Review - Lone

Lone

Presented by The Rabble and St Martins

Creators - Emma Valente & Kate Davis
Set & Costume Designer - Kate Davis
Lighting & Sound Designer - Emma Valente
Artistic Associate - Katrina Cornwell
Producer - Tahni Froudist
Production Managers - Rebecca Etchell &Gwen Gilchrist
Stage Manager - Cassandra Fumi
Performers, Creators & Designers
Clea Carney, Abigail Fisher, Ashanti Joy, Remy Lawlor, Ave Maui, Lola Morgan, Griffin Murray-Johnston, Raven Okello, Jackson Reid, Thomas Taylor & Frankie Wilcox

Arts House – North Melbourne Town Hall

8 – 17 June 2018

Due to its unique and somewhat provocative nature and very limited number of tickets Lone is likely to be a difficult to catch during its short season at Arts House.   

This work is partly a legacy of Clare Watson, the previous artistic director of St Martins, who commissioned The Rabble (Emma Valente and Kate Davis) to create and develop it in conjunction with young theatre makers from St Martins Youth Theatre.  Lone is about being alone/lonely that is clearly described as work for an adult audience and is part of St Martins thrust to create ‘Art.’

In each of eleven small rooms, the size of a garden shed, one of eleven child performers and one audience member experience around 30 minutes together. 

When I entered the small space, as the light within in went on, I wondered where to place myself - feeling cumbersome and awkward and wanting what would be most conducive for the young actor lying, as if asleep, on the floor.  I sat on the stool by the door not wanting to create discomfort by invading personal space.  I hoped I was being an appropriately supportive audience and was close enough to engage.  I had been told all the girls, (and hopefully boys as well), had a whistle around their necks and a healthy number of support persons were hovering around the performance spaces - in the unlikely event of assistance being required. 

Everything is white.  The child is surrounded by white flowers – both on the floor and hanging around the small space.  Delicately with committed focused concentration she works with the flowers and other accouterments and finally makes a spell to work magic that invokes colour.   Subsequently she talks about individual taste and her sense of isolation due to contrasting preferences. 

We communicate on a small note pad with a black texta partly, I guess, because I’m wearing headphones which envelope me in ambient sound.  It is a lovely light interaction.  Ultimately the child leaves me ‘a-lone’ in the room - to meditate on the experience?  Charmingly and politely she utters;  “It was nice to meet you,” as she departs.

The gentle sensory aspects of the experienced remind me of the workshop I had done last year with the UK troupe Bamboozle at the Melbourne Arts Centre.  They work with children who have disabilities so there performances are intimate, sensory and tactile. 

This comparison leaves me thinking - I would love to know how, children would enjoy being entertained by their contemporaries.  And having worked extensively with children and drama I am very aware of just how clever and fascinating they can be as creators and performers.  When encouraged they can have this marvelous sense of self and self-assurance.  Often the trickiest thing is getting them to forget their own fabulous ideas and engage genuinely with the ideas of others and be critical and supportive audiences to each other.

Lone is an exhilarating, heady and heartening work that portends well for St Martins current exciting trajectory.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Personal

Personal

Artistic Director/Writer/Performer

Jodee Mundy

Director – Merophie Carr

Design – Jen Hector

Sound – Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey

Video – Rhian Hinkley

Movement Consultant – Jo Dunbar

Script Consultant – Sandra Fiona Long

Auslan Translation Consultant – Gavin Rose-Mundy

Arts House – North Melbourne

April 24 to 29 2018

Personal by Jodee Mundy is an acute insight into some of the strains and joys of being a ‘CODA’ – a hearing child born to a deaf adult/parents/into a deaf family.

As a short but intense 60 minutes of theatre it frames, elucidates and distills this experience, on a very personal yet totally relatable to level, for a mixed audience of deaf and hearing.  This rewarding compelling work brings deaf and hearing a little closer together both literally and through its delicate and sharp insights - crisply and clearly presented.

Personal feels like an especially liberating opportunity for creator/performer Jodee Mundy to communicate her experience through both her spoken language English and signed language Auslan.   With her beautiful physicality as a trained mime artist, her pleasingly modulated voice and command of Auslan she delights her audience.  Throughout the work what is signed is spoken as well, or interpreted through subtext.  Mundy’s experience - so very expressively communicated, often with cheeky witty nuances, is accessible to all.

Personal is the sum of a number of aspects of Mundy’s experience integrated with the help of Director Merophie Carr into a lovely expressive unified, finely tuned and fascinating whole.  Nothing is extraneous and everything has been beautifully linked and crafted together by massively skilled performance makers. 

The design of movable open boxes by Jen Hector offers numerous opportunities for modifying and changing the performance space in a smooth and direct manner.  Rhian Hinkley is a master of video.  His work of recording and projecting anecdotes and conversations adds a stunning immediate dimension to the whole. Sound (Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey) in the form of a kind of static or ‘white noise’ is initially directed in a very specific way to areas of the audience and later sound is integrated in numerous ways.  

Doubtless the input and work of Jo Dunbar as Movement Consultant, Fiona Sandra Long as Script Consultant and Gavin Rose-Mundy as Auslan Translation Consultant is just as vital to the ultimate result though not necessarily as obvious to the viewer. 

Ms. Mundy who has an agreeable and disarming ‘stage presence’ talks to us, plays with us, moves boxes, interacts with projections and generally commands the space.  Everything is linked and on a number of occasions projections even converse with each other in an unanticipated manner.  Most tellingly we are given a glimpse of how Ms. Mundy must have experienced very unusual boundaries/or lack of by virtue of living in two often-separate worlds through her childhood and adolescence.

Congratulations to all involved - this is a must see!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Black is the Colour

Deafferent Theatre Presents:

Black is the Colour

By Daniel Keene

Director – Jessica Moody

Catherine – Anna Seymour

Irene – Hilary Fisher

Creative Producer – Jessica Moody

Auslan Master – Sherrie Beaver

Production Manager and Creative Producer – Ilana Charnelle Gelbert

Lighting Design – John Collopy

Sound Design – shannyn,art

Caption Technician – Jessica Murray

Arts House – North Melbourne Town Hall – 24 September – 1 October 2016

This is an awesome first production by Deafferent Theatre.  It is a wonderful opportunity for Deaf

and hearing friends to come together to experience dialogue and interaction in Auslan performed by two expressly engaging and consummate performers.  Their work is crisp and vibrant and clearly supported with captions. 

As a hearing person it just takes a little time to get used to looking above the actors to, as quickly as possible, read the text and then be able to check into the beauty and clarity of the signing.  And it is surprisingly satisfying to engage with a signed work that is partially buoyed with sound (shannyn.art).

Black is the Colour is about a friendship, with at times hazy boundaries, between two women where one is trying, as best she can, to support the other to leave an abusive relationship.

The choice of this sensitive, rich and current text by writer Daniel Keene is a resonant and rewarding one.   It explores the profound difficulties undergone in trying to leave a relationship that is infused with physical, and therefore, emotional and psychological violence.

A hallmark of Keene’s work the courage to look into the dark corners of social alienation and disenfranchisement.  In this instance he explores the experience of psychological instability that can be caused through enduring abuse in a relationship.

Anna Seymour is an experienced dancer, who in this work although not dancing, sensitively and explicitly, lets the audience into the quandary her character Catherine is tussling with.   Hilary Fisher as Irene communicates her characters deep concerns and persistence and also sadly - ultimate disenchantment.

As I watched I started to think how amazing it would be if, at some point, the performers could leap into dance and even just momentarily transcend the need for spoken or signed words.  But maybe that could be a twist in Deafferent’s next project?

Tickets are selling like hotcakes – so book now if you want to catch this show.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Song - Ranters Theatre

Song

By Ranters Theatre

Concept/Director - Adriano Cortese Visual Concept/Designer Laura Lima, Songwriter/Performer - James Tyson,

Image Production and Lighting Design - Stephen Hennessy, Sound Designer -

David Franzke, Perfumer - George Kara, Performers - Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt, Text - Raimondo Cortese, Producer - Sara Austin, Adriano Cortese,

Production Management - Geordie Baker & Govin Ruben from Rubix Cube

Arts House – North Melbourne

12 April – 21 April

This ‘sense around’ experience can be enjoyed against the wall, on a stool, or, on your own piece of astroturf placed anywhere on the beautifully polished Town Hall floor.   It is a very individual experience that doubtless many participants have reveled or will revel in, in the next few days.

It is so often what frame of mind one brings to theatre, that colours the experience, and can enhance with piquancy and assist in the suspension disbelief.  Exhausted at the end of a long week I was looking forward to something immersive and magical.  And, initially, I responded to Song with as much generosity as I could muster to find myself strangely transported to my sometime, misspent youth – imbuing me with the feeling of being totally stoned and lying heavily on the grass with a heightened awareness to my natural surroundings. 

A solid and interesting starting point I thought.  But sadly not a place I was able to freely maneuver from with the limited resources at my disposal. 

Song is an intense experience that makes weighty demands on its audience as it separates out the senses.  What one has most to work with is sound (David Franzke), sounds from nature as well as songs simply sung with a guitar and then piano (James Tyson).  There are also smells (Perfumer – George Kara) and air movement and a large round white object and some falling water.    Although initial smells are light and pleasant they are almost all somehow synthetic, and, except perhaps in the early stages, do not necessarily relate to the sounds.

Overall there is little to look at, other than other audience members.  To start with this is unmediated and not particularly comfortable though as the event moves on lighting (Stephen Hennessy) states change.   I was expecting projected images.  In a world that is so dominated and informed by the image it feels strange to do without them.  And for me the strongest messages from Song are just how dependent I have become on visual stimuli and how discomforting and disconcerting it can be to separate out and isolate ones own senses.

A worthwhile adventure in theatre making and interesting journey as participant but it did seem to give me a headache.

Suzanne Sandow
(For Stage Whispers)

Review - RRAMP

RRAMP

The Collector, the Archivist and the Electrocrat

Arts House

North Melbourne Town Hall

5 – 8 September

Devised and Performed by Christine Johnston, Lisa O'Neill, Peter Nelson, Animation - Ahmarnya Price, Video Production – Jen Jackson, Costume Design and Construction – Selene Cochrane, Lighting Design – David Walters, Production Stage Manager – Leila Maruan.

Put simply, RRAMP is a beautifully produced quirky, eccentric collection of animated (Ahmarnya Price) love stories, mostly about life in the hen house. These are seamlessly presented by The ‘extraordinary’ Collector (Christine Johnston) with the assistance of her, longsuffering, ‘tenants’ the dancing Archivist (Lisa O’Neil) and musician Electrocrat (Peter Nelson). 

This sophistically costumed (Selene Cochrane), formidable talented ensemble entrance as they bemuse with song, dance and story. 

The disturbing issues of hording - at the core of RRAMP, though only really touched upon, provoke thought and leave a residue of intrigue.  In searching for meaning with regard to this motif there is, amongst other things, a suggestion that hoarding has vicariousness at its heart.

Many will recognize Christine Johnston as the easily lead and rather fragile Kransky Sister, Eve.  In RRAMP her ‘over the top’ character, reminiscent of Morticia from ‘The Addams Family’, of The Collector allows her to explore and thoroughly entertain as a bemusing and controlling spinster of a darker more creepy nature.

Musically the work is very satisfying and the lovely, cleverly integrated dancing by Lisa O’Neil is delightful. 

We are so fortunate, that currently, this type of vital and inspiring alternative work is being developed, supported and brought to us by our arts bodies.  And for our part - we should endeavor not to miss any of it!

Suzanne Sandow

For Stage Whispers