Watching the development of theatre companies is a fascinating business. They are organisms subject to all the travails of being alive: growth, change, decay, death and renewal. They are networks of individual energies which seed in unexpected places, producing unexpected syntheses and collaborations. The Hayloft Project and Chamber Made Opera are cases in point. Both have had a major impact on performance in this town, and both are under new artistic leadership.

Hayloft was begun by Simon Stone in 2007, pulling together a bunch of recently graduated talent for a notable production of Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening (review here). Since then, Melbourne, and later Sydney, has seen a series of productions that re-examined classics and mounted new works, sometimes controversially, and Stone has catapulted to the main stage at the STC and is now resident director at Belvoir St. Hayloft, which has never been short on talent, is now under the artistic leadership of Anne-Louise Sarks, who as well as being assistant director on Stone's recent Belvoir production of The Wild Duck, directed the Fringe hit Yuri Wells and last year's exquisite version of Gorky's The Nest.


Chamber Made, on the other hand, has been around since 1988, until last year under the artistic directorship of Douglas Horton. From its first production, the oft-returned Helen Noonan solo work Recital, it defined itself as the place for modern opera in Melbourne. Its production of Phillip Glass's The Fall of the House of Usher, which featured an outstanding design by Trina Parker, remains one of my peak theatrical experiences. And this company too has a new artistic director - David Young, formerly AD of Aphids and a composer in his own right.

The continuities are much more obvious in Hayloft, which is not so much reinventing itself as continuing its previous explorations, using much of the same talent that drove their earlier work. Delectable Shelter, directed and written by Benedict Hardie, is Hayloft's second production under Sarks. Under the umbrella of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, it's an SF apocalyptic satire, produced with all the style we've come to expect from Hayloft. It's a stylish three-act nonsense with savage undertones and a surprisingly optimistic feel.

The conceit is that a bunch of fanatics have decided that the world is past saving and have ramped up climate change to a catastrophic degree that destroys all life on earth. Five people - an engineer and four members of an upper-middle class Melbourne family - are in a bunker underground, readying themselves to repopulate the planet, once it is possible to reinhabit it, with a new, utopian society.

The bunker itself, represented in Claude Marcos's design by a kind of open-sided cabinet propped on the stage, is decorated with the most eye-burning wallpaper I've ever seen which, even more than the walls of the box, emphasises the claustrophobia of Hardie's black vision. (The single sign of real life, a painting by Van Gogh, sits jarringly on the wall, representing everything that has been destroyed). In between the three acts, we are given performances of 80s pop songs rearranged by Benny Davis as Bach madrigals, sumptuously sung by the performers in eye-popping salmon-pink choral robes.

There are touches of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf and Chris Morris's deeply unsettling Blue Jam in the text. The first two acts follow the fortunes of this dysfunctional family, immediately after the catatrsophe and then a couple of years later. Privilege functions here as emotional and intellectual cauterisation, a complete inability to empathise with anyone, or to grasp any reality beyond the immediate situation. It emerges as careless cruelty and a carefully meaningless dialogue that skates over an abyss of neuroticism. The family obediently bows to the necessities of their situation: breeding schedules and survival.

The action then leaps three centuries, to the eve of their re-emergence onto the surface of the planet. Hardie examines the (il)logical results of a vastly depleted gene pool - a bunker populated by hundreds of people who are all identical to their five progenitors, and a musical culture that has evolved from two Ur-texts, Bach chorales and 80s pop songs. Idle suggestions written down three centuries earlier have risen to the status of religious texts, cannibalism is a way of life and the Chinese - according to rumour, the only other survivors of the destruction of the earth, and masters of leaping backwards onto buildings - are The Enemy. But how to greet the Enemy? With guns or with songs?

Alistair Mew's sublimimally rumbling sound design adds to the dissociative realities, suggesting a world crumbling in chaos outside the bright, airtight box where the increasingly unhinged characters dutifully pursue their deluded dreams. Hardie's play is sharp and clever, paying off all its jokes, although I thought the middle act a little overwritten and consequently slow. The cast brings an infectious energy and some beautiful voices to this bizarro world, with an especially sharp comic performance by Yesse Spence; the early scenes were a little sticky on opening night, but relaxed as the evening progressed. Very funny, with enough sting to create a lingering aftertaste.


Chamber Made's Minotaur: The Island is another cup of tea entirely. Something between a New Music concert, an installation, a ritual or invocation and the kind of performances children make for their families, it's part of an initiative by David Young that literally brings opera into the living room. For this performance, co-commissioned by Tasmania's 10 Days on the Island festival and a private sponsor, Dr Peta Gillingham, we were invited to an apartment 17 floors above St Kilda Rd. The event was catered by a chef and involved some good wines and a stunning night-time view over the Shrine: I imagine it was a very different experience from the opera's premiere at Bruny Island, where it was developed among the community.

Quite aside from its loungeroom setting, the reverberations with theatre made at home are irresistible. Once everyone was seated, we were asked to close our eyes, in lieu of a blackout. The costumes are all repurposed - dress-ups, headgear made of baskets and handbags and pencil-cases. There is a percussion kit, a small harpsichord and a double bass, but music is also made from a series of props: cane coffee tables, wooden objects, a conch shell. The event is immediately domestic and improvised, but the effect is fascinating: it's a re-enactment of a myth that draws out of these humble objects a compelling sense of ritual. I found the performance wholly absorbing, and started thinking about the Lares, the household gods of the Romans, where the domestic sphere is also the site of the sacred.

Margaret Cameron's text is a fragmentary poem of considerable beauty that bookends the performance. The opening section is spoken by Caroline Lee, lying as Venus washed up on an imaginary shore, "the worst place I can imagine", and the final stanzas are sung by Deborah Kayser as Ariadne, who has lost her way and now must "start again". In the centre is the question of ecstasy and loss.

Venus recalls the conception of the Minotaur, half bull, half man, the result of Pasiphaë's passion for a white bull - a punishment meted out to her by the Goddess of Love for the husband's refusal to sacrifice the bull. That perverse copulation is the precursor of Ariadne's treacherous passion for the Athenian champion Theseus who, once he has used her insider knowledge to find and slay the monster in the Labyrinth, abandons her on the Isle of Naxos on his way back to Athens. The opera is about this place of abandonment.

In this opera, "identity is all timbre". David Young's score is about detail, silences and sounds drawn from ordinary objects as well as conventional instruments - the scraping along a plank, the rustling percussion from striking a basket, the breath of the performers - that build to concanetations of musical energy and then dissipate. It has a feeling of something ancient behind it: there are sounds that gesture towards the music scored for the Classical Greek theatre when it was first performed. Transformations are minimal and uneasy, and demand close listening. It's a familiar enough menu of sound for those at least a little acquainted with New Music, but what it's not is theatrical: Minotaur explores other senses of rhythm and fragmentation and attention.

The music evolves alongside highly stylised, hieratic performance. The performance walks a fine line, always with the threat of falling into the risible, but it never quite falls over. This is because its unstable tensions retain their suspension, and is also due to the performances themselves, which are utterly focused. And it creates some memorable images: a woman with a bird's head, playing the harpsichord; a multiple vision of a bull, made of six bodies; Ariadne holding a conch shell, perched like a ship's figurehead on a island made of a jumble of furniture. I couldn't always read the symbolism, but somehow that didn't matter. Fascinating work.

Images: promotion shots. Top, Hayloft's Delectable Shelter; bottom, Chamber Made's Minotaur.

Delectable Shelter, written and Directed by Benedict Hardie. Composed by Benny Davis, musical direction by Nathan Gilkes, set design by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Lucy Birkinshaw, costumes by Esther Hayes, sound design by Alister Mew. With Thomas Conroy, Simone Page Jones, Anthony Mackey, Josh Price and Yesse Spence. The Hayloft Project @ Theatre Works, until April 17.

Minotaur: The Island, composed by David Young, directed and written by Margaret Cameron. Performers: Deborah Kayser, Caroline Lee and Hellen Sky. Musicians: Mark Cauvin, Matthias Schack-Arnott and Anastasia Russell-Head. Commissioned by Ten Days on the Island and Dr Peta Gillingham, performed at a private apartment. Closed.

Material Mouth, performed and devised by Carolyn Connors. Directed by Margaret Cameron, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist. La Mama Theatre until October 9.

Material Mouth, says the press release, is a "theatrical concert for solo voice", which seems as good a description as any. Created and performed by the remarkable Carolyn Connors, it's as hard to classify as it is to adequately describe - a work of performance art that encompasses sound poetry, compositions for voice and wine glass, cabaret and satire.

In Material Mouth, music, poetry (in its least semantic form) and theatre collide in the female body. As much as anything, this work is a very conscious performance of femininities, a subtly devastating parody of how the politeness of the feminine is laid, like a constricting costume, over the impolitic female body. The gap between the proper and the improper emerges as a disturbance, in expressions of hysterical extremity clothed in a parade of apology, which assault the audience with a discomfort that is very close to embarrassment. The response, certainly on the night I saw it, is a lot of laughter.



This is not to say that Connors isn't funny; she is often very funny indeed. But there was an interestingly nervous edge to the laughter of the audience; Material Mouth was as clear a demonstration of the mechanism of laughter as a release for anxiety as any I have seen.

Carolyn Connors has been called one of the "most experimental mouths" in Australia. A composer, keyboardist and vocalist, she has collaborated with the sound poets Amanda Stewart and Chris Mann, and most recently she was the "Psychokinetic Pianist" in Gotharama with Moira Finacune, star of the "new burlesque". Here she is directed by Margaret Cameron, one of the most innovative and distinctive theatrical talents in Australia.

Material Mouth begins by gently satirising La Mama itself: as every regular habitue knows, most performances begin with the sound of footsteps creaking down the stairs. This is a sound we are supposed to politely edit out, as we edit out the bottles crashing into the recycler from the restaurant next door. In Connors' show, it suddenly becomes foregrounded: we hear her coming down the stairs and wait for the lights to come up and the show to start. But the lights don't come up: the footsteps go up the stairs again. And then down. Then they seem to be going around in nervous circles. Or maybe she's going upstairs again? We are not sure... There's a bit more fussing about and then, finally, the lights come up on a silent woman smiling at us anxiously. She spends more time than is comfortable standing still, looking at her leisure at each of us, her smile flickering with a kind of incandescent apology across her face, as if she has discovered herself here by accident.

In the liminal space before the performance, when everything is possible, this pause is an uncomfortable questioning of the presence, not only of the performer, but of the audience. What, she seems to be asking, a little quizzically, are we doing here? What will we do now? Only the most confident of performers can pull off enacting this kind of uncertainty; it can easily collapse into real embarrassment. Connors deliberately walks this tightrope throughout the performance, always on the edge of catastrophe, with never a false step.

Finally, as if she remembers something, she crosses to a tightly lit area of the wall and slowly, with a hieratically stylised movement, puts on an absurd velvet hat that obscures the entire upper part of her face. As in Beckett's play Not I, everything is focused on her mouth. She turns, so we see her in dramatic profile, looking like a cross between a priestess and a model on a Parisian catwalk. We wait, breathlessly, for Connors to speak...

With an almost melodramatic gesture, Connors sticks her finger in her mouth. Then she starts talking. It has all the expressivity and volubility of language, without a trace of semantic sense. Then she stops, takes her finger out of her mouth, pauses, turns her other profile, and puts her thumb in her mouth, and speaks again, this time in a lower voice. She performs a dialogue between the two profiles, which is at once comically infantile - it's exactly the sort of thing children do for fun, to make silly noises - and yet, in its vocal variations, disturbingly close to real speech.

This is pure sound poetry, removing all trace of semantic recognition from spoken language and exposing its subterranean physicality and sonic values. I found it interesting at this point how much I was longing for actual words to emerge from the vocalisations (a longing related to the difficulties I have, as a word-centred person, in describing adequately my experience of the show). But, as with all aspects of this work, Connors is not in the business of satisfying expectations; she forces the audience's attention to focus on the mouth and the noises it is making, on the embarrassing, recalcitrant presence of the performer herself.

This introduces a series of "acts" separated by blackouts, which are orchestrated to gradually expand Connors' musical and theatrical vocabulary. She mimes playing a piano, voicing the notes, pushing them to harshly discordant, assaultive extremes before bringing them back (apologetically, as if it had somehow got away from her) to something like melody. In a particularly beautiful moment, Connors sits like a medium before a draped table covered with wine glasses, places pieces of tin foil on top of them, and begins to sing. The tinfoil vibrates and splits her voice, so it seems as if there is more than one person singing; and then the foils slowly begin to rotate, like miniature ballet dancers, turned by the answering vibrations of the glasses.

In another act, three tiny music boxes are spotlit by the window; one by one, Connors flips them open. They are all playing Für Elise. To the accompaniment of this melodic tinkling, Connors wriggles into two huge tulle petticoats, flashing that brittle smile as she becomes entangled and clumsily sticks out her arms in a grotesque attempt free herself.

Because the eye and ear have adjusted to the minimalism of the performance so far, it is a shock when Connors puts on an accordion and belts out a number. It's almost like a pay-off, the performer finally relenting and delivering some entertainment; except that it has a sting in the tail, the delivery of such satisfaction itself a mockery of expectation. It's a parody, at once fragile, joyous and satirical, of the romantic feminine, and is followed almost immediately by a hilariously grotesque vision of a vagina dentata.

The lights come up to a disconcerting vision of a face, upside-down and seemingly between Connors' legs, lit from beneath by a tiny hand-held strobe light. This time the "other mouth" speaks (the only time words are spoken, rather than sung, in the entire show), a fragmentary dialogue with, one assumes, a lover. "Unlike you," it says, "I have twooo mouths." It finishes, impatiently, "Ok, I'll be the man." Predatory and sardonic, impropriety incarnate, this mouth does not apologise for itself; it takes what it wants.

There follow more songs, this time accompanied by a ukelele: a divertissement on the Australian women's swimming team ("What we want is LIFT!"), sung while she stands in a pan of water dressed in a bathing suit covered in obscenely drooping balloons, and another played in a costume that is really a brown paper bag. The paper, of course, crackles embarrassingly. The surprisingly lush design is full of intriguingly ambiguous promptings of the "proper": a music stand with music by Bach, empty earphones dangling from its side; yellowed sheet music pasted across a window.

Connors finishes by again meeting the eyes of her audience, smiling that smile, which remains as enigmatic as it was at the beginning. Is it apology, or mockery? Challenge or welcome? Benediction? All of these? The relationships in this intimate space between the proper and improper have imperceptibly, wickedly, been disrupted until it is impossible to tell which is which. And what are the implications of these disruptions? At once, I suspect, mundane and profound: again, I think of Beckett, of the pitiless compassion which exposes the fragility of human gesture, observing it without the comfort of consolatory moralising. And also of the perverse lightness of being which follows this observing.

Material Mouth is one of those deeply satisfying works which leave you ruminating for hours afterwards. A word for the lighting and design, which are beautifully precise and subtle, a hard ask in a space as small as La Mama. And also for Margaret Cameron's assured direction.

If you can manage it, I recommend catching Margaret Cameron's one-woman show Proscenium, also part of the Fringe, which I saw in July (review here); on some nights the timing allows you to see Material Mouth and run to the Malthouse for Cameron's piece afterwards. It would make a remarkably complementary evening of works by two of Australia's most interesting performance artists.

Picture: Carolyn Connors

La Mama Theatre
The Proscenium

Torque: Liquid Paper 1: Making Light of Gravity by Hellen Sky and The Proscenium by Margaret Cameron. Three performance "showing" @ the Malthouse Theatre.

One of the definitions of torque is "the moment of a system of forces producing rotation". It's easy to see why Hellen Sky and Margaret Cameron chose Torque to title this double bill: Liquid Paper 1: Making Light of Gravity and The Proscenium stand in dynamic relation to each other, circling around common concerns and creating a deeply interesting theatrical conversation between two extremely accomplished and very different solo performers.

Hellen Sky's background is mainly in dance and new media; she is artistic director of Dancehouse, and the co-director of Company in Space, whose work focuses on the intersections between technology and art. Margaret Cameron is a performer/writer, whose profoundly poetic work has for years been stubbornly challenging conventional theatre practice in Melbourne. Seeing their two solo pieces in tandem was fascinating. Both are challenging works of considerable beauty, and both, in different but deeply related ways, interrogate notions of the self and the body.

Liquid Paper 1: Making Light of Gravity is an elegant and multidimensional work which synthesises a number of approaches to theatre. Hellen Sky uses performance, text and new media image-making to create a densely poetic work on the mediated, technological body.

For me, new media works in the theatre when it sets up a tension between the living, immediate performer and the mediated image. Liquid Paper not only sets up this tension: it's about it.

Three sides of the stage are hung with long rolls of paper, on which are projected animated images: elemental images of flames and water, words which break up into their constituent letters, disconcerting close-ups of a woman's body. Hellen Sky moves between and within the projections: sometimes she dances, sometimes she sits at a desk reading from a computer screen, pushing it around the space. A monitor forestage captures her live movements on a screen.

Her stage presence flickers from complete anonymity, silhouetted against the febrile projected images, to a particular, if nameless, individual. This performance interrogates an idea of the body which attacks the notion of the individual self. It shifts between differing angles and states of perception, oscillating between expressing the body as conscious subject and describing it as technological object. The tension in this work is partly between ideas of the body and this body; that is, an Aristotlean tension between the universal, which can be described, and the particular, which no term can wholly capture and which, therefore, becomes the province of the poetic.

In a text which is a collage of quotation, poetic epiphany, snatches of anecdote and ironic observation, Sky draws connections between the social /political body, computer technology, media networks and cellular processes like the neural networks of the brain. The boundary between one self and another is skin, but skin is by no means a certain border: it is permeable, fluid, a layer of "liquid paper".

The connection between different systems - social, biological, technological - is code: the codes of spoken language, DNA, computers, social encounters; all the subliminal systems that shape meaning, place and identity. With code, as with language, the question is whether we define it, or if it defines us. Sky's answer is by no means definitive: she opens with a sinister example, the Bush Government's colour-coded "Homeland security defence system", which controls power by manipulating social fear. "Green - 'low'; blue -'guarded'; yellow - 'high'; orange - 'elevated'; red - 'severe'...."Safe," Sky notes, "doesn't even merit a hue. Safe, it would seem, has fallen off the spectrum of perception."

That is, of course, if "safe" ever existed as anything more than a comforting illusion. Sky explores a reality in which nothing is safe or certain, in which the self threatens to disappear entirely in a haze of pixels, to "fall like Alice down that virtual hole". But rather than vanishing, the self adapts and transforms. "The body is a conduit … making meaning…making new bodies and senses of the languages of media, codes and scripts codes of inscription... The key to my code is in my skin, is in my blood, and is in my brain," says Sky. This recalls cruder ideas that remain, despite the vertigo of virtuality, as tangible and intransigent as her dancing body is in the space before us.

The text is pre-recorded, and shifts between clarity and distortion. The distorted sound makes the language work as if it were a score, with phrasal repetitions acting like musical motifs. The audience listens, half hears, misinterprets, then collides with a shock against a clear passage, an intimate anecdote or a repeated poetic line. The effect is grating, disconcerting, alienating and intriguing: like some contemporary poetries, it asks you to focus on the sonic qualities of words, their rhythms and sounds, as much as on their meanings.

Margaret Cameron, in startling contrast, is an actor standing barefoot on a stage, mediated by nothing except the masks of her words and performance, which reveal as much as they conceal. For Cameron, the mind itself is the theatre, and thinking is a kind of performance. The stage is a space of dream, a threshold where anything might be possible, "the scene of thought, the proscenium".

The Proscenium is subtitled "A childhood speaking against the drying wind", and the text constantly returns to some very specific childhood memories: the vivid image of her father being hosed through a window, making it "rain inside", which becomes for Cameron a primary metaphor of possibility in the theatre; and a memory of standing at a doorway, a threshold, on the other side of which stands her unhappy mother. The threshold is also a central image: the doorway where an artist hesitates, neither in one place nor the other.

"Our work," says Cameron, "enunciates thought / becoming shape". The Proscenium doesn't seek to express a finished thought, but rather to catch it on the wing, in the moments where thinking is still not quite articulate, when it is indistinguishable from physical embodiment or dream. It's an ambitious and fascinating undertaking, and suggests a profound idea of the theatre.

This performance dramatises a return to the very genesis of creation, its a priori. Where Sky uses code as a primary metaphor, Cameron speaks of the dream image "embedded within the ancient erotic curve / of the imaginary of the symbolic of that / which forms us". Which could equally be an image of DNA, as much as a description of dream.

Cameron's only prop is a large stone, which she stands on, plays with, or lays on her belly in a series of fluidly linked scenes that are differentiated by David Franske's evocative lighting states and soundscapes. The stone's obdurate materiality becomes the outward embodiment of primordial imaginative form, the expression of a freedom which is the return to "a bare child of imaginings / prancing barefoot / with a stone".

An avowed ambition of this piece is to embody ambiguity, a state when form is still shaping itself and has not solidified into singular meaning: and here Cameron resorts to the language of paradox. It is in this language that it's possible for a stone to symbolise a liminal state of becoming, to be at once a literal outline of form and an allusive and elusive symbol. She speaks of a "return" to an interior landscape of memory and desire, a movement which folds back against itself in a spiralling motion or which she describes elsewhere as a "vertical descent". "I must advance to return," says Cameron; but clearly also she must return to advance. This double movement is, as is Cameron's project to physicalise thinking, essentially erotic: a motion of fluid exchange between substance and the insubstantial, the literal and the metaphoric, act and thought.

Like all Cameron's solo pieces,The Proscenium is a strikingly personal work, an impression reinforced by the astounding mix of vulnerability and forceful presence that Cameron achieves in her performance. But it is a mistake to think of Cameron's work as merely personal and impertinent to assume it is autobiography; its authenticity stems from other qualities. Cameron's concern with aesthetic as a process pushes her work past the personal into something like the anonymity of poetry. Memory is not locked into a nostalgic past: it insists itself actively into the making of the present, the atemporal space Cameron creates so compellingly on the stage.

It's the latest and perhaps the most lyric of Cameron's ongoing explorations of the "solo female performer". Its contrasts with Liquid Paper are as interesting as its cross references, and seeing both together was an experience which resonated well beyond their performance. No doubt these works will return to Melbourne, though perhaps not as a double bill. They are each well worth the attention they demand.

Company in Space
Knowledge and Melancholy by Margaret Cameron