Death cultivates visibility...

The image does not reflect reality, but rather, the spectacular end of all reality.

To see, means to die; to watch, dying.

Wind and sand revel in worsting the eye, making it cry.

Yellowed with age, the image yields only nostalgia: image of a lost image.

The Line of the Horizon, Edmond Jabès

Contemporary life, says choreographer Akram Khan in a note in the program, is pulled along by horizontal forces: we sacrifice depth and height for breadth. And this is precisely my dilemma with Khan's extraordinary dance work, Vertical Road: I would like to spend a few days thinking about it, but simply don't have the time it deserves. This, for all its physical excitement, is a deeply contemplative work: a rich hour of dance that explores the other axis, the still point of the turning world where height and depth become manifest.


The design is absolutely simple, and consists of a series of revelations. When we enter the theatre, the stage is hidden by a black curtain that slowly draws back to reveal a bare space. A flexible transluscent membrane divides the space, with perhaps a third of the stage hidden behind it. A group of figures is folded in a semicircle near the screen, unmoving: they are dressed in white unisex costumes, a tunic over trousers, recalling the linens of the dead, perhaps, or the robes of a Sufi devotee.

There is a dim figure behind the screen, limned by a golden light, but we cannot see him clearly: he reaches forward and touches the screen, and his hand is suddenly clearly outlined, although the rest of his body remains blurred. We watch his hand as it dips and weaves, inscribing something on the screen: we can see the pressure of his finger, but the text is invisible. "The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on," as Edward Fitzgerald says in his sumptuous translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The lights black out: and when they rise again, the membrane is opaque: we are in the material world, cut off from the divine.

The rest of Vertical Road is a series of approaches to the divine, a struggle between the earthy weight of the human body and its desire for flight. Khan's seven dancers enact possession, desire, fear, power: most of all, a sense of possession, as if an angel inhabits the body, violent and desirous, and just as suddenly leaves, the dancer standing puzzled and alone, his hands empty. The movement whirls out of a catatonic stillness (the dancers can be picked up and put down like pieces of furniture) into ectastic states. spinning like - but not exactly like - Sufi dervishes. The axis of the spin wobbles: the dancers might cartwheel in strange, insect-like formations diagonally across the stage, or dislodge into a sudden, disconcerting disharmony.

Sufism, the most poetic of all religions, is a continuous echo through this dance: the immanence explored here is mystic, the promise of a personal understanding of the divine. There is a constant dialogue of the text in tension with the body: the word - represented by seven tablets, just as there are seven dancers - is placed in ascetic contrast with the body. At one point, two lovers writhe across the stage, tumbling over and over, while a solitary dancer sits still with the tablets, posed in contemplation.


This apparent dichotomy is not straightforward: one of the great paradoxes in mystic writings is their erotic nature, how the most religious experiences, which struggle at the very limits of the possibilities of human expression, emerge as love poems and in metaphors of sensual desire: the poetry St John of the Cross or Rumi, or the visions of Hildegard von Bingen or the love mysticism of St Bernard of Clarivaux. The more ecstatic the body, the more presently it insists: a contradiction Khan's choreography perfectly expresses.

The movement is thrilling. It expresses the impulse to flight - the bodies of the dancers sometimes seem to lift of their own accord, rising out of their material limitations. In one final, beautiful scene, the dancer left alone on the stage wriggles and turns as if his shoulders are itching, as if he is sprouting wings from his shoulder blades, and for a moment, as his writhing becomes more violent, it is almost as if the wings are there. Equally, the movement makes us aware of the weight of bodies, of their material density, as they fall, smack, on the stage, or crawl haltingly towards a moment of death.

The dance is driven by an incredible score by Nitin Sawhney. It opens with the sound of wind: then there begins an insistent, throbbing pulse, a drumbeat that gets into the blood like fever, which itself moves the dancers, so all seven seem to be pulsing as one body. This retreats into a play of soaring voices backed by a menacing electronic groan, that rise up out of silences in which we can only hear the dancers gasping for air. The score is at once beautiful and terrifying, like the angelic intelligences it invokes.


This is the sort of work which invites the audience to make its own narratives. I am not religious, and certainly do not believe in life after death; yet I find these invocations of the divine deeply powerful. It's a function, maybe, of their stern beauty, which exists in their hesitations and doubts and refusals, as much as in the beautiful completion of particular gestures. I guess such works - written or performed - summon within me an involuntary faith in the immanent, rather than the transcendent: in the possibility held within each consciousness, that is its own sacredness, and which reflects or reveals the sacredness of both the animate and inanimate world.

In its realisation of the sacred, Vertical Road reminded me strongly of Bangarra's Of Earth and Sky, which I saw a couple of weeks ago. And also, in the beautiful tact of its expressing what cannot be expressed, of Bill Viola's Fire Woman and Tristran's Ascension, which I saw the night before, arriving at a little church in Parkville on a wet Monday night to find other devotees clustering in the porch, as if we were all members of a secret cult. The only proper response to any of these works is, in fact, a poem: but for the moment, these words will have to do.

Pictures: Vertical Road by Akram Khan. Photos: Carla Gottgens

Vertical Road, directed and choreographed by Akram Khan, composed by Nitin Sawhney. Lighting Design by Jesper Kongshaug, costumes by Kimie Nakano, set conceived by Akram Khan, Jesper Kongshaug and Kimie Nakano. Material devised & performed by Eulalia Ayguade Farro, Konstadina Efthymiadou, Salah El Brogy, Ahmed Khemis,Young Jin Kim, Yen-Ching Lin, Andrej Petrovic and Paul Zivkovich. Akram Khan Company, Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, until October 23.

Now I'm facing Melbourne Festival Week #3: and I confess that my feathers are a little bedraggled, my tail and whiskers a little less than perky. Since the beginning of September, when I attended the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, life has been as tightly packed as a spiral erbium-doped waveguide amplifier; and believe me, that's tightly packed. If all the words I've written in the past six weeks had been devoted to a novel, I'd have written at least Death In Venice or The Leopard by now. (This is why I have these recurring nightmares of finding myself on my death bed with a list of all the great books I never wrote scrolling across the inside of my eyelids - but that's another plaint.)


Week #2 began benignly last Tuesday with Jack Charles V. The Crown, a genuinely feel-good show in which Indigneous performer Jack Charles tells his own story. In 2008, Charles was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Bastardy, which frankly examined his drug addiction and thievery. On the evidence of Jack Charles v The Crown, which functions as a kind of theatrical sequel, Bastardy changed Charles’s life, by giving him a chance to see objectively what it was, and opening him to a new public. Charles's frankly expressed sense of his own mortality and his plain desire to redeem his life - he has been clean now for six years - is one of the most moving moments of this show.

The show is essentially Charles’s plea to have his criminal record expunged. The second half is a theatricalisation of an address to the High Court, with the first providing biographical context. Strung together with songs, some nifty audio-visuals and a tight band, it makes a well-crafted piece of theatrical cabaret. It opens with a long voice-over, during which we watch Charles skilfully throwing a clay pot on a wheel, which generates all the absorption of watching a craftsman at work. At the centre of this show is the potent metaphor of clay - as an image of the malleability of the human soul, its ability to be turned towards good or ill, and especially to demonstrate the sensuous - even erotic - thrill of making.

Co-written by Charles and John Romeril and directed by Rachael Maza Long, this show literally embodies a significant slice of theatrical and social history. John Romeril - author of the Australian classic play The Floating World - has worked in Australian theatre for more than four decades, and was a founding member and leading light of the Australian Performing Group, which revolutionised Australian theatre through the 1970s. Rachael Maza Long is the daughter of playwright and actor Bob Maza, who was a driving force behind Indigenous theatre in the 1970s, and was also a prominent activist. Maza Long has had a distinguished career as actor and performer, and is the artistic director of Ilbijerri Theatre Company, the longest running indigenous company in Australia and the only one in Victoria.

And Jack Charles? He's social and theatrical history in person. Born during World War 2, he was taken from his mother at six months and raised in boys' homes in the suburbs of Melbourne, before embarking on a life of drug addiction and petty crime that saw him spend nearly half his life behind bars. Early in the show, Charles shows some photographs of himself, aged perhaps nine: a sweet-faced, luminous boy, notably the only dark-skinned child in the picture. The show is in part a simply biography, showing without self-pity how the mechanisms of racism and institutionalism (like many others, he was abused in the boys' homes) shaped this young boy's life.

Charles's story is the classic story of Aboriginal deracination: he was brought up in total ignorance of his own culture and family, and didn't even know that he had 12 siblings until he was an adult. When he first met his relatives, who lived in inner-city Fitzroy, he was dreadfully punished by his foster family, who were obviously terrified he might return to his black roots and shame them all. The psychic effects of his treatment are left to our imagination: we don't need to join many dots to see how poverty, addiction and petty crime emerge from a cultural vacuum that amounts to an erasure of oneself. It's a story that's been told again and again, and not only in the Stolen Generation narratives: the stories of Native Americans, for example, are horrifically similar.

Yet shot through this is another parallel story, that of the performer and maker: the Elder who founded the first Aboriginal theatre company, Nindethana, and who has worked major Australian stages and acted in some iconic films. For all the weight of the story, this is a light-hearted, even joyous, show, sharply directed by Maza Long. Nigel Maclean's musical direction drives the rhythms under the monologues, keeping things moving and tight. Even opening night uncertainties and the odd bit of prompting didn’t dampen the charm of this show, which is an open-hearted crowd-pleaser.


Adapting for Distortion & Haptic are two dances by Japanese dancer and choreographer Hiroaki Umeda that combine some electronic wizardry with a bit of stylised hiphop derived dance. It is almost at the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum to Jack Charles v. The Crown, a show where presence and heart is everything. Here, the body is an absence in the world of electronic signals, a shadow that interrupts the white noise of technology.

It certainly has its moments: Umeda vanishing altogether into shadows in Haptic as colours pulse on the stage; startling images of an absent body that paradoxically is stubbornly, even subversively there in Adapting for Distortion. Yet I couldn't help feeling that I had seen all this before, even if I haven't; I know that others have been talking about Chunky Move's Mortal Engine, which similarly (and more interestingly) puts the human body in uneasy dialogue with technology, but I'd rather think of Chunky Move's exquisitely satisfying solo piece Glow. which has rather more in common with Umeda's ambitions. Umeda's choreographic and visual vocabulary seems limited in comparison: I found myself feeling that the dance was merely repeating its tropes, rather than deepening their meanings. And so, despite their shortness, felt myself becoming a little bored.

Pictures: Top: Jack Charles. Photo: Steven Rhall; bottom, Hiraoki Umeda in Adapting for Distortion. Photo: Shin Yamagata

Jack Charles V. The Crown, by Jack Charles and John Romeril, directed by Rachael Maza Long. Design by Emily Barrie, lighting by Danny ettingill, music direction Nigel MacLean. Performed by Jack Charles, with music performed by Nigel MacLean, Phil Collings and Mal Beveridge. Ilbijerri Theatre Company @ Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre (closed). Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, March 30 to April 17.

Adapting for Distortion/Haptic, created and performed by Hiroaki Umeda. Sound by S20, images by S20 and Betrand Baudry. Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse. Closed.

This inertia of things is enough to drive one literally insane.
Molloy, Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is famously one of the most recondite of writers, especially in speaking about his own work. Yet, in the one of paradoxes of modern literature, his work has spawned millions of words of scholarly exegesis. I’d swap much of this commentary for this performance by Conor Lovett: his bitterly lucid performance of extracts from Beckett’s trilogy of novels – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable – tells you everything you need to know about Beckett, that isn’t said by Beckett himself.


Lovett’s performance reveals Beckett’s humility, that ironic compassion and obdurate, sly humour. There isn’t a trace of vanity in these cruelly comic narratives, built precariously before our eyes “to pass the time”. Lovett and his director, Judy Hegarty Lovett, wisely don’t attempt to summarise all the novels into what is already a marathon (three and a half hour) performance. Instead, they select a few passages from each work and structure the evening as a fragmentary progression. For those unfamiliar with the trilogy, it's an excellent introduction; for those who have already read them, it's a joyous exploration of a work that remains as freshly challenging as when it was written.

Beckett's characters enact powerlessness. Most obviously, it's at the hands of mysteriously intentioned others: the bafflingly charitable, who insist their charity on the benighted whether they desire it or not; or those who insist some kind of claim of obligation, perhaps the accidental death of a dog; or the policeman who embodies an irrational social order. Just as often, they are at the mercy of things: bicycles, trousers, trees, their own bodies. Yet, with a very human irrationality, if Beckett's characters have power of their own, they will exert it on others, and their actions are as cruel and absurd as those they suffer (less evident perhaps in this performance, than in the novels).

For Molloy and Malone, these encounters are merely symptoms of a brutal interior impotence, in which the self is in an unavailing struggle with itself. They are fictions who know they are fictions: and the hand that structures the writing, the author himself, despairingly sees himself in their inadequate mirrors, a thing of language at the mercy of the imperative of living, a drive for survival that is no more than a primitive instinct for continuation. It's in the clarity of this vision - as disinterested as a natural historian's - that Beckett's compassion is most evident.

Most of all, these characters are alone, in a wasteland bounded by the limits of their skulls. Through the three books the fictions narrow and focus, until the nameless protagonist of The Unnameable begins to grapple with the act of speech itself, tormentedly unsure whether he is saying the words or whether the language is saying him, his consciousness nothing but a series of predestined patterns in which individual choice is nothing but a fragile illusion. "Hearing nothing, I am nonetheless a prey to communication. And I speak of voices! After all, why not, as long as one knows it's untrue..."

The chief virtue of Lovett’s performance is how he embodies the struggles of Beckett’s absurd and tragic characters, in their struggle to exist and to remember; most of all, in their struggle out of silence, towards speaking. Dressed in dark clothes that change subtly for each recitation, he emerges from the audience for both Molloy and Malone Dies, as if to emphasise that these stories do not concern themselves with those who live in the limelight, but with more ordinary, anonymous lives. Speaking in a soft Cork accent, Lovett’s white face and fluttering hands articulate the cruel intelligence and surprisingly gentle ironies that animate the writing. Perhaps the performance is most powerful in its silences, which are impeccably timed, permitting the implications of what has been heard to flower vividly in the mind.

The staging is pleasingly bare. For the first two, a white circle of light snaps open on a huge, naked stage. We contemplate the light for some moments, until Lovett emerges from the audience and onto the stage. The Unnamable is staged in a narrowly angled blade of light that throws a monstrous shadow on the wall behind Lovett, and is more sober, more painful, than the preceding two. I find it hard to judge this last one: a migraine of titanic proportions clamped down on my skull, making being present at this performance a real struggle. Despite this, Lovett kept my attention, and somehow the physical pain seemed strangely appropriate for witnessing this anguished conflict with language and consciousness. Perhaps it was Beckett playing a final, mordant joke.

A shorter version of this review is in today's Australian.

Picture: Conor Lovett as Malone. Picture: Dylan Vaughan

The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett, writings selected by Colin Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, performed by Conor Lovett. Gare St Lazare Players Ireland. Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. October 15.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2007, Raimondo and Adriano Cortese's company Ranters had an independent hit with their production Holiday, which saw a return season at the Malthouse the following year. Featuring Ranters regulars Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt, Holiday was an apparently artless construction of inconsequential conversations between strangers at a resort, punctuated by some beautiful baroque singing. Absurd and gently comic, it opened up the vulnerabilities and innocence of its characters, leaving you with a mysterious buoyancy and joy.


Since then, Ranters have further explored the idea of the inconsequential through different scenarios. Importing Beth Buchanan into their ensemble, they produced Affection at the Arts Centre's Black Box, which followed the conversations of friends in a lounge room. I thought this show exposed the perils of this kind of theatre, which walks a fiendishly narrow line between an artful transparency and the merely banal. Is it enough to frame the apparently "ordinary" to make it art?

Their much-anticipated show Intimacy, Malthouse Theatre's festival offering, explores the same conceit again, but does little to deepen the inquiry. Here the narrator (Lum) approaches strangers in St Kilda (Buchanan and Moffatt) and asks if they would like to talk. "A surprising number," he reports, "said yes." What follows is a kind of documentary relation of these conversations, presented as theatre.

Anna Tregloan's set is a consciously theatrical, abstract space: the stage is naked except for several large rocks, like those you might find on a foreshore, its walls surrounded by plain blue curtains. St Kilda itself is evoked by an introductory video and a burst of ambient sound. Then there's a close-up of Moffatt's face, labelled "Russell, 62", and the first conversation, with a man who is a roller-coaster geek, gets under way. The conversations are punctuated by longish silences, and the odd spot at a karaoke bar, where one or other of the performers shows how badly they can sing. (Though anyone who has seen Holiday won't believe it). And there are a couple of deliberately amateurish dance routines.

There's no doubt Intimacy makes affable and often funny theatre, but it seldom reaches beyond what has become a comfortable convention. It's coyly self-conscious: the silences are mannered pauses, rather than spaces in which unspoken desires and longings anxiously reveal themselves, and the conversations are too often consciously shaped to reflect back on the work itself. This isn't, in itself, a problem: but I did have a quote from Endgame echoing in my ears through the play: "We're not beginning to... to... mean something?"

I was too aware of a hand at work directing its meanings, which mitigates the airiness that made Holiday such a beautiful piece. David Franzke's maddening sound design, which seems to be at once everywhere and nowhere, flooding all available space while somehow flattening out its texture, contributes to this sense of dilution. But it might also be the premise of the show, which depends on an interlocutory framework. What do people actually reveal about themselves in interviews with strangers? The "intimacy" of its title describes the consequenceless trust between people who will probably not meet again, and the play itself seems to be about people who are unable, for whatever reason, to form close relationships. Which is to say, it's not about intimacy at all, but its avoidance.

There is a point to exploring what people might be, if released from the prisons of the selves that others project onto them: but I seldom felt that I was watching more than the construction of another self, the artful construction of performance. What's lacking is difficult to articulate. This piece evades the nagging loneliness that seems to exist in its centre, and at the same time fails to achieve the delicate tact of Holiday. I suspect that on both counts, this is because it gives its audience little space in which their understanding might bloom: paradoxically, it's too controlled, too theatrical, to maintain its own anti-theatrical conceit. A comparison might be with an artist of the ordinary like Jérôme Bel, who balances with superb restraint the contradictions of apparently spontaneous performance.

Perhaps this emotional avoidance is the point. As I said, it's affable theatre, generating a lot of laughs: but I don't think that's enough. The tightrope of risk seems to me to be carefully chalked on the ground here, rather than airily stretching over our heads. Painless, but disappointing: and who wants theatre to be painless?

*


Robert Lepage’s The Blue Dragon, a continuation of his mid-1980s work The Dragon Trilogy, is also naggingly disappointing. As a piece of visual theatre, there's no doubt that it’s an achievement: with the help of a huge crew (who came out for some deserved applause at the end), Lepage and his set designer Michel Gauthier create a kind of theatrical film, complete with credits.

The design works in a two-dimensional plane: there is no perspective of depth, a sense that is highlighted by the clever interactive projections. Like the cartoon frames in a graphic novel, the set is divided horizontally and vertically into eight frames, which can unite into a single image or be isolated into different cells, as in a series of images towards the end. This generates some completely gorgeous moments: snow falling on a black screen; tiny Miyazake-style trains crawling along the stage before a dark industrial cityscape; an airport departure lounge; a train station: most frequently, the hero's double-storey apartment in the old quarters of Shanghai.

For all its graphic influences, this show generates a naturalism that is more usually associated with film. The play itself, co-written by Lepage and Marie Michaud, seems like a romcom movie: take away the technical wizardry, and what's left is pure soap opera. The story revisits Pierre LaMontagne (Henri Chasse), the protagonist of The Dragon Trilogy. Now 50 years old, he has abandoned his own art in favour of running a gallery in Shanghai. He is sleeping with one of his protegees, Xiao Ling (Tai Wei Foo), a young artist he discovered in Hong Kong when she gave him the blue dragon tattoo of the title, and who specialises in self-portraits taken on her mobile phone, a supposedly revolutionary aesthetic of individualism.

The story begins when his ex-wife Claire Forêt (Marie Michaud) turns up. A late-40s alcoholic advertising executive, she is visiting China to adopt a baby. Pierre attempts, unsuccessfully at first, to rekindle their relationship: he is at a loss, belonging neither in Quebec nor in China, and hopes that Claire will solve his problems for him. Claire returns from the adoption agency without the child, and develops a relationship with Xiao Ling, not knowing that she is Pierre's lover. And then Xiao Ling falls pregnant... so will Claire adopt this baby instead?

And so it goes on, narrating a story that is bafflingly trite. Xiao Ling - the desirable, sexual young woman - begins to represent China itself, even though the two western characters do not, in anything like the same schematic fashion, represent the West. This is partly because her character is so secondary to the others, but it is also a sense reinforced by Lepage himself. In his director's note in the program, he suggests that The Blue Dragon is about "our contradictory feelings about China today", our fears that it is a "gigantic whale about to swallow us whole", a "golem that will crush us all". It's hard to relate these statements to the work itself, which is really about a love triangle with exotic furnishings and with a baby thrown in to make things interesting: but it does highlight a surprising Orientalism.

The Blue Dragon in fact tells us very little about China, which figures mostly as exotic backdrop to the relationship between the two aging and lonely French Canadians, who are attempting to deal with their lost idealism and interior emptiness. The few moments of real feeling are between these two. Despite a vivid performance by Tai Wei Foo, Xiao Ling is little more than a catalyst for their relationship, a sense that becomes increasingly clear when you begin to wonder about the gaping holes in the narrative around Xaio Ling - why does she keep the baby, when she clearly doesn't want it, and abortion is so easy to arrange? If she does want it, why does she so easily give it away? And so on.

In short, The Blue Dragon seems like a nicer, updated version of Madame Butterfly, which ends with everyone smiling: this time, the West gets to keep the baby. Unambiguously gorgeous to look at, but in the end, troublingly empty.

A version of this review was published in yesterday's Australian.

Pictures: Top: Beth Buchanan and Paul Lum in Intimacy, Malthouse. Photo: Jeff Busby. Bottom: Tai Wei Foo in The Blue Dragon. Photo: Louise Leblanc.

Intimacy, devised and directed by Adriano Cortese, text by Raimondo Cortese. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, lighting by Niklas Pajanti, sound design by David Franzke. With Beth Buchanan, Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt. Malthouse Theatre, @ the Beckett, until October 23.

The Blue Dragon, by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud, translated by Michael Mackenzie, directed by Robert Lepage. Set design Michel Gauthier, sound design by Jean-Sebastien Cote, choreographer Tai Wei Foo. With Henri Chasse, Marie Michaud and Tai Wei Foo. Ex Machina. Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 12.

Born in 1952, Heiner Goebbels is a difficult artist to categorise, although it's probably most accurate to call him a composer. He has written music for film, theatre and dance, as well as for various contemporary ensembles, including Ensemble Modern and Ensemble Intercontemporain. But he most often composes in three dimensions, and since the mid-1980s, when he made audio plays based on texts by Heiner Müller, has worked consistently in the theatre. Since 1999, he has been a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen: an institution that focuses on scientific and artistic research, and searches for the links between them.


Which is to say, Goebbels is a most interesting mind. His 2007 piece Stifters Dinge (Stifter's Things) is a little like entering that mind: it's a kind of dream about technology, culture and nature, a strangely celebratory lament for the natural world. Although the audience sits watching it from the auditorium in the conventional way, the experience is surprisingly immersive, gathering a meditative intensity as it evolves. A dynamic collage of sound and objects, text and music, it packs a considerable emotional punch.

Like many people in the English-speaking world, I hadn't heard of Adalbert Stifter, let alone read him (I am remedying this deficit at once). In Germany he is considered a major early 19th century Romantic novelist. He was admired by Thomas Mann and W.G. Sebald, and seems a clear precursor to writers such as Peter Handke. On the evidence of the extract in the show, the sensual precision of his prose seems to have much in common with the American essayist and observer of nature, Henry David Thoreau.

Here Stifter's careful attention to the natural world is placed next to a selection of other texts: a poem by William Burroughs; a speech by Malcolm X that predicts the end of Eurocentricism and the rise of Africa and Asia; indigenous songs from New Guinea and America; an interview with Claude Levi-Strauss, in which he confesses that he would prefer the company of his cat to Mozart. The whole piece seems saturated with Stifter's vision of the human being alone and isolated in the midst of the deadly beauty of the natural world, which itself recalls Caspar David Friedrich's vision of the sublime. And indeed, this show seems deeply Romantic: but it is a contemporary Romanticism in which the self has vanished, and which is fraught with a very contemporary anxiety, a very contemporary nostalgia.

The paintings Paolo Ucello's Night Hunt, and Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael's Swamp are also part of this theatrical collage. Ruisdale's Swamp transforms into a hallucinogenic, toxic landscape, while Night Hunt is revealed in details. The effect of this detritus of European culture - its music, its writing, its visual splendour - is an increasingly powerful sense of melancholy, of "fragments / shored against my ruin". Stifter's Dinge is an elegy, not only for the natural world, but for the beautiful things we made while we were destroying it.

Strictly speaking, it is automaton theatre, theatre made by machines without any sign of performers. This is hardly a new thing: Heron of Alexandria invented an ingenious device in the first century AD, in which a series of ropes and pulleys operated a ten minute play, complete with artificial thunder. Goebbel's machine has something of the same ingenious charm, but is vastly more complex. When we enter the theatre, it looks like the interior of some insane factory: forestage is dominated by three empty rectangular flatbeds, that look like distillation pools. Alongside these run sets of rails, and next to those are vaguely sinister rows of speakers on high stands, that stare at us like electronic eyes. To the right are three illuminated tanks, with large pipes leading to the flatbeds.

The two technicians appear to be finishing off the set, laying down railings on each side of the beds. Gradually the attention of the audience shifts, although people are still, quite comfortably, talking: it seems that this is the beginning of the show. The technicians then methodically sift what appears to be salt onto the three flatbeds. The lighting shifts, throwing sharp shadows, and quite suddenly we are looking at what appear to be aerial maps of an industrialised landscape, bisected with roads and covered with snow. Then, one by one, they turn the taps on the tanks, and black water slowly floods the landscapes. By now the audience's attention is riveted to the stage.

Screens begin to descend gradually from the flies, punctuated by a blindingly bright light from the back of the stage that turns on and off, like a miniature sun. The ripples of shadow and light from the water dazzle on the screens, which fall and rise in a slow, beautiful ballet of light and shadow, and it begins to feel like we are watching the rhythms of days and nights, a simulacra of the whole planet. Then, at last a voice speaks - Bill Paterson reading a passage from Stifter's novel, My Great Grandfather's Portfolio, a vivid (and disturbing) description of a snowscape which focuses, in particular, on its sounds.


At the back of the stage is a construction of mysterious objects that gradually reveals itself to be five pianos and several naked trees. The pianos are operated by some complex electronics as well as robotic arms. They are beautiful, ingenious, strange; I found myself watching them with the kind of fearful awe that can only be generated by human creations that seem to have their own lives, going beyond us.

At one point, in an image that was like a direct realisation of a scene from a Tarkovsky film, and which possessed the same astonishing beauty, the pianos poured out Bach's Italian Concerto in F Major while raindrops pattered onto the pools of water. In another, the whole backstage construction started moving imperceptibly towards us on silent rails. The pianos seemed to be played by ghosts, the keys depressing faster than human fingers could possibly manage, as they slowly came closer and closer. It was at once absurd, beautiful and unaccountably menacing.

Then the pianos paused, rattling their teeth, and began to retreat. Their retreat revealed the pools beneath them, which once again became aerial landscapes. This time we were placed high in the stratosphere, looking down on swirling cloudscapes of dry ice. By then, such was the meditative power of this work, I was content to observe the entire chemical reaction of dry ice transforming into gas, creating a complex and beautiful brownian motion both like and unlike mist or fog.

At the end of the show, after the applause, we are somehow invited to come and look at the stage. (Which is to say, I don't remember the actual invitation being given, but everyone took it). The beds of the pools, where the remaining chunks of dry ice are still giving off tiny puffs of smoke, are covered with what looks like handwriting. You can't see this unless you walk up close and look: it plays no part in the actual work. I think they are facsimiles of pages from the notebooks of Adalbert Stifter.

So many texts, meanings under meanings. As Stifter says in the show: "I had never seen a thing like this before". It's been haunting me for days.


*

I find Bill Viola's video art shattering: it is as if he slices open, precisely and mercilessly as a surgeon, the most protected, most painful part of my pysche. Even so, I was totally unprepared for The Raft, a video work of apparently transparent simplicity which somehow expresses all human sorrow. How does he do it?


The Raft is a direct reference to Théodore Géricault's famous Romantic painting, The Raft of the Medusa, which records a horrifying 1816 shipwreck, when the French naval frigate Méduse foundered off the coast of Mauritania. 147 people were set adrift on a raft, but after a fortnight of starvation, thirst, cannibalism and madness, only 15 survived. Géricault's painting is of the crucial moment of rescue: he paints the survivors at the nadir of catastrophe. Some are dead, partially eaten; others are dying. Some are waving to an unseen ship, shining with hope.

Using slow-motion video, Viola recreates this narrative of atrocity with devastating simplicity. Twenty people - different ages, different races, different classes - gather together in some indeterminate public space. It might be a railway station or a bus stop: in any case, it's a place where people wait for something to occur. They are all strangers, all differently dressed. Once they are gathered, and without warning, a giant jet of water hits them from the left. They reel: some fall, some brace themselves against it. Shortly afterwards, another comes from the right.

Their forms are obscured in a violent mist, flailing helplessly. You almost feel the shock when the water impacts on these bodies, its horrific weight and turbulence, the fragility and helplessness of human flesh. They can do nothing but endure the water: it has no thought for them. All difference is erased as they are all hurled into a horrible equality of crisis. Then, gradually, the water stops. Bit by bit, they pick themselves up. Some turn to others, try to help them. Two women embrace, holding each other as if to let go will cause them to fall into some abyss. In the centre an old woman lies on the floor where she has been thrown, and only slowly begins to move as hands touch her in inquiry.

I can't really explain why this work affects me so deeply. There is much art here - the flailing bodies in Viola's slow-motion are as graceful as the classical nudes in Géricault's painting, but here translated into a heightened sense of the ordinary that also makes them immediately familiar. Just as immediately, it recalls news images of catastrophe - the stunned survivors of the London Underground bombings, the floods of New Orleans. The score is complex and strange: there is the punishing rush of water, the elongated sounds of slowed down speech, but also a dog barking. Perhaps what is most moving is how it frames the artless - the tiniest involuntary gestures, here magnified and made epic. Maybe it is simply that The Raft is so nakedly exposing, both as a work of art and as an observation of people.

But there is also something excessive in it, something of Rilke's terrible angel: a sense of being violently seized by the inhuman:

For beauty is nothing
but this terrifying beginning, which astonishingly we endure,
and we admire it so because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.

All this, and then a gesture as everyday and heart-shaking as the touch of a hand. Seldom is simplicity this profound.

Pictures: Top and middle, Stifters Dinge. Photo: Mario del Curto. Bottom: Still from The Raft, Bill Viola.

Stifter's Dinge (Stifter's Things), concept, music and direction by Heiner Goebbels. Set design, lighting and video by Klaus Grunberg, music collaboration and programming by Hubert Machnik, sound design by Willi Bop. Merlyn Theatre @ Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne International Arts Festival. Until October 12.

The Raft, by Bill Viola. Executive producer, Kira Perov. Performers: Sheryl Arenson, Robin Bonaccorsi, Rocky Capella, Cathy Chang, Liisa Cohen, Tad Coughenour, Tom Ficke, James Ford, Michael Irby, Simon Karimian, John Kim, Tanya Little, Mike Martinez, Petro Martirosian, Jeff Mosley, Gladys Peters, Maria Victoria, Kaye Wade, Kim Weild, Ellis Williams. ACMI 2, until February 20, 2011.

The first few days of the Melbourne Festival have been a time of maximum input, with no time for outputting (aside from Twitter, which exists, as you know, outside time). I've seen five MIAF shows so far, and will be logging my reviews in the next few days. But because the season is so short I wanted to tell you of my highlight so far: Stifter's Dinge, Heiner Goebbel's miraculous automaton, which leaps from the writings of the German Romantic writer Adalbert Stifter. It's on at the Malthouse, and there are several showings before it closes on Tuesday. I'd be running for tickets. No YouTube clip can tell you what it's like to be there: it's not like anything I have seen. And I can't stop thinking about it.

Ms TN's second week of Fringe demonstrated her craft and guile in negotiating the program: I enjoyed all three shows. There were a couple of regrettable TN misses - I intended to see Uncle Semolina & Friends' mega one-night-only production of Peter and the Wolf at the Collingwood Underground Carpark, but the Australian sent me to the bling opening of Hairspray instead (print review here). And a temporary brainfreeze meant I turned up an hour late for Mothlight, a circus show that I'd been greatly anticipating (shows at the Fringe Hub start an hour earlier on Sundays - doh!) Any reports on these shows, or others worth noting, are most welcome. Also, keen theatrenauts should keep an eye on Neandellus, Capital Idea, Sometimes Melbourne and Cameron Woodhead's new blog, Behind the Critical Curtain, for more reviews of more Fringe events.


My Fringe blogging is now all done, but the Fringe proper continues until October 10. I'm attending From Somewhere Underneath, Part 2 at the Donkey Wheel tonight. But that, like the MTC's offering next week at the Melbourne Festival, Life Without Me, (written, for those few who don't know, by my husband Daniel Keene), will be a family affair: courtesy of Platform Youth Theatre, my son Josh, along with a number of other young artists, is making his writing/directing debut. Then the Melbourne International Arts Festival officially opens on Friday night, although I'll have already seen two MIAF shows by then. I'm looking forward to it: I missed most of last year's festival, Brett Sheehy's first, because I was unexpectedly awarded a Poetry Tour of the UK and Ireland. One shouldn't look a free overseas trip in the mouth, but I was a bit sorry about missing the fest. (Only a bit, mind.)

But now, without further ado: Notes On What Ms TN Saw At The Fringe, Part The Second:

Intimate Exposure

Intimate Exposure takes place in what is surely the most notable new space in Melbourne: The Substation in Newport. The Substation is a magnificent early 20th century industrial building, built in 1915 by Victoria Railways to convert electricity supply for Williamstown. After it closed in the 1960s it was derelict for years, until it was restored to become Hobsons Bay Community Arts Centre. Upstairs at present is the Fringe Furniture Exhibition (my favourite piece being a steampunk gentleman's valet). And downstairs, in the catacomb-like rooms which once housed the rotary converters, is Intimate Exposure: three short dances especially created in and for these spaces, punctuated by two dance films by Dianne Reid.

There's an organic feel to how the event is structured. The audience members wander downstairs to see Dianne Reid's film she sleeps, a brief meditation on chronic illness featuring Jaye Hayes, which is on a loop in one of the basement rooms. In our own time, we reassemble in the central corridor, and the crowd is then divided in two for for the first dance, Soft Targets [solos], danced and choreographed by Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Amelia McQueen. The audience is reunited for the next three dances: Carlee Mellow's Simmer, in another room; Dianne Reid's gorgeously lyrical film Magnificent Sadness (Luke Hickmott), in the corridor; and the final part of Soft Targets, a duet this time, with William Bilwa Costa manipulating the sound live.

As the live performers are all women, the dances made me especially aware of the female body: vulnerable, manipulated, assertive, comic. This is especially the case in Simmer: that which bubbles away beneath the surface. The dancers perform the soundscape, at first singing wordlessly, exploring their voices as instruments. The dance is a witty exploration of feminine inhibition: the dancers wear pink gumboots and strangely crocheted dresses that makes them seem to be parodies of femininity. They ask nervous questions of the audience without waiting for answers, and dancers Madelaine Krenek and Paula Lay end up shouting through plastic tubing into a paddling pool, literalising the piece's title, while Sarah Black's rebellious body neurotically articulates the rage beneath feminine obedience, until her apologetic smile or her tears no longer seem to be part of her face.

Tungall and McQueen's dances work specifically with the Substation spaces, focusing on the body's vulnerability in the graffitied shadows of the industrial brick walls. I thought their solo pieces more successful - McQueen writhing to a sinister heartbeat score in an enclosed space so small she can barely stand up, while we peer down a tunnel like voyeurs, or Tungall, her mouth covered by a strange crocheted mask that looks as if it were made of internal organs dyed in day-glo colours, retching as if her body were poisoned, before she plunges all of us into total darkness by switching off the light. Until October 9, Newport Substation.

The Event

John Clancy's meta-meta script, The Event, is given a spare and intelligent treatment by director Daniel Clarke and performer Nick Pelomis. It is, basically, theatre in the third person: the actor stands in the pool of light, and informs us that he, the actor, is standing in a pool of light, speaking words written by the author, and making gestures as rehearsed, in front of a bunch of strangers (us). Clancy's text is a smart and detailed deconstruction of a particular type of theatrical event. Because it is so smart, the pedant in me wants to point out that there are many kinds of theatrical events, employing or breaking different sets of conventions to those fondly satirised here, but it is only a minor point, since what Clancy's describing is the most conventional conventions.

I spent two days trying to remember what it reminded me of. For what it's worth, it reminded me of the clip below: Charlie Brooker taking the piss out of television news.



The Event could get a bit cute for its own good, but mainly stays a leap ahead of us. The most effective moments are those where the text cheats, leaping out of its meta-self-consciousness into sometimes quite moving meditations about contemporary life (that then snap back to reminding us that this is performance - haha, that wasn't me - a device technically known as "having one's cake and eating it").

But it all works: even though The Actor pauses at several points to tell us exactly how many minutes have passed, and how many more there are to go - a risky strategy, because it immediately makes the audience aware of time in a way that theatre seeks to defeat - it doesn't drag. Pelomis's performance is very likeable, making us intensely aware that, for all the skill and distancing techniques employed in the performance and the script, he is a living, breathing human being in the same space as us. Well worth a look, although I think this kind of theatre finishes where work like last year's Fringe hit Yuri Well begins. The Loft, Lithuanian Club, Fringe Hub, until October 9.

Dances with Worms

Which brings me to Dances with Worms - like Yuri Wells, a collaboration between Stuart Bowden and Benedict Hardie. I have no idea how to describe this one, without making it sound desperately unfunny and deeply infantile. The fact is that this show is very smart, and very funny indeed. But it is, perhaps, more than a little infantile: its scatalogical jokes and, most of all, its forlornly comic hero, Stuart, seem to place it in an adulthood that is crippled by nostalgia for its own past.

I don't think it was just Bowden's red velour dressing gown that made me think of Barry Humphries's Sandy Stone, a similarly lugubrious character nostalgically washed up on the edges of suburbia. When the audience enters, we see on stage an old-fashioned electric organ topped by an aspidastra pot plant, a large amplifier and a beige lounge chair on which is seated a worm (a long brown sausage with goggle eyes, glasses and black wool hair). Stuart emerges clutching two mugs, a skinny, slightly stooped, shy-looking man, and drops a kiss on the worm. Which he continues to embrace with increasing passion - until, with a start, he becomes aware of our gaze and stops, embarrassed. The worm, it turns out, is his wife; their relationship, we obliquely discover, is undergoing some kind of crisis.

In between, to the accompaniment of Stuart's ukelele, the odd skirl from the organ and some nifty sonic layering with a loop pedal, we are treated to some scatalogical and surreal fairytales and songs. They work just on the hilarious side of what would be otherwise searingly painful explorations of sexual humiliation. Performed with po-faced exactness by Bowden, it's worth the price of admission for its evocation of the Savannahs of Melton alone, let alone Bosley the Pencil's disastrous encounter with a lustful balloon. Highly recommended. Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, until October 9.

It's unlikely to be published anywhere: so here is the celebratory speech I wrote for last night's launch of Philip Salom's new collection of poetry, Keepers, now available from Puncher & Wattman.

I am honoured to be be asked to launch Philip’s new collection, Keepers. And as I‘ve read and reread it, I’ve been pondering how to describe it. What kind of book is this? It’s easy to praise, but far less easy to categorise. Reading it is entering another reality, a reality constructed of language that is as complex and ambiguous as those we inhabit. The conceit – a series of linked poems forming an implicit narrative about the staff and students of a School of Arts – is simple; but its execution belies this apparent simplicity. Here are some attempts at a description:

Keepers is a prodigious act of imagination and thought. It’s a work of poetic virtuosity that wickedly undoes its own virtuosity. It’s a witty, beautiful and moving series of reflection on art and artists that is itself a work of art, that enacts its own argument: “Art is a strangeness come to wake them”. It’s a work of fiction, creating in its slim 100 pages an entire world, populated by a cast of immediately memorable and recognisable characters. It’s a satire of contemporary academia and culture, sometimes stingingly funny, sometimes scathingly black, that exposes and mocks the “health and safety” culture that represses and marginalises the dangerous reaches of the imagination. It’s a memento mori, that reminds us, as the poet says in a meditation on the Japanese board game Go, that the “game of poetry is mortal / accretion”. Perhaps it is, in the end, an opera, a story of love and death.

The art school is like an aquarium, as Salom suggests at one point, or a zoo or a gallery, that becomes a burning glass for emotion: love, hatred, abjection, desire, envy, spite and, increasingly, sorrow. The Keepers of the title are, among others, the staff members in the school. “The students,” as it says in the poem "The Kept Ones", “do not feel kept, but of course they / are kept. Someone or something or some household / keeps them. The staff members keep and are paid to keep keeping.” The poems dance around all the senses of keeping and being kept – the sexual economics, as suggested in the leering lecturer, “his voice in her head like a hand on a thigh”, and the ancient sense too of artists as custodians of knowledge, keeping the flame. Both these meanings – and others – are kept continuously in motion through the book.

Perhaps inevitably, as I spend a ridiculous proportion of my waking life in the theatre, the first word that occurred to me in thinking of Keepers was “play”. Keepers offers some of the most playful language in contemporary Australian poetry: the book is a celebration of poetic forms, and each poem generates a sensually charged language of constant transformation. But it also calls up another sense. Keepers is a kind of theatre: its characters flicker across the darkened stage of the mind, melancholy, estranged, hungering, each poem a spotlight in which we uneasily enter, like voyeurs, their secret thoughts and shames. And here even props have voices: inanimate objects, like "The Printmaker’s Copper Plate", or the plastinated corpses of Gunther von Hagens, articulate their thoughts. Dead artists – Dmitri Shostakovich, Artemisia Gentileschi, Francis Webb, Eadweard Muyerbridge - rise and speak with the living. In a brilliant (and brilliantly funny) series of fantasy lectures, "Lectures They Never Had", ideas lift like acrobats from the page and perform themselves. Keepers is a theatre of hallucinatory memory, of a present haunted by the thickening past of a culture that stirs and breathes in an artificial environment.

The poet himself contains multitudes, but remains invisible, vanishing into his own language. Or does he? Underneath almost every poem is a contrapuntal footnote, ironic, vernacular, prosaic, supposedly extracted from the diary of a character called Alann Fish. Fish is the cleaner and general dogsbody at the art school, and a key character in the unfolding narrative of the poems. He works in the basement, the id of the institution, and is a keen flaneur and a obsessive player of Go. Go is a defining metaphor throughout this book, which introduces another sense of the word “play”: the game of art, the game of life, the game of language. Most of all, the game of poetry. It’s not surprising to learn that Alann Fish is himself a poet, and is planning to release a book.

“I think I am real,” says Fish early on in the story. In the circling narratives of the art school, Fish becomes the work’s emotional centre, the ironic counterpoint of silence to the institution’s voluble artifice. Of course, the more real Fish becomes, the more vertiginous his existence, the more we’re haunted by his inner emptiness. This may be, in the end, a book about loneliness: all of its characters are devastatingly alone, and none more than Fish. One of its more beautiful images is one of the final visions of Fish, unravelling in a soft riot of internal rhymes before a mistakenly kindly neighbour:

Sunlight took his hat off
for him, and doffed it, and the wind that loved
the lorikeets and dried them, blew his shocked
expression off. Only his hands lifted from him
a question that wasn’t a question and therefore
said nothing.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Keepers here, but will leave it to you to discover more of this book’s multiple pleasures for yourself. I recommend it unreservedly, and declare it launched

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of editing Cordite Poetry Magazine's Creative Commons issue. Now, for your further pleasure, the second part of the issue, Creative Commons Part II - the Remixes, is online. Also, I finally got around to writing an editorial about the whole exercise. It's been a fascinating project.

And if you're in the mood for more poems, come along tomorrow night to Carlton, where I will be launching Philip Salom's new poetry collection, Keepers, out from Puncher and Wattman Poetry. Tuesday October 5, 6pm, Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall. All invited.