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)

Review - When the Mountain Changed its Clothing

When The Mountain Changed Its Clothing

By

Heiner Goebbels

Featuring the Vocal Theatre Carmina Slovencia

State Theatre – Arts Centre Melbourne

Until Sunday 26 October

This is a marvelous chance to hear some extraordinary choral work that is moving, mysterious and other-worldly.  From a simple start of an almost empty stage When The Mountain Changed Its Clothing leaves a beautiful expanding and flourishing rich sense of spring full of promise.  Perhaps ambiguously it is the promise in the life of women or a woman, perhaps a simple homage to womanhood or just a homage to spring and the life-cycle.

As the performance progresses we watch forty young women enter the performance space, set up the stage, change their drab costumes into something more feminine and bright and perform some texts in front of some simply designed projected imagery.  All of this they do mostly in unison as they sing like angels. 

Creator/Director Heiner Goebbels uses a combination of unexpected texts that in being presented in this context undergo a kind of deconstruction.  Being put into the context of such a streamlined seemingly unrelated bold theatrical piece endows what is being spoken with a sense of irony or at the very least allows for discrete interpretation. Two of these resonant texts are printed in the program; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile Or on Education and Gertrude Stein’s My Last about Money.

Much of the music is traditional and very old including a textural Indian piece all presented with such glorious finesse by this very large a cappella choir. 

An unusual and unique experience – a true festival piece.

Highly recommended – but only a couple more shows – just go!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Hipbone Sticking Out

Hipbone Sticking Out

Written with and for the Roebourne community & directed by Scott Rankin. Big hART production at Melbourne Festival. Arts Centre Melbourne, 

Playhouse. 17 – 21 October 2014 

Hipbone Sticking Out s a beautifully polished will funded/supported/backed work a stunning opportunity to see what Community Theatre can be – at its best. 

Having taken three years to develop by Big hArt with the community of Roebourne in the Pilbara Hipbone Sticking Out takes it inspiration from the death in custody of a 16 year old boy John Pat.  It is a sort of retrospective look at the damage done to Australia’s beautiful sensitive indigenous communities from the beginning of brutal imperialistic colonization.

Trevor Jamison and Nelson Coppin

Very movingly it focuses on the boy John Pat as an adult through the strong and thoroughly engaging stage presence of Trevor Jamison who is a continual presence with his sixteen year old younger self played by Nelson Coppin.

Trevor Jamison

Boasting some wonderfully strong performers and a whole troupe of glorious singers the work just bursts to life with a splendid audio of exquisite voices.

Lex Marinos is a beautiful strong presence and his voice is rich and mellifluous.  He plays a wonderful Pluto as things get rolling and narrates throughout.

Although it does have a very persuasive didactic core there is much humour throughout and a sense of irony often comes to the fore.  

How Australia’s Indigenous Mobs were forced into the untenable position that was and is now unrelentingly debilitating is clearly described.  It is a timely work a clear and through overview, a background that we can move forward from.

Having recently read Kate Grenville’s moving Novel The Secret River noted some similarities and that text is fairly soon to hit our small screens.

The concluding positive and proactive emphasis is on the young people and how to support them and help facilitate burgeoning futures. 

  

The set designed by Genevieve Dugard is versatile and interesting.  The stage that is raked to one side and offers considerable flexibility.  The use of projections is simply stunning. 

In interval I found myself thinking of all the people I would love to be able to take to this show – hopefully there will be other chances.

Really tremendous Theatre - so worth catching.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - We're Gonna Die

We’re Gonna Die

Presented by Jean Lee’s Theatre Company

For the Melbourne Festival

Written and performed by Young Jean Lee, Original Music by Young Jean Lee, Tim Simmonds, Mike Hanf, Nick Jenkins, and Ben Kupstas.

Choreography by Faye Driscoll, Directed by Paul Lazar.

Future Wife: Make Hanf, Andrew Hoepfner, Nick Jenkins, Ben Kupstas and Young Jean Lee.

Arts Centre Melbourne

24 – 27 October (season ended)

Young Jean Lee is certainly a courageous, sharp and perceptive theatre maker, she knows how to get to the bare bones of universal experience that can be satisfyingly shared with an audience.  Her approach to creating work by specifically propelling herself out of her comfort zone is inspiring.

We’re Gonna Die is a series of true-life anecdotes, around the subject of death, told quite entrancingly with an almost monotonously dry, controlled, delivery with a naïve youthful edge. Lee’s material comes from her own life experience and the resulting retelling is disarming in its sincerity.  She is at home with her audience as are her supporting band of musicians Future Wife.  Songs and music that are completely intrinsic to the whole are reminiscent of the songs of the band Rilo Kiley.

Under the matter-of-fact delivery, which brings Seinfield to mind, one sometimes glimpses Lee’s expressive strengths as a performer.  She is particularly animated when she sings a song as her mother giving rather chillingly pessimistic advice.  Lee introduces this item, a little confusingly, as one character portraying another character.

This production is closer to stand up cabaret than theatre actually, but is well housed in the intimate Fairfax Studio.  The simple staging, and charming neutrality of the delivery of this work, belies the number of creative individuals engaged to achieve a perfectly paced effective result.

It is a novel, communal experience singing ‘we’re gonna die’, in celebration of our mortality as an audience at the end of Young Jean Lee’s sensitive and moving show.

Engaging with this work got me thinking that perhaps there is a place in this festival for the more full engagement of a younger demographic in the Melbourne Festival.  It is the third one-hander that I have seen this Festival!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Before Your Very Eyes

Before Your Very Eyes

Presented by COMPO / Gob Squad

For Melbourne Festival

Concept, Design and Direction

Gob Squad (Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastain Trost, and Simon Will)

Performers: Martha Balthazar, Spencer Bogaert, Faustijn De Ruyck, Gust Hamerlinck, Zoe Luca, Jeanne Vanderkerckhove and Ineke Verhaegen, Voice Over – Rigley Filey, Camera – Philippe Digneffe, Pol Heyvaert and Gob Squad, Video Post Production – Mile Chalcraft, Koeneel Coessens, Sarah Michelle Harrison, Anna Zett and Gob Squal

Before Your Very Eyes rewards with the sheer entertainment of watching beautiful young, energetic, professional actors at work, to say nothing of the interesting perspective it throws onto the art of living, by looking at it through young eyes.  

On a set that has been likened to a fish bowl, after a lively warm up and introduction, under the guidance of a neutral style female voice-over, seven young feisty charismatic actors dress up and ‘act’ growing up.  They seem to work as if in a game without guile or pretense and each child has a very strong ‘stage presence’.

Masterfully, three or so years ago when this part of a three-tiered project commenced, the creators had set aside considerable recorded footage of the youthful participants so as to be able to incorporate it in future performances.  The payoff, of this, is now. The younger children interview their older selves.  There is often something profound about the probing questions of a child to an adult.  In their concern for a child’s piece of mind an adult will perhaps censor or moderate their responses.  There is something almost mind boggling about the questing of the child actors to their older selves who are guised in the characters of their ‘interpreted’ mature adult selves.   

Very strikingly we are watching lively energetic performers who do not seem to have inflated egos and are not posturing.  What could have been a voyeuristic experience is not, particularly, because of the forthright commitment of the performers and their representation of themselves and thankfully they are not in the least sexualized.

This is one of three shows that I choose from a restricted list this year although I did see others.  All three After Life, We’re Gonna Die and this Before Your Very Eyes are really about what we value in life.  They all discuss death or and dying in an open way leaving space for ones own take, interpretation and thought processes.

Demanding but Satisfying Theatre.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)