Ms TN's second week of Fringe demonstrated her craft and guile in negotiating the program: I enjoyed all three shows. There were a couple of regrettable TN misses - I intended to see Uncle Semolina & Friends' mega one-night-only production of Peter and the Wolf at the Collingwood Underground Carpark, but the Australian sent me to the bling opening of Hairspray instead (print review here). And a temporary brainfreeze meant I turned up an hour late for Mothlight, a circus show that I'd been greatly anticipating (shows at the Fringe Hub start an hour earlier on Sundays - doh!) Any reports on these shows, or others worth noting, are most welcome. Also, keen theatrenauts should keep an eye on Neandellus, Capital Idea, Sometimes Melbourne and Cameron Woodhead's new blog, Behind the Critical Curtain, for more reviews of more Fringe events.


My Fringe blogging is now all done, but the Fringe proper continues until October 10. I'm attending From Somewhere Underneath, Part 2 at the Donkey Wheel tonight. But that, like the MTC's offering next week at the Melbourne Festival, Life Without Me, (written, for those few who don't know, by my husband Daniel Keene), will be a family affair: courtesy of Platform Youth Theatre, my son Josh, along with a number of other young artists, is making his writing/directing debut. Then the Melbourne International Arts Festival officially opens on Friday night, although I'll have already seen two MIAF shows by then. I'm looking forward to it: I missed most of last year's festival, Brett Sheehy's first, because I was unexpectedly awarded a Poetry Tour of the UK and Ireland. One shouldn't look a free overseas trip in the mouth, but I was a bit sorry about missing the fest. (Only a bit, mind.)

But now, without further ado: Notes On What Ms TN Saw At The Fringe, Part The Second:

Intimate Exposure

Intimate Exposure takes place in what is surely the most notable new space in Melbourne: The Substation in Newport. The Substation is a magnificent early 20th century industrial building, built in 1915 by Victoria Railways to convert electricity supply for Williamstown. After it closed in the 1960s it was derelict for years, until it was restored to become Hobsons Bay Community Arts Centre. Upstairs at present is the Fringe Furniture Exhibition (my favourite piece being a steampunk gentleman's valet). And downstairs, in the catacomb-like rooms which once housed the rotary converters, is Intimate Exposure: three short dances especially created in and for these spaces, punctuated by two dance films by Dianne Reid.

There's an organic feel to how the event is structured. The audience members wander downstairs to see Dianne Reid's film she sleeps, a brief meditation on chronic illness featuring Jaye Hayes, which is on a loop in one of the basement rooms. In our own time, we reassemble in the central corridor, and the crowd is then divided in two for for the first dance, Soft Targets [solos], danced and choreographed by Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Amelia McQueen. The audience is reunited for the next three dances: Carlee Mellow's Simmer, in another room; Dianne Reid's gorgeously lyrical film Magnificent Sadness (Luke Hickmott), in the corridor; and the final part of Soft Targets, a duet this time, with William Bilwa Costa manipulating the sound live.

As the live performers are all women, the dances made me especially aware of the female body: vulnerable, manipulated, assertive, comic. This is especially the case in Simmer: that which bubbles away beneath the surface. The dancers perform the soundscape, at first singing wordlessly, exploring their voices as instruments. The dance is a witty exploration of feminine inhibition: the dancers wear pink gumboots and strangely crocheted dresses that makes them seem to be parodies of femininity. They ask nervous questions of the audience without waiting for answers, and dancers Madelaine Krenek and Paula Lay end up shouting through plastic tubing into a paddling pool, literalising the piece's title, while Sarah Black's rebellious body neurotically articulates the rage beneath feminine obedience, until her apologetic smile or her tears no longer seem to be part of her face.

Tungall and McQueen's dances work specifically with the Substation spaces, focusing on the body's vulnerability in the graffitied shadows of the industrial brick walls. I thought their solo pieces more successful - McQueen writhing to a sinister heartbeat score in an enclosed space so small she can barely stand up, while we peer down a tunnel like voyeurs, or Tungall, her mouth covered by a strange crocheted mask that looks as if it were made of internal organs dyed in day-glo colours, retching as if her body were poisoned, before she plunges all of us into total darkness by switching off the light. Until October 9, Newport Substation.

The Event

John Clancy's meta-meta script, The Event, is given a spare and intelligent treatment by director Daniel Clarke and performer Nick Pelomis. It is, basically, theatre in the third person: the actor stands in the pool of light, and informs us that he, the actor, is standing in a pool of light, speaking words written by the author, and making gestures as rehearsed, in front of a bunch of strangers (us). Clancy's text is a smart and detailed deconstruction of a particular type of theatrical event. Because it is so smart, the pedant in me wants to point out that there are many kinds of theatrical events, employing or breaking different sets of conventions to those fondly satirised here, but it is only a minor point, since what Clancy's describing is the most conventional conventions.

I spent two days trying to remember what it reminded me of. For what it's worth, it reminded me of the clip below: Charlie Brooker taking the piss out of television news.



The Event could get a bit cute for its own good, but mainly stays a leap ahead of us. The most effective moments are those where the text cheats, leaping out of its meta-self-consciousness into sometimes quite moving meditations about contemporary life (that then snap back to reminding us that this is performance - haha, that wasn't me - a device technically known as "having one's cake and eating it").

But it all works: even though The Actor pauses at several points to tell us exactly how many minutes have passed, and how many more there are to go - a risky strategy, because it immediately makes the audience aware of time in a way that theatre seeks to defeat - it doesn't drag. Pelomis's performance is very likeable, making us intensely aware that, for all the skill and distancing techniques employed in the performance and the script, he is a living, breathing human being in the same space as us. Well worth a look, although I think this kind of theatre finishes where work like last year's Fringe hit Yuri Well begins. The Loft, Lithuanian Club, Fringe Hub, until October 9.

Dances with Worms

Which brings me to Dances with Worms - like Yuri Wells, a collaboration between Stuart Bowden and Benedict Hardie. I have no idea how to describe this one, without making it sound desperately unfunny and deeply infantile. The fact is that this show is very smart, and very funny indeed. But it is, perhaps, more than a little infantile: its scatalogical jokes and, most of all, its forlornly comic hero, Stuart, seem to place it in an adulthood that is crippled by nostalgia for its own past.

I don't think it was just Bowden's red velour dressing gown that made me think of Barry Humphries's Sandy Stone, a similarly lugubrious character nostalgically washed up on the edges of suburbia. When the audience enters, we see on stage an old-fashioned electric organ topped by an aspidastra pot plant, a large amplifier and a beige lounge chair on which is seated a worm (a long brown sausage with goggle eyes, glasses and black wool hair). Stuart emerges clutching two mugs, a skinny, slightly stooped, shy-looking man, and drops a kiss on the worm. Which he continues to embrace with increasing passion - until, with a start, he becomes aware of our gaze and stops, embarrassed. The worm, it turns out, is his wife; their relationship, we obliquely discover, is undergoing some kind of crisis.

In between, to the accompaniment of Stuart's ukelele, the odd skirl from the organ and some nifty sonic layering with a loop pedal, we are treated to some scatalogical and surreal fairytales and songs. They work just on the hilarious side of what would be otherwise searingly painful explorations of sexual humiliation. Performed with po-faced exactness by Bowden, it's worth the price of admission for its evocation of the Savannahs of Melton alone, let alone Bosley the Pencil's disastrous encounter with a lustful balloon. Highly recommended. Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, until October 9.

For reasons which now are mysterious to me, but which probably reside in a diabolical subconscious masochism, I decided to see three Adelaide Fringe shows yesterday, which also happened to be the day I arrived. I found myself scrambling from show to show, with barely time to draw breath between each one. It's not an ideal way to see theatre, at least not for me: I like to think about what I've seen before being flooded with yet more stimuli. But as a crash course in the theatrical variety on offer at the Adelaide Fringe, it was probably exemplary.

The first was a rather charming piece of audio-instructed theatre, En Route, by Melbourne group Bettybooke. This won the Best Live Art Award in last year's Melbourne Fringe, and is, as they say, a "pedestrian-based event", in which mobile phones, iPods, hidden letters, chalked signs and company members lead you on a kind of Easter Egg hunt through the Adelaide CBD, with the city itself as the prize. It's part of an international trend of headphone-centric theatre that seeks to put the audience in the middle of the performance: through its insistence that participants look out, as it were, through their skull, it generates a crowded solitude that is at the centre of urban experience. The stage is the city, the theatre is your imagination, and the presiding god is Ranier Maria Rilke, whose insistence on the gaze is one of its final meditations.

There are 17 tracks, each accompanying a different route, and each offering a different audio experience that features music by local Adelaide musicians. Some are simple instructions ("walk slowly, take your time, look..."); some are narratives, such as a saunter through a bizarrely empty shopping arcade to a detective story; some are meditations on the act of perception by people like Maurice Merleau Ponty; others generate a mood for a walk down a particular lane, or create a background to a short exhibition of artworks about Dante's Purgatorio, shown in a carpark stairwell. It's a complex show, because the perspectives are constantly changing, but it's fun because it's constantly surprising, and it generates a nice balance between the participant's freedom and its own structuring necessities. I thought it a little long - maybe the ideal length for a show of this sort is an hour - but it kept me constantly interested while, of course, giving me some healthful exercise.

In an illustration of the perils of making theatre in an uncontrolled environment, my En Route began with a couple of security guards taking violent exception to Bettybooke "conducting its business" on the verandah of the Adelaide GPO, backed by a chorus of outraged staff members. I can't imagine what they thought we were doing, as they warned me against the sinister man ("don't trust him!") who was fitting me up with an iPod; perhaps they thought we were dealing drugs. Who knows? Their hostility was in marked contrast to this show's essential innocence, which was maybe what I liked most about it.

After that, I had time for a G&T in the diverting environs of the Garden of Unearthly Delights before heading to The Hive - a tent with chairs - for Baba Brinkman's The Rap Guide to Evolution. Brinkman is a Vancouver rapper whose last work was, apparently, a rap version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. After a performance of that show, he was approached by a scientist who asked him if he could do the same for Darwin as he did for Chaucer, and thus was produced what Brinkman calls "the very first peer-reviewed hiphop show".

Anyone who thinks rap is just about gangstas and hos should take a look at this (as it is as instructive about the social origins of rap as it is about Darwin, it might equally have been named The Evolutionary Guide to Rap). After a fair bit of forceful campaigning from my kids, I've had to lower my prejudices: rap is the popular poetic form, it's as various as any art, and there's some classy stuff in there. This is probably one of its stranger manifestations, but Brinkman's Byronic wit and performative energy combine to make it an irresistible hour. Plus you get to learn a lot about mitochondria and the social behaviour of slime moulds. Wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Darwin (and the slogan "Very Gradual Change You Can Believe In"), Brinkman takes us through 10 chapters, in which he explores various aspects of Darwin's theory (and attacks the whole premise of Intelligent Design), ultimately to reveal the humanity and "grandeur" of Darwin's vision. Science is seldom this much fun.

My final destination was a performance of My Name is Rachel Corrie, at X Space at AC Arts. Edited from the writings of young activist Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, it premiered at the Royal Court in London before running into controversy when the New York Theatre Workshop "indefinitely postponed" its performance in New York in 2006. Although I followed the various controversies with interest - this is a play that situates itself right on top of the Israel/Palestine political faultline, and generates as much seismic activity as one might expect - I haven't before now had a chance to see it.

As is well known, Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza in 2003, when she was crushed by a bulldozer while defending a Palestinian home from being demolished. At the time, she was part of a band of non-violent international activists who sought to protect the homes, properties and lives of the Palestinians by interpolating their bodies between them and the IDF, on the assumption that killing a foreign national would cause more trouble than a Palestinian. The play is taken from her emails and diary entries, and follows the trajectory of a bright, idealistic young woman with enormous personal courage. It is also - and this is where the controversy stepped in - a bald statement about the daily persecution of ordinary Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

In this rather beautiful production directed by Daniel Clarke, Hannah Norris gives a passionate and accurately observed performance of Corrie. As the play opens, she stands amid a pile of cardboard boxes in the mess of her chaotic bedroom. The first half consists of recollections from Corrie's school and college years, and her early activism. This, the most engaging part of the play, is staged with effective simplicity, with Norris bit by bit packing away her belongings as she speaks. She's funny, innocent, smart, ironically aware of the pitfalls of being a "progressive", and remarkably intelligent. In the second half, when Corrie journeys to Palestine, the boxes become the walls and houses of Palestine: some open up to reveal miniatures of houses, or spill out a rubble of children's shoes and stones. This section's staging was much fussier, with actions that seemed merely decorative - the arranging of the children's shoes in the shape of a heart, for instance.

The production's conscious theatricality heightened the problem with using this kind of verbatim script: criticising it is a little like attacking a memorial service for using bad grammar. Here the play is presented as theatre, but it carries with it a weight of authenticity that closes down responses. It's like being in church: its polemic is unforgiving and earnest, with the constant reminder that behind this theatrical illusion is a dead woman. One is supposed to be moved, or one is heartlessly dismissing this awful death.

I wasn't moved, but it wasn't because Norris's remarkable performance lacked any skill or feeling: it was the set-up of the whole play, which left me no room to respond, either emotionally or politically. What if you already know about the IDF demolitions of houses, gardens and olive groves, or the daily harassment of civilians in the Occupied Territories? Is your task in this theatre, then, simply to nod in agreement (or, alternatively, to rage in disagreement?) And does either response really lead to thought?

I prefer, for example, Brecht's approach, which understood the power of Verfremdungseffekt, the "making-strange" which permits - rather, which insists on - active thinking as a response, in order to get beyond the singular focus of empathy (which Brecht thought fatally bourgeois). There's a Zizekian argument to be unpacked here, which I have neither the time nor the energy to follow through: but Howard Barker says it all quite well from the aesthetic side of the equation. Uncomplicated empathy is what drives this show; it's a well-realised production done in complete good faith, but it demonstrates that empathy is not enough for either political or artistic radicalism. Which is not at all the same as saying that it ought not to be there.

En Route, concept by Julian Rickert, created by Bettybooke - Suzanne Kersten, Claire Korobacz, Paul Moir and Julian Rickert. Adelaide Fringe, until March 14.

The Rap Guide to Evolution, Baba Brinkman and SPL Productions. The Hive, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Adelaide Fringe, until March 13.

My Name is Rachel Corrie, from writings by Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, directed by Daniel Clarke. Design by Cassandra Backler, lighting and sound design by Ben Flett, video by Annemarie Kohn. Performed by Hannah Norris. X Space at AC Arts, Adelaide Fringe, until March 14.