Theatre Guild. The Little Theatre. 10 Mar 2016
Debra Oswald is a contemporary Australian playwright with credits in theatre, film and television, with hits on stage like Dags, and Mr Bailey's Minder. The Peach Season was first presented at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney in 2006. She seems to enjoy writing about and for young people, so I would have hoped for a better Peach Season.
It's a pretty straightforward yarn. Two young adults on the lam and looking for picking work lob up to Celia's peach orchard. Celia's overly protected and horny 16-year-old daughter, Zoe, makes a move on the young man and runs away with him. And then the fretting really starts.
That might work if Oswald had done something interesting with the situation, but the action is linear, and everybody is very busy being worried and concerned and looking out for one another, and asking how they are - there is an overabundance of anxiety and little real danger.
Oswald leaves nothing to the imagination and characters' thought bubbles are explained to the nth degree. The character of Celia's mother, Dorothy - of Hungarian-like accent and descent for no apparent reason except to complain about the seasons - is superfluous. Her only duty seems to be to repeat in words what you just saw or are about to see in the play's action. Dorothy's role as narrator just slows things down and makes tedium. For example, she says, "at night, she lives in this dark place, so in the day, she can face the world." But we just saw that in Celia's face and body language. In fact, all the acting in this production is of a very high quality and I wondered if Oswald gives actors any credit at all for conveying thought and emotion, or credits audiences for getting them.
Emma Kerr as Celia has a wonderfully naturalistic carriage. But how long can we expect her judgmental disapproval and later concern over Zoe to be effective? Overprotective mothers and rebellious daughters are indeed strong emotive premises, but they are unchanging in this play and provide no dramatic velocity or intrigue. James Watson is an amazingly energetic performer. While his Kieran's psychological condition was complex and highly physicalised - and probably undiagnosible - his mercurial nature and charisma were a pleasure to keep company with. I can see what Zoe was attracted to.
Zoe, played with some veracity by Zoe Muller, and Kieran, as impetuous young loves incomplete without the other, are exemplary of real life.
Timothy Tedmanson's and Rachel Lee's design of a fruit-sorting shed was peachy. The large photomurals were a great addition. Director John Graham played a straightforward play straightforwardly - nothing juicy here.
PS James Watson of Year 12 is already a playwright. Two of his short plays will be presented by the Theatre Guild in April, and if they are as colourful and raw as his acting, I should think they would be good viewing, and you may be witnessing somebody on the way up.
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 19 Mar
Where: The Little Theatre at the University of Adelaide
Bookings: trybooking.com
Erth Visual & Physical (Australia). Norwood Concert Hall. 10 Mar 2016
Only a few days to get the kiddies and your adult self to this enchanting giant puppet show of creatures past and present found in the deep blue sea. The Norwood Concert Hall proscenium stage is transformed into a giant aquarium glass and then magically into open ocean using sparkly light, bubbles and by getting a school of kids in make-believe deep diving suits to hold their breath and swim around on stage.
Instead of being hosted by an avuncular and earnest scientific type, like Erth's creator in the accompanying dinosaur offering, this show attempts a bit of humour by foiling the incompetent and loudly dressed "marketing manager" with a bright young marine biologist- and palaeontologist-type.
They start small with the sedentary Charniodiscus and one of the first swimmers, Dickinsonia rex, of the Precambrian Ediacaran Period. They proudly point out that this geological time period and a lot of its creatures were named and found right here in South Australia in and near the Flinders Ranges. In fact, all the prehistoric biota of the show were discovered in Australia.
Soon we do a detour to the present day deep ocean where equally bizarre creatures exist presently. They were represented by magnificently large and colourfully lit puppets that either loom over or travel right across the audience. The kids get a first glimpse of plesiosaurs gliding through the water in their cutesy juvenile state, foreshadowing an enormous puppet of this long-necked beauty. And no show would be complete without a scary villain, here represented by the even larger plesiosaur hunter Kronosaurus queenslandicus, whose head is as large and toothy as that of a T.rex.
The kids and the parents and I loved the learning and the graceful movements of these awesome puppets. I hope this show creates some budding paleontologists in the audience. A definite go see.
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 13 Mar
Where: Norwood Concert Hall
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Atlanta Eke. The Space Theatre. Vitalstatistix. 10 Mar 2016
Atlanta Eke’s Body of Work does for dance, performance art and DSLR photo documentation what Laurie Anderson’s work does for deconstructing and rebuilding sound and lyrics as social and political commentary.
There is no mystery about what Eke does on stage, which is the least surprising aspect of the production. There is a brilliant flash of humour.
Eke begins the production by walking down the stairs of the audience seating area as animate lounge. Her costume is magnificent, comically scary. The lounge takes centre stage, and slowly, ever so slowly, does the splits and slides off stage right. This serves as an interesting take on the audience, on who the camera is turned on as they took their seats, waiting for the performance to begin, gazing at themselves projected on the scrims.
The audience sees what’s done, is aware of the two projection scrims before them, is also aware a DSLR still/video camera is being adjusted as it films and projects Eke’s image. They are not, however, aware of the slowly constructing intent and meaning behind what is obvious to their eyes.
Eke creates components of images involving costume, additional props and make up effects before us. Then, the camera, Daniel Jenatsch’s wonderfully technology orientated sound score, and Matthew Adey’s effects lighting, takes over.
The angle at which Eke is photographed and projected in motion, often offers something different on the projection scrim. To make it more interesting, the camera is set to lapse delay and repeat, resulting in a series of motions, or images infinitely reflected; to the point her body in motion on the floor appears in projection like an alien Borg.
Over the less than hour of the production, Eke constructs a series of fascinating ‘movies’ if you like, in which her body, objects, light, shapes and movement have been captured and rendered in a new ‘reality’ in which time, motion and reactions are completely reconstructed.
Her choreography is not one of classical symbolism or contemporary expressionism that arrives whole in performance. It’s a collection of practical moves that only part fulfil her goal. The camera’s reconstruction of it makes the ‘move’ complete in projection. What Eke does on the floor is alike to a performer setting up a prop or a costume piece to assist a complete effect in performance.
Body of Work is a doubly mesmerising experience. By the artist building the work, and as the audience experiences its end product, they live in two dimensions of space time simultaneously. We do this every day with our camera equipped phones. Ponder that one for a bit.
David O’Brien
When: 10 to 12 March
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
A piece by Pina Bausch. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Festival Theatre. 9 Mar 2016
For 34 years we have waited to see the Pina Bausch company perform again in Adelaide. Thank you Arts Project Australia and the Adelaide Festival of Arts, for making it happen. The first time the Wuppertal ensemble performed in the Festival of 1982, we were agog. It was a very lateral and different face of contemporary dance: strange and beautiful gestural motions; dancers speaking aloud; and dancers moving like people in the street. On the spot, it redefined our perception of an art form. That performance was in Thebarton Theatre, playing Kontactof.
Now, minus its remarkable creator, Bausch, who died in 2009, it returns to play upon a vast expanse of pink carnations which carpet the mighty Festival Centre stage, row upon row on their long naked stalks, offset by the dead black of the back wall.
The first dancer who steps upon the stage seems diminutive. But the dancers don't dance into sight. They pick their way slowly and carefully, carrying chairs, and they sit down. Then, one by one, some make their way slowly offstage and into the aisles, select audience members, and escort them silently from the theatre.
The Bausch dancers are many. They are lithe and fit. And, they are diverse. Their ages reach into the 60s. They are tall and small. They are of many nationalities, including three Australians and even one from Adelaide who, having seen the company in 1982, was to run away and join the circus, so to speak, and live her professional life on its stage. Julie Shanahan’s place in the company now is outstanding insofar as she features in a games scene, towering aloft on the shoulders of another dancer, long skirts making her appear a giant. Thus, does she claim power in a scene of strange and tense play, a game of creeping statues which, in Bausch spirit, is edged with cruelty.
Nelken is very much about the unkindness of humanity, about cruelty and compassion, about the fact that groups are made up of individuals and that everyone in a crowd has a story.
Bausch has used the contrast between authority and the individual in the most dramatic way, dressing male dancers in dark suits and having a lead performer who, if anything, is like a Vladimir Putin. She has him confront the passing people and demand to see their passports, creating a relationship of intimidation and in one case, abject humiliation. And a hapless man must scamper four-legged among the flowers barking like a dog. There are real dogs, too; four sleek German Shepherds, once again representing the power of authority. They hint at wars in Europe, the Berlin Wall, and the Iron curtain
Bausch underscores these associations in costume and music. Her women wear long formal satin gowns of 30s style and the music leans to Mancini, Gershwin and Ellington . For much of the two hour performance, the cast wears loose little sunfrocks. Androgynous, they gambol through the carnations, rolling, rabbit hopping, chasing with the innocence of children. But authority is never far away. They are smacked and chased. The harshness of real life is waiting for them.
Individual dancers present vignettes. One girl, after spooning dirt from a bucket and tipping it over her head, comes to a state of howling tears, running in circles pursued by a man with a microphone. Between tears, she chastises herself for crying, like an autistic child's echolalia of parental reproach. Then there is the feeding of the orange, a dancer dutiful slurping and chewing into a microphone. It is not good, she says. The man feeding the girl, firmly cajoles her to just one more piece, bringing it to her mouth like an aeroplane, stuffing its hugeness in. She is left alone centre stage, chewing diligently. Endurance. Survival. Hope also lives in this surreal flowerscape.
Thematic is Gershwin's The Man I Love in which lyrics sung by Sophie Tucker are interpreted through sign language by a lone dancer. Love is the human dream. The song and the dream return at the show's end, somewhat battered as, by now, are the carnations. They have been trampled and rolled upon. They've even had towers of cardboard boxes piled upon them to cushion the falls of sinister besuited stuntmen. Dancers have dashed to and fro carrying the chairs upon which they sit to execute perfect symmetries of chorus-line choreography. Sometimes the chairs are upended.
Always the dancers are on the mark, in absolute tune with each other. They are supplicant. They are desperate. They are fighting back. Sometimes it is a frenzy, exhausting to behold. They speak out. The audience meets them. They are getting tired. One seeks the canteen. One has sore feet. One feels the need to prove that they are proper ballet dancers, after all. Bellowing hoarsely, he performs the great moves of classical ballet, never shutting up as he does so. Is that enough, he challenges.
Sign language is hallmark to the Bausch choreography and it returns triumphant at the production's denouement with the ensemble performing Bausch's elegant signature march, faces in those exquisitely complicit expressions, their arms repeating the signs for summer, winter, autumn and spring. With the 30s music and 30s glamour these ghosts of style from a grand era parade across the stage, cool eyes ever on the audience, the antithesis of the frenzies just moments before.
And thus, two wondrous strange hours are gone, leaving thoughts and images swarming through the mind. Dance genius has touched us again and the late Pina Baush never will die.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 12 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Tiny Bricks. Plants 1 – Bowden. 8 March
Beckett for the internet era?
Phillip Kavanagh’s Deluge, in Director Nescha Jelk’s and Designer Elizabeth Gadsby’s hands profoundly invokes the despair, isolation, hopelessness and intractability of modern life of Samuel Beckett’s era summed up in Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape.
The difference being playwright Kavanagh’s characters are reaching across to, and over, each other in a search for meaning and connection in real life via the digital world, in which their physical selves never move anywhere.
Nothing, seemingly, actually eventuates. Nothing is achieved. Nothing is saved. Nothing is better.
Yet something is going on. What? Information overload, and all of the above.
Deluge, set in Gadsby’s steel-fenced oblong, filled with square blocks of white Styrofoam, above which is set Lighting Designer Chris Petridis’s white/green flickering roof of LED cable, proves the perfect existential expression of the digital world. It is one in which the cast bob up from underneath the Styrofoam blocks to communicate across the sea of white. It is arguably one of the most intense, freeing yet scary spaces capable of nursing, and oppressing the expressions of human feeling and thought imaginable, given it’s very clear in a flash, this is the internet.
A fascinating duality comes into play for an audience. Are these characters real people? Digital archetypes based on ‘reality’? Are their fears, feelings and expressions genuine or mindless spam? Do we really care about any of them?
Amongst the sea of wires are two gamers. There’s a jousting couple’s one night stand, one person who questions everything, a lone soul falling apart, and more. For the audience, it’s a case of quickly creating snap shot digestions of character relations and story lines and hanging on to them as the production veers wildly away under its own criss crossing over and under narratives.
The ensemble of ten is uniformly brilliant in balancing the questioning depths of Kavanagh’s text while eliciting, with effective care, the rich vein of humour flowing through it. Each actor’s work within the small confines of the Styrofoam space is deftly managed with emotional aplomb. Their characterisations wonderfully skirt the boundaries of archetype and full blooded individual personality. They offer a uniform sense of isolation, confusion and loss particular to a character that’s nonetheless fully realised and individually appropriate to character.
Deluge begins a serious inquiry into the ‘other world’ the bricks and mortar one which we physically inhabit now parallels, just as Beckett’s work did the same for his equally far different world.
David O’Brien
When: 8 to 13 March
Where: Plant 1 Bowden (cnr Fifth Street and Park Terrace, Bowden)
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au