The Green Room

By Thomas Connelly

In my utopia, art would be intimate. Art would compel people to think. Art would take place in interesting venues. The Green Room gave me a taste of my utopian dreams.

In this work, The Green Room, Jane Longhurst and Dylan Sheridan were able to create something challenging and invigorating. They have made the overture to an endless and communal symphony, that each of us can carry and add to daily. 

On a sunny first day of summer I drove to a much ignored historical part of Hobart, the Victoria Gunpowder Magazine on the Queens Domain.

I arrive early, and entertain myself with a stroll along Soldiers Memorial Avenue. A bleak and silently beautiful memorial to those sacrificed in the Great War . Alone but for the wind on my face and the song of the birds, this quiet futility of war moment places me in the right frame of mind for the Green Room . 

The audience is led to an intimate dance floor . A woman is dressed in black:. is she a servant or a mourner? As she endlessly sweeps the floor with her old fashioned broom, Dylan Sheridan's modulated rumblings signal a dreamy twilight entrance and a beginning. A theatre of gesture and sound follows, filling the abandoned space and transmuting the audience. Minimal lighting adds a thrilling unity. 

Years ago punks prided themselves on breaking the distance between performer and audience. The Green Room extends this idea. The audience becomes the performance. The rustling of clothing - the string section, shifting feet - percussion, breathing - woodwind. Peristaltic motion forms the brass section, breaks down barriers, and at the same time raises questions and the audience becomes part of the performance. What is meant to be heard? What is performance? What is real?

Jane Longhurst performs a silent dance; her movements layering questions and her very being becomes ambiguous. A ghost of the long empty gunpowder magazine? An echo of the forgotten Crimean War? The fear of Tsarist expansion? The endless domestic labour of women? Or is her sweeping structure for the soundscape?

The performance doesn't end, rather it fades and changes location. Walking away from the keyboard, doors open and the audience slowly melts away, a simulated ending. Once everyone has left the room Jane finishes her sweeping and her dance. And we are outside in the light and the real world. Off in the distance a band plays, birds sing, conversation flows. The performance continues without end. 

In all this was a fabulous production; a subtle and revolutionary work. Simple and complex, artless and polished, all at once. Equal parts theatre, dance, installation and composition. All bundled up with questioning strings, in a appropriate and interesting venue. A venue that not only allows intimacy, but forces intimacy upon the audience and performers alike. 

Congratulations to the Salamanca Arts Centre's HyPe (Hybrid Performance) Program for nurturing innovation and allowing this and many other vigorous performances to be created in and around the local area. 

http://www.salarts.org.au/hype/

http://www.salarts.org.au/events/the-green-room/

SOUND TO LIGHT-Crossing Borders

By Thomas Connelly

Last night I Went to the opening night of Sound to Light - Crossing Borders (STL). As well as the exhibition, which runs until June 23 at the Salamanca Arts Centre, I saw some audio/visual performances.

Image courtesy of www.soundtolight.net

STL is described as a dynamic, playful, chaotic, experimental project. A social art project that seeks to transcend boundaries between disciplines, but more importantly - and something that can only be done at this time in history - seeks to transcend physical location. This could not have been done before the invention of high-speed networking. Like the ancient shamans who could be in two places at once, nowadays artists are able to perform bi-location. Optical fibre being part of the infrastructure of modern shamanistic practice the name of the exhibit takes on a special meaning.

starchild

If I had the power of Orpheus, O Father, to bewitch the rocks to dance with me by my song...
Iphigenia in Aulis 1212 - Euripides

After seeing some MONA FOMA performances at the Princess Wharf I waddled my self over to the Peacock Theatre to see a chamber opera 'starchild' by Tasmanian composer Dylan Sheridan. Even though I knew next to nothing of the composer or of the piece I had high hopes for this work. In many ways it is best to know very little about the artist. Like the rest of us, artists are selfish little jerks in the main, and to know too much about them only opens a series of doors into rooms of doubt, fear and envy. I am glad to say that I was not disappointed.

The Peacock Theatre was a very different venue from the Princess Wharf. The Peacock Theatre is small, Princess Wharf is huge. The Peacock is intimate, the Wharf is one of those spaces that makes one think of old 1950's tropes of the post Atomic Age, the lonely battlefield and the individual lost in the crowd. Coming into the cosy space from the late afternoon angle of natural street sunlight, it took a few moments for my vision to settle into the gloom of the theatre. As I adjusted to the dim artificial light the stage and the many details came into view. This was a small simple piece, with only four musicians plus some electronics controlled by the composer. One singer and a child who sings a song at the end of the opera.

I was interested to see how this could be done. The conceptual idea of the opera is in the idea of the 'far-off song' carried on the wind. The endless song of crying far off, unable to be touched or to even be heard properly. Is there a better way to think about this? Is there a better way to discuss the ephemeral and the ineffable, than by using the structure of the dream?

Three loud claps, a drum beat, a woman's scream. And here recalling Finnegans Wake we fall; not however into shame and disgrace, but into a dream.

As in a certain class of dreams the scene was sparse, alien, with few objects and interactions. The small space of the theatre was used to maximum effect. The musicians were integrated into the set design. Obvious when one looked, but with a turned head the musicians seemed to fade away to became Satie's famous furniture, or like the Silence in recent episodes of Doctor Who.

Opera is in many ways the greatest of all art forms, in that it uses all other art forms. Music, dance, gesture, speech, painting and more. This is not to attempt to rank types of art, but merely to point out the unifying aspect of opera.  In this production the scenery was sparse, but effective in all ways. A small table, a floor of artificial grass, the netted and muted coverts for the musicians to play. All of this slotted together and supported the dream state nature of the work. With a small, empty arena for performing the action, it is important for the lighting to 'do more work.' In this case the lighting was able to texture the simplicity of the set design, revealing and concealing in turn, imparting a dream quality to the commonplace. A thin aerosol filled the stage so the lights could fall like solid cubist rays of pure fiery light onto the beautiful dancing place. This misty, obscuring light did much to reveal the mental state of the singer and to add solidity to the nebulous world of the interpretation of a dream.

Like a dream emotions moved quickly, from lighthearted confusion to moments of terror and panic. Internal questions unknowable spilled across the dream story. External stimuli imposed themselves on and were incorporated into the dream nature, be it the whistling wind in the background, the abrupt alarm clock, a far off laughing transforming into crying and back again into laughter, the branches tap tap tapping on the window.

And the 'heroine' sang of her and our confusion, like Gaugain. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?  Soprano Allison Farrow used her voice to tell the story to move along from one scene to the next. Her voice became another instrument, an extra layering onto the simple yet complex music created.

After a day of listening to male bands and male artists it was a much needed break to hear a woman's voice being brought to the fore.

This was a lovely little piece and one I would happily recommend. I can understand some not enjoying the work, but to my mind it was a success. This simple short chamber opera was enjoyed so much that the audience seemed surprised and a little disappointed when it somewhat abruptly -  ended. But this seems a good thing, surely it is much better to leave the audience wanting more rather than saying you have gone on too long.

Don't know if I should feel vindicated in my view of this opera, or should I think I am completely wrong? Seems the Mercury and I are on the same page, as it were.