★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Chris Henry. Belgian Beer Café Oostende. 1 Mar 2020
Balloon tricks is almost an iron-clad guarantee to entertain kids, and Balloonatics (pronounced to rhyme with lunatics) is no exception. Start winding those long pencil shaped balloons into animals, and you’ve won.
Scottish comedian Chris Henry (who let the adults know that he also does a show at night, which is a little less polite) welcomed the kids with some good patter from the mobile phone attached to his wrist, although the notion of a pre-recorded script and the concomitant jokes was somewhat lost on the younger audience members, who just wanted to get the balloon action going.
‘Favourite animals’ was of course the theme to get them going, and luckily the usual pets came up, the dog, the cat, the giraffe. You don’t have a giraffe? Loser.
The kids were for the most part, happy to be part of the show; the small audience meant that anyone who wanted to could join in. From super heroes to emojis, balloons were twisted, turned and tugged over kids - and occasionally their parents – accompanied by much raucous laughter (and a few tears as they inevitably popped) and just a bit of audience heckling.
Henry makes enough adult allusions to keep the parents entertained, but there probably needs to be a bit more for the kids; their attention span is short, and they’re just not there for the conversation, unless it’s about them!
Lots of room for improv; it does take a brave man to work with kids and balloons, and Henry is up to the task. Funny, silly and entertaining.
Arna Eyers-White
Whewn: 1 to 15 Mar
Where: Belgian Beer Café Oostende
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Shamel Pitts & Mirelle Martins. Odeon Theatre. 29 February 2020
One of the great things about the Adelaide Festival is having New York come to us. American choreographer Shamel Pitts was trained by Israel’s Ohad Naharin and passes on Naharin’s Gaga dance language in the Big Apple. He was enthralled by pupil Mirelle Martins from Brazil and their collaboration over several years had resulted in Black Velvet. Pitt says it was “as if we were two different aspects of the same person.”
The two dancers have shaved heads and are naked except for simple cloths woven around their waists. Both costume and skin are bathed with a chocolate-coloured sheen resembling, well, black velvet – a sort of hyper-realisation of their natively dark skins. The dance begins excruciatingly slowly and indeed is measured throughout, excepting some explosive frenetic movement resembling the inner workings of a mad clock. Yet the narrative arc is one of love, of engagement and entanglement – an intimate investigation of both masculinity and femininity. Pitt’s choreography, he says, celebrates his female family role models as a gay black man. Watching Pitt’s and Martin’s beautifully toned and muscular, yet lithe, figures writhe into each other’s body hollows is both erotic and joyful.
Black Velvet is a mesmerising work of universal attraction. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 28 Feb to 2 Mar
Where: Odeon Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. The Workshop, Adelaide Festival Centre. 29 Feb 2020
This one-off performance was a real hoot. A large screen is set up in the workshop deep in the bowels of the Festival Centre. The audience is surrounded by jungle motifs including faux life-sized stuffed jungle animals. Geoff Cobham’s lighting above signifies colourful contrails from soaring birds. And below the screen is the Shaolin Afronauts – Adelaide’s own 10-piece afrobeat/soul/funk/avant garde jazz band. They completely enhance the Mad Max movie experience.
George Miller’s 1979 dystopia pic still packs a punch and the young NIDA graduate Mel Gibson is very lithe and handsome. The first four-fifths of the film is a horror job movie; you are terrified the feral motorbike gang will wreak violent havoc at any time. The remainder is a vengeance film, where Mad Max takes revenge for the murder of his son and the near-fatal injuries to his wife. Never mind now that Max’s final retribution torture is inflicted on a man who pleads mental illness and was shown not to be guilty of torching Max’s cop partner (it was an accident!). You don’t have to be a psych nurse to figure that all the characters – cops or crooks – are struggling with their inner demons.
The Afronauts got everyone’s attention by bellowing out the suspense during the opening car chase when Max mows down his first bad guy in the film. Where the Afronauts’s nuanced notes were overwhelming, the subtitles kept you filled in, but there were a few short bits where the original soundtrack/dialogue sufficed and the Afronauts took a deserved breather. When their brass revved up and the guitar wailed with the Bronze’s sirens, the Mad Max mayhem was overwhelming. Bravo!
P.S. Sorry, show over. One night only
David Grybowski
When: 29 Feb
Where: The Workshop, Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Main Theatre, AC Arts. 29 Feb 2020
Samira Elagoz was born in Helsinki in 1989 and identifies as a Finnish/Egyptian film maker. Since 2014, she had been making award-winning visual art, including her first feature film, Craigslist Allstars, and this narrated documentary, Cock Cock…Who’s There? from 2016. Cock Cock… was winner of the Prix Jardin d’Europe at Vienna’s ImPulsTanz in 2017, and also took the Total Theatre Award at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe.
Elagoz was raped six years ago and after a year of recovering – on her self-described “rape anniversary” - she commenced a project of filmed conversations of her family’s and friends’ response to the rape. This turned out to be the most benign segment of the documentation. She ratchetted up her research to document her first encounter with men harvested from advertising websites catering to adult services, and later, to document her first kiss with such the same. It’s not as cut and dry as that – there is a film of a man sucking his own cock and some footage of Elagoz’s button-like nipples. She informs that these filmed encounters take place under conditions made safe, yet completely intimate.
Part-way through her “research,” she meets American photographer Richard Kern in New York, soon after her second rape in Tokyo, and reveals that he bragged to her how he has sex with every one of his models. With a hint of jealousy, Elagoz laments how unfair that was; that he can safely have sex with any one, any time he wants, while with her, any sexual encounter can rapidly spiral out of control. I could not possibly know Elagoz’s mind, but it appears as if she thought: How can I interpret my rape through a project where I can safely meet and possibly have sex with as many strangers as I want, record the evidence while saying I’m presenting the female gaze, and then make a narcissistically super-indulgent documentary – a kind of never-ending selfie – showing what a desirable cock-teaser I am, like I’ve been doing since I was 10. And then convince award committees and festival directors that it’s cutting edge and not angst-ridden self-promoting propaganda.
In Elagoz’s show, I was reminded of Eckhart Tolle’s concept of the pain body - how the pain body likes to spread its pain. Elagoz is a great case of the victim becoming the perpetrator and perpetuating that pain. I felt used and maybe that’s her point.
No, that wasn’t a standing ovation at the end of the show. That was people lining up in the aisles still trying to walk out during the closing images of frontal close-ups of Samira Elagoz’s face while she’s dribbling cum out of her lascivious lips. And in case you averted your gaze the first time, the moving image of about 15 seconds is repeated about half a dozen times – each one different. But you don’t need to see the show for this pleasure – go to her website: samiraelagoz.com/cock-cock-whos-there.
Fascinating like a train wreck.
David Grybowski
When: 28 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: Main Theatre, AC Arts
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Ukiyo, Gluttony. 1 Mar 2020
Two guys, the brothers Angus and Matilda, comprise the Circus Firemen, whose show is aimed squarely at the children and family market… this Sunday morning session was a willingly raucous full house. We’d been promising the kids we’d see this show for a couple of Fringes now, and they didn’t disappoint.
Four and six year olds hoot with laughter at some of the more obvious slapstick (‘my ladder is the wrong way around’) but there were long spaces which cried out for more. Even in a short one hour show, young kids in particular quickly lose interest, and the longwinded recruitment of audience member Reuben was merely filler, I’m afraid. Too much talk, too many thoughts iterated then reiterated, then restated: “I hope you survive the trick, Reuben.” One would have expected these guys to be able to read an audience better by now.
But the firemen turn in some great tricks, the ubiquitous juggling – up to seven clubs (skittles) in the air at one time, some exceptional balance and ladder tricks, and some tricks aimed directly at the adults in the venue. The kids who helped in the reviewing process agreed (unsurprisingly!) that the juggling with chainsaw and two sharp knives was the highlight of the show.
And it was. My only real complaint – as expressed above – was that there were too many slow spots in such a short performance.
Alex Wheaton
When: 1 to 15 March
Where: Ukiyo, Gluttony, Rymill Park
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au