Right now, just after the winter solstice, Ms TN is struggling. The skies have been grey for too long, the news has been bleak for too long, and human beings have been stupid and destructive for too long. Nary a light gleams at the end of the tunnel, and actually doing things - like, say, getting out of bed - seems impossible and futile. Yes, I know despair is a sin - I suspect I am on my way to discovering why - but the fear of God's wrath is little use to an atheist.

Midwinter funk is an all-too-common disease. But I can recommend a very effective temporary medicine - a visit to the latest incarnation of The Burlesque Hour at Fortyfive Downstairs. The theatre is transformed by a cloud of red Chinese lanterns into a cosily tatty club that might have existed in the Weimar Republic, with nests of be-candled tables and a catwalk up the middle of the space. You can hear the buzz of conversation ascending as you walk down the stairs, and already the sad heart lifteth. The Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne is a tonic for the soul: sexy, hilarious, perverse, disturbing and liberatingly beautiful.


Contemporary burlesque curated by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, it's an exhilarating meld of cabaret, circus, vaudeville and performance art that moves spankingly through its many moods. It's a very Australian show, and has everything I love about this culture - fearlessness, subversion, wit, mischief and intelligence. And it has a starry list of weekly guests: so far they've included Rhonda Burchmore and Pamela Rabe, and coming attractions include Phillip Adams (he of Balletlab) with an especially commissioned dance; Meow Meow, direct from the West End; Constantina Bush and the Bushettes and Die Roten Punkte.

Finucane and Smith fans will have seen a few of these acts already: this is a kind of "new and selected" anthology of burlesque hits, with spangles, feathers, balloons and plenty of spillage (umbrellas are provided). But I can confirm that they are even better on a return visit. There's Romeo, the leather-jacketed macho boy stripping to Chrissy Amphlett's I Touch Myself, and the Queen of Hearts, with her cloud of red balloons and her nests of nipple-needles. There's Finucane's repressed pie woman, trembling with orgasmic excitement as she stirs her finger into a meat pie to AC/DC, and spilling tomato sauce and pie innards all over her neatly buttoned uniform.

Vaudeville acts by Holly Durant, Harriet Ritchie and Sosina Wogayehu include juggling, a whip cracking display and dance, including a dervish dance of two outrageously hairy women, an extension of an idea first performed for the burlesque by butoh dancer Yumi Umiumare. Their somehow innocent perversity recalls something of Maenads or forest spirits out of a Miyazake film. And they encapsulate the polymorhous nature of this show, which is at once serious and outrageously hilarious, surface and depth, spectacle and intimacy. Many acts invert expectations, such as the incomparable Maude Davey, stark naked aside from heels and rhinestone necklace, turning the sexual mystery of the vamp torch singer inside out by exposing everything, which somehow got funnier as the act went on.

There's a dark subtext to this show. A woman in a fur coat and sunglasses enters through the audience to Anthony and the Johnson's heartbreaking ballad Hope There's Someone, and appears to collapse; she makes her trembling way to the back of the stage, and is then hoisted up naked, like a carcass in an abattoir, leaving us momentarily and starkly silent. Or an avatar of death parades slowly down the catwalk, draped in black fabric through which she languorously smokes a cigarette, before popping a balloon that leaks sticky strips of black tar all over her naked body.

Finucane's bizzare erotic monologue to the National Gallery's water wall is a highlight. I can't think of another performer who is able to reach simultaneously such heights of comedy and erotic extremity. Unless, of course, it's Pamela Rabe. The guest artist for this week, she appeared as a statuesque goddess in a full-length black rubber dress with buttons all down the front, and performed an extraordinary monologue. It was a collage of quotations from Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening and excerpts from an ancient Sumerian poem about the Queen of Heaven, the goddess Inanna. I shall not forget (and neither, I suspect, will the two men from the audience with whom she exited stage left) Rabe declaiming: "Who will plough my vulva!" It was breath taking, beautiful, terrifying and absurd, all at the same time.

But maybe I laughed most at Maude Davey's astounding performance of The Angels' classic hit, Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again. Davey is in heels, nipple stars, ridiculous orange ostrich feathers, spangles and not much else. I'm old enough to remember seeing an angel-faced Doc Neeson belt this one out in some sticky-carpeted pub, and I can tell you that Davey gives him a run for his money in the rock-star charisma stakes. But she is much, much funnier.

This show is all about being human: human desire and human fear and human beauty and human laughter. It's a reminder of all those complexities that get edited out of mass culture. As with poetry, these things won't make the news, but people "die every day for the lack of what is found there". I can't think of a better antidote to the midwinter blues.

Picture: Queen of Hearts Moira Finucane in The Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne

The Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne, created and directed by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith. With Moira Finucane, Maude Davey, Holly Durant, Harriet Ritchie, Sosina Wogayehu & Miss Pamela Rabe. Fortyfive Downstairs until August 14.

Ms TN is still standing: but I was grateful for a couple of nights home early this week. I'm not complaining - don't get me wrong - but I'm not really built for mass cultural consumption: I can only absorb so much and write so many hundreds of words before the cerebellum begins to feel like sticky porridge. I'm a one-on-one, contemplative kind of gal. Still, I love festival time.


After the first week, I'm getting a feel of MIAF 2010, my first experience of Brett Sheehy's festival direction. It's difficult not to look nostalgically back to Kristy Edmunds's four years, which really put some electricity into this city: so far I'm having a pleasant but not a delirious festival experience. Most of all, I'm missing the palpable sense of furious conversation, of excited debate and stimulating difference. It feels decentred: perhaps because we lack the democratically open-to-everyone artist's bar, which provided a conversational hub and meeting place that didn't cost an arm and a leg. And also, maybe, the Spiegeltent, which seemed like an instant tradition (although tent fans will be glad to know that it's coming back in February). As for my Fab Tally: half way through, it's working at around 50 per cent. I'm hoping that percentage will lift by the end of the week.

Before I move on to brief discussions on the last of the shows I saw in last week's avalanche, a couple of diary notes. I saw Jack Charles V. The Crown on Tuesday night, and will report further on this next week, after the Australian publishes my review: suffice to say, it is a crowd-pleaser. Tonight is the premiere of Daniel Keene's Life Without Me at the MTC, which I will be attending as Mrs Keene, relieved (and how nice that is) of the responsibility to write anything. Tomorrow I'm off to see The Beckett Trilogy, and Saturday it's dance again with Adapting for Distortion and Haptic. And then we whirl into Week Number Three.

But back to some final notes on Week #1. One of my festival highlights is the wild and wicked Carnival of Mysteries at Fortyfive Downstairs. It's the most extravagant so far of Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith's explorations of burlesque, which are providing increasingly immersive experiences that they call "intimate spectacle". I last saw them taking over La Mama with the sensory overload of their Triple Bill of Wild Delight: and what a blast that was. Those who saw that show will have an approximate idea of what to expect in Carnival of Mysteries: extravagantly staged passion, perverse and liberating sensual delight, sly comedy, nudity, and excess, excess and more excess. And dancing.

That's what happens at Fortyfive Downstairs, only more so. When you arrive, you are given $30,000 in carnival money and a program, and then you are simply taken down stairs and let loose in the space. It's set up as as a fairground, with miscellaneous tents painted in circus colours and sumptuously undressed performers spruiking their shows. There's a central area with a bar and cabaret tables, where you can take some time out with a wicked cocktail and play noughts and crosses; otherwise, you pays your money and you takes your chances. It's a show where you make your own narrative, so everyone's experience will be different.

I heard there were altogether about 30 acts. We saw around ten, I guess, in the almost two hours we spent there. They ranged from the Garcon Gigolo (the incomparable Brian Lucas), who got nude and personal, to Carolyn Connors's performance of Erik Satie in the Shrine, to Moira Finucane's idiosyncratic portrayal of a Librarian (needless to say, not like any Librarian I've ever seen, although it's a welcome reminder of the perverse eroticism of literary endeavour). Every now and then the crowd would gather in the general area for a "free" act: Finucane again in huge metallic wings, declaiming that "revenge is a dish best eaten... frequently", or Azaria Universe shoving fairyfloss in her bra, and eating it, or a jaw-dropping performance of Billie Holiday songs by the wondrous Lois Olney, in which "everyone and I stopped breathing".

It's basically a glorious party. Funny, beautiful, unexpectedly touching and enormously enjoyable. Go with someone you love.


Carnival of Mysteries held all the perilous desire that was lacking in come, been and gone, the Michael Clark Company's opening night offering at the State Theatre. The evening begins with Swamp, a 20-year-old piece to music by Bruce Gilbert & Wire that was recently revived by the Rambert Dance Company. The costumes have a comic book feel - blue skintight lycra, with black eye masks - that is accentuated by the simple lighting, a bar of light slowly moving across the back of the stage.

In its angular purity, Swamp recalls the classical lines of Merce Cunningham; indeed, for much of the dance, I was contemplating the chilly discipline of the dancers and wondering if that - compelling in itself - was truly enough. Yet towards the end of the dance, the slow steely spring of the choreography suddenly lets go in an exhilarating finale, a sudden and surprising release of energy that generates a rush of feeling. Although the choreography feels dated, it was so exactly and confidently itself that this ended up being my favourite piece of the night.

After that, it was all downhill for me. There followed a series of dances set to music by The Velvet Underground, the most successful of which was probably Venus in Furs, which gave us some startling stage imagery - a dancer crouched midair, totally still, suspended by wires that drew him across the stage, Venus herself exposed as her furs fly up into the air. Heroin featured probably the naffest costume of the night, a skin-coloured body suit out of which were sticking a couple of dozen syringes (wtf?) And speaking of naff, there was a half-hearted 10-second flash of projected Pop Art (big bright fonts screaming ANAL! BANAL!) which hardly seemed worth the effort.

The third part of the evening, come and come again, was mainly choreographed to David Bowie: and here it became clear that rock and roll just doesn't do en point. I preferred by far the Kraftwerk piece, Hall of Mirrors, for here the music has sufficient abstraction to support the dance without it looking fey. For the most part, the Bowie choreography seemed all about taking the sex out of rock and roll: lots of surface style and bright cossies, and a serious lack of grunt.

Dancers running onto stage on tippy toes just got more and more absurd the rockier the music became: glam rock might be camp, but that doesn't mean it's prissy. The most puzzling - because the most exposing - decision of the night was to project the video clip of Bowie singing Heroes hugely behind the dancers. It reminded me that as a 15 year old fangirl, I was absolutely correct: Bowie was a god. It was impossible to watch anything except him, let alone take any notice of the dancers. Who were, it must be said, absolutely superb in their precision and discipline: but by the end of the night, I had answered my own question. It really isn't enough.


A little virtuosity never goes astray, however, as Thomas Adès demonstrated in his concert with the Calder Quartet at the Melbourne Recital Centre. The beautifully balanced program was an excellent introduction to this composer, who was unfamiliar to me. It presented a range of work, opening with the lushly romantic strings of Arcadiana, played by the quartet, and then continuing to two piano solos played by Adès - Darkness Visible, an intricate and delicately felt work written when he was a student, and Three Mazurkas, composed last year. Both skin tingling performances.

Adès's work was contextualised by three piano works by Stravinsky, including the bizarrely fun Piano-Rag-Music which is, as Adès said, "cubist rag", and the highly technical Three Canons for URSULA by the American composer Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who mainly wrote for pianolas, and which maybe appeals more to those musically literate people who can follow the argument of the music, which - despite Adès's lucid introductions to each work - I could not. For the finale, the quartet returned and performed with Adès, playing his exhilarating Piano Quintet.

Adès is a riveting, even charismatic performer: it is as if, from the moment he begins to play, his entire being, body, mind and soul, is possessed by the music. You can't stop looking at his continuously expressive hands. He is also a particularly charming host. Given that I am hardly deeply literate in music, an enthusiastic rather than an informed listener, I wish that every concert I went to could be introduced with the diffident and courteous friendliness with which he explained the formal principles behind the works he played. A wholly enjoyable evening.

Pictures: Top: Carnival of Mysteries crew. Photo: Jodie Hutchinson. Middle: Come, been and gone. Photo: Clair Thomas. Bottom: Thomas Adès. Photo: Maurice Foxall

Carnival of Mysteries, created and directed by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith. Designed by The Sisters Hayes, costume design by Doyle Barrow, sound design by Adam Hunt, lighting design by Lin Tobias. With various artists. Fortyfive Downstairs until October 30.

come, been and gone, choreographed by Michael Clark. Compsers: David Bowie, Brian Eno, Bruce Gilbert & Wire, Kraftwerk, Lour Reed. Lighting design by Charles Atlas, costumes by Stevie Stewart, Richard Torry and Michael Clark. Danced by Harry Alexander, Kate Coyne, Melissa Hetherington, Brooke Smiley, Benjamin Warbis and Simon Williams. State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. Closed.

Thomas Adès & Calder Quartet. Piano, Thomas Adès; violin Andrew Bulbrook and Benjamin Jacobson; viola Jonathnan Maerschel and cello Eric Byers. Melbourne Recital Centre, October 11.

The oft-asserted wisdom behind the categories "Fringe" and "Mainstream" runs something like this: the mainstream is mainstream because it is more fun, while the fringe is the fringe because it's so unremittingly serious its arty eyebrows disappear up its own fundament.

As those who read Ms TN with attention will know, she is a mortal enemy to these categories. Because one needs some kind of general handle, I prefer the slightly less unsatisfactory "main stage" and "independent" for distinguishing between companies with large institutional structures and those running on rags and hope, and I certainly never use them as aesthetic predictors or descriptors. Otherwise you fall into absurdities, such as Peter Craven's and Robin Usher's claims a few years ago that artists such as Jérôme Bel or Romeo Castellucci - who have played some of the largest venues in Europe - are "anti-mainstream". Whatever that means.

Anyway, the point is that fun occurs, or doesn't occur, across the entire spectrum of theatre. (Actually, "fun" is a depressing word, which for me evokes the spectre of cocktails with suggestive names in bleakly desperate nightclubs, or The Footy Show, or a certain scoutmaster I once encountered who had an extraordinary talent for killing any kind of social enjoyment by shouting: "Now everybody listen! We're all supposed to be having fun here! Will the mums stop chatting and line up so we can wrap them in toilet paper, ok? We're all having fun! Ok?")

There's "pleasure". Or "delight". Spontaneous joy. Whatever. It's a lightness of being that rises involuntarily and lifts us momentarily out of time on a gust of laughter. Like happiness, it can't be commanded - which is why that scoutmaster got it so wrong, and why it's so sheerly embarrassing to watch a bad comedian. In such moments of delight, we forget the weight of ourselves. We become bigger than we are, and more innocent; we might gasp at comic savagery, but our souls are never shrivelled by its calling to our meaner selves. So while the Sam Newmans of this world might claim they're "just having a bit of fun" by saying black people are just like monkeys, they never inspire delight. Sam's just saying he's the biggest boot on the block, and his obsequious followers snigger in the bully's shadow.

True delight is liberation rather than such enslavement. For instance, on Friday I spent five hours at La Mama, at Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith's Triple Bill of Wild Delight! (It comes with an exclamation mark). On a balmy autumn evening, the moon swinging high over our heads, it was hard to think of anywhere better to be. We arrived to find La Mama's courtyard decked out as a cantina, with coloured lights and candle-lit tables, serving pre-show sangria and barbecued corn cobs and chorizos, before being ushered into Finucane's one-woman storytelling fantasia, The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina. Argentina Gina Catalina is - well, what is she? Her footsteps melt the pavement where she walks; her deadly gaze can freeze the hearts of two thousand pirates; she's the daughter of wolves and whales and a priestess who can make a cascade of oranges fall out of the sun. She is the embodiment of excess and desire, and she carries the tropes of magical realism beyond parody, into sheer hilarious poetry.

Finucane's performance is as over-the-top as her gorgeous costumes; she ignites a spectacle of desire that somehow, for all its excess, unwaveringly maintains its own reality. Duende, maybe? The sensuality of the language takes cliche and sets it on fire; even as our credulity is mischievously mocked by more and more outrageously absurd stories, we believe in Argentina Gina Catalina. In between each narrative, we're fed and watered with various delicious titbits: olives, bread, Spanish cured meats, mussels steamed in boullibaise, chocolate cake, ice cream and tequila (the food is provided by KT Prescott).

After a half hour's break in the Pleasure Garden, there's contemporary circus with Azaria Universe, Jesse Love and Derek Ives in Tooth & Nail: a show with trapeze and aerial acts (astounding in La Mama - who would have thought it?) in which the traditional circus tropes - especially the sexy showgirl - are undermined, mocked and also brilliantly realised. We still, after all, want to see deeds of derring do, even if the co-stars are bickering and putting razor-blades in each other's toffee apples. The final act, in which the naked performers stand before us wearing huge cartoon animal heads, is so blazingly strange that it knocks the performance into some other dimension. Perverse, disturbing and oddly beautiful.

And after that comes Salon de Dance DELUGE, hosted by Maude Davey, which features an all-star cast of performers mainly drawn from Melbourne's rich dance scene. It features 19 acts, performed inside and outside La Mama; they range from the absurd (two identical Frauleins with blond pigtails performing a bawdy version of the lederhosen slapping dance, or Moira Finucane, dressed as a prim waitress, orgasmically eating a meat pie to AC/DC's TNT) to the beautiful (Brian Lucas, performing a dance of yearning as he rises operatically from a sea of red fabric) to the macabre (Yumi Umiumare's weeping, faceless woman dancing in a dark forest, or Finacune's later adventures with a sauce bottle, as excruciating a performance of sexual loneliness as anything I've seen). Or there's Christopher Green's recital of Molly Bloom, as you've never heard it before, which gives us, as he points out, some "proper acting". As, indeed, it does.

Everything is directed with unobtrusive slickness: food is served, theatres re-dressed, costumes changed, tomato sauce mopped, with never a glitch in the action. Stage manager Cath Carmody must be working harder than anyone else in Melbourne. She and her staff of enablers, plus the first-class performers, add up to a show that reminds us why life is worth living. It's wit, poetry, hilarity, nonsense, pleasure, beauty, all rolled into a gloriously subversive, wickedly sexy evening that nourishes both soul and body. You can book each show separately, but I recommend seeing the lot if you possibly can. Long live Finucane and Smith, I say.

The night before, your fearless correspondent was pursuing pleasure at the Collingwood Underground Carpark. Plunging like a dark mouth beneath the tower blocks of Collingwood, it seems at first glance an unlikely venue for seekers of delight: but enter past the forbidding portal, and you are in another world, possibly Berlin circa 1984, where gorgeous denizens of the underworld gather around an incongruously cosy bar, as music blares at a decibel level beyond the range of the human ear.

The occasion here was Sisters Grimm's production of Little Mercy. At the proper time - or, to be more accurate, a little after the proper time - audience members were led along a path in the darkness marked out, like an airport landing strip, by rows of candles, to a surprisingly intimate theatre scratched together somewhere in the bowels of the carpark.

Little Mercy is an absurdity devised by Declan Greene and Ash Flanders, a fond pisstake of that staple of Hollywood horror movies, the demon child. Roger Summers (Sean-James Murphy) and his wife Virginia (Ash Flanders) are the successful power couple: he is a celebrated musical director, his wife a successful glamour alcoholic. There is only one grief in their life: they have no child. As the play opens, they are rushing off to the premiere of Annie when Virginia (searching for her earrings) discovers a letter from an orphanage mysteriously left beneath a couch. Just as she reads the contents, lightning flashes, thunder rolls and the child itself, Mercy (Susie Dee, in frilly dress and pigtails) appears at their front door.

A carnivorous cuckoo, Mercy settles into the house and begins her murderous career by killing the adored but ancient cat (a stuffed toy which scuttles in and out of the stage on a skateboard) and blinding her tutor (Cara Mitchell) by substituting sulphuric acid for her eye drops. The one difference from the Hollywood version is that, instead of being sent back to the Abyss from whence she came, Mercy wins the day.

It's acted with the appropriate po-faced melodramatic passion by its cast, with some ingenious stage tricks and multi-media. In some ways, it recalls The Thirty Nine Steps, which the MTC produced in 2008: it has the same light hearted delight in meta-theatrical camp, the same low-tech pleasures. And the production and performances are high quality, with Ash Flanders as the soft-hearted innocent Virginia stealing the night, so by the end I wholly believed his performance. Nonsense, yes, but irresistibly funny nonsense, delivered with brio and flair.

Finucane & Smith's Triple Bill of Wild Delight: The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina, Salon de Dance DELUGE and Tooth & Nail. Devised by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, with numerous collaborators. La Mama Theatre, until March 28. Check the La Mama website for details of performance times.

Little Mercy, by Ash Flanders and Declan Greene, directed by Declan Greene. Costume design by Alice Swing, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, print media design by Andrew Downer. With Ash Flanders, Cara Mitchell, Sean-James Murphy and Susie Dee. Sisters Grimm @ Collingwood Underground Carpark, 48 Harmsworth St, Collingwood, until March 27. Bookings: Sisters Grimm.