Review - Unknown Neighbours

Theatre Works and Festival of Live Art Present

UNKNOWN NEIGHBOURS

By Ranters Theatre and Creative VaQi

Created by

Beth Buchanan                 Performer

Adriano Cortese               Co-Director

Da-Huim Kim                    Performer

Kyung-Sung Lee               Co Director

Deborah Leiser-Moore   Performer

Kyung-Min Na                   Performer

Soo-Yeon Sung                  Performer

Theatre Works 12 – 18 March 2018

Site-specific work can be a bit hit and miss.  Unknown Neighbours is a hit not to be missed!  No seriously - this is a rich and rewarding collaboration between Ranters Theatre and Creative VaQi from Korea for the FOLA (Festival of Living Art).  And the season is only a few days!

As an organic cultural exchange that was first performed in Seoul, Unknown Neighbours is, and is destined to be, much more then the sum of its parts.  It is a collaboration between Theatre makers from Eastern and Western communities with differences in language, community structures, religion and styles of theatre making and an inimitable offering. 

On any single visit each audience member gets to see one main piece of the four or five unique sight-specific installations, but most significantly, acquires a rich sense of the connections and rewards of this intercultural collaboration.

On opening night I went to the house that was occupied by Beth Buchanan and her investigation into, and expression of, separation.  This intense and affecting work conjures the visceral reality of what, individuals dissolving relationships can experience.  Eventually, it, very satisfyingly, morphs into a philosophical contemplation on romantic and lasting relationships, home and aloneness.  Ms. Buchanan is beautifully in control of her material and environment and communicates with her audience with great integrity.

I can only speak for this particular experience however - as an indication of the gravitas of the work on offer any of the individual works would be worth caching.  I don’t know how the bookings are decided - it may just be the luck of the draw – ‘pot luck.’  (Check with Theatre Works on this.)

A brisk walk follows the engagement with the various housed performance installations, to a park area where all performers and audience meet amongst locals and general vibrant everyday goings on.  Here the intended focus seems more general and elicits a sense of community.   Our next stop is the wonderful atmospheric and unsettlingly enhanced environment of the very old Christ Church St Kilda - next to the once Parish Hall - Theatre Works.  Here idiosyncratically East meets West with an unearthly sense of magic as Korean bells chime in a traditional church space and we move in an unconventional way throughout the area.

Finally five performers share something of their experience of involvement with aspects of the work and we are taken on a, galvanizing, projected video of the surrounding suburb and out to the bay.

A unique and very special adventure that I can’t recommend highly enough.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - The Dead Twin - FLIGHT - Festival of New Writing

The Dead Twin

By Chi Vu

Director: Deborah Leiser-Moore 
 


Visual Artist: Naomi Ota 


Sound Designer: Jacques Soddell 


Costume Designer: Ross de Winter 


Performers: Deborah Leiser-Moore, Alex Pinder, Harry Tseng, Daniel Han and Davina Wright

Footscray Community Arts Centre

August 12-22

The Dead Twin is a mysterious and haunting experience that ebbs and flows into the genre of horror.  This immersive journey starts from a secret place and is quiet magically enhanced by an amazing haunting sound scape.  It is the very type of work that is satisfying for theatre literate audience with rewards coming from active engagement, remaining focused, observing nuance and piecing inference together.

The Dead Twin explores the all pervading grief of two gentle and tortured souls Barbara (Deborah Leiser Moore) and Harold (Alex Pinder) who are the well meaning parents of the remaining, also grieving, twin Steve (Harry Tseng).  Both Leiser-Moore and Pinder movingly and sensitively embody the devastating grief resulting from war related trauma.  Steve their son seems to be masking his distress by attempting to convince his parents that he is living productively in the here and now.  And yet amongst all characters attempts to put on best appearances, everybody, including the audience, are haunted by the dead twin played in an eerie and creepily ghostly manner by Daniel Han. 

As the desperation of traumatic grief turns in on the family things go more and more awry.  Ultimately the surviving twin is forced to make deals with the underworld as personified by a beautiful young sex-worker/sooth-sayer Lola portrayed by Davina April Wright.

Chi Vu’s courageous writing highlights the deep scaring of losing loved ones to violent death.  It touches on the carnage of war that somehow, over generations, as a nation, we seem to have been able to ‘sweep under the carpet’. 

This production is masterfully choreographed by Deborah Leiser-Moore, as Director, who as well as interpreting and managing the work has taken the challenge of performing in it, apparently with the aide of a body double in rehearsals.

 

The audience’s attention is being continually focused and refocused and there are surprises aplenty.  Ms Leiser-Moore’s courageous and refreshing approach to directing has moments of luminescence.  There are instances in this work when visceral poignancy pulls at ones very being as we witness the desperate rawness of grief.  And there are other moments where it depends on one’s own placement in the space as to how the work is received.  This is usually the case with, the at times unpredictable beast that is, site-specific work.

Inspiring theatre makers to keep a very close eye on.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)