On Your Marks

Stompin

Ten Days on the Island

By Wendy Newton

Blue.  It's the colour of the sky and of the team I'm allocated to by one of Stompin's attendants as we make our way into the Aurora Stadium for a daytime performance of On Your Marks.  I'm told that 'blue' is all I need to know.  I almost reply that I was captain of team Florey in my Grade 7 sports day competitions and we were the blue team, but I stop myself.  What possessed me to think of that after decades of growing up?

The things that stay with us.

I am surrounded by hundreds of students and wonder who my team-mates are, if we're going to have to compete in our teams, if I'm going to have to do something, or be something, instead of a passive viewer.  The set-up has already begun.  My alliances are being formed, my mind is beginning to frame the experience in terms of 'my team' and 'the other' and I am measuring myself to see if I'm up to the task. I am as much a part of the performance as the dancers that are to come.

I follow the 'coach' with my team-mates onto the oval and feel exposed and insignificant in this giant space.  Applauding dancers encourage us to run through a Stompin banner and the audience runs through like champions who have never been clapped for anything before.  So the game begins.

On Your Marks is an engaging contemporary dance fusion that utilises theatre, film and alternate spaces within the Aurora Stadium to amplify different perspectives on competition, ambition and self-image - for better or worse - and to heighten our sensitivities within the immersive experience. 

We view gladiatorial dancers from a distance as they warm-up, face each other, tumble, tussle and fight for control, with moves that mimic footballers, sprinters, gymnasts and netballers.  Jerseys are remnants of pompoms that sit across shoulders like ribboned aiguillettes used to fasten armour; their team colours are worn like war paint.  We're behind glass like tv viewers and the rivalry becomes something apart from us, distilled to a projection of our own competitive urges that we can deflect onto the sporting field for the next few minutes of viewing.

But there's a clever juxtaposition between the public and private face of competition: we move into the Stadium's change rooms and are treated to a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the celebrity of sport.  Performers in their underwear dance in pairs, flimsy and vulnerable in their 'whites' as they hover in corners and glide trance-like among us.   It's an intimate and surprising moment: we might anticipate the replay of glory, of revelling in triumph and unity, but instead, we discover pain, alienation and shame.    

"Take a hard look at yourself and grow up."

"Why do you have to be so strange?"

"I never loved you."

They might be ghosts of conversations past, echoes remaining in the change rooms and in our heads as we try to convince ourselves that words don't hurt. The smell of liniment permeates the room; it settles on the benches, in the carpet, the lockers, along with the deep feelings of loss and anguish.  It's a salve for physical injuries, but not the ones that cut the deepest: the feelings of inadequacy, of failure, of not belonging.  Of not being good enough. 

The things that stay with us.

It's an extremely moving piece that brings me close to tears.

The final seven minutes of improvised dance is full of sound and fury, signifying everything.  Twenty-four dancers take to the field, but this time we are at an intimate distance and feel the threat.  A furious techno beat drives the chaotic dancing as performers are fuelled by rivalry, comparison and competition - but they struggle with themselves as much as each other.  There's no room for injuries here on the battlefield; the losses are shared, the triumphs, the euphoria. Individuality no longer counts; the uniqueness of each is lost in the homogenous drive to perform and conform and measure-up.  But what if we don't fit?  What if we're not 'good enough' for the team?  How do we find resilience in defeat when the hardest fought battle is the one with ourselves?

On Your Marks is four quarters of highly entertaining, intensely physical and deeply moving contemporary dance.  It might have only been a cleverly choreographed performance about competition and the way expectation permeates our whole lives, but it is so much more: it is an immersive and thought-provoking piece that suspends our disbelief long enough to experience something that moves us somewhere we hadn't expected.  That's the transformative nature of the arts and Stompin's unique and provocative work: to move us from the intellect into being, from the mind into the heart, where the real things live. 

The things that stay with us.

Murder

by Thomas Connelly

Nihil humani a me alienum puto

On a night when the heavens themselves seemed to be weeping in sympathy for us stupid apes I took myself to see Murder at the Playhouse Theatre in Hobart. I had heard that it was a powerful, confronting work. I was also intrigued by the use of puppets in the play. So I took my seat in the balcony and looked down upon the stage, like an Olympian watching the clots of gore.

There were many things to like about this production; the music of the Bad Seeds, the way the space was used and the stark use of pulsating lighting. The puppet masters were of great interest. Black burqa clad ninja blobs that seemed to appear and disappear, flitting about the stage like shades of the dead warriors confronted by Odysseus during the Nekuia. These puppet masters, like priests and shamans of old, controlled much of the action in the play and brought to mind questions of free will. Are we in fact free or are we controlled by these anonymous forces? All in all an interesting and powerful use of alienation techniques that propelled the action along and left the audience breathless. Added to the bubbling hexenkessel was the physical presence and voice of Graeme Rhodes who was able to pour out a rich roiling spew of tortured words. There was much to like in this production.

As We Forgive

By Eliza Burke

As We Forgive is a play in three acts, about three sets of circumstances in the lives of three different men. Written by Tom Holloway, specifically for Tasmanian actor Robert Jarman it is structured as three separate monologues that explore the moral repercussions of events affecting each of the men. In its premiere season at the Theatre Royal, Julian Meyrick’s direction set a tone of classical restraint with each monologue divided by solo cello music, (written by Raffaele Marcellino, performed by Antony Morgan) and projected photographs and lighting (Lisa Garland; Nicholas Higgins) enlivening the spare set design (Jill Munro and Julian Meyrick). All these elements combined to make a show that was subtle and thought-provoking but ultimately left me feeling unchallenged and unmoved.

The acts are divided into the emotional realms of vengeance, hatred and forgiveness and in each we are given different angles on the complexities of morality: an old man who is empowered by the vengeance he wreaks on the teenager who invades his home; another man whose hatred for his abusive father affects his moral radar in his adult life; and another whose own deadly actions against his two sons leave him without recourse to forgiveness.

All three men describe tough personal circumstances and Jarman’s solid performance throughout threw light on many dark corners of the psyche, especially in Acts II and III. But by the end of the play I was left with a feeling of detachment, looking for links between the acts or to the world beyond each of these individual lives, but not really finding them.

For me, this was partly an effect of the retrospective angle of each of the monologues that set up a distance between the description of events and their effects. The circumstances to which we are being asked to apply our own moral radar come to us through subjective description which at times felt laboured and uncertain. Without witnessing the drama of the action or emotion as it has been played out, we are left to ponder the effects in their wake and I felt something of the drama of each moral dilemma and of the play as a whole was lost.

Although each character is written with great emotional awareness and there are profound insights into human frailty, there is a reserve in Holloway’s writing, (and perhaps also in Meyrick’s direction) that left me wanting more tension from these dilemmas, a greater sense of quandary, or perhaps just a greater sense of theatricality to match the depth of the play’s philosophical concerns.

Holloway is renowned for his subtlety and deft structuring of material to create emotional fields of great import. As We Forgive is another example of this. But aside from the shared theme of father/son relationships, it wasn’t always clear whether there were meant to be links between the three stories – a progression of some kind from vengeance to hatred to forgiveness? And if there was, whether these emotional fields had things to share that may have lead to a more coherent claim on what it means to forgive, what brings us to bear judgement in order to forgive, or what events may prevent or hinder forgiveness altogether.

The last act attempted to offer greatest insight into this latter concern, but ended up feeling more like a portrait of self-pity or grief, than a plea for forgiveness. The symptomatic bleeding from the breast in the character appeared as a somewhat trite rendition of the bleeding heart metaphor that ultimately distracted from the breadth of distress facing this particular character.

I wanted to care very much about these men, whose stories I recognised from our collective memory and whose lives were in various states of injury, ruin or suffering because of their own amoral acts or those of others. But I couldn’t help feeling that their concerns belonged to the contained kind of universe as described by the character in Act I – a world that didn’t quite connect with the collective “we” addressed in the title. But then, perhaps this is Holloway’s point – have ‘we’ lost our moral radar, is there no unifying moral compass anymore? – is the amorality of our age such that there is no sense of connection in these matters beyond individual experience and is this our greatest challenge?

I am still pondering these effects of the play, the questions it contained and the sense of detachment I felt as I left the theatre. To this end As We Forgive was a success.

SPRAG SESSION

By Gai Anderson

Huonville Town Hall

As part of Ten Days on the Island , 2013

sprag [spræg]

n. 1) a young man 2) a young cod 3) a wooden prop to support the roof of a mine.
 sprag unit auto part with several rotating sprags that lock to provide traction.
 adj. 1) quick and lively (Shakespeare) 2) of sprag mind: one’s thought process in constant cognitive motion creating a distracted and wavering personality.

I don’t know what I expected of SPRAG SESSION on Monday night at Huonville, but as these young energetic musicians from Cape Breton stepped onto stage and played those first electrifying notes I knew that I was in for something really special.

As if dropped in from another place in the midst of full musical flight, their toe tapping wild energy expanded instantly to fill the room with an intoxicating and multilayered mix of Celtic traditions with twists of funk and rock.

For these five smiling young men are no ordinary Celtic band, but one that layers upon the reels and jigs and Breton dances with their unique and inspired arrangements to create thoughtful original “toons”. Their music is infectious.

The ever-smiling sprite that is the toe-tapping frontman Colin Grant, has gathered a group of amazing musicians around him to create Sprag Session, bringing together a traditional trio in combination with a blues, funk rhythm section . Combining virtuosic mandolin, guitar, banjo, drums, wild thumping piano and the ever soaring fiddle of Grant himself, Sprag Session created a dynamic range of grooves, beats and melodies, which occasionally slowed for soulful moments of great beauty.

Grant is also a great story teller whose impish enthusiasm to connect with the audience and comic chatter between the sweat-inducing tunes were delightful. His comic stories of the people from the community they live in had a great generosity about it and a great familiarity. In fact the photo of the lads on the Ten Days program, sitting in the park with the ducks, could be of a bunch of local boys taken in Huonville.

And that’s a bit how the whole night felt, like we had known these boys forever and they were  playing to their home crowd. Except we were definitely not all up and dancing as we much as they would have been at home when these boys were “driving the ceilidih bus”.

But it was a Monday night in Huonville.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway 

By Elevator Repair Service

By Lucy Wilson

It’s rare to experience theatre these days with a cast of ten and a running time of over three hours. It’s also rare for a New York Theatre Company to stage an Ernest Hemingway novel in Hobart. Rumoured as the headline show for this Ten Days on the Island Festival, the award-winning company, Elevator Repair Service, staged The Select (The Sun Also Rises). It’s a semi-autobiographical 1920’s novel about the lost generation of post-war Brits and Americans spending decadent alcohol drenched days in Parisian cafes and visiting a famous bull fighting festival in Spain.

SHADOW DREAMS

By Gai Anderson

Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

Seen as part of Ten Days on the Island Festival, 2013.

The Recital Hall, Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, Hobart .

Theatre at its best is transportative – it takes you to places outside your self – where you suspend your disbelief and begin to take part in the alchemy that is happening before you on stage.

Some time its the trickery and spectacle that does this, sometimes it’s the quirky humor, the depth of story, the uplifting beauty of the music, the emotional life of the characters, the simplicity and wisdom of the message. But sometimes you are privileged enough to witness a show that does all those things and more.

Shadow Dreams is a technical and artistic triumph by any standards - a superbly crafted, simple, heart-felt story, beautifully told, of two boys who begin to dream each other’s dreams. It is a colaboration between Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, performing the very beautiful uplifting music of Graeme Koehn live.

The show is staged simultaneously in two theatres at the two ends of the state using broadband to stream the live orchestra and vision.

So on the stage in Hobart I could see a screen divided in half, before which the story of Peter, a suburban white boy living with his Mum and gran is enacted live.

On the other half of the screen is the Aboriginal boy Dale with his father and sister in their house on a farm near Launceston. This was a projection streaming live from the Launceston stage, where they were performing.

But that’s not all, the trickery went much further than this as layers of animation, detailed landscape captured in stunning painted backdrops and atmospheric shadow puppetry and other live puppetry elements were layered to continuously transform the visual story with incredible beauty.

There was an awful lot going on on-stage sometimes, which may have been easier to take in in a larger theatre. But that didn’t stop me from being totally engaged from start to finish with the beauty and significance of the story.

The boys themselves were a delight, played by actors Kai Resbeck and first time Aboriginal performer Nathan Maynard. As we watched their days at school and at home we met two funny characters with the quirky details of their lives, and where they live, of Bridgewater Jerry, Seven Mile Beach and Dove lake.

But this story is not just about the boys – it’s a story about the wisdom of the generations who have been here before and the shared dreaming for a communal future. For what they dream together is not just any story, but the Palawa story of the creation of Tasmania and its sacred landscapes.

Eventually it led them to each other when they met with the families at Dove Lake, and amongst the elders and the wisdom of culture, they ran and laughed together, dreaming of that communal future.

This is a very important story; a moment of reconciliation, albeit on stage. It is certainly the first time I have seen the reenactment of the Palawa story in such a public forum and it brought a tear to my eyes. Let’s hope every Tasmanian gets to see this show in all its heart felt beauty.

Thanks to the generosity of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community, to the ever inspiring talents of Frank Newman and Finegan Kruckemeyer and to the huge caste and crew of Terrapin who worked together to make this incredible show happen.

MURDER

By Gai Anderson

Erth Visual & Physical Inc.

Hobarts Playhouse Theatre

As part of Ten Days on the Island 2013

Puppetry can be so powerful in so many ways on stage; can potentially go so much further visually and psychologically than the real human body on stage. And of course puppets offer so much potential for exploring human darkness, as they can actually be injured, tortured, and murdered right there in front of us in graphic detail.

MURDER begins with a slightly haunted domestic scene in cold, night light, with the words – How shall I kill thee? Let me count the ways.

Its meaty premise is the exploration of our relationship to murder. Is our modern fascination with murder via pornographic-real-crime TV, for example, any different to the impulse that drove the crowds to witness mass murder at the coliseum?

With the Murder Ballads of the Nick Cave as a backdrop to this investigation, MURDER begins strongly. The visuals and songs sit well together, as the chilling domestic scene of the live male-protagonist is filled with a cast of puppet ghouls and characters; a table of insipid-skinned dolls momentarily come to life; a gaggle of sinister nasty teethed caricatures appear from suitcases to laugh and cavort and faceless human sized bunraku puppets are brought to life by a chorus of black masked puppeteers who are chilling in their own not-hereness. The spinning bed, the shadow forest scenes, all beautifully realized, come together as inhabitants of the disturbing and fearful inner reality of the protagonist.

This is the stuff of all our horror movie and murder show imaginings, but the direct story telling of the actor is also strong and powerful here, his emotional landscape clear and chilling, as we begin to watch his slow slip into the land of murder.

There are some exceptionally provocative visual moments, which I found electrifying, such as the actor's huge, sinister sausage fingers, disembodied via video, placing story cuts-outs in the clay. In my mind this became both a clinical murder reenactment and a murderer late at night burying a dead body in the earth. Another was the unexpected appearance of his faceless puppet lover appearing from the fridge…and there were many more .

Where the narrative is strong it worked well – the beginnings of the chat room sequences with its video and typing, and the story of the broken down car and narrow escape is powerful stuff.

But at some point MURDER lost its way, and no matter how many clever visual ideas or glimpses of incredible puppets and puppetry are seen, they inevitably become a distraction as the thrust of story lost its focus and power. Even the Murder ballads disappeared mysteriously until a quick reprise at the very end.

MURDER promised so much.Our human relationship to death in all its forms is really important and rich and I felt really cheated by the dribbling away of the great momentum and profound investigation it had developed.

But complex story telling with puppetry is not easy and it is not the first time I have been disappointed in such a way. Sometimes it seems as if the enthralment of the makers with their endless wonderful visuals is hard to resist.

I would have liked less with a greater depth of engagement .
I do hope all the wonderful puppets get to have a larger life somewhere in the future.