Ms TN is not normally in the business of doling out writing tips, of which there is a sufficient plenitude online: but here's one. If ever you want to get some work done, book yourself into a hotel in a strange city for a week. The lack of procrastinatory devices such as washing dishes, polishing the bathroom taps, answering the telephone or castigating children has a startling effect. Everyone says that the internet is the problem, but I find that the internet runs out fast when there is nothing else to leaven it with.

Aside from seeing theatre, since I arrived in Perth last weekend I've done almost nothing but write, as I have a couple of pressing deadlines which I brought across the continent with me. This meant that yesterday - which was scheduled for writing reviews - I hit that mysterious but frustrating wall which forbids the construction of a single thought, let alone a paragraph. On such days it is best to bow to the gods, and hope for better things. Meanwhile, the shows are piling up. So before I discuss my midweek adventures, let me highly recommend Trust, a collaboration between playwright/director Falk Richter and choreographer Anouk van Dijk from the Schaubühne Berlin that opened last night. It's a must-see for anyone interested in the possibilities of dance theatre.


On Tuesday night I saw David Milroy's music theatre work Waltzing the Wilarra, which is given a luscious production by Wesley Enoch for Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company. Drawing on Australian traditions of cabaret and vaudeville, it's a swift-moving evening of knockabout melodrama with a political message. Its easy slippages from highly poetic language to vulgar comedy and its heightened theatricality recalls no one so much as the Wheatbelt poet and playwright Dorothy Hewett (whose play The Man from Mukinupin Enoch directed in a superb 2009 revival for Belvoir St and the MTC).

The play opens and closes with a scene of stunning theatrical lyricism - Old Charlie (Trevor Jamieson), softly lit in the darkness, recalls a transcendent moment of initiation during his boyhood. He walks into a pool until he is up to his chest in water on a night that "was so still, the stars floated on the water...I couldn't tell where the night sky ended and the pool began". This moment of union and innocence sets the keynote for a possibility that is lost and betrayed in the action of the play.

The chief theme here is reconciliation: whether it's possible and, more searchingly, what it might be. The action is set in a post-war dance club in Perth run by black MC Mr Mack (Kelton Pell) where white and black can socialise, despite repressive laws that ban Aborigines from entering Perth and threaten immediate arrest if they are found drinking alcohol. What's important in this play is that there are intricate (if troubled) familial relationships between all the characters, white and black.

The local star is the singer Elsa (Ursula Yovich). She is married to a white ex-soldier, Jack (Tim Solly), who is suffering a severe form of what is now called PTSD. It has transformed him into a sick and violent man, who in his clearer moments knows that he will eventually kill his wife. Elsa is a stolen child, brought up in a mission; her mother, Mrs Cray (Irma Woods) is "nanny" to the white girl Fay (Alexandra Jones), whom Elsa resentfully feels has taken her place in her mother's heart, while Mrs Cray is the Australian equivalent of a household slave. Jack's adopted brother is Charlie (Trevor Jamieson), who is also in love with Elsa, while Fay has a consuming, hopeless and predatory crush on Charlie. The ensuing melodrama of jealous passion is played out in song and scenes of naturalistic drama, all of which is framed with vaudevillean patter from Old Toss (Ernie Dingo) and his offsider Young Harry (Jessica Clarke).

In the second act, the action is brought forward to a degraded present, with the former dance hall now condemned. Here the well-meaning activist Athena (Jessica Clarke) organises a reunion of the estranged group, prompting unquiet ghosts to rise out of the past. This is much weaker than the first act: with the removal of Jack, we are left with white characters who are little more than wooden stereotypes, parodies of white attitudes towards blacks. One might argue some payback in this for centuries of offensive black caricatures, but the fact remains that, just as with black stereotypes, it doesn't help the drama: what is there to reconcile when the white characters are so one-dimensionally stupid?

This highlights a major problem with the text, which otherwise is rich with both wit and feeling (especially in the fantastically punning speeches that Dingo as Old Toss delivers with such superb showmanship). When the script drifts into didacticism its energy flags, and this happens frequently in the second act: there are moments when you quite literally see actors step out of character and become declarative mouth-pieces. It's a shame, because this is otherwise powerful theatre, and Milroy's songs, which range from classic blues to growling contemporary Nick-Cave-esque ballads, are showstopping examples of the art.

Enoch gives the play a seamlessly slick production, capitalising on its vaudevillean energy and Jacob Nash's cosily intimate design, and it's performed with energy and commitment by a first class cast. It seems unfair to pick out particular performances, because each cast member has his or her moment, but Yovich's Elsa is a winner, both as singer and performer, her power and allure riven by vulnerability and bitterness, and Tim Solly as Jack has a couple of devastating solo moments in a difficult part that often threatens to dwindle into cliche. Dingo is in his element as jester, and has many of the best lines: and it's in these moments that Milroy's satirical message finds its real teeth.


My Bicycle Loves You is another Australian production, this time from physical theatre company Legs On The Wall, which was recently revamped under the direction of Patrick Nolan. To my shame, this is the first Legs On The Wall production I've seen; but it is a good introduction. My Bicycle Loves You is a knockabout theatrical ride through some of the crazier excesses of The Corrick Collection, 135 films produced by the Corrick family in the early 20th century that are now preserved in the National Film and Sound Archive.

The conceit is that the action follows "a day in the life of seven characters, all of whom live in the same apartment block". We see them first as if we were voyeurs from the street, peering in through the windows: then, gradually, they emerge, as if stepping out of a screen, and begin to play. Nolan exploits the remarkable and often bizarre Corrick archive as counterpoint and inspiration to the action on stage. A series of antics exploiting various stunts - hat tricks, balancing acts, slapstick fights, aerial acts - come into theatrical play with the projected images.

The stage (in a flexible and deceptively simple concept by Anna Tregloan) is a space of constantly changing planes and perspectives: the eye is drawn from the present to the past, from filmed image to live performer, until each becomes inextricably tangled with the other. There are moments of fabulous comic ingenuity: at one point Laasko the hat designer is looking for his wife, whom we see standing in the distance: he takes a drawer out of his desk and looks at it lovingly, turning it to the audience, and her projected image appears in the drawer, then on his chest, then serially on the desk as he turns it over looking for her, until at last the performer herself is revealed on top of the desk.

My Bicycle Loves You is a confection of image and sound (from an excellent band playing live in front of the stage) that at its best is enchanting. The program claims that it's an exercise in story-telling, which seems to me a bit of a misnomer. The only stories that were really clear on stage were those on film: an astonishing reel from the Corricks, for example, in which a magician in what seems to be mediaeval Venice is burgled by two thieves who steal his invisibility potion, with slapstick results. For the most part, it's a series of episodic acts, loosely linked by image and character rather than any pretence at narrative, which doesn't sustain the length of the show. Perhaps part of the problem here is that an expectation of story-telling is set up, without being delivered.

Sometimes the acts lack the virtuosity that makes impossible feats seem effortless, generating an anxiety for the performer, although this roughness can in fact be a virtue, part of a shambolic and peculiarly Australian charm. However, little on stage rivals the sheer craziness of some of those films. There is a recurring comedy in which a man grows enormous horns and runs about the town attempting to gore innocent bystanders: when this is translated to physical theatre, it somehow loses its surreality. I have always sworn that theatre is more poetic medium than film, but maybe I have to rethink that prejudice. All in all, well worth a look.

Pictures: Top: Waltzing the Wilarra; bottom, a still from the Corrick archive that inspired My Bicycle Loves You.

* Alison Croggon travelled to Perth as a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival.

Waltzing the Wilarra, by David Milroy, directed by Wesley Enoch. Music director Wayne Freer, set design by Jacob Nash, costumes by Isaac Lummis, lighting design by Trent Suidgeest, sound design by Kingsley Reeve, choreography by Claudia Alessi. With Ernie Dingo, Jessica Clarke, Kelton Pell, Irma Woods, Ursula Yovich, Trevor Jamieson, Tim Solly and Alexandra Jones. Musicians: Ric Eastman, Wayne Freer, David Milroy, Lucky Oceans and Bob Patient. Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, Subiaco Arts Centre, until March 6.

My Bicycle Loves You, devised by Beatrix Christian, Patrick Nolan, Anna Tregloan and company. Directed by Patrick Nolan, composer Ben Walsh, designer Anna Tregloan, video artist Mic Gruchy, lighting Damien Cooper. With Alicia Battestini, Tom Flanagan, Alexandra Harrison, Aimee Horne, Kate Sherman, Matt Wilson and Emil Wolk. Musicians: Eden Ottingen, Matt Ottingen, Daniel Pilner and Mich Stuart. Legs on the Wall, Regal Theatre, until February 26.

On Sunday afternoon, I saw les ballets C de la B's performance of Out Of Context - For Pina at the stunning new Heath Ledger Theatre, a venue that combines the virtues of modern theatre architecture with the embracing intimacy of an old-fashioned theatre. I had planned to stay for the artist talk that was scheduled afterwards, but when the show finished, I realised that the last thing I wanted was the immediate imprisonment of what I had just seen and felt in a lot of words. I walked out into the warm Perth evening and let the dance's penumbra work its chemistry, like the slow developing of a black and white photograph.

This was a work that had a considerable emotional impact on me, at levels of wordlessness that are difficult to translate. One of the great challenges - and, it must be said, pleasures - of writing about contemporary performance is how absolutely the attempt demonstrates the limits of words. Many choreographers press against spoken or written language, hovering on the threshold of speech: at its most successful, as in some works of Lucy Guerin's, this preoccupation reveals language to be as opaque and textured as the body itself.


This reflects a deep concern in a lot of contemporary dance: the problem of communication. So much of it reaches towards an almost utopian idea of unmediated contact: clearly an impossible ideal which can, all the same, attain a fragile reality in the fluid space of performance. Maybe this explains the uninhibited audiences dance can generate, as it did during les ballets C de la B's performance. When they weren't being as quiet as mice during the silences (no outbreaks of anxious coughing, which means they were paying close attention) the audience at the State Theatre Centre was laughing and whooping, even applauding individual performers during the dance. The last time I saw an audience respond so spontaneously to contemporary dance was at a performance of Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On at the Victorian Arts Centre.

There is certainly a connection between Out of Context and The Show Must Go On, although Platel's multiple layerings of sound and complex choreographies differ wildly from Bel's almost indescribably bare aesthetic. Bel and Platel both comprehend the whole auditorium in their idea of the stage, offering an invitation to a mutual adventure which the audience feels surprisingly free to accept. In both cases, this turns on what it might mean to be a human being, a social animal imprisoned in an opaque body: their dancers are individuals, rather than generic bodies exploring abstract form. And both use popular culture as artists once used religious iconography, as a touch point of emotional recognition.

Out Of Context begins with a simple conceit. The lights lift to reveal a bare stage. At the back is a pile of orange blankets, the same colour as the saffron robes of monks or, more disturbingly, the uniforms of prisoners. Otherwise there are only two microphones. We stare for a while, and then a man (Emile Josse) walks up on stage from the auditorium and begins to undress to his underpants, unhurriedly folding his clothes. He picks up one of the blankets and drapes it about his shoulders. About half way through his undressing, I saw a woman stand up in front of me and work her way through the row: until she began to walk towards the stage, I thought, with surprise, that she must be a disaffected audience member, leaving already. She too begins to undress. And gradually, all nine dancers gather on stage, emerging out of the audience. This is the first trick, and it is very effective: any barrier between stage and audience is immediately removed.

The recorded sound track here is mostly silent, aside from the occasional moo of a cow and percussive sounds from knocking the microphone against the floor or the dancers' bodies. Dancers mill about like herd animals or a flock of birds; they encounter each other in pairs and, in choreography reminiscent of illustrations from a Konrad Lorenz textbook, make ritualistic movements of greeting and curiosity. Through the first forty five minutes, the choreography expands and intensifies from animal-based behaviour to Platel's signature interest in spasmodic, involuntary movement: these are constrasted with classical representations of the body, especially from ancient Greek statuary - one image almost casually formed back stage briefly showed us three muses, one classically posed Venus, half naked and armless, the other two headless torsoes. There are others drawn from classical representations of wrestling or battle.


An insistent techno beat starts up, and the next section is a parody of contemporary mating rituals, with the dancers sardonically speaking various pop lyrics into the mic: here the choreography is drawn from dance clubs and pornography. A male dancer even steps out into the audience, stepping from seat to seat to writhe above a patron who was very determinedly staring straight ahead. Here are all the codes of mating, all the triggers of contemporary representations of sexuality, but the cliches are riven by the interventions of the body, its insistent presence, its involuntary, unaestheticised life.

We then return to a reprise of the first section, but here the body is more nakedly exposed, and, for all its expressed desire, more nakedly alone. This is where Out Of Context began to bite for me: I'm not sure that I've seen the erotic body, in all its absurdity and longing, expressed so frankly and delicately on a stage.

Its final gesture is almost histrionic: dancer Romeo Runa, who has been a kind of master of ceremonies, asks everyone in the theatre to raise their right hand. They do. "Who wants to dance with me?" he asks, and the forest of hands magically vanishes. The barrier between stage and auditorium hasn't been erased to that extent... until a man shyly appears out of the audience and they dance, to Jimmy Scott's version of Prince's Nothing Compares To You. Shamelessly manipulative, yes; but something else as well, more humble, more difficult. This seems to me to be a work that's sophisticated enough to be naive. And then the dancers simply put their clothes back on and return to their seats among the audience.

None of this emotional power would be possible without the virtuosity of these dancers: the movements are sometimes impossibly demanding and their control is astounding. The trust between them is palpable. You can't see everything that's happening on stage: it is always active all the time, with all nine dancers constantly making and remaking images, but Platel's rhythmic control is such that this seems a thickening of texture, rather than a means of frustration. What's important is that we are watching nine individuals, whose identities become more clear through the dance until the audience feels they know them, which is I think the real point of Platel's contact to Pina Bausch, to whom this work is dedicated. A beautiful work, which touches that fragile transparency which makes live performance truly memorable.

The following night I went to see Martha Wainwright perform at Beck's Music Box on The Esplanade. It was stiflingly hot, with a brilliant gibbous moon hanging in the luminous sky, and the city lights had that phosphorescent halo they seem to attain on hot evenings. I was glad to find that this is an outdoor venue, most civilisedly set up so no matter where you sit, you are never far from the stage.

Wainwright's performance was another exercise in destroying barriers between audience and stage, but in an entirely different way: while the conventions that separate performer and audience were carefully observed, Wainwright offered herself on a slab for two hours of powerful performance in which stunning virtuosity is cut with raw feeling. It's clear that for Wainwright, who of course hails from a famous musical dynasty, there is no division between her music and her life.

The show opened and closed with spine-tingling performances of a selection of songs made famous by Edith Piaf, another chanteuse who sang on pure nerve. Wainwright gave us a good selection of Piaf's stirringly theatrical ballads, songs such as Marie Trottoir, Le Brun et le Blond or Les Grognards (from which she took the title for her Piaf album, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, à Paris) which, in the greatest tribute that one artist can make to another, she took and made her own.

In between Wainwright sang her own songs, including a couple of scorching new works and, in a moving tribute, several by her mother, legendary singer/songwriter Kate McGarrigle, who died early last year. "Last year was tough," Wainwright tells us. "I lost my mother, my son was born five weeks early... it was hard." And then she sings her anguish, striking her guitar as if it is a percussive instrument, and that voice goes right through you. Of course it is a performance, but the feelings are real. And as with all great singers, the grief and anger and longing and ordinary ecstasy touches us and and becomes our own.

Pictures: Out of Context - For Pina. Photos: Chris Van der Burght

* Alison Croggon flew to Perth as a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival

Out Of Context - For Pina, directed and choreographed by Alain Platel. Danced and created by Ellie Tass, Emile Josse, Hyo Seung Ye, Kaori Ito, Mathieu Desseigne Ravel, Melanie Lomoff, Romeu Runa, Rosalba Torres Guerrero and Ross McCormack. les ballets C de la b, Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre, Perth. Closes tonight.

Martha Wainwright, Beck's Music Box, Perth. Closes tonight.

Sometimes there's an unexpected serendipity to picking festival shows. So it was on Saturday, when your humble correspondent landed in Perth. My first day here included some of the final performances of two shows from the earlier weeks of the festival - Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, by Swiss company Teatro Sunil, and The Red Shoes, an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's remarkably cruel story by Cornish company Kneehigh Theatre. The rhymes between the shows ranged from clowns to rose petals: but in the end, it was the differences that intrigued me.


Donka: A Letter to Chekhov is precisely what it claims to be: a theatrical letter to Anton Chekhov. (Reflecting Chekhov's passion for fishing, "donka" is the Russian word for a small bell attached to a fishing rod, which rings when there is a bite.) Writer/director Daniele Finzi Pasca glances off almost all of Chekhov's writing, including his sojourn to the penal colony of Sakhalin, where he took the first census of the convict population and campaigned for education for the many children born there, but the key here is lightness.

The Chekhov summoned here is more the letter writer than the tragedian. Donka leaps from the playfulness and surreality that shines in some of his earlier, lesser known short stories, or the love of absurdity and wicked sense of humour of his letters, which must be among the most enjoyable authorial correspondence ever published, and which reveal a man who is a far cry from the melancholic Russian depressive his name commonly summons. Chekhov the sensualist was, for a long time, edited out of the biographies: but a sensualist he was.

He was a man of the theatre, with passionate relationships with actors and directors (among many others, the avant garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold and Chekhov were regular correspondents). And he also shared the love of his peers for circus, which in early 20th century Russia entered the theatre as an art form. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky remains, at least to my knowledge, the only person to have written literary works for circus. It's this tradition of circus which is summoned in this show.

Rolando Tarquini, in a white summer suit based on a famous photograph of Chekhov, represents the writer, although he doesn't, as it were, play Chekhov: Donka is an exercise in metatheatrics as much as anything else. Rather, he and his fellow clowns present a show in which various images are introduced - skating, fishing, hospital beds - that become symbolic of different aspects of Chekhov's life. These in turn become occasions for some sublimely lyrical circus acts. Using standard circus tropes - aerial acts, juggling, the wheel, shadow play - the company creates visual fantasias that quicken into an imaginative life that is purely their own.

The performers are as skilled as any I've seen, but what is most breath-taking is how the choreography and design lifts circus into poetic performance. There are moments of joyous wit, as when two acrobats lying on the ground are projected onto a curtain front-stage, so we see their vertical images as they move on the horizontal plane. The vertical image shows an apparent chair act, in which the performers appear to be - quite literally - defying gravity. At the same time, the performers on the ground are perfectly visible. We are in on the joke, and enjoy its ingenuity: at the same, we catch that childlike astonishment - look, she is walking on his fingertips! - that is something like wonder. Then there are others, as in a set piece where an ice chandelier descends on the stage and is smashed to pieces by the cast, which aside from their compellingly strange beauty, foreground the sense of transience that is the emotional timbre of the show.

Maybe the key phrase is a quote from The Seagull: "Life should be represented, not as it is, not as it should be, but as it appears in a dream": this is a performer's dream of Chekhov. Underlying its lightness is a preoccupation with death, a search for what vanishes (where is the soul?) and what remains behind. A recurring image is Chekhov's death bed, and close to the end is an absurd representation of a duel, where the duellists spray endless bottles of sparkling stage blood all over the stage. As the show unfolded, I began to find it almost unbearably moving: as each act succeeded the other, its images created and dismantled before my eyes, Donka's transparency, ingenuity and beauty began cumulatively to reveal something about the fragility of the act of making theatre.

Donka strikes me very much as a recognition of and tribute to Chekhov's delight in the serious play and illusion of theatre. To represent death on stage is an absurdity: Donka allows us recognise this, and then, by exposing its artifice, reminds how it is theatre itself that is mortal, a gesture drawn on the air that shines for a moment and then vanishes forever, to exist only in the memories of those who saw it. Chekhov understood this as well as Beckett did. Yes, it's a show about pleasure, and is a crowd-pleasing, sensuous riot notable for the beauty of its design and lighting. But it reminded me how profound pleasure can be.

The Red Shoes, which was first performed in 2000, also relies heavily on clowning, this time by a cast who seem to be channelling every popular comedian in Britain. Hans Christian Anderson's story concerns an orphaned girl whose vanity leads her to buy a pair of red shoes, deceiving her blind guardian. She is horribly punished when she finds she can't take the shoes off, and is forced to keep dancing past the point of utter exhaustion. At last her feet are chopped off and she repents her vanity, walking around on stumps until she is accepted into heaven. The sadism of the story is compelling, and perhaps accounts for its multiple adaptations, particularly in film.

Adapted and directed by Emma Rice in 2000, the story is retold in rhyming couplets, building its theatre from the ground up. The design has a junkshop aesthetic, with the improvisatory air of having been thrown together from available materials. The whole is overseen by a witchy pantomime dame, Lady Lydia (Giles King), who acts as a master of revels, appointing roles to the performers and narrating the story, and the music is performed live by Stu Barker and Ian Ross. The five performers who enact the story are stripped to their essential clown: their heads are shaved and they are dressed in ill-fitting white underpants and vests, so they become, like Anderson's anti-heroine, objects of humiliation and ridicule. As they are appointed to different roles, they put on the appropriate costume, so we literally see the theatre made in front of our eyes.

There's much to like in these ingredients: the Kneehigh company give performances of infectious energy, and their clowning was received rapturously by the audience. But I found myself falling into longueurs: there was a paucity of invention in the conventions it set up (at once point, I thought that if I saw another suitcase, I would scream) and I felt patronised by the text, which is uncomfortably pitched between child and adult sensibilities, without quite being able to decide where to exist. It's often forgotten that Anderson was regarded in his own time as a writer for adults, counting among his many admirers Henrik Ibsen, which might explain the difficulty here.

For me, the troubling misogyny of Anderson's story, in which a young girl is mutilated for her nascent sexuality (for what else do those red shoes represent, really?) is somehow reinforced rather than questioned: the taint of public shame that infects Anderson's fable is consciously woven into the experience of its theatre, but is rendered oddly innocuous by its comedy. In this version, the Girl (Patrycja Kujawska) refuses Anderson's redemption, in which her "heart breaks" and she enters heaven, where no one asks her about her red shoes; instead she runs away from the forgiving Christ into the audience, presumably defiant even in death. I don't know whether, if the story had been followed to its puritan finale, the effect might have been more troubling, and thus more conducive to thought. As it was, it left me feeling strangely empty.

Ms TN is up at this ungodly hour on a Saturday morning because she is imminently flying to the other end of the continent. I'll be there for a week as a guest of the Perth Festival, absorbing as much of the rich program as is humanly possible. I'll be blogging everything, and if you're super keen on the butterfly peregrinations of this too too sullied flesh, you can follow me on Twitter as well at twitter.com/alisoncroggon.