Review - For The Ones Who Walk Away

St Martins Presents

For the Ones Who Walk Away

Concept and Direction – Nadja Kostich

Text – Ursula K.LeGuin, Daniel Keene and the St Martins ensemble

Associate Director – Luke Kerridge

Dramaturgy and Video Design – Michael Carmody

Composition and Sound Design - Jethro Woodward

Set and Costume Design – Emily Barry

Lighting Design – Richard Vabre

Associate Artists:  Stefan Bramble, Kat Cornwell, Harriet Devlin, Lyndsay Marsden, Katy Maudlin, Joana Pires, Ahmarnya Price, Gabriel Collie and Jo Dunbar

This work is for an active audience – one that is thoughtful and keen to find and make meaning. 

All the child participants work sublimely as a team. An extraordinary sense interconnected community is created through the amalgam of a big group of kids with varying skill and abilities, working together as small groups with strong messages, then as a huge cooperative where there is minimal digression – a neutrality. 

Symbols such as flower petals, rocks, strips of newspaper and feathers encourage thought processes to drift to subliminal levels.  These simple objects also act to interlink the individual stories and the driving ideas that are communicated in a number of classroom size performance spaces. 

My plus one and I only really experienced four spaces fully.  (I think there might be ten or more.)   It is not a theatrical experience that can be rushed through.  The only way to see it all would be to go twice or more.  I’m tempted but perhaps part of its charm is this illusory quality.

In our first room the offering was beautiful crystal clear storytelling from a young female performer dressed in flower petals and lit through a sort of birdcage grid.  She talked of a dark space were a child is detained in fear.  Our initial guide was one of three young women who sang beautifully as they restricted the narrator with restraints attached to her costume.

As it was the first work I saw it felt very pivotal to the whole.   However I there is an interconnectivity linking all of the separate works that surely render them all pivotal to some degree.  This is a huge testament to Artistic Director Nadja Kostich and her production team and particularly design by Emily Barrie where costume morphs into set and visa versa and holds integrated and essential meaning.

Our second room was about choices and particularly choices that require some examination of ethical thought.   As with St Martin’s most recent show Banjos, Boots & Beyonce we the audience are encouraged to participate -to find ourselves cooperating and engaging in a prescribed exercise.  This is fun and absorbing.  And I believe Associate Artist Stefan Bramble is to be complimented for this engaging, thought provoking, experience.

I am reminded of the writing of Isobelle Carmody - specifically her book of plays Way Out.  And in a room with talented musicians playing as stones were placed on a girl’s body the story ‘Singing my Sister Down’ by Margo Lanagan from her short story collection Black Juice.

One of the scenes/stories is seemingly about a child being pushed (by her mother) to public objectification.  This portrayal of ‘child as art’ turns the performance on itself and creates a kind of Meta thinking about the whole.  All that we are experiencing is, from a Youth Arts Centre, that, on it’s web home page states: Art by children for adult audiences.

For the Ones Who Walk Away is a haunting experience.  Perhaps, partly, because it is presented from the perspective of a the assumed innocence with which we endow children.  One of the things that stayed with me is searching looks from performers that questioned what I, as audience, was gleaning or understanding.

A heightened poetic language is particularly evident in the third and final section where we are all gathered together as spectators.  Ursula Le Guin’s poetic truncated language permeates the whole with a sense of struggle to create meaning from what has come before.

In the last ten minutes I could imagine myself in a hive of bees and the building of Siteworks a beehive.

All in all exciting and challenging contemporary Theatre.

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)