Oz Asia Festival. Papermoon Puppet Theatre. 25 Sep 2015
53 years is quite a long wait to feel comfortable about tackling extremely dark moments in a nation’s history publically in performance. Then again, it’s only roughly two generations removed from the political violence and unrest that gripped Indonesia in 1965. For some nations, that might be considered too early.
Papermoon Puppet Theatre’s Mwathirika successfully manages the difficult task of revisiting what one historian described as the “black hole” of Indonesian history; the nation-wide massacre of PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) members, those perceived to be members, or opportunistically assumed to be members as a means of settling village scores. All this occurred as a response to allegations the PKI was involved in a coup against the military, lasting well into 1966.
Writer/performer Maria Tri Sulistyani and Visual Artist Iwan Effendi’s production balances a complex blend of puppetry, human actors and multimedia elements to express the fatal consequences for the innocent, caused by sanctioned political actions. Their intelligent, beautiful and gently developed story of two close brothers, nine-year-old Moyo, his little brother Tupu and their father, Baba, strives to discover and reclaim a deep humanity from the aftermath of the nation’s blood thirsty past.
To a child, a red balloon is an innocent thing of joy, of play. Baba gives such a balloon to Tupu after Moyo has broken his toy wooden horse. A travelling show visits not long after replete with clowns, and red flags are eagerly handed out. After the excitement, Tupu leaves the balloon outside overnight. The morning finds a red triangle painted on their home’s window shutter. What does this mean? A visit from a an armed soldier asking the neighbour who lives there makes the danger of the red triangle clear.
Mwathirika’s emphasis on crumbling communal trust between neighbours, brutal oppression of people, no matter who they are or what part of the nation they come from, and meek acceptance of this by those targeted, is writ large in Moyo and Tupu’s experiences.
Moyo and Tupu’s innocent games, the joy of the red balloon and their communication with each other using red whistles, mark some of the many bonds of unity and support they enjoy. The encroachment into their lives of fear and the gradual stripping away of support is heart breaking; made comprehendible by the simple directness in the performance of the narrative, and subtle nuances of characterisation elicited from the production’s five puppets.
Mwathirika seeks neither to offer qualified context or slant to an audience. It offers merely a series of real consequences to real events, leaving the audience entirely free to formulate their own opinions and structure their own pathway to further understanding.
David O’Brien
When: 25 and 26 Sep
Where: Rehearsal Room
Bookings: Closed
OzAsia. Banquet Room. 25 Sep 2015
Patience must be the gift of the viewer just as endurance is the gift of the performer. And originality.
If Melati Suryodarmo is anything, she is original - in the same way that Yoko Ono was original back in the day with her very strange performance art asking people to cut the clothing off her immobile body or imagine their own art work.
Suryodarmo requires no such direct action from her audience. They are simply witness to her art and to think their own thoughts.
For OzAsia, they can see it at the CAS gallery or in The Art Space as videos. Pop on the headphones, sit on the ottoman, watch the artist’s extraordinary efforts rolling on a floor and writhing her way into a veritable op shop of garments, one after another, layer upon layer upon layer. The longer you watch, the stranger it seems. Weird, unpleasant, sad, unnecessary. What is she saying? Surfeit rules? Yes. And one can ponder out myriad theories as one watches her go on and on, the mind wandering, conjuring…
And isn’t that the point.
Hence, Suryodarmo is all over town, so to speak, in various manifestations of her performance art.
She is most famous for the butter dance in which, in high heels, she dances slowly and steadily upon a little stage made of blocks of butter. As she breaks into them, they become more and more viscous and slippery and she begins to fall, heavily. She is not a small woman. She falls again and again, hauling herself up to once again dance, try to balance, fall again. Bruised and brave she finally gives in after about 20 minutes. Why? It’s life, hard knocks from soft things.
Its…what you think it is.
Suryodarmo brings a new work to Adelaide. She has given it a name which represents the girth of the planet - 24,901 miles. She has explained that she is thinking of circles as beginnings and ends and continuities.
For her live performance, now moved from The Artspace to the Banquet Room at the Festival Centre (because of the disruptions from the Noodle Night Market on the plaza) she works in a classic gallery space. There is an opening for audience members to enter and a few chairs. People may also sit on the floor. Annoyingly, vacant chairs are reserved by people who have left possessions there while going off to do other things.
It is an epic performance. No one is staying there for the duration. People come and go. Sometimes only one or two people are watching.
To be frank, when Suryodarmo’s performance is not hypnotic, it is pretty boring. I spent what felt like too long watching her hiding under a mattress. I thought she would never move. We were sitting there looking at a mattress. My partner was nudging his restlessness. People were getting up and leaving.
There was hardly anyone left when, eventually, very slowly, she rose and began to undertake a journey with the mattress, wading through a floor of deep red sand in the twilight hues of the performance space. She saddened me. Her journey was arduous and lonely. She was somewhere nowhere in a bleak landscape, her mattress a shelter, a comfort, a companion, a burden…
No one will have seen the entirety of Suryodarmo’s performance. The endurance is hers alone. We have choice to go out into the sunshine, eat, wander in and out…to come back the next day and watch a bit more.
Many, like my partner, will think her art is an absurd indulgence, a waste of precious time and attention.
But, if they look upon it for a while, I’m betting just as Suryodarmo is, that they will find themselves thinking about it, pondering the ifs and buts of life, the universe and art and, most likely, never forgetting it.
Samela Harris
When: 25 and 26 Sep
Where: Banquet Room
Bookings: Admission free
Works also at Artspace Gallery until Oct 4
Contemporary Art Centre of SA Until Sept 30
OzAsia Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 24 Sep 2015
Intimately connected to Cry Jailolo is Indonesian choreographer Eko Supriyanto’s most recent performance research work, The Future of Dance is Under Water.
Even knowing nothing about the work, or Jailolo’s reputation as a tourism diving location, you would recognise Cry Jailolo immediately as being deeply concerned with connection between a community and the sea.
Supriyanto expresses this in demanding choreography which, with seeming effortlessness, fuses the individual body and body of the community and sea as one. It is impossible to mistake it as anything else, as the gentle but intense opening moments of the production made starkly clear.
Slowly and gently, a solo dancer comes into view, spot lit at centre stage just below the knees, the light spot increases as the dancer moves at a slow pace downstage; his right foot tapping him forward as his left foot twists above ground rapidly.
Iskandar K. Loedin’s simple lighting against the stage floor’s green and black and the upstage black drop curtain throws into relief the red and saffron traditional men’s diver trunks. The total effect, as the light rises up the dancer’s body, is of treading water, sinking deeper into dark sea. This movement is foundational to the whole work as dance and cultural expression.
Supriyanto’s ensemble of seven male dancers take the audience through a series of tableaux and solo phases in which their bodies express men on the sea sailing. Then merging their bodies with the sea they powerfully work with and against its ebb and flow, rising and crashing like waves in motion akin to reverent worshipful prayer.
The ensemble’s intense, perfectly precise and uncluttered movement is equally meditative and spiritually gracious in execution. Cry Jailolo gives voice to a people pressured, proud and united in the face of odds clearly hidden by the glamour of tourism. That these odds might be environmental issues is strongly hinted at, if you don’t know more about Jailolo’s reality. Better that you don’t.
Cry Jailolo as conversation with an audience possesses the power to prompt questions to be asked and a dialogue begun.
David O’Brien
When: 24 to 26 Sep
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
Oz Asia Festival. Space Theatre. 24 Sep 2015
Teater Garasi has warned that its show will be raucous and chaotic. The audience should not feel too comfortable.
The first message is at the door to the theatre - a thin, rolled mattress, a pair of large feet protruding from one end. A welcome from the dead.
The Space is wide open with performers meandering about as the audience enters. There are some benches against the wall, some flat cushions for the floor and a row of tables with "VIP" reserved cards upon them. It turns out that the ushers very thoughtfully steer the older people to the tables. A bit of Eastern respect for age. How refreshing. There is a convivial, busy feel to the theatre. The show begins in an organic way with things just happening and then a marching band stomps through - and the world of a Jakarta night street comes alive.
The performance is physical theatre at its best. The performers exhibit the many disciplines of sophisticated stagecraft. Their bodies tell a thousand human stories as they dance and march, carry things to and fro, set up little trading stalls, dart from the shrill whistle of the policeman. Corrugated iron plays a large part in the play, depicting transience, enterprise, poverty, hope... Characters set it up as little building symbols in the changing shape of the city. They use it as shelter. They carry it about and wear it rolled up on their heads. They dance loudly upon it.
There is an MC of sorts who explains that the audience will be moved about, so expect surprises. He comments throughout the busy hour of the show while assorted others carry crude PA systems or megaphones and make announcements or revelations to the audience. A surtitle screen translates these commentaries which, often with dark themes, have a beautiful sense of poetry.
All Jakarta life throbs by, fast and busy, sad and hopeful. People scurry under umbrellas, ride bikes, jostle, roll, flee. There are raunchy sex workers, stern Muslims, hawkers, protestors, all colours and creeds overlapping in the seeming chaos of the vast Indonesian populace. There is even a wedding ceremony, a lively band and singer celebrating at one end and at the other, a groom sitting in solitary state. People dance with plastic bags over their heads. The bride, Nur, is not present. She has had to go and work as a domestic in Malaysia, the groom explains. So it is, these days. A hard life. This scene is followed by the most perfect moment of the show, an older woman in classic Indonesian garb, singing solo a song of philosophic fatalism. It segues into a death dance, a silent topeng duo.
Essentially, what award-winning director Yudi Ahmad Tajudin brings us is vivid and feisty agitprop theatre. From the well-observed people soup of Teater Garasi's Jakarta street comes the powerful message of an oppressive government agenda. People controlled to keep them poor, the play asserts.
And there, on the stage, beside the hubub of seething urban existence, lies that rolled mattress one first saw at the door with those huge brown feet protruding from the end. There lies the constant thing, the unifying common factor, death.
The Streets is a simply wonderful work of immersive theatre. It is a grittily aesthetic picture of the ordinary life of our near neighbours. It is a contemporary cultural experience, superbly wrought. A triumph of OzAsia 2015.
Samela Harris
When: 24 to 26 Sep
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Bakehouse Theatre
James Johnson's The Audition is about the audition from hell, the ultimate audition which plays on the theory of the actor as a blank canvas.
It is a ferocious two-hander which pushes the actors to extremes but, of course, is quite the showcase for the talented upcoming performer, being both a challenge of intensive dialogue and a playground of veering emotions.
It describes Lauren, an aspiring actress who attends an audition for an unidentified play. Stella is the steely director who seeks to put her applicant through not only all the tricks in the acting book but also all the games of psychological confrontation. Lauren already has a few vulnerabilities, scarred by the ugly volatility of her parents' relationship, for instance. Stella presses her emotional buttons and then some of the most primal of human insecurities as she exerts all the mighty power and mystery of the director and, beyond that, a strange calculated sadism.
It is not a play which speaks well of directors. Then again, it is really a fairly ridiculous play. It is an exercise in dramatic theory and virtuosity. The dense script calls upon lots of shouting and weeping, sex, violence, drugs and absolutely no humour or even irony.
But director John Hartog has picked a couple of very capable actors to engage in all the sturm und drang. Clare Mansfield reaches into the realms of desperate overplay as the aspiring actress Lauren, giving her all the cornball histrionics which would ensure that she will never get the role. From the silliest formal self-written audition piece right through to the writhing cot case, she delivers it as breathtakingly stereotyped. It is exhausting simply watching her.
Krystal Brock's character of Stella is a counterpoint of steely restraint. Brock nails it nicely. Passive aggressive manipulative cruelty is her game and she imbues the role with graceful sangfroid.
Hartog's design is rather effective, The Bakehouse's black stage is opened to the back wall where ladders and scrims rest in the spirit of a dark theatre. Centre stage is a blackboard, oh so symbolic, where names are written and erased. Then there is the director's table and chair and an isolated chair for the vulnerable actor.
Lighting and sound by Stephen Dean and Matthew Chapman are apt and effective - and, indeed, all round it is a highly proficient production of an annoying play.
Samela Harris
When: 17 Sep to 3 Oct
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com