen. 4 Mar 2016
After being ushered Down the Rabbit Hole in the cavernous Queen's Theatre, a disheveled man is about to launch into a lecture on criminology and deductive reasoning using old fashioned overheads. It's 1963, and Holmes and his nemesis, James Moriarty, have not been seen since they went over the Reichenbach Falls in a death grapple three years previous.
The lecturer, played by Dominic Accęn, had us deducting Holmes-like what the stranger seated next to us is all about, and that was fun and engaging. Yet just when I experienced rising concern that there wasn't much more to this show than this rumpled man, new, intriguing and surprising things began to happen.
Playwright Alexander Wright has constructed a ripper puzzler of a play. Utilising a high level of audience participation akin to playing games in Grade 4, we were swept along in a dangerous quest. New characters show up and their complicity in the narrative is revealed in good time.
Dominic Accęn has huge stage presence. His character has depth, his performance is intense, and he is quick-footed with audience feedback. Wright's script captures the vernacular of the classic work previously referred to and starting with a mesmerising premise, he maps out an intelligent yet twisted pathway to the solution of the intrigue. It's all silly and earnest, funny and finally sentimental. I can't say much more without a reveal - Sherlock Holmes - A Working Hypothesis is a definite go see.
The Flanagan Collective is associated with the York Theatre Royal and dedicated to a people's theatre. Brought to the Adelaide Fringe by the same mob as the excellent Bunker Trilogy, a trio of shows is also on offer. I didn't care for Bablyon, but I will give Fable a bell.
David Grybowski
When: 12 Feb - 14 Mar
Where: The Queens - The Red Queen
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Never Never Theatre Co. White Queen. 3 Mar 2016
It wasn't a publicity stunt. It was just uncanny happenstance that there was a fire alarm at the Old Queen's Theatre just as a play about a massive fire was about to open.
The fire of the drama is set in Sydney's Botanic Gardens in the year 2020. In the production, it is depicted by a long row of orange fluorescent light tubes stretching above the performance space like a blazing sky. This is a brilliant piece of design.
It is almost a star in the play, so potently does it play its part - the tubes going out one or two at a time as the play progresses and smoke eclipses the sky.
The soundscape works less well. It makes its point and then some. It is a droning rush of ambient thrum, ever-present, sometimes rising. It is like agonising tinnitus. The actors have to play over this city din and the audience members have to deal with it. It is a comment, perhaps, on the ugliness of urban noise pollution as well as a heavy-handed sound effect. It is too oppressive and for some audience members it undermines the lucidity of the words on stage.
Not that the play is exactly about lucidity.
It is more Brechtian than Brecht.
It is an absurdist fantasy about two survivors who colonise a park bench like specks in a calamity. They are just Woman 1 and Woman 2, argumentative abstractions from the imagination of playwright Harry Black. He's an Adelaidean and, while this play premiered in Sydney, it has come to Adelaide with strong Adelaide links, including the brilliant designer, Jeremy Allen.
Black's women toss about acrimonious exchanges, ponder possessions, survival, the point of things or lack thereof. The waters boil around them. The sky darkens. Their nasty little park-bench-island world shrinks.
Mix Godot and Endgame, throw in some Ray Bradbury, Neville Shute and a spectrum of apocalypse dreamers. Add some captivating prose from an interesting new young Australian writer, and you have the picture.
Perhaps director Jessica Arthur could have eked a bit more vocal light and dark from the dialogue to better play against the drone of the soundscape, but the performances by both Eliza Scott and Emma Harvie are strong and the characters they play are memorable.
It is hard to imagine a more intensely atmospheric venue for such a work than the rustic old demolition-dodge survivor we are now calling the White Queen.
And, we can only look forward with curiosity to what next the lively pen of playwright Harry Black may deliver.
Samela Harris
When: 3 to 6 Mar
Where: White Queen
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Presented by Strindberg Stages. La Bohème - Upstairs. 3 Mar 2016.
Cougar Morrison is a nearly-thirty androgynous cabaret performer with striking looks who channels stars of today, yesterday and yesteryear of similar ilk. He is scantily dressed in exotic cabaret costumes, replete with stilettos in which he is quite at home. At times Morrison has the air of Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, David Bowie or Annie Lennox, and some of his vocal numbers even mash together the styles (and even the song lyrics) of these iconic chanteurs.
His fusion of Dream A Little Dream of Me (written around 1931, and made especially popular by The Mamas and the Papas in 1968) and Sweet Dreams (by the Eurythmics) is particularly well done and suited his range darling, his range! When he began Somewhere over the Rainbow one was ready to be underwhelmed but was quite blown away by his performance of what was quite an idiosyncratic arrangement that breathed new life into something that can be, well, somewhat tired.
In essence, Cougar’s almost fleeting show – a tad over 45 minutes – is a story about loneliness, but the touching narrative is almost derailed by the less than witty patter that connects the musical numbers. In fact, it detracts at times, as does his accent that can’t make its mind up about what side of the Pacific ocean it wants to be on (despite the fact that he is a citizen of the world and moves freely between the USA and … WA). However, Cougar’s performance exudes honesty and the mediocre attempts at humour are quickly forgotten.
The show reaches quite different heights when Cougar keeps it real and focusses on anecdotes from his own experience. He relates stories about being different, coming out, being lonely, and patiently waiting for the love of his life to come into his life, that will make the loneliness that precedes it all the more worthwhile. In fact, it is such anecdotes and their skillful underscoring with careful song selections that keeps one connected to the act and completely on his side.
Cougar is an engaging performer and his show is a diamond in the making.
Kym Clayton
When: 2 to 6 Mar
Where: La Bohème
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au