Review - Tao Dance Theater

The Arts Centre Presents

TAO DANCE THEATER

Choreographer – Tao Ye

Music – Xiao He

Lighting Design – Ellen Ruge

Executive Lighting – Ma Yue (‘6’ and ‘8’) Ma Yue (‘8)

Costume Design – Tao Ye, Li Min (‘6’) Tao Ye, Duan Ni (‘8’)

Rehearsal Director – Duan Ni

Dancers:  Fu Liwei, Mao Xue, Li Shunjie, Yu Jinying, Haung Li,  Ming Da (‘6’ and ‘8’) Hu Jin, Yan Yulin (‘8)

Arts Centre – Playhouse

22 – 24 January 2017

Melbournians are so privileged to have this new tri-annual Asian Performance Arts Festival Asia Topa in Melbourne;  ‘A festival celebrating Australia’s connections with contemporary Asia’.

From China we are honored to experience Tao Dance Theater’s works ‘6’ and ‘8’ performed for us by a marvelous troupe of young Chinese dancers.

As a truly exceptional and unusual experience hopefully all Melbourne’s young dancers and choreographers will be/have been able to catch a performance.

‘6’ premiered in Sweden in 2014.  Its costumes are dark and dancers hold a blanket or cape like piece of material in front of themselves rendering their arms fairly static.  The lighting is low which provokes longing to see it illuminate faces.  This marvelously hypnotic work just pulls us in.  I imagine it is not dissimilar to watching Sufi Whirling Dervishes.

‘8’ is performed solely on the floor.  Initially it presents some confusion as to whether the bodies are placed facing up or down.  The costumes are a kind of dusty grey, or appear to be dusty grey under Tao Ye and Ma Yue’s integrated lighting design.  Watching the weight of the bodies being lifted and falling on the floor moving from the front to the back of the stage is truly fascinating.  Initially I was reminded of the floppy cuddly dacron filled dolls my sisters had when we were kids.  This is a darker and more troubling work and not as hypnotic as ‘6’.   There is, at times, a sense of desperation in the oppression of the dancers bodies remaining on the floor.

It is extraordinary watching dancers rigidly perform such uniform work.   Yet as both works progress and bodies function in a more fluid and hypnotic way a beguiling essence of individuality emerges from the dancers.

Both the piano music in ‘8’ and electric strings of ‘6’, credited to Xiao He are superb.

A unique and rare opportunity.

Suzanne Sandow

(Suzanne Sandow)

Review - All This Living

All This Living

Written and performed by Camilla Blunden

Director – Rochelle Whyte

Sound Designer – Kimmo Vennonen

Lighting Design – Gillian Schwab

Dramaturg – Peter Matheson

Stage Manager/Operator – Lea Collins

All this Living is a complex rich work that touches on the difficult subject of aging.  It is particularly relevant to the older woman.  Full marks to Camilla Blunden for engaging with focus groups of older women to bring their experience and voices out into the light through this very personal medium of a one-woman performance.  All this Living is a fabulous vehicle to open up the subject area and broaden awareness with divergent audiences.  It is nothing if not worthy. 

Ms. Blunden is an excellent performer she is attractive, clear and engaging and thoroughly committed to her very pertinent well written material.  Her incorporation of Myth and Legend weaves in a deeper and richer more universal relevance to the personal. 

The Butterfly Club, as fantastic atmospheric venue, doesn’t seem to be the right fit for this work or Ms. Blunden’s target audience.  A torn red velvet curtain is a very limited backdrop – literally. 

It feels like a ‘work in progress’ that would generate better understandings and broaden perspectives on female aging through audience discussion and questions.  It does not feel like a finished polished piece of Theatre that fully serves the material or indeed Ms. Blunden.

The use of voice over is a clever device and mostly successful, I would imagine in particularly keeping the work on track.  But it got me wondering how the material would develop and grow through the incorporation of another performer.

The staging could be much more supportive of the performer.   A stage scattered with saucepans, calico cloths, a pen and notepad just looks cluttered and messy and at times renders movement ungainly.  As for the Kangaroo suit costume its intended semiotic meaning completely evaded me.   However this could be my fault as I arrived slightly late.   

I imagine All this Living works as a touring piece for Health and Community Centres and possibly even Schools.  But it would pack a much stronger and worthwhile punch if it was refreshed and renewed with crisp, clear and defined direction and a more consolidated design.  

It is a bit like an old still very serviceable couch that urgently needs to be overhauled and re-upholstered.  It would be wonderful if the whole creative team could get back together to remake the somewhat battered staging.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - John

Melbourne Theatre Company Presents

John

By Annie Barker

Directed by Sarah Goodes

Set and Costume Designer - Elizabeth Gadsby

Lighting Designer - Richard Vabre

Composer and Sound – Russell Goldsmith

Cast

Elias Schreiber-Hoffman – Johnny Carr

Genevieve Marduck  - Melita Jurisic

Jenny Chung – Ursula Mills

Mertis Katherine Graven – Helen Morse

Art Centre -Fairfax Theatre

10 February – 25 March 2017

Ursula Mills, Johnny Carr and Helen Morse - photo Jeff Busby

The Fairfax Theatre opens out to embrace the audience and bring them into the intimate workings of four complex individuals.  It is a great venue for this fascinating, intriguing and enigmatic work. 

The domestic setting by designer Elizabeth Gadsby, of an all-purpose living room for guests, is busy with clashing yet strangely simpatico décor.  Like a fifth idiosyncratic character the set is acutely integral to the unfolding of the story.  At times it is also used to add dashes of magic realism.

A young unmarried couple, Jenny (Ursula Mills) and Elias (Johnny Carr) come to stay at a Bed and Breakfast in Gettysburg Pennsylvania.  It would appear the reason they’re there is because Elias had a great interest in the American Civil War as a lad.  There is considerable stress in the couple’s relationship and things aren’t running smoothly for them. 

The environment is quaint and quirky and their mature and delicate hostess, Mertis played by Helen Morse a little odd.  She seems to have an uncanny control of eventualities – but does she?

Annie Barker is a much-lauded playwright.  To date she has written and had produced seven highly regarded works.  Melbourne audiences may remember Circle Mirror Transformation, with which, Melbourne Theatre Company introduced us to her.  Then fast on it’s heals Red Stitch produced Aliens directed most skillfully by Nadia Tass.  Red Stitch also produced her more recent play Flick to considerable acclaim.

Ursula Mills, Helen Morse and Johnny Carr - Photo Jeff Busby

John takes naturalism to an extreme.  It’s characters function in as close to real time as possible.  Although it is slow the audience is perpetually on ‘tender hooks’ searching for and making meaning.  In all, it generates a rich sense of humanity, compassion and kindheartedness.

What is this play ultimately about?   It is a work about living and about intimacy, sticky interactions, tolerance, acceptance, patience and self-reflection - to name the most obvious things. It looks at varying degrees of deception, self-deception and collusions and it confronts the niggling and uncomfortable.  It also touches on the mysticism and superstition we use to frame and understand the day-to-day mysteries and uncertainties in our lives.

Over all the characterization is glorious.  Johnny Carr is virtually unrecognizable as Elias.   His Elias has a big, almost uncontainable, presence.  He has masses of hair and a slightly uneasy and irritated demeanor.  As actor he masterfully renders himself unrecognizable. 

Helen Morse creates a wonderful quizzical and wholly believable Mertis Katherine Craven or Kitty - so down to earth and yet bemusingly evanescent.  Morse is so deeply ‘in the moment’ that Mertis is marvelously convincing.

Melita Jurisic brings her own unique magic and ages by at least twenty years to delight us with the blind but wise Genevieve Marduck.

Ursula Mills play the seemingly straight -forward Jenny beautifully.  The lack of artifice in her characterization seems to render her the pivotal character.  This tends me toward the feeling that John is at its heart a young woman’s story.

Mysterious and subtle and not so subtle light changes (Richard Vavre) accentuate some of the strange and weird atmospheres and eventualities.

Johnny Carr, Helen Morse, and Melita Jurisic - Photo Jeff Busby

The sound (Russell Goldsmith) is mostly constituted of upbeat classical music that I suspect is heavily prescribed by Ms. Barker.

They (whoever they are) say it is the sign of an artist to be able to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.  This is definitely what Annie Barker achieves and she finds joy and a kind of redemption in the troubled and troubling minutia of life.

Four and a half stars.

Suzanne Sandow

Review - Little Emperors

Little Emperors

By Lachlan Philpott

Directed by Wang Chong

CAST

Diana (Xiaojie) Lin

Liam Maguire

Alice Qin

Yuchen Wang

Dramaturgy – Mark Prichard

Set and Costume Design – Romanie Harper

Lighting Design and AV Consultant – Emma Valente

Sound Design – James Paul

AV Programmer – Andre Vanderwert

Stage Manager – Harriet Gregory

Malthouse Theatre

The Beckett

9 – 26 February 2017

Little Emperors is multi layered.  It is a personal family story that is profoundly meshed in the immeasurably burdensome cultural story of China’s One Child Policy.  It is presented in a wonderful surreal abstracted way, and yet surprisingly, it also accentuates the naturalistic and acutely personal via the use of ‘state of the art’ Audio-Visual projection.

The staging is unusual - perhaps inspired.  The set (Romanie Harper) is a shallow pool of water in front of a scrim made up of numerous distended scrolls.   At first the performers work with the water in a tentative controlled way.  However, as the work progresses, the water is used to express emotions of varying extremes.

Considerable variety in atmosphere is communicated specifically with the use of lighting (Emma Valente) and how it plays on/and with the water and the scrim.  Lit with red lights at times it feels encompassing and hypnotically lulling, at other times, bright and clear - with sharp reflections in the water, and silhouettes on the scrim.  Crisp clarity and murky confusion and numerous states in-between are conveyed. 

Generally the acting is stunning.  Yuchen Wang as Kaiwen is wholly convincing in his role of hidden second child who finally escaped China to ‘indulge in’ a Western way of life in Melbourne.  His work is fine and astute and seems to channel the writer and director and character all at the same time.

As Kaiwen’s Mother Diana (Xiaojie) Lin gives a very sincere tightly timed and controlled performance.

Alice Qin who plays Kaiwen’s sister gives a vital performance full gloriously expressed energy.  She plays a first child who although a girl was kept and dressed as a boy to hide her gender.

Sound (James Paul) initially introduces a kind of weird surreal atmosphere and then enhances and underscores effectively.

This is a wonderful glowing experiment as a cultural exchange.  It has particular relevance to our changing political landscape.  And it highlights the hubris intrinsic to the overly nurtured children of China’s One Child Policy - that may constitute a ‘cultural time bomb.’  

But who can say if it is any more of a cultural time bomb then the one building in the West - through unfettered consumerism, self-interest and individual self-aggrandizement?

It marks a very successful venture of a commissioned work with Writer (Lachlan Philpott), Director (Wang Chong) and Dramaturge (Mark Pritchard) developing a significant and resounding piece of contemporary Theatre for Asia Topa.

In many ways a masterful achievement!

Suzanne Sandow