Festival Diary #2: Saturday

The Big Game, directed by Sue Giles. Designed by Geoff Kennedy, lighting by Richard Vabre, music composed by Ania Reynolds, costumes designed by Ella Misso and Rebecca Clark. Polyglot Puppet Theatre, North Melbourne Meat Market.

Three, choreographed by Ohad Neharin. Costume design by Rakefet Levy, lighting design by Avi Yona Bueno, sound design by Ohad Fishof. Batsheva Dance Company @ the State Theatre.

Kitten, written and directed by Jenny Kemp. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, composition and sound design by Darrin Verhagen, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti, choreography by Helen Herbertson. With Christopher Connelly, Natasha Herbert, Kate Kendall and Margaret Mills. Malthouse Theatre until October 25.

It is, I suppose, part of The Festival Experience to find oneself waving a blue plastic plate on a stick at 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning. This, mind you, after an ill-advisedly late night. But there we were, me and the Esoteric Rabbit himself, amid a noisy bunch of small, enthusiastic children and assorted adults, barracking for Our Team in The Big Game.

This was Polyglot's free show for children, and it is no small tribute to note that it got jaded aesthetes like me and Matt into the groove, even though we're supposedly well outside the recommended age group (5-12). It was a heap of fun. When we arrived, we were given the said paper plates, which assigned you to a particular audience area and your "world". There you were greeted by a personal cheerleader, who explained the deal and led the waving and chanting.

The show itself is a kind of animated board game that fills the gigantic atrium space at the North Melbourne Meat Market. The plot involves a nefarious inflatable volcano king and the kidnapping of his daughter by three Game Masters, who thus blackmail him into permitting the game to be played. Volunteers are then chosen from each "world", massive dice are thrown, and children move around the board and perform various tasks - star jumps, drawing a picture, hooking a fish from a wooden boat - according to where they land. They are accompanied by Game Masters in huge purple top hats, Ania Reynold's bouncy music, played live, and the enthusastic backing of their worlds. Whoever gets home first wins.

It's a fun premise, and involved the best sort of audience participation. Certainly the children present responded vociferously. Our team (Ocean World) won, and our representative, Courtney, had to fight the volcano king. This involved a mass distribution of paper planes to the audience, which were then thrown on the count of three at the king. That huge space suddenly alive with a flock of paper planes was a joyous sight.

Those who wished could stay after the show and play the game themselves, or explore the colourful and intriguing installation that doubles as the set. Matt and I went off to find some coffee, feeling remarkably light-hearted.

My next appointment was a marked contrast: Batsheva Dance Company's Three, in the plush velvet and brass of the State Theatre. This is a triptych choreographed by Ohad Naharin, Batsheva Dance Company's artistic director for the past two decades, to three constrasting works of recorded music - one of Bach's Goldberg Variations performed by Glenn Gould, Brian Eno's minimalist electronica piece, Neroli, and a mashup of contemporary music.

This joyous and humane work is performed by dancers in an assortment of casual contemporary clothes with an clarity that is thrilling to watch. The design is very plain, the stage in shades of grey and black, with minimal lighting changes. The only objects are big grey speakers hanging from the flies, which remind us that this is recorded music, music to which any one of us might casually listen on cd players and ipods.

The three pieces are quite distinct, although the design and costumes remain unchanged for each. In the brief interludes between the first and second dances, a man (I presume Ohad Naharin himself) walks on stage carrying a small television, behind which drags a long lead, stirring ripples of laughter among the audience. He stands mutely while on the television screen he does a deadpan introduction to the next piece, and just as mutely walks off.

What's striking about Three is its lucidity and elegant, seemingly effortless, accuracy. It's a style of dance that carries the pure movement of classical ballet into contemporary gesture. In the first piece this clarity was so strong it made me think of those Assyrian reliefs at the British Museum, an association reinforced by movements from the dancers that recollected Egyptian heiroglyphs. The second involved all the women of the company, carrying a disturbing subtext of militarism and throttling conformity that played against a gentle satirical lightness. The last, with the whole company back on stage, sees the individuality of each dancer breaking out from the tyranny and harmony (both qualities were present, winding tightly against each other) of the group.



When the lights went up, I found myself moved and stirred without quite knowing why. Naharin's choreography holds a number of things in exquisitely erotic tension - the group and the individual, perfection and imperfection, the real and the ideal human body. And ultimately, for all its purity of gesture, it's a celebration of common humanity, all the more powerful for its understatement.

After a short break, I finished off the day at Jenny Kemp's new work, Kitten. This, Malthouse Theatre's contribution to MIAF, was a keenly anticipated show. Jenny Kemp is a respected auteur, a theatrical visionary whose dreamscapes in her 1989 show The Call of the Wild still vibrate hauntingly in my memory.

This is Kemp's first work for five years, and she is backed by a top-flight production team - Anna Tregloan, Niklas Pajanti, Darrin Verhagen - who are people behind a string of mainstream and indie hits. On paper, it looked like a surefire winner. So what went wrong? Kitten is a woeful disappointment, a show of embarrassing banality.

The play traces the mental breakdown and ultimate healing of a woman whose husband Jonah has disappeared at sea, leaving no trace. Kitten is played by three actors - Natasha Herbert, Kate Kendall and Margaret Mills - who articulate her warring selves as she disintegrates into madness. A fourth actor, Christopher Connelly, plays Jonah's best friend and Kitten's future lover Manfred, a role which is practically redundant: he exists so wholly as an extension of Kitten herself that one wonders why he's there in the first place.

The whole is informed by an excruciating sincerity which, in that Wildean paradox, makes the show almost unbearably dishonest. It is impossible to buy Kitten's return to mental health, which occurs after a breakdown and hospitalisation and a visit into an interior world which I can't quite bring myself to describe.

I sat through Kitten waiting for some sign of irony, some sign of real complexity, with a dawning sense of doom that what was on show was all there was. I felt nothing at all, save an increasing amazement that anyone, let alone Jenny Kemp, could present something so simple minded after Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis.

There is little sign in the production of the talent at Kemp's disposal: Tregloan's set, for example, looks like a bad copy of Tregloan. I went home very depressed, wondering if, after all, the Australian component of the festival was going to be a terrible letdown.

Luckily Sunday restored my spirits. But more of that tomorrow.

Melbourne Festival Diary #1: Thursday and Friday

The Schönberg Ensemble, Program 2. Conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw. Instrumental soloists Ger de Zeeuw, Joey Marijs, Sudanne van Els. Vocal soloist Barbara Hannigan. Micrographia by Michael Smetanin (2006), Umo Só Divina Linha by Jan van de Putte (2006), Kammerkonzert (1969/70) and Mysteries of the Macabre (1974/1977) by Györgi Ligeti. Hamer Hall, Victorian Arts Centre.

The Navigator, score by Liza Lim, libretto by Patricia Sykes, directed by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Manuel Nawri. Set design by Barrie Kosky and Alice Babidge, costumes by Alice Babige, lighting by Damien Cooper, sound design by Michael Hewes. With Andrew Watts, Talise Trevigne, Omar Ebrahim, Deborah Kayser and Philip Larson. Elision Ensemble. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre.

Ms TN went a bit wild on the MIAF program this year, with a particular bias towards the opening weekend. And thus events are overwhelming my keyboard: since the Melbourne Festival opened last Thursday, I've seen five performances (by the end of today, make that eight). Things calm down to something approaching sensible next week, but in the meantime take this as an experiment - how much can I see and discuss before my cerebellum explodes in a cloud of splintered syntax and unmoored metaphor?

Or perhaps it is an experiment in the subjective experience of time. So far the tally runs at two performances that polished time to an exquisite needle point of present being, two that made it run like treacle with rocks in it, and one that simply involved a lot of enjoyable banging and shouting, neither treacle nor needle but more a kind of fairy floss. But more of this hereafter.


The Schönberg Ensemble, the first headline act of the festival, was one of the needles. This two hour concert seemed to erase duration altogether. Partly it was the artfulness of its programming, which placed four utterly contrasting works together so that the virtues of each was highlighted by its differences from the others in an exquisitely enjoyable balance. And partly it was its lucidity and lightness of execution under the masterly hand of Reinbert de Leeuw, the kind of play that can only happen when performers have an utterly sure command of their material.

It opened with a 2006 piece by Sydney composer Michael Smetanin, which was commissioned by the ensemble. As with much of Smetanin's work, Micrographia has a heavy emphasis on percussion, with two soloists (Ger de Zeeuw and Joey Marijs) playing an amplified marimba with their bare hands blurring over the wooden bars while tremolo violins spiral dizzily into the stratosphere. It's intricately textured, vividly dramatic work, with a sensual body rounded by a fat trombone and the plucked bass notes of the piano, in which the dense layers of sound are leavened by a delicate playfulness.

The contrast with Jan van de Putte's Umo Só Divina Linha could not have been more skin-pricklingly surprising. This piece is for soloist and chamber orchestra, scoring a superb poem by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (or, more strictly speaking, one of his heteronyms, Alvaro de Campos) and introduced the extraordinary soprano Barbara Hannigan. The poem is an invocation to night ("the Absolute Voice, the Mouthless Voice, / Calling me, calling me, calling me...Like a stifled sob, a snuffed flame, a silent breath"). Van de Putte's setting is a gorgeously sensous embodiment of the poem.

It begins, quite literally, with silence, and gradually you become aware of breath - the blown breath of the musicians, the breath of Hannigan - like the faint sough of the wind on a still evening. Gradually the silence becomes more textured, with the harsh breath of an accordion inhaling and exhaling, the noteless drawing of bows over strings or breath blown through brass. It seems impossible for this ghost orchestra to lift into the world of music, until a faint trill of piccolo signals the universe of notes and, at last, a high, thrilling note escapes Hannigan's mouth. Then musical colours spill outwards through the orchestra like a gradually incoming tide. Breathtaking.

After interval were two pieces by Györgi Ligeti. Kammerkonzert is a chamber orchestra piece scored for several keyboards - a celesta, piano and harpsichord - in four movements. Here language defeats me even more than usual. This is an exquisite piece. In its movement, it is like Octavio Paz's description of poetry, which he says moves from silence to silence, changing its quality. Much of its sheer pleasure arises from how notes scatter under some kind of centrifugal force until it seems almost impossible that they should express any sort of harmony, only to hear them resolve in a new and revelatory beauty. Watching Reinbert de Leeuw conduct silence, holding it taut in your ear until its resonance has leached through your soul, was unforgettable.

The concert finished with a short extract from Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, an opera which incidentally was directed by Barrie Kosky in Berlin in 2003. In the original libretto, the part is sung by the "Gepopo Chief, disguised as a fantastic bird of prey. He comes in on rollerskates." Here the part is filleted out into a solo, and the Gepopo Chief becomes Barbara Hannigan in outrageous black rubber S&M bustiere and long black coat, staggering around the stage on ridiculous stilletos in a kind of paranoid panic.

The text is nonsense language, hard consonants and hissing sibilants punctuated by cries toward riot and panic. Hannigan somehow manages an extraordinary vocal performance while tottering around the stage, at one stage pushing the conductor off his podium and inspiring comic chaos among the orchestra. (De Leeuw turns to the audience in lugubrious despair: "What the hell is this?") It was a joyously anarchic performance, a sharp sorbet which perfectly finished the evening.

It was a lightness of touch signally missing from The Navigator, Elision Ensemble's staging of Liza Lim's most recent opera. Even Barrie Kosky's mischievous direction could do little to lift the ponderous weight of this piece, which plunged inexorably through my consciousness like a brick of uranium.

Here I must make a confession, of which regular readers will be totally aware. I am a language-oriented person, and I find an execrable text an almost insurmountable barrier to enjoying a piece. No matter where I went with this opera, I could not get past Patricia Sykes' libretto, which is one of the most awesomely bad pieces of poetry it's been my misfortune to encounter. It's like a very unfortunate bastard child of Anne Sexton and Stéphane Mallarmé (think a metaphorical stew of blood and dice).

Sykes, whose two published collections have attracted notice in recent years, is certainly a poet much more at home in the concrete world than in the windy abstractions she employs here. This is text that, with a portentousness that made me think of George Lucas, informs you constantly about its Significant Meanings (even winding up with a little lecture about Love) but which never gets close to actually embodying experience in its language. The fact is that poetry, even at its most asbtract or symbolic, must work at some level of literalness - however attentuated - or it dissipates into a fog of meaningless abstract nouns.

According to the program's synopsis, The Navigator is allegedly a piece about "extremity of passion, about Eros and Thanatos, Desire and Death, the gamble of lovers and war". And so on. The inscrutable anti-narrative features a pair of Lovers and a "sirenic chorus" comprising an Angel of History (a poor shadow of Benjamin's Hegelian nightmare), a Crone and a Fool. I'm not a complete idiot, but I could make very little sense of what transpired on stage.

It begins promisingly enough, with a lurex gold curtain framed in a black box rising to a space that looks like a ruined hallway or some other space that is in between, neither here nor there, and reveals two figures in grotesque masks. One plays the overture, a delicate and beautiful flute solo. Then the surtitles began, and my brain began to fall apart.

There is no doubt that there are some extraordinary musical passages in The Navigator, and that it's beautifully executed by Elision and its performers. And it features some incredible vocal performances, the highlight being the animalistic growlings from the Angel of History (Deborah Kayser) and the gorgeous counter-tenor voice of Andrew Watts. Lim's score is a kind of sensual assault, heavy strokes of sound punctuated by delicate lyrical moments, howling electric guitar and woodwind wound together with apocalyptic strings. The effect was, however, oddly monotonal: the emotional pitch was signalled from the beginning, and powered along unwaveringly in a kind of self-cancelling annihilation that after 90 minutes burned out its affect, leaving me exhausted and bored.

Part of my problem was a total inability to understand why it was necessary to make it into an opera. Words aside, I might have found it much more enjoyable as a concert presentation: the opera seemed to me to lack any inherent theatricality. Kosky's direction picks up on this quality and reinforces it inexorably with staging that emphasises stillness, a series of grotesque tableaux that follow an entirely different emotional narrative to the text.

Had the libretto had some intellectual coherence, this strategy might have made it cumulatively compelling; as it was, it just made the whole experience confusing. I was grateful, nevertheless, to have something to watch: Alice Babidge's outrageous costumes, with outsize genitalia and ridiculously over-the-top headpieces and masks, were highlights of the design. There was an absolutely beautiful scene where three performers entered one by one, each lighting a sparkler, which then burned out serially in the dark. I don't know what it had to do with anything, but it was one of the few moments where I was suddenly watching theatre.

Picture: Schönberg Ensemble conductor Reinbert de Leeuw.

Disclosures: I have written several libretti for Michael Smetanin, including a work performed and recorded by Elison Ensemble.

The scene at Readings yesterday, where I was the "conversation" bit of "Patti Smith in conversation". Somehow Readings managed to cram 220 people in between the bookshelves. It was a chance to get up close and personal with Patti Smith and director Steven Sebring, who made the extraordinary film portrait of Patti's life and work, Dream of Life, which is showing at ACMI as part of the Melbourne Festival.

I am not sure I've ever been more nervous before an event: I'm generally proof against the glamour of celebrity, but Patti Smith is more than a celebrity. As I said in my introduction:

She’s one of those people who is impossible to summarise, a rock star and poet, a visual artist and performer, an artist whose life and work have been a constant quest for freedom, for change, for beauty, for life itself. There are a few adjectives I associate with Patti Smith. The first is “visionary”. The second is “revolutionary”. The third is “ecstatic”. The fourth is “cool”.

It seems, to anyone looking at her biography, that Patti Smith was there whenever anything was happening. She lived with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe when he was an unknown art student, she wrote and performed the play Cowboy Mouth with Sam Shepard, was there at CBGBs with William Burroughs when the punk revolution was happening, she hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and Gregory Corso. She is a mother. She has lived enormously and suffered great losses. But she was always, from the beginning, a poet.

She was there. And then she was here. The conversation ranged from William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Susan Sontag and Mikhail Bulgakov to noses and her mother's collection of china cows (140). She finished by pulling out a guitar and singing My Blakean Year. She dedicated the song to me. I was floored. And that legendary voice soared unadorned through the hushed book shop, and everything was absolutely now.

It was a fine moment.

If you missed the Readings appearance, you can catch Patti Smith and Steven Sebring at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, today from 1.30 to 2pm.

And if you missed that, you can read Chris Boyd's interview at The Morning After.

Before I dive into the maelstrom of the Melbourne Festival, which opens tonight, I thought I'd briefly revisit the latest Henson fracas, which boiled over after extracts from David Marr's new book, The Henson Case, were published in the Fairfax Press last week. In a pattern that has become depressingly familiar, politicians scrambled over each other to find appropriate adjectives with which to express their disgust and revulsion and the msm hacks went thermonuclear, behaving exactly as if a known paedophile was permitted to enter a primary school and let loose among defenceless children. And yet any sober assessment of the facts shows there is absolutely no suggestion that Henson or the principal concerned behaved with anything less than propriety.

How is it that an internationally acclaimed photographer, who has been making his art for 35 years without a whisper of complaint from any of his collaborators, has become the local equivalent of Gary Glitter? The mere mention of Henson in some quarters now means "paedophile" and "kiddie porn". And yet - even under the glare of this hostile publicity - the images he makes have been passed by authorities as suitable for general viewing. At worst, PG. At the height of the first controversy, when you would have thought that, if there were any basis to the accusations made against him, aggrieved models would have been coming out of the woodwork, the only ones who went public did so to defend Henson's practice.

The new media frenzy has sparked an inquiry into the principal concerned, Sue Knight, who invited Henson to the school, St Kilda Park Primary School, last year to scout for models. While the principal concerned has been properly discreet, refusing to pre-empt the findings of an inquiry while projecting an air of quiet confidence that she breached no protocols, Premier John Brumby has had no such qualms, telling the media that she had behaved "inappropriately".

There is much talk about protecting the innocence of children and "community standards". There is endless discussion about how the "arts community" is "out of touch". The few politicians - both, sadly for those who believe in the Right/Left dichotomy, Liberal pollies - who have stood up for Henson have been howled down and mocked in what is a startling example of cynical political opportunism by Labor. But what of those at the centre of this toxic scandal?

The parents and school council at St Kilda Park Primary have come out aggressively in defence of their principal. Parents have complained that fighting through a media scrum to get their kids to school has been a far worse invasion of their privacy than any visit by Henson. The Grade 6 children sent a letter to the Age today defending their former principal. Industry professionals, from Olympians to Oscar-winning actors, have said again and again that scouting for talent in schools is standard practice which, even if it's news to almost everyone else, has been going on for years.

As with the models who defended Henson's ethics and behaviour, the evidence of those who might be said to be best informed about the issue seems to count for nothing. Henson photographs nudes, so he is abusing children. The equation is unshakeable. His reputation can therefore be dragged through the mud with impunity, even though there has never been a complaint of abuse against him, and even though the authorites concerned have - unambiguously and despite huge political and media pressure - agreed that he has never broken the law.

It's one of the most unpleasant and unjust spectacles I have witnessed for years, and is only the most public aspect of a general clamp-down on the arts, fuelled by an arts-hostile media. The arts do good scandal, as can be seen by the headlines generated by a hapless Fringe show this week, whose bad taste title hit the current affairs shows. The message is clear: the arts are offensive. The arts should not be allowed.

Perhaps what is most depressing is that those who argue in defence of Henson, myself included, have said from the beginning - despite constant claims to the contrary - that there is a need for public debate on the issues that have inflamed the Henson controversy. We have acknowledged the public anxiety and genuine concerns about child protection. Many of us have children of our own, and feel those same anxieties and concerns. We just think that debate ought to be based on facts, not hysterical supposition and the fevered imaginations of shockjocks.

Despite this, "Henson apologists" have been painted as people who support paedophilia and ride roughshot over the "rights of children", when we are simply pointing out that Henson has not, and has never had, a case to answer. Every investigation has found that he is innocent of the loathsome accusations made against him. The sober and fair-minded analysis of Marr's book has been overwhelmed by the media frenzy, when there has never been more need for it. What we have been watching is not a public debate, but a public lynching.

Pace my comments below on the air of the blogosphere, here's a reason why it matters, courtesy of a TN reader - a most interesting response from Dancehouse artistic director David Tyndall to a review published in last Saturday's Age of Jo Lloyd's Melbourne Spawned a Monster. "Now," says Mr Tyndall, "I am not responding because the review was particularly unfavourable. I've read too many reviews to allow the unfavourable ones to bother me. But, what does bother me, in this case, is the combination of unfavourable with lazy, ill-informed, insulting and utterly useless. It's this combination that has motivated my response." (And what's your point, David?)

After a forensic dissection of the review, he points to Chris Boyd's response as an example of how to "make more of an effort". Which indeed the Boyd, most vividly, does.

Fringe Festival: Hitlerhoff, written by Tom Doig, directed by Erin Kelly. Video by Anto Skene and Puck Murphy, sound by Keith McDouglass. With Tobias Manderson-Galvin, Simone Page Jones and Ezra Bix. North Melbourne Town Hall until October 11.

Villanus by Vlad Mijic and Rhys Auteri. Set design by Philippa Barr and Caroline Comino, lighting by Natalie Vincent, music by Raphael Hammond. Performed by Vlad Mijic. Welcome Stranger @ J-Studios, North Fitzroy (closed).

Well, what with her various attacks of the vapours, and mindful that from Thursday on her life is no longer her own, Ms TN hasn't got out to much of the Fringe. But there's been no shortage of coverage elsewhere in the blogosphere - Born Dancin' has been stunning observers all over Melbourne with his Quixotic quest, posting his seventh multiple post of capsule reviews; Richard Watts and Michael Magnusson have been out there, as has tyro blogger Long Sentence No Suggestions; Jana Perkovic has posted a must-read review of Rawcus; and Ming-Zhu Hii used the Fringe to begin her tracking of racial casting in Melbourne theatre. My Esteemed Colleague Mr Boyd has been coming at things obliquely, as always, with a post on Dancehouse. And no doubt there have been others which have escaped my notice.

Take a bow, bloggers. It's so great to see the oxygen of response livening up the performance scene here. Not one, not two, but lots, all cheerfully disagreeing. Now, that's what I call civilisation.

But on to my notes on what I did see. I made my way to the North Melbourne Town Hall on Friday to see Hitlerhoff, intrigued and curious. And came out with a similar feeling to Born Dancin's succint response (possibly the review of the Fringe). A deep desire to go hmmmmm...

This is YouTube theatre. It's like those remixes of Downfall where Hitler is getting upset about Barak Obama (or X-Box or Real Madrid). Tobias Manderson-Galvin plays a genetic collision of Adolf Hitler and David Hasselehoff, star of Baywatch and some awful music videos (and Spongebob Squarepants, although that doesn't get a look-in), a man in speedos who's got a fake moustache and is not afraid to use it.

The premise behind this show, according to the website anyway, is that there is an ethical imperative in disrespectful satire that lampoons sacred cows. Marrying the images of Hitler and Hasslehoff is a way of signalling parallels between the nude-Aryan-youth-and-muscles Nazi aesthetic and the blonde, busty babes (male and female) of Baywatch. And, of course, the Nazis were big on showbusiness. The opening video, a mash-up of Leni Reifenstahl and Californian beaches, does in fact make this parallel quite well.

And the spoof which follows is undeniably fun. It's not as if the Holocaust is beyond satire - look at the work of absurdist Polish playwright Tadeusz Rosewicz, which is as black as it gets. Baywatch and the theatrics of the Third Reich are a deliberately provocative conjunction, but what's perplexing is that it's hard to see in the show what insights this provocation actually generates beyond its initial frisson. To discuss it with any seriousness feels like making some heavy weather about an essentially harmless and diverting pisstake.

It's witty and fast-moving, and performed with the necessary brio by its very energetic cast. But somehow it elides the discomfort of its subject matter and its humour, crucially, depends on that elision. It doesn't feel heartless to laugh at it. And perhaps that's the point, that the hyperreality of mega-celebrity reduces everything to the affectless image, shorn of context and meaning. Again like Born Dancin', I'm curious to know what others thought.

The one time where I felt some prickle of reality was towards the end of the play, when Hitlerhoff himself was passionately declaiming about the necessity to act now, which gave an echo of the state of permanent emergency that drives the emotive politics of Fascist regimes (and our current political situation). Otherwise, it made me feel a little nostalgic for Mel Brook's 1968 masterpiece, The Producers, which cornered the market on Nazi bad taste.

The following evening I trekked out to J-Studios in North Fitzroy to see Villanus, a show which is as deeply concerned with the idea of image and identity as Hitlerhoff, but to rather more profound effect. This is deeply interesting theatre. I saw this show on its premiere at Trades Hall last year, and don't have much to add to what I said then. To quote me:

The apparent artlessness belies the intelligence of the theatre that follows, a series of discrete verbal arias in which notions of self and identity are put under intense interrogation.

The show opens with a stumbling disclaimer from Mijic, in which he explains that although this performance is partly autobiographical, it is also a tissue of lies and half truths. Playing a version of himself called Vlad, Mijic launches into a paranoid exploration of what it means to be called a “villain”. Wearing a piece of paper taped to his back which says "Vlad is dead", he begins with the obsessively repetitive recording of a video diary. “If you are watching this now,” he says intently into a camera, “I have been murdered”.

Mijic and his co-creator Rhys Auteri are most concerned with the notion of mediation, with how much our self-image - individually and collectively - is formed by expectations projected onto it. Much of the text, which is both spoken and written in Texta on butcher's paper or projected onto a screen, consists of lists (a major trope of much contemporary poetry): lists of personal characteristics, of fragments of text rescued from unlikely places, of scraps of received reality that enter a world-view and then form it.

At the centre is the question of Vlad's Serbian ancestry: Serbs being, before the sudden stardom of Saddam Hussein, the arch-villains on the international global stage. He was born in Yugoslavia, he tells us, but now Yugoslavia no longer exists: like his primary school, which was shut down by Jeff Kennett, it is now a place that only lives in memory. What is the fiction called Vlad to make of this? Is his inescapable ethnicity a reflection of an inherent monstrousness, or is his villainousness simply a desire "not to disappoint" expectations (a desire immediately ironised by this show's anti-aesthetic presentation)? This question splinters and fragments through fantastic or even surreal obsessions, several posthumous death scenes and a comedically dislocated self-reflection on the process of making Villanus itself.

Rhys Auteri and Mijic have refined the show considerably, cutting out some of its circular excesses and introducing some new elements (a brief take on Eurovision, for example). It is a now an excellent, tightly poetic text. And it has a set design this time, rather than a jumble of objects on a stage.

Although this made for a slicker and more focused show, and it certainly benefited from cutting the long ending, I missed some of its initial roughness, which gave it a nimbus of imminent collapse, an air of uncertainty that fed fruitfully into the experience of the performance. But I still walked away with the feeling that this is a piece of theatre made with real courage and theatrical curiosity, and which, in a world driven by mediated images, radiates a genuine and fertile unease.

I may have mentioned once or twice that I have a brutal muse. Its presence has the general effect of a large steel hammer being dropped into a blender.

There have been a couple of periods in my life when I have been really convinced that writing poetry is over for me, that the Pierian Springs have dried up and the muse has packed her bags and headed off for greener poets. Far from mourning such a departure, my response has been a surge of relief. My experience of poetry is that, all my life, I have suffered from a regularly recurring illness, a kind of psychic possession. Poetry is a bad-mannered relative who moves in without notice and locks me in the pantry while it takes over my life. Choice has absolutely nothing to do with it.

This phenomenon is why poets get all vague and mystic when they speak of the process of writing poems. If you try to describe what actually happens, you just sound crazy. Some poets have more polite visitations, and some find their muses fatal. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam coined the term Pre-Lyrical Anxiety (PLA to you and me) to describe the complex of symptoms - lassitude, depression, irritability, intellectual dysfunction - that accompany the writing of a new poem. The problem is that this state can go on for weeks, only to result in a few lousy lines. And human consciousness being what it is, full of charming self-blindness, I only recognise the symptoms after the fact.

This might explain why the idea of writing prose - a relatively sane, measurable, sober activity - holds such attractions for me. And also why I've found myself barely capable of holding a conversation or writing a sentence for the past few weeks. After an absence of nearly 18 months, the muse turned up without notice, hoovered out my brain, mashed it into a pulp and, finally, turned it into about 20 lines of poetry. Is it really worth it? I ask the muse. Who cares? says the muse. And before I can answer, vanishes as completely as if she were never there.

So now I seem to be free again, I'm contemplating the mess she's left behind and hoping that it's at least a month before she visits again. I'm a couple of reviews behind on the Fringe, and my desk looks like a bombsite and, frankly, I'm a little tired.

Moreover, later this week Ms TN (she thinks she's Ms TN) begins her annual high-octane coverage of the Melbourne Festival. The big news - in this family anyway - is that I'm in conversation with Patti Smith and documentary maker Steve Sebring at Readings on Friday, hopefully to discuss Rimbaud, Bulgakov, Wilde and other mutual passions. I only say this to share my fangirl enthusiasm, as the event is booked out. And I'm hoping the muse keeps a polite distance, so I can function. Hello everybody, and nice to be back.

My copy of David Marr's new book, The Henson Case, arrived this morning, and I have just finished reading it. Extracts are printed in tomorrow's Good Weekend supplement in the Fairfax papers, and its publication will no doubt herald more debate around the issues of child protection, freedom of expression, art and Bill Henson.

One can hope for sensible debate in the midst of the heat. I always do. In the meantime, I recommend Marr's book for its clear, dispassionate analysis of how this great national uproar unfolded. It's mandatory reading for anyone who seeks to discern the facts amid the fuss.

Robert Musil (1880-1942), the great German novelist and intellectual, observed once that if there was to be real social change of any kind, what was required more than anything else was not idealists nor intellectuals, but managers: those who knew the nuts and bolts of creating and maintaining organisations, and understood how to change organisational structures.

It's a view that is not exactly popular among artists, and sometimes for good reason: a dismaying large proportion of the hard-won arts dollar goes, not into making art, but into paying administrators. But nevertheless, there is a great deal of sane wisdom in Musil's observation. One example close to hand is the Malthouse Theatre, the fortunes of which were turned around by a radical corporate restructure. The artistic shift was simply not possible without the remaking of the relationships within the organisation, from the Board down to the bar staff.

One of the most useful weapons in an artist's survival arsenal is a practical understanding of how cultural policy and funding work, not from the narrow view of a practitioner applying cap-in-hand for the advantage of his or her project or organisation, but from the wider perspective of the place of culture in political and financial economies. This understanding is often rare among artists, not least because practitioners are too busy practising to have the time to read government reports. I find all this stuff fascinating, but I quite understand why it might make the eyes of others glaze over. But one simple way to glean some understanding is to subscribe to Currency House's Platform Papers, which regularly publishes overviews of public arts policy.

Getting Heard: Achieving an effective arts advocacy, released yesterday, is a stimulating and pragmatic analysis by Chris Puplick of the way Australian arts funding works. In particular, he examines, from his various experience as a politician, Australia Council Board member and Chair of various arts organisations, how Australian culture depends crucially upon the "kindness of strangers": that is, how policy has been driven by the interest of influential individuals, rather than by any broad-based policy.

As Ms TN gloomily noted in the Guardian after the election, arts patronage is not an exclusive policy of the Left. In fact, the arts have often done better under Liberal Governments than under Labor, and there's no reason to believe that the election of a Labor Government means better times for the arts. And one of Puplick's major points is that good arts advocacy ought to be non-partisan.

He also notes the lack of a peak body for the arts, a major problem in this country, since it means that instead we have a bunch of rival bodies squabbling for their share of the pie, rather than looking at the bigger picture and arguing for a better pie. I thought that the 2020 Summit might herald a change in this - the single most valuable part of the exercise was how a lot of people from differing disciplines were brought together and discovered that they had a lot of concerns in common, both within the arts community and outside it.

Puplick makes some valid (and not so valid) critiques about the 2020 Creative Stream. He discusses the way facilitating directed the conversation, and how this caused a mass rebellion, but doesn't take into account how this same facilitation distorted what was reported. For instance, he says one of the Summit's most disappointing aspects was its "deafening silence" on the topic of "soft diplomacy", or using the arts as other countries do as a key part of international diplomacy. This was in fact a topic to which I was assigned with people like David Throsby and Rupert Myer, and our group came up with at least half a dozen recommendations, including the reinstatement of the DFAT touring fund that the Rudd Government axed and the beefing up of the presently inadequate cultural arms at our embassies, several of them "cost-neutral" (as instructed). * But there we go.

Aside from the Bill Henson fracas and the much publicised 2020 letter - the subject, incidentally, of a new book by David Marr, The Henson Case, which is due for imminent release - the possibility of a group which speaks for all cultural interests has not materialised. For which I, for one, am sorry. Puplick could have acknowledged too, in criticising Cate Blanchett for being "partisan", that she was the single international movie star who signed the letter, ensuring that it hit the headlines and letting herself in for a lot of wingnut abuse. It's an act which perhaps makes her partisanship slightly more principled and complex. But enough of 2020.

As Puplick points out, one problem with the lack of a peak body is how culture gets hived off as separate from the rest of society, apparently blind to the needs of, say, hospitals or schools, which contributes to the perceptions of the arts community as an out-of-touch elite. This is a strong, if erroneous, perception which artists are very slack about addressing. (Not that media coverage like this helps; let's face it, there's not a lot of interest in the non-arts media in cultural affairs, unless they involve naked girls, scandals or controversial curmudgeons). And he suggests that we are still stuck in the old ways of arguing, instead of embracing the model of the "creative economy". (I'm not sure that's entirely true - the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, is certainly driving that rhetoric).

In any case, Puplick's view of how arts funding works here, even if it makes Australia sound dismayingly like a local parish, is a very clear and useful document. It's full of need-to-know information, including a list of the major public inquiries into the arts that have mostly shaped Australian cultural policy. It's well worth a read.

Watch out too for news of an upcoming forum at the Malthouse on November 10, when Chris Puplick will be here to discuss his paper.

* I checked the Final Report of the 2020 Summit (available since May) and found the relevant bit on "Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy", which follows for anyone interested:

The group discussing soft power and cultural diplomacy was asked to identify strategies whereby Australia could project ‘soft power’ internationally through cultural and other creative endeavours. The concept of ‘soft power’, as enunciated by Joe Nye, was discussed and its elements enumerated—such as arts and cultural exchange, promotion of Australian ideas, and media and other people-to-people contacts. Better projection of Australia’s creativity and cultural strength should augment Australia’s international credibility and influence. There would be domestic benefits within Australia because such a strategy would send to Australians a strong message about the nation’s values, achievements and confidence.

Indigenous culture was acknowledged as especially relevant—indeed, ‘central’ to international promotion of Australian culture given its distinctiveness, quality, high impact, international appeal, and importance to Australian identity. It was emphasised that it was ‘hard to curate a national vision’ or to choose the themes for promotion internationally. Australia’s international image and engagement was a composite picture, influenced by many factors. There was some criticism of the government’s decision to cut the funding provided to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for its international touring and other cultural programs, and there was a call for more cultural attaches to be placed in Australian diplomatic missions and consolidation of resources allocated across various departments and agencies. (Italics mine).

The group endorsed the value of cultural exchanges and residencies such as those arranged by Asialink, noting the importance of casting the net widely to include relevant institutions such as universities in these programs. There was discussion of the role of arts festivals in Australia and overseas in developing productive international links between Australia’s creative community and international counterparts.

The economic dimensions of international cultural promotion were canvassed. One speaker highlighted the export potential of Australian culture, arguing that other economic activity often followed cultural connections overseas. Another participant raised the challenges faced by Australian writers given the continuing British dominance of the international book-publishing market by virtue of its possession of British and Commonwealth rights from US publishers. Globalisation was seen as raising other challenges, such as displacement of Australian cultural activity by international products and other influences. Others saw new opportunities for outward looking engagement in a global domain. The key was to strike the right balance between national and local on one hand and international on the other.

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.