Watching Rawcus's superb new production Small Odysseys was an oddly personal experience. For me, it was the psychological equivalent of that optical test in which, when a bright light is shone into your pupil, you see the veins of your own retina. It was as if I was watching a repatterning of some of my peak Melbourne experiences of the past few years: Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), Bill Viola's The Raft, Ron Mueck's sculptures, the theatre of Romeo Castellucci and Jérôme Bel... even down to a recent book purchase, the haunting and comic urban miniatures of Slinkachu.


If ever there was an argument for the dependence of art on a rich soil, it's this show. It demonstrates how artists are magpies, stealing one idea here, another there, and transforming them into something completely other. Works of collage or bricolage expose this process, but all artists do it. When the original inspirations remain undigested or misunderstood, it produces more-or-less successful pastiche, the merely derivative. The process has to be equal to its sources: when it is, it creates an artwork that absorbs those earlier influences into its own concerns, throwing their illuminations into unexpected contexts. In a sweet synchronicity, I recently quoted the great literary critic Viktor Shklovsky here on just this process: as he says, "Art cognizes by implementing old models in new ways and by creating new ones."

This language of formal and emotional allusion is one of the ways that an artwork signals its ambitions, which is always a risky business: the bigger the ambitions, the bigger the scope for collapse. Small Odysseys makes its claims from its opening moments: this is epic work, seeking to give poetic shape to intimate, inarticulate moments of isolation and loneliness. Director Kate Sulan and her collaborators walk the line to create a dream-like work of theatre which is as deeply felt as it is richly imagined.

Like Back to Back, Rawcus is a company of performers with and without disabilities which collaboratively generates self-devised works. The sense of ensemble is tangible in the rhythms of the work, which are (almost) unfaltering. Perhaps one sequence extends itself too far, but mostly it steps from transformation to transformation in ways that ignite continual slight surprise, loosing time from its moorings. The performance lasts almost exactly an hour, but the concentration it quite voluntarily elicits makes this hour seem both shorter and longer: it passes swiftly, but it seems to traverse whole worlds. Small Odysseys is huge, both literally - it uses the vast perspectives of the Meatmarket stage to full advantage - and emotionally.

Mnouchkine's influence is perhaps the most explicit, and not only in its title: as in Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), designers Shaun Patten and Emily Barrie employ miniature sets on wheels which are swept over the wide spaces of the stage: small illuminated rooms, in which we witness private moments, or islands, complete with grass, that recall the islands Odysseus visited on his long journey home. As with Mnouchkine's show, these miniature sets create a disconnect between the motion of the set and the performers which is oddly intensifying: more importantly, it generates an increasingly powerful transitoriness, a sense of how human beings exist in vast, indifferent space.

Mnouchkine used this convention to permit the swift telling of complex narratives; here, the fluidity of movement allows the performers to create poetic vignettes, images that invoke emotional states rather than stories. For some reason I can't quite trace, another artist it recalled for me was Paul Klee: maybe it was a strong sense of dream, of incongruities that create their own overwhelming emotional logic.

Mnouchkine is only one of the influences employed here - there are many others. At one point the performers recreate Théodore Géricault's famous Romantic painting, The Raft of the Medusa, the inspiration behind Bill Viola's The Raft, engaging both of the earlier works. There is minimal text - we hear one side of phone conversations, a list of questions about what it means to be lost, one performer singing lustily from the back of the space. The stage is constantly animated with an opening and closing of perspectives that moves with a rhythm like breathing. Illusions are rapidly created and as rapidly dismantled: one moment it is a sea peopled by surreal, mythically resonant islands of humanity, the next a naked, harshly lit space in which the performers stand exposed and vulnerable before our gaze. There's an honesty in this performance which allows it to escape the seductions of the merely pretty to explore a real beauty.


Richard Vabre's superb lighting design is crucial: it can blank out the stage altogether by blinding us with a bank of yellow lights, give us a haunting glimpse of a ship with a lighted prow gliding far in the distance, or set us in a moment of complete everydayness by locating a performer in a corridor of light. And the emotional texture is extended by Jethro Woodward's encompassing sound design, which reaches from lush lyric to harsh percussion.

Within this complex construction, the performers move like voyagers, always the central focus. It is probably closest to dance theatre - there is in fact is a powerful dance sequence, in which gestures are picked up and repeated by an increasing number of performers - but it's not purely anything. What's most interesting is a gathering sense of the individuals who made this piece, a sense of personal investment, that is released by the show's formal shaping. (This is the quality that made me think of Jérôme Bel). Its lucid focus on human desire and longing makes Small Odysseys deeply moving. It's probably one of the most beautiful works of theatre we'll see this year.

Small Odysseys, directed by Kate Sulan. Sets and costumes by Emily Barrie, sculptures and design by Shaun Patten, composition and design by Jethro Woodward, lighting design by Richard Vabre. Musicians: Jethro Woodward, Ida Duelund Hansen. Dramaturge: Ingrid Voorendt. With Steven Ajzenberg, Clem Baada, Michael Buxton, Ray Drew, Rachel Edward, Nilgun Guven, Paul Matley, Mike McEvoy, Ryan New, Kerryn Poke, Louise Risiik, John Tonso, Danielle von der Borch. Rawcus @ Arts House Meatmarket until July 23.

Melbourne Fringe Festival: The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest, directed by Kate Sulan and Ingrid Voorendt. Set design by Emily Barrie, lighting design by Richard Vabre, sound design by Jethro Woodward, music by Zoe Barry. Rawcus and Restless Dance Company, Dancehouse.

In The Arms of a Lion, written by Peter van der Merwe, in collaboration with Penelope Chater. Directed by Penelope Chater, performed by Peter van der Merwe. Set by Brian Finlayson, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Xana Chambers. White Swan Productions, Northcote Town Hall Studio 2 until October 4.

The haunting title of The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest is a quote from the early 20th century American novelist Willa Cather, who was notable for writing in plain, poetic speech about the lives of ordinary people. And this collaboration between Rawcus, a theatre which works with both disabled and abled performers, and the Adelaide dance company Restless, is an attempt to glimpse the most private desires of other people.


Rawcus produces unashamedly romantic work, rich with texture and colour and expressive lighting that frames the delicacy of the moments it is seeking to express. The Heart of Another... is no different. It is a sumptuous feast for the senses, from the live score and sound design, to the William Morris-style decorated walls and fabrics that are the main feature of the design. It's work that seeks a poise between delicacy and darkness, treading the border between the inscrutably private and its public expression.

The performance opens as the audience enters the space, where musicians are playing back stage and forestage a man is balletically posed, wearing a robe of excessive and androgynous luxury that recalls the ornateness of Regency Beaux, rather than feminine display. When the lights go down, the performers enter the stage one by one. Most of the cast is disabled, but here the focus is on the individuality of each person, challenging the generalised blindness that often comes with the label "disability".

The show consists of a series of encounters in which we are invited into private worlds, expressed through a series of often arresting theatrical images. Desire is symbolised in a variety of ways - as a jar in which is placed different objects or through play; through shadow theatre, when the curtains back stage open and reveal a counter-text of imaginings; through the shifting relationships of bodies on stage.

It's a show of interesting ambiguities and ambitions. There was one very moving moment when a girl with no arms discovers flight. The shy joy of the young performer was intensely poignant, revealing the ambition of the show, its movement towards freedom through the expressiveness of imagination.

There is a danger in this work of heading towards the twee, which The Heart of Another... evades because it unearths the ambiguity of desire, its darkness as well as its illuminations. Nevertheless, I felt an uneasiness about its decoration, the careful assembly of its images, that made me wonder if something was being obscured. As I watched, I thought of, say, the straightforwardness of Stephen Page's marvellous show Kin, which was devised with young members of his family, or Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On, which also investigates the depth of the everyday. Both these works achieved a passionate delicacy of communication in ways which I think The Heart of Another... just missed, for reasons that are very hard to trace.

One thought is that, where Bel wears his profound thinking lightly, finding a purity of performative expression that can ambush you with unexpected and joyous feeling, The Heart of Another... insists on its emotional integrity in a way that somehow impedes the experience of the moment. But for all that, it's a show which achieves moments of real beauty.

PETER van der Merwe's one-man play, In the Arms of a Lion, is an elegant and moving show which explores the effects of Apartheid on those who enforce its privilege. Its effects on the black population of South Africa are well known, but here van der Merwe is more concerned with what he calls the "deformation of the soul" that results from violently oppressing the majority of a country's population.

It consists of a series of monologues by different characters, all of them memories of a young gay man called Stephen, the son of a fundamentalist Afrikaaner family. His uncle is a priest who uses the Bible to justify the ideology of white supremacy as the will of God, and who expresses in a baldly shocking fashion (shocking only because of its utter conviction) the ugly realities of racism.

But this play is much more than a simple condemnation of plainly ugly social injustice. It opens with Stephen confessing his sexual orientation to his mother, who as a God-fearing woman is wholly distressed that her deeply loved son has revealed himself to be, in her eyes, an abomination. Stephen himself rejects the epithet "gay"; he prefers "queer". He loves to wear women's clothes, but not, he says, because he wants to impersonate a woman, but because he finds a deep pleasure in his own male body clothed in femininity. In the same way, as he says, when he puts on men's clothes, he is not "being a man": he is merely dressed as a man.

This subtext on the performance of gender reaches into the performance of race. Being "white" is as much a performance as any other, and comes with its particular rules and tabus. Stephen's sexual ambiguity makes him Other to his family and his community, even a traitor, and he lives in terror of being beaten up and killed. What gives this visceral weight is that he is constantly witness to how the other Others - those with black skin - are themselves brutalised and demonised.

Stephen's mother, who is much more than a caricature, is torn between her love for her son and her ingrained, unshakeable beliefs, which are reinforced by the fears that underlie them. Stephen's situation is not as simple as the young gay man being rejected by his family - emotionally brutalised himself by growing up in a state threatened constantly by terrorism, he is as much an agent of his alienation as his family.

In the Arms of a Lion is a complex and emotionally potent take on its subject, with its own clear parallels to Australia's less than glorious treatment of its own demonised others. I seldom say this, but I felt its hour-long format, while adequate, was too short - a little more air might have made the show less impressionistic. The design and direction reminded me rather of Peter Brook's production of Sizwe Banzi is Dead at last year's Melbourne Festival - a bare stage, simply but evocatively lit, with all the mechanics exposed and the performer changing character through costume. Absolutely basic and absolutely effective.

And it's a bravura performance from Peter van der Merwe, who handles all the registers, from pathos to comedy, with total commitment. Courageous theatre.

Melbourne Festival #8

Hunger, devised and created by rawcus and musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, directed by Kate Sulan. Designed by Emily Barrie, lighting design Richard Vabre, dramatury/choreography by Ingrid Voorendt, original music by Jethro Woodward. rawcus @ Arts House Meat Market until October 24.

I wanted to like Hunger. It's a collaboration between rawcus, which creates theatre by and about disabled people, and musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, that explores the nature of longing and desire. And it's got music by the ubiquitous Jethro Woodward and completely gorgeous lighting by Richard Vabre. What's not to like?

Nothing, as it turns out, that you can really put your finger on. And maybe that's the problem. Hunger has many of the right ingredients, and achieves moments of truly memorable theatrical image-making: but a certain elusive, cohesive spark is missing. It reaches, and just misses.


As Andrea del Sarto says in Browning's poem, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" There are failures that ought to be admired, and such failures are usually in proportion to a work's ambition. And there's no doubting the ambition of this work, a physical theatre piece that draws on the tropes of romantic love (and romantic music) to excavate the desires of the disabled, a section of the community usually denied such expression.

Director Kate Sulan takes full advantage of the perspectives of the the Meat Market theatre, which is surely, as Spark Online commented recently, one of Melbourne's most beautiful venues. As the audience files in, they are confronted with rows of paper shopping bags, propped upright to cover the entire stage. Against a wall at the back stand some musicians, bowing some gentle lyrical flights. Then the lights go down, the sound rises in an electronic roar, and a man in a beautiful brocaded dress enters and dances a balletic solo, knocking the bags over with the sweep of his gestures.

As a comment on how the anarchies of desire disrupt the manipulative order of consumerism, it's simple, effective and beautiful. The show is threaded with such moments: a woman emerging from a fantastic dress whose skirt is almost as big as the stage, its fabric surging around her like the ocean, and at last winding her in a blue whirlpool, or a man playing a clarinet, dragging a woman across the stage as she clutches his ankles.

Interestingly, the most effective moments were often those with text. At one point, for example, a woman standing at a lectern read the dialogue from Gone With The Wind where Rhett leaves Scarlett O'Hara, while others around her parroted the lines. It was at once touching, funny, and a pointed comment on the ways our desires are shaped for us by popular culture.

But too often I felt the stage metaphors lacked clarity; by which I mean, not that they ought to be instantly interpretable, but that their conception was somehow muffled. At one point, and no doubt unfairly, I wondered what Romeo Castellucci, master of the breath-takingly resonant stage image, might have done with this material; something much crueller, I imagine, and perhaps more moving.

While the show deals with dreams and fantasies, it all felt too lush. The set and costumes, which draw from the kitsch of fairytales and romantic love, were gorgeous, but there seemed to be too much of them. The danger in dealing with Hallmark imagery is, of course, becoming a little Hallmarkish oneself.

More troublingly, there were times when I felt a real - and I think unintentional - discomfort about watching, as if I were merely invited to something that amounted to an act of voyeurism. I'm not suggesting, by any means, that Hunger is done in bad faith, or is at all exploitative: it's manifestly not. But every now and then I was haunted by a feeling that I was merely witnessing the ablement of the disabled, that my response couldn't reach deeper than an inevitably patronising applause. I think this might be a function of the conception of the piece itself as spectacle, with images that don't quite reach across the space of difference into the sudden epiphany of mutual understanding.

I strongly suspect the real problem lies in the dramaturgy, the larger rhythms of the piece itself. Perhaps if they had been cleaner, if the show had had a more definable shape, the sense of clutter would have been abated. Comparisons with Back to Back's Small Metal Objects, its brilliant 2005 festival offering, are inevitable. Where Back to Back, which also works with a mixture of professional theatre artists and disabled performers, managed to open your perception to the fascination of the apparently mundane, Hunger seemed much of the time to be making a kind of costume party.

The music, which included Dvorak, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky as well as Woodward, was good to listen to, but it too tended to prettiness. In the end, although there were images of yearning and loss, and moments of wit that undercut the kitsch, Hunger felt too, well, nice.

Picture: the cast of Hunger. Photo: Paul Dunn