By
Thomas Connelly
The
crowd gathered and chatted, looked at mobile phones, took photos and
texted envious friends. Some sat on recently installed bleacher
seats, some on giant hot pink bean bags, some stood in the centre of
the hall surrounded on both sides. The rising din echoed off the hard
walls and was at the same time muffled by the soft humid crowd.
Phones flashing, children laughing. Out the open door the blue blue
of the river. Warehouses along the waterfront and the low foothills
retreating to infinity. And then the hushing anticipation as the
musician took the stage and nodded here and there with their
instruments warming up and calming nerves.
 |
| The Arrival on stage (www.benw.info) |
We
were gathering to see a performance of Ben Walsh's Orkestra of the
Underground scores Shaun Tan's The
Arrival.
The
lights fall and rise, eyes appear and fade away, rapid changes and
snatches of folk music and other snippets of sound and sense swirl
and build to a frenzy of faces and drums and horns and a take your
breath away in a galloping pace. The music flows, images fade and now
we see fearful children under covers. A clatter of drums, the wail of
horns. Mystery and Menace. After the rapids, a slow cool eddy.
It
is easy enough to make a hash of introducing electronic or found
sounds into a piece such as this, but here I am happy to say that the
various sounds included fit together smoothly. The gulls overhead and
the waves splashing, the immigrant ship add to the soundscape, slowly
fading away. At one point I look away to see the heaving river and
can almost smell the salt air. Further into the maelstrom of emotions
the hero of the book comes into the city with a discordant resonating
click clack series of sounds. And looking out the window of his
railroad flat window, a fractal wall looking the same from any
dimension, one could sense his isolation. A feeling of alienation and
vulnerability. A longing for return and reuniting.
As
well as the images projected on screen the lighting and effects for
this piece were all very supportive, and added to, rather than
subtracted from or overwhelmed the primacy. Which in this case was
the music of the story. Flashing red as things fell apart to wide
spans of thin smoke glowing purple in the light, and the menace of
blue as runaway children held hands amid the clatter of drums, the
popping of hand slapping skins and wailing and crying of horns. All
moved together as one relentless flow of music and art and technology
and space and coincidence to tell a sparse tale which forced the
individual observer to fill in gaps with their own life experience.
Shaun
Tan is an Australian writer and illustrator, who is originally from
Perth, Western Australia. In 2006 he produced The
Arrival; a
wordless story which in 2007 won the New South Wales Premier's
Literary Awards Book of the Year prize.
Apparently,
it was by happy accident that Ben Walsh came across this evocative
book. He is a composer and drummer who embraces diverse musical
genres including jazz,
electronica, Hip Hop and has made music for dance, circus and film.
Urged
on by Tan's silent, wordless images Walsh created a score for The
Arrival.
The performance was a well produced effort by obviously a great many
people. All the various elements of sound, rhythm, image, light and
motion worked seamlessly. To the outsider who is not privy to the
minor errors introduced in any live performance, the production seem
to flow flawlessly.
One
of the key aspects of this performance was the inclusion of a series
of illustrations from the book projected onto screens behind the
Orkestra. These dreamy, lovely drawings of half forgotten times were
filled with strange amphibian like creatures and indecipherable
squiggles and markings meant to be the foreign language refugees must
learn. Amphi being a Greek word, and having at the root of the word
the idea of 'on both sides.' (According to my (online) Liddell &
Scott Greek–English Lexicon.) Whether by another happy accident or
prior planning these strange creatures in a single simple image
encapsulated the real life of the immigrant. That is the fact of
being caught between two worlds, being on both sides of a cultural
divide. Even the venue had echoes of this idea of being between two
worlds. The old passing into nothingness Hobart and the new Hobart
coming into being.
Any
criticism I could make would be only the quibbles of one with neither
the talent nor the drive to make such an event happen. A wider range
of instruments could have allowed more texture and nuance of emotion
to come through. As the number of makers in the Orkestra was only a
cricket team the emotional range was limited by the tonal range of
the instruments. I admit to having a hard time even typing this as
the piece worked so effectively, and opened another door of
discussion in the topic of how we treat newcomers to our sun burnt
land. So I will say that it is a shame that this piece is not
performed more often. It would be a useful activity to film the
concert for viewing on one of the sensible stations, either ABC or
SBS, followed by discussion with various people involved in the
immigration debate. For all the joyful, liberating power of music,
speech is often required to fine tune the discussion. But again this
is just my opinion, and opinions as we all know are like (insert rude
or cheeky body part here), in that everyone has one. And I more than
anyone understand that my opinion is just that, an opinion not a
truth.
The
Arrival was included in the MOFO 2013 program and performed at
PW1 in Hobart.
