Review - Animal

Animal

Created by Susie Dee, Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks

Director - Susie Dee

Performers – Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks

Composer – Kelly Ryall

Designer – Marg Horwell

Lighting Designer – Andy Turner

Projected Text and Dramaturgy – Angus Cerini

Producer – Adam Fawcett

Theatre Works – St Kilda

17 to 27 November 2016

Susie Dee, Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks, with the assistance of Angus Cerini, have had the courage to delve into the murky depths, and usually hidden experience, of the insidious damage of abuse.  Marvelously they have extracted a poignant poetic essence.  And with the help of an exemplary production team are sublimely communicating this to audiences.  

Designer Marg Howell has created what looks like a found space and made Theatre Works feel cavernous.  It is fitted out, like a huge shed, with metal encased water tanks.  There is a sense of being in the country feathers are littered and float about and a kind of angel bell is ringing.  Two young barely clad women are perched near the rafters like featherless birds with clipped wings who are unable to escape and destined to an existence of ‘acting out’.  Imagery abounds and so do semiotics.

Composed sound (Kelly Ryall) is often effectively loud at times, and at some points appropriately disturbingly overwhelming.

Animal interprets the tragic effects of the internalized response to abuse.   It is not the experience of being violated we witness.  It is the resulting carnage that is expressed through the exceptional work of performers/co-creators Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks.  The ordeal is relived again and again.   A huge energetic expression of trauma is exhibited through their strong vigorous physical performances.

Wilks is extraordinary in her capacity to morph into an innocent child.  Evidently the abuse, this work is most particularly looking at, is the sexual abuse of young girls.  This aspect of victimization is depicted as children dancing in a ‘sexy’ way for someone.  There is a weary desperation in this dance, a sense of fretful apprehension.  It is evident that their aim to please is marked with a deep fear and a kind of defeated resignation.

The perpetrator is absent, but his presence is palpable.  He is rendered an absent shadowy figure – a larger than life specter that will always haunt.  His victims may have murdered him, however if this is the case, it is to no or very little avail.  His dark presence looms larger than life.

All roads seem to lead to a bottomless pit of psychological pain.  This devastation is expressed with amazing clarity in a kind of helpless, hapless stillness.

The abstracted roles these two women play interchange between victim and bystander, inferring an unavoidable situation.   They take on dresses – guises.  There are two distinctly different costumes one indicates more kudos the other outright victim status.  Although throughout there is a shared victimhood and a strong sense of sisterhood even when they attack each other.   They express an extraordinary intimacy through shared experience.

One discussion I had in the foyer likened the work to The Boys (the film adaptation by Stephen Sewell).  However it is not so much the horrifying edge of threat we witness, as audience, but the overwhelmingly demoralizing results of violation.  It is not frightening but enlightening.

Also in the foyer while I was half listening in to someone telling me it didn’t make them feel anything, I was observing a woman struggle with her tears.  Responses will by mixed.

This is such a gutsy challenging work – so worth catching – we will be talking about it for years.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Melbourne Festival, St Martins, Fraught Outfit and Theatre Works Present:

The Bacchae

Conceived by Adena Jacobs and Aaron Orzech

Music Composition – Kelly Ryall

Dramaturg – Aaron Orzech

Musical Director – Danielle O’Keefe

Lighting Designer – Danny Pettingill

Costume Designer – Chloe Greaves

Set Designer – Dayna Morrissey

Performed by St Martins Teen Ensemble: Bonnie Brown, Tove Due, Eve Fitzgerald, Anouk Gleeson Mead, Cindy Hu, Maima Masaquoi, Romaine McSweeney, Eve Nixon, Bridie Noonan, Lois Scott, Mieke Singh Dodd, Carla Tilley.

Music Performed by:

Freya Boltman – Vocalist

Julian De Marco – Boy Soprano

Nicholas Dugdale – Boy Soprano

Xiao Xiao Kingham – Pianist and Organist

Sarah Lee – Violinist

Bella Noonan – Vocalist

Zofia Witowski Blake –Vocalist and Percussionist

Lier Deng – Violin

Lara Stebbens – Cello

Kelly Ryal – Electronics and Sound

Theatre Works 8 – 24 October 2015

A strong sense of danger and menace lurks in this courageous contemporary interpretation of The Bacchae.  It is a vital production, performed in raw and natural way, without artifice, by girls and young women from St Martins Youth Arts Centre. It is apparently the culmination of the results of these young performers being empowered and supported to self-devise around the ‘adult themes’ of The Bacchae. 

Euripides’s original is an Ancient Greek Play that was first performed in 405BC.  Put very simply it looks at the conflicting sides of man’s nature – the controlled and organized, verses, the passionate and hedonistic as personified by the God Dionysius.

Andrea Jacobson as Director achieves in subverting ways of seeing through carefully managing the work with Dramaturg Aaron Orzech.  It is a fascinating attempt at communicating through a uniquely ‘feminine’, and therefore a somewhat enigmatic, sensibility.

There is an inference of youthful defiance in the performers commitment to the strong and weighty fabric of the ancient material, along with their retuning of ‘the gaze,’ through blatantly watching the audience watch them, often in a hostile way.  Refreshingly it never smacks of the actor wanting to be approved of by their audience.

The evening starts with two figures on stage, possibly a male being pleasured by a young female – but no - it is Dionysius being born from the thigh of Zeus.

Sound (Composition by Kelly Ryall and Direction by Danielle O’Keefe), although often electronic, is live.  Violin and voices combine exquisitely.  And the drum is used skillfully to underscore and vibrantly energize as well as to highlight and accentuate the perpetration of violence.

Tableaux and images allow for individual interpretation, many of them are very simple but loaded with social comment.  For example the only male performer, a very young person grabbing a can of coke and opening it after sinking into a couch may as well be cracking a can of Victoria Bitter. There are re-enactments of debasing sexual acts, imitation phalluses, an expression of the abject in the form of gold paint and Santa even makes a rather unpleasant appearance.

These young women morph form gawky kids to temptresses and everything in between and beyond.  In doing so they remind us just how complex, clever and sensitive young people are.  And how they are emerging into a treacherous world where their individuality is threatened through being overtly sexualized.

The evening concludes with the lyrical touch of an inflated Theatrical Mask, of a happy comic mouth with a Greek flavor (pardon the pun) with a large lascivious tongue.

I felt an acute similarity with Gob Squad and CAMPO's Before Your Very Eyes that came to Melbourne for the Festival in 2012.  A kind of amazing trust and theatrical intimacy of watching young performers communicate, with adult audiences, from a natural and sincere place. 

Somehow through the sum of its various parts and after a pensive walk up and down Acland Street from Theatre Works my specific, very strong and clear, take home message was - as a community we need ritualized bacchanalian (Dionysian) festivals to release some of the darkness in our natures in a safe and overt way.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)