Review - Germinal

Melbourne Festival Presents:

Germimal

Conception and Direction

Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort

Performers

Arnaud Boulogn

Beatriz Setien

Antoine Defoort

Halory Goerger

And the voice of Maillard

Technical Conception – Mael Teillant

Technical Direction – Colin Plancher

Malthouse Theatre

19 – 22 October 2017

Germinal is marvelous festival fare – an exceptional experience.  It is just the sort of show that stretches expectations and delivers the completely unpredicted in a totally unique way.  One gasps and laughs with surprise whilst being charmed by the whimsical nonsensicality of the experience.  And yet all the time the reasoning of the whole seems to be based on the perfectly rational.

Do take your glasses if you are a little short sighted because the written word, projected onto the back wall, is an integral component as is the distinctly French philosophical approach.  Most of the spoken language is French though the initial set up is in English.

This work professes to be about working with time and space.   It is sparse and focused and allows for a variety of interpretations. 

Everything starts in the very dark void of the black box of a neutral stage space.  Four actors of apparently equal status work together, all are integral to outcomes.  They initiate, communicate, share, negotiate, contravene, create, respond and cooperate as individuals.  It is evident that they know each other well although they appear unsure of how to interpret the place and situation they find themselves in.  And everything seems to be based on the premise that they, and we with them, are moving into the unknown.  Ideas are explored, offers are made and accepted and built upon.   Then wacky things happen.  Nothing can be taken for granted.

This show is the perfect reminder that the courage of venturing into the unknown is a visceral launching point for making art.

Suzanne Sandow

Review - In Between Two

In Between Two

Writers/Composers - Joel Ma and James Mangohig

Director - Suzanne Chaundy

Dramaturges - William Yang and Annette Shun Wah

Visual Designer - Jean Poole

Stage/costume Designer - Euygeene The

Lighting Designer - Lucy Birkinshaw

Performers - Joel Ma and James Mangohig

Melbourne Festival and Arts Centre Melbourne. Fairfax Studio –Arts Centre Melbourne. 11 – 15 October, 2017 

It is the generosity of spirit this work is imbued with that reaches out to us all.   In Between Two is two stories of how two young ‘hip hop’ artists - Joel Ma who is half Chinese and half Pilipino James Mangohig - grew and developed into the charismatic men they are today.

The audience is kept on its toes as each story unfolds in turns, starting with the rarefied history of Joel Ma’s extraordinary Grandmother Edith.

The bighearted openhandedness of these two performers; their capacity to understand, honor and support each other’s stories with music is brilliant.  All the while visual images are projected on two background screens.

Individual narratives of eventualities, achievements, mishaps and disappointments are related with humor and insight.  Both growing boys somehow forged on regardless, even though surrounded by a hostile and unyielding racist Australian culture.

At times, family tensions and difficulties and risky transgressions of adolescence threatened to completely derail them, yet both managed to develop, grow and thrive, most particularly through their music.

Suzanne Chaundy’s direction is pitch perfect.  Everything moves at a beautiful poetic pace and there is nothing extraneous or unnecessary.  Both performers appear totally comfortable in their skins, rendering us relaxed, open and available as audience. 

William Yang and Annette Shan Wah’s dramaturgy is flawless.  Not surprisingly the extraordinary is brought to the fore but nothing is excessive or unnecessarily labored and spelt out.  The touch is light. Moments of acceptance and observation offer the opportunity to commingle with ones own understandings and fuse into something that feels like growing wisdom.

What stays with us is the sense of joy, purpose and integrity that imbue these artists with vital valuable creative spirit.

Suzanne Sandow
(For Stage Whispers)

Photographer: William Yang.

Review - All of My Friends Were There

All Of My Friends Were There

Presented by the Guerilla Museum

In association with Theatre Works and Melbourne Festival

The Guerrilla Museum:  Annie Bourke – Producer, John Byrne – Venue Production, Manager and Lighting Designer, D.A. Calf – Technical Production Manager and Sound Designer, Bryanna Lowen and Sarah Hall – Set and Costume Design, Sean Healy – Video Design, Lloyd Marsden – Video Programming

This is a really fun and joyful evening of participatory entertainment.

Pretty much what happens at Birthday Parties transpires at a completely co-opted Theatre Works for the next few evenings.  So bursting to the seams with party preparation and performance spaces - is Theatre Works - that a Porter Loo needed to the flown in!

I took and old friend and had a really great time.  We went with the flow, had silly photos taken, put on make up in a 1960’s malaise, generally relaxed, had a laugh, and went out of our way to cooperate with a large performance audience to celebrate the birthday (not even on the right date) of someone most of us just didn’t know.  And dance – we drank bubbly and danced like we haven’t in a long time.

The audience is all mixed up in designated groupings and some go off to Luna Park and undoubtedly have great fun and some stay and play amusing games like Musical Chairs and Pass the Parcel, a secretly organized group work on a speech, others make lolly bags and there is the opportunity to make Fairy Bread and discuss its cultural significance with Maude Davy as well as do a bit of shared cake decorating.

Some get treated to an awfully raunchy “Girl’s Party” – and blimey does that go off.  Three lovely nubile young women strut their stuff and get most of their audience moving in sync to The Time Warp.

Most instructions are issued non-verbally – which definitely cuts down on unnecessary time wasting and requires everybody to communicate in a more expressive, than usual, way.

You can stand back and be a voyeur or innocent bystander and/or chat to people you have never met before.  But hey our guides, and performers and the band offer engagement in such a light encouraging way it just seems fun to express exhilarating exuberance for the imaginary love of the surprise birthday person. 

A unique and memorable celebration of life!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Backbone

Gravity and Other Myths for the Melbourne Festival

Bring us

BACKBONE

Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse

1hour 15 mins, no interval

Wednesday 4 to Sunday 8 October 2017

Director – Darcy Grant

Designer – Geoff Cobham

Ensemble:  Martin Schreiber, Lachlan Binns, Jascha Boyce, Jacob Randell, Lewie West, Lewis Rankin, Joanne Curry, Mieke Lizotte, Lachlan Harper and Jackson Manson

Music

Elliot Zoerner

Shenton Gregory

Backbone is the most elevating and enjoyable celebration of human circus feats of acrobatics from Australia’s longest running acrobatic ensemble.  From the very opening moments when all performers stand up and start moving the audience is engaged in lively surprising, imaginative feats of strength, lifting, jumping, flipping and extraordinary balancing.  The whole us underscored with vital live music from Elliot Zoerner and Shenton Gregory.

Although a times definitely dangerous and suspenseful there is always a sense of shared responsibility and duty of care for each other.  This troupe of seven young men and three young - amazingly agile and game young women - dazzle the audience with their athleticism.  They are truly remarkable and their performance is deeply heartwarming because it seems to come from such a genuine place of wholesome integrity.

Gravity and Other Myths started working together almost 18 years ago when the core group met at the Cirkidz youth circus program in Adelaide.  They are now experiencing considerable success and are in demand.  And it is easy to see why sitting in an audience that is totally invigorated by what they are watching.  However, I couldn’t help wondering if it is time for them to find an artistic director and perhaps to begin to create works with more complex meaning perhaps a narrative. 

Looking for something to take the family to this Melbourne Festival?  Well this is the perfect double bill for the whole family with Dark Circus  at 6pm and a brisk walk from the Beckett at Malthouse to the Playhouse at the Arts Centre. Backbone as light no nonsense, clean and uncluttered with message is the complete antidote to the pensive dark inference laden work of Dark Circus from the brooding duo that is Steroptik from France.

Don’t miss this opportunity to revel in the Circus Arts both dark and light.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Dark Circus

Dark Circus

Melbourne Festival

Beckett Theatre – Malthouse

5 – 9 October 6pm 2017

This delightful work of sound and projection with an old world charm is high art in motion – it speaks to us all in a unique individual way.   This work sardonic is completely entrancing from go to woe.  “Come for the show, stay for the woe”, is the sardonic catch cry.

Beginning with the sound of a base guitar that quickly accompanies the simple lyrical projected circus images created on the spot as ink sketches that grow and develop and change in medium as the music moves us forward with changes in instruments and sounds.   We witness two artists working in exquisite synchronicity.

Drawings are made in sand, some are very architectural everything transforms.    Images are wiped away and replaced.  Silhouettes come and go representing characters and objects.  Ink merges with water to stunning effect.

The whole is full of wit and ironic humour.

The re-occurring Ringmaster is a motley rather jaded character. 

So many marvelous and exciting things happen in the circus and it feels as if we get to see them all.  There is a human cannonball, an untamable beast, knife throwing and some rather tawdry juggling from Joe the Juggler. 

The whole moves at a agreeable organic pace and is completely mesmerizing due to the highly practiced and exceptional skills of Romain Bermond and Jean-Baptiste Maillet, otherwise known as Stereoptik.

I worry that this big old town of Melbourne is turning into a city of navel gazers.  This is not the first time in the last few years that I have had review ticket for a marvelous European work of very considerable quality and found the auditorium to be less than three quarters full.  Is it that word is not getting out there by the right channels early enough? 

Catching exquisite work such as this on one’s home-town is really a marvelous and inspiring opportunity.

I was captivated!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

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)