So, that was MIAF 2010, signing off last night with a huge star-studded Black Armband extravaganza in the Myer Music Bowl. The weather gods of Melbourne decree that anyone with the hubris to stage a large outdoor event in October will be punished, and so it came to pass that Seven Songs To Leave Behind hurtled in on the icy wings of a wind from the bleak southern seas of Bass Strait. But it was some concert, well worth the brass monkey stuff.

There were plenty of highlights. The strongest acts of the evening for me were the chamber pieces, rather than the big symphonic numbers: Gurrumul Yunipingu's Bapa (in fact, all of his songs: I have absolutely no defence against that pure, soaring voice) a case in point. Ricki Lee Jones gave maybe the best set of the night: clad in an Orchestra Victoria beanie, she belted out a brilliant version of Gansta Paradise (reminiscent, as my partner commented, of Renee Geyer in Sleeping Beauty bringing out the wicked in Eminem's Go To Sleep) and a heartbreaking A Place for You, in duet with a recording of the voice of Archie Roach, who is presently recovering in hospital from a stroke. Sinead O'Connor's version of Shitlist and her skin-tingling renditions of Psalm 33 and Bob Dylan's Serve Somebody were frankly fantastic.

The women didn't have it all their way: John Cale opened his selection with a machine version of Heartbreak Hotel, and followed up with songs about Magritte and Picasso, and a viciously angry anthem about the war in Afghanistan, proving this is a man who has stayed awake. John Cale must be the coolest human being on the planet. When he came on stage - dark grey pants and jacket, white collar turned up so its points stroked his sideburns, white, stylishly ruffled hair, white ziff - he looked like some kind of overlord from a steampunk universe. I mean, pink highlights? No one his age should be able to get away with it.


Yes, far from a shabby end to what has been an interesting few weeks. And now to the hot topic of the day: Hotel Pro Forma's opera on evolution, Tomorrow, In A Year, which I saw last Thursday. I'm not sure that an opera has been greeted with such hostility from the arterati since Madama Butterfly was blown off stage by the Italian equivalents of raspberries and vuvuzelas. Melbourne audiences don't riot in the aisles (although, as on the night I went, they might boo). These days, they tweet their outrage. I'm intrigued by the anger it's engendered: the opera was described as an "atrocity", "painful, pretentious, passionless", a "disgrace". And I keep hearing again and again how it demonstrates a waste of taxpayer's money. Robin Usher summed up most of the objections doing the rounds in yesterday's Age: "Tomorrow, In a Year was so solemn it was boring - electronic music, inane libretto, old-fashioned set and dreary choreography".

Now, as you all know, I'm all for a bit of critical cut and thrust: and every festival needs an act like this, which brings everything to life by galvanising debate. Me, I wasn't one of the revilers: I found myself engrossed from the beginning of Tomorrow, In A Year. I have had some fascinating conversations with some very smart theatre watchers and makers who loathed it, and I can see their points. Still, without feeling it was the best thing I've seen, I liked it: I found it absorbing, strange, and alienatingly beautiful. Here I'll briefly attempt to dig back through the commentary to what I actually experienced while I was watching it.

As a side note, I don't know how much my openness to this opera might have to do with the fact that, for the past three weeks or so, I've spent my few moments of spare time obsessively watching BBC natural history documentaries narrated by David Attenborough. (I am currently halfway through Planet Earth.) As soon as I realised, in the opening scene, that I was watching an opera that spoke about fossil deposits in river beds and the origins of limestone cliffs, I was hooked.

The real jewel is The Knife's sumptuous electropop score. It's a gloriously complex mix of many different elements: pop and operatic voices, eight-bit sound and electronic and acoustic instruments, looped acoustic beats, field recordings, apparently structured from Richard Dawkins's gene trees. And I was delighted to see a new opera libretto using techniques of contemporary innovative poetry - notably, collage and found texts - something much rarer than it ought to be. The text draws intelligently from the writings of Charles Darwin, exploiting complex, anti-lyrical rhythms in rich antithetical repetitions. The final two songs, apparently from Darwin's writings on his dead daughter, veered perilously close to a disappointing sentimentality, but retrieved just enough obliqueness to avoid simplifying everything in a fake sense of uplift.


I'm hard to put to make much sense of the staging, but found it bizarrely hypnotic in its alienations, which I took to be an analogue of contemporary human alienation from the natural world. The dancing - a pretty ballerina en pointe, a man who seemed to be a piece of seaweed, another bald man dressed in a puffy white hoodie suit who did almost nothing for most of the show, until at the end he danced wildly in the Nightclub At The End Of The Universe - gave no sense of uplift or airiness, but all the same generated a weirdly static formal beauty. Everything was glued to the ground, bound by gravity.

The design featured lots of toxic lime-green, a colour that seldom occurs in nature: laser lights or projected text that scribbled phrases of Darwin's on the screens, or drew simple outlines over complex representations of nature - naturalist's drawings of different pigeon species, or a photograph of a cliff. When the lime-green wall that dominated the early part of the show was pushed back, it revealed something that looked like a hydroponic farm, artificial cultivations that begin to generate an alternative nature, just as we do in our cities. Cities as terrariums? Maybe not so odd. I found it all strangely compelling, like trying to read a text that's not only in a foreign language, but in an unknown script, and which is somehow also opaquely comprehensible.

Frankly, sometimes it's quite pleasurable to be a little mystified. Even if I didn't understand precisely what the directors were attempting, and sometimes felt that the various artists involved might be on different planets (what was with the surfboard, really?), I never at any point felt I was being gipped. I was, rather, fascinated by the centrifugal force driving all these different elements in differing directions on stage. It felt liberating to see theatre that was at once so crazily ambitious and unabashedly oblique, and which built its idiosyncratic realities on such tenuous connections. Bad? Good? They seemed irrelevant judgments. I don't think it's the future of opera, but I did think it was worth the trip. Which is why I'm a bit puzzled by the outrage. Isn't this kind of experience what festivals are for?


An Anthology of Optimism, Pieter de Buysser and Jacob Wren's theatrical lecture on the possibilities of what they call "critical optimism", made an interesting counterpoint the following night. This is totally disarming anti-theatre, which, if it were not so intelligent, might be too cute for words. The theatrical conceit is that one performer (Belgian writer, philosopher and theatre maker De Buysser) is an optimist, while the other (Canadian writer and performer Wren) is a pessimist. This crude polarity not precisely true, as they hasten to explain: but it's enough to drive the theatrical dialectic of the show.

The anthology of the title is a collection of things - writings, objects, quotations, photographs, paintings - donated by a variety of people who were contacted by the pair for this project. A selection of businessmen, artists, politicians, scientists and so on from around the world were asked to submit something that for them represented "critical optimism": optimism, that is, that is not blind, that pays attention to the facts (the facts being that "the world is going badly"), that is about "focusing on the next small experimental step instead of the big utopian dream", that is resistant. Embedded in this question is, what happened to the progressives? Is it still possible to hope that the world might be a little better?

Pessimism is, as De Buyssers claims, systemic and embedded in capitalistic ideology as a mode of disempowerment. All the same, so systemic are the challenges we face in making any difference to this world that is "going badly", that often pessimism seems like the only rational response to our situation. Yet doing nothing out of despair only serves to confirm our pessimism and so shore up the status quo. What to do?

Well, we could do worse than exploit De Buyssers' machine for optimism, the crucial mechanism in which is a "leap of faith". He's right, too. This blog is precisely an act of critical optimism, in the strictest definitions set out by the two in the course of their show: an act of resistance, an act of realism, a small step rather than hubristic idealism (well, look where that utopianism took us in the 20th century). An act of belief that is not, all the same, naive and blind. An act of belief that is, as Buysser says, a belief in...nothing: no god, no overarching ideology. Just a belief in the act itself. You have to begin somewhere.

Pictures: top and middle, Tomorrow, In A Year. Photos: Photo: Claudi Thyrrestrup. Bottom: An Anthology of Optimism. Photo: Phile Deprez

Seven Songs To Leave Behind, directed by Steven Richardson. Musical direction by Eugene Ball, Iain Grandage, Orchestra Victoria conducted by Benjamin Northey, sound Design by John O'Donnell, lighting Designer by Phil Lethlean, designed by Adam Gardnir. With Sinead O’Connor, John Cale, Meshell Ndegeocello, Rickie Lee Jones, Gurrumul Yunupingu, The Black Arm Band: Leah Flanagan, Shellie Morris, Dan Sultan and Ursula Yovich. Myer Music Bowl, October 23.

Tomorrow, In A Year, music by The Knife, directed by Ralf Richardt Strobech, Kirsten Dehlholm. Musical collaborators Mt Sims, Planningtorock, text by The Knife, Mt Sims, Charles Darwin. Concept and set design by Ralf Richardt Strobech, lighting design by Jesper Kongshaug, sound design by Anders Jorgensen, choreographic consultant Hiroaki Umeda, costumes by Maja Ravn. Performed by: mezzo-soprano Kristina Wahlin, singer/actor Larke Winther, singer Jonathan Johansson, dancers Lisbeth Sonne Andersen, Agnete Beierholm, Alexandre Bourdat, Bo Madvig, Jacob Stage, Jan Strobech. Hotel Pro Forma, State Theatre.

An Anthology of Optimism, by Pieter De Buysser and Jacob Wren. Campo. Fairfax Studio.