Brett Dean, artistic director of the Australian National Academy of Music, passionately defends the academy in today's Age against the funding cuts that presently mean it will cease operations forthwith. He's backed by Richard Tognetti, head of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, who today condemned the cuts and called for Arts Minister and Chief Axe Peter Garrett to rethink the decision (Garrett says, in his usual decisive way, that "talks are continuing").

The ANAM receives $2.5 million a year, which trains 55 elite musicians on a model derived from the Australian Institute of Sport (and with, Dean notes with subdued irony, one fifteenth the AIS budget). According to Dean, this training stems the otherwise inevitable flow of ambitious Australian talent to the US and Europe. It's peanuts in the larger scheme - especially when you think of Scotch College's government grant of $4.3 million, which helped it to post a profit of $12.7 million last year. If only the ANAM owned a cricket pitch that a freeway authority needed to buy...

Meanwhile, let me point you to a fascinating post by Guardian critic Lyn Gardner, which discusses theatre created with young people - among other works, Tim Etchell's That Night Follows Day (seen here last week). It's prompted some deeply interesting responses from the theatre makers themselves that are well worth reading.

The Malthouse Theatre launched its first 2009 season last night, with a bunch of kilted bagpipers doing the full skirl. The pipers cued enough mysterious references to Scotland for a conference on Macbeth, but nary an explanation passed the tight lips of Michael Kantor (or his henchmen or women). However, there's a hint in Robin Usher's Age preview today that these vague allusions might have had something to do with the Edinburgh Festival and a possible interest in the big show of the season, Optimism, an adaptation by Tom Wright of Voltaire's Candide, to be directed by Kantor.

Whatever the case, we got to admire the Highlanders' kilts and spectacular socks. And sporrans, of course. But on with the season, which looks good even through the fog of hangover.

First cab off the rank is Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, a play often cited as the beginning of modern theatre, in an Icelandic adaptation that premiered at the Barbican Centre. This version features songs by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, which for this production will be performed by Tim Rogers. There's a new collaboration from Lally Katz and Chris Kohn, a step back to Melbourne's vaudeville history called Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd, which stars Julia Zemiro, and a new play, A Commercial Farce, from Peter Houghton (who can be presently seen in The Eleventh Hour's brilliant festival production of Endgame).

Acclaimed British actor Kathryn Hunter is performing Kafka's Monkey, her adaptation of Kafka's short story, A Report to An Academy. And the Malthouse is also remounting the Fringe hit, Adam Cass's I Love You, Bro, which is a show I missed but which prompted a lot of enthusiastic emails to the TN inbox.

In case people think the Malthouse is getting all logocentric, there's also a showcase of our lively contemporary dance scene, Dance Massive, which is an exciting initiative that formalises the company's continuing connection to dance. It kicks off with Chunky Move's Mortal Engine, which follows on from the exquisite Glow to explore the choreographic possibilities of responsive technology, and Brisbane-based Splintergroup's Lawn. And Rogue, a season in the Tower theatre, showcases the work of some of our most promising new dance talent.

Changing the subject, sort of, I was wondering whether to respond to Peter Craven's odd attack (or was it?) in yesterday's Age on the Melbourne Festival and all things Avant Garde. Under the headline "Avant Garde is all very well, but what about the rest of us?", he reprises his tired argument about how "post-Edmunds" Melbourne ought to get all mainstream. Edmunds, he says, ignored the great writers. Aside from Shakespeare, of course. And they should have stars, like Patti Smith. Oh, they did have Patti Smith. And the Romeo and Juliet was pretty good, actually. Where were the Young Turks? (Aren't Young Turks by definition Avant Garde? - Ed) Or Jack Hibberd or Hannie Rayson? But still, mumble mumble mumble... Actually I couldn't make head or tail of it. Which makes it hard to take issue with.

www.malthousetheatre.com.au

The Melbourne Festival this year had a surreal edge. As capitalism crashed about our ears amid headlines of financial doom, it had the air of a dance at the edge of the abyss. I kept feeling that we were standing in the etched light of an oncoming storm, with long shadows streaming behind us. A little voice kept saying to me, This won’t happen again.

As we all know, it’s the last of Kristy Edmunds’ festivals, and boy, has she given us a party for the past four years. From 2005, her first festival and still one of the best this city has seen, she’s changed the main stage aspirations of this city. People started going to events with intense curiosity and emerging to have fierce arguments (I still remember the couple having a stand-up fight over asylum seekers after Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail). They were festivals of passion, excitement, artistic depth and, often, controversy. Her programming attracted some of the most vicious and sustained media attacks I’ve seen on an artistic director - first for being too “elitist” and then – when it was clear people were going – for being too “populist”.

Despite the attacks, she steadily continued to follow her nose, attracting a younger demographic with programming that reached into both popular culture and high art, and which unobstrusively demonstrated the humane and complex politics of art. Most importantly of all, she brought us great work, from Peter Brook to Jérôme Bel, from Romeo Castellucci to Diamanda Galas. This year has been no different: looking over what I’ve seen, the quality has been just as high. Possibly higher: festivals can be cut in an infinity of ways, but I’ve had a brilliant time. As in previous years, there have been some disappointments. But what would a festival be without something to argue about?

Over the 17 days of the festival, I got to 21 events. I’ve seen a lot of international work of outstanding quality this year – the Schönberg Ensemble, OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Tim Etchells & Victoria and both Patti Smith performances were all five star events. And for the first time, Australian works stood substantially beside them – Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc, Back to Back, The Eleventh Hour and the Black Arm Band – without inviting invidious comparison.

Doing the stats, that adds up to half my festival experience being pure gold: a high proportion by any standards. And I missed some of the buzz-making stuff – Wendy Houston, Deborah Hay, Ben Cobham and Helen Herbertson, Goran Bregovic – which by all accounts would have added to my tally.

Around these events was a lot of high-quality work that was fascinating or moving without grabbing my whole heart – Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND, for instance, or DJ Spooky’s Antarctic symphony, or Batsheva – or was just plain enjoyable, like the Interpreti Veneziani Baroque Ensemble (as an aside, I read Clive O’Connell’s dry, indifferent Age review of this inspiriting concert and decided that I don’t want to be a music critic). There were a couple of disappointments – Barrie Kosky and Liza Lim's The Navigator was one of those, and the markedly unremarkable Glass/Cohen collaboration The Book of Longing. And then there were a couple of dismaying failures, both Australian – Jenny Kemp’s Kitten and, notoriously, KAGE’s Appetite. Of which more in a moment.

That seems like a pretty successful festival to me, and certainly no less successful, aesthetically speaking, than in previous years. At the closing night party, Edmunds revealed her “theme”: the fragility and strength of human beings. The theme I kept tripping over was poetry, which perhaps might add up to the same thing. Certainly, this was a festival that kept reminding me, with exquisite poignancy, of my own mortality, of the complexity and pain and joy of existence.

But I constantly encountered people who expressed disappointment. There wasn’t, they said, that one inspiring event; or there wasn’t enough edge; or they had just been to see Appetite (which generated an extraordinary level of hostility).

Given what I was experiencing, I kept wondering why. I looked through my reviews of previous years, and couldn’t see how what was on offer was any less substantial or interesting than previous years. This could of course be my own incapacity. But it made me think.

I suspect two things changed this year. Firstly, Edmunds has been hoist on the petard of her own success: her last three festivals have lifted the bar out of sight. She generated such enormous expectations that it was perhaps impossible for people not to be disappointed with something. And the other was what I thought one of the strongest aspects of this festival, its Australian content. This was a brave move on Edmunds’ part, a long-term expression of faith in our local talent. In terms of overall work, we saw some extraordinary things; but I think it also backfired.

Instead of the unexpected, we got the familiar: Chunky Move or Back to Back didn’t erupt as new discoveries, but as work we can see in our own backyard. And perhaps we primarily expect the festival to bring us amazing discoveries from elsewhere, rather than to show us ourselves.

Also, programming local work changed the politics: it was easier then to question what was not chosen, and for a certain schadenfreude to emerge when the annointed didn’t deliver. I suspect that’s part of what happened with Appetite.

In a way, this year’s MIAF showcased both what is best and worst about our culture. My god, we can do extraordinary work. Most of what was there deserved to be there, to stand beside the best work that came from the rest of the world. And the work that collapsed dramatically in the face of comparative pressure – Kitten and Appetite - seemed to epitomise the failures of our theatre: shocking writing, fuzzy conceptualisation, narcissistic self-involvement, a tendency towards shallow moralising. Which is perhaps why they felt so scarring.

If my speculations are correct, it’s rather depressing: no matter what our achievements, value still lies elsewhere, rather than here. However, we can be almost certain it won’t happen again. The incoming artistic director, Brett Sheehy, is not notable for the same kind of programming depth that Edmunds has brought to Melbourne over the past four years.

Moreover, my instinct is that the arts are heading into rough times under the dubious rudder (pun intended) of our Arts Minister, Peter Garrett, who has not demonstrated, at any point since his appointment, an iota of moral courage. Nor much interest in the arts. His first act was to cut the staff at the Australia Council – a decision that didn’t create much protest, because who cares about bureaucrats? But I thought it an ominous straw in the wind.

And now it seems he's the smiling man with the axe. Last week, the Australian National Academy of Music received a peremptory fax from Garrett telling them that their funding was to be summarily cut: a decision that artistic director Brett Dean (composer extraordinaire and internationally famous viola player) says he refuses to accept. Today the Australia Council – buckling under an inflexible budget that has been straining at the edges for years – announced that 11 companies, including Queensland’s La Boite, have had their funding cut. This despite the new artistic directorship of David Berthold, who suddenly finds himself not at the helm, but out of a job. (Update: David Berthold assures me in the comments that he most certainly is still in a job, and that La Boite - unlike ANAM - will be going strong next year, albeit on a smaller scale than originally planned).

This is in a climate in which the arts are on the back foot in many ways. There is the dwindling quality of mainstream arts coverage. The brutalising idiocy of so-called cultural commentators like Helen Razer or Age arts editor Raymond Gill doesn’t help. And this in part accounts for the hostility towards the arts community expressed in the Henson brouhaha earlier this year, which itself is heralding a new form of puritan repressiveness, best summed up by the campaign to cut funding to companies that depict smoking.

But it seems wrong to end on a note of doom after such a brilliant time. I want to thank the 13,500 readers who accompanied me on this 17-day wild wild ride. And, as I thought after the inspiring Black Arm Band concert, it’s gutless to despair. As the man said, climbing the mountain in Longfellow's bizarre poem: Excelsior!

Festival Diary #12: Friday

That Night Follows Day by Tim Etchells. Tim Etchells & Victoria. Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse. October 24.

Some theatre refines its form to such a degree of purity that it seems almost indescribable. It simply won’t translate into language that effectively communicates its experience.

This struck me forcibly when I attempted to describe That Night Follows Day to a friend. This exquisite show is a collaboration between British innovator Tim Etchells and the Belgian company Victoria, which features 16 children between the ages of nine and 15.


“They were lined up in chorus on what looked like a school basketball court,” I said. “And they listed all these ways that adults shape the reality of children. Things like ‘You cut our hair and our fingernails,’ or ‘You take the coins from our money boxes and promise to pay it all back later’.”

“And…?” said my friend.

“Well, that’s all it was,” I said.

“For an hour? In Flemish?”

"Well," said I defensively. "They had surtitles on a blackboard above the set..."

Clearly this was inadequate.

That Night Follows Day is in fact a quietly revolutionary work which, with immaculate artfulness, strips theatre back to the barest essentials. Performance is the simplest utterance, and the text – a beautifully modulated series of variations on a theme – is a sequence of statements.

With the clarity and poise of a poem, these statements accumulate to become a complex portrait of the relationships between adults and children.

It is wholly recognisable without ever becoming cliched, delicately exploring the truths and untruths with which parents condition their children, and revealing the complex mutual dynamics – love, play and betrayal, dependence and rebellion – that underlie these relationships.

As the recitation evolves, the military ranking begins to dissolve: children wander to the back wall, where they hang upside down, or sprawl on plastic chairs. At one point they break into playground mayhem.

The chorus speech is counterpoised with solos and duos and trios and undermines any tendency towards cuteness by giving the smaller children some of the more confronting lines.

Etchells directs his impressive young performers with an austerely profound understanding of the stage. The children move with a precision that itself comes under question during the performance, as one more instance of how adults control children. But, like everything else in this show, this is done with a light touch.

That Night Follows Day demonstrates how few elements are required to make compelling and moving theatre – words, a stage, performers. And, perhaps most importantly of all, unsparing intelligence and honesty.

Picture: That Night Follows Day. Photo: Phile Deprez

This review appears in today's Australian. Ms TN isn't up to an extended review today.

And I'm still standing! Quelle amazing! I can't match The Boyd's 30 shows - I have very definite limits before everything begins to break down - but I saw a fair proportion of MIAF 2008 all the same, and blogged my fingers raw. The last of my reviews (the exquisite That Night Follows Day) will go up tomorrow, when it appears in the Australian. And I'll do a wrap-up in a couple of days, when the dust has settled. I've had many interesting conversations over the past fortnight that have sparked a fair bit of sober thought, and I feel compelled to share it with you all.

I finished my festival on a blast with last night's performance of The Black Arm Band's Hidden Republic - a brilliant concert from beginning to end, with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra powering up incredible performances from some of our most spine-tingling Indigenous singers, from Ruby Hunter and Lou Bennett to Archie Roach and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, in a joyously literal celebration of racial harmony.

It was more than just a concert. It was, as a friend said afterwards, a ritual: a summoning of hope and possibility, a mourning and expiation, a gift of huge spiritual generosity, a Damn Good Time. The evening was punctuated with readings from Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poem Song of Hope. Kutcha Edwards got up and listed his 17 dead relatives, each a stone he kissed and threw with a clang into a bin, and then sang: Is it only a dream? Tell me it's not just a dream... Let's make it more than a dream. For those two hours, it was more than a dream. And this morning, it seems frankly gutless not to hope.

Festival diary #11: Thursday

Appetite by Ross Mueller, directed by Kate Denborough. Set design by Kennedy Nolan Architects, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti, costumes by Paula Levis, composer New Buffalo (Sally Seltmann). Kage @ Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until today.

As we barrelled down St Kilda Road in search of post-show consolation, my outraged son told me that Appetite had bruised his soul. I guess he takes his theatre very personally. But then, how else is one to take it?

And I was right with him. Appetite was one of those dismaying experiences which make you flee the theatre in search of strong alcohol, so disheartened that targeted destruction of the relevant memory cells seems like a top priority.


I'm sure I sat through most of it with my mouth open in disbelief. Kage is, after all, the same company which made Headlock, and Headlock was, in stark contrast to this show, a visually thrilling piece of physical theatre that was an intensely moving and honest exploration of masculinity. (It also, signally, didn't have any words in it). Appetite, on the other hand, was a very bad play punctuated by some ordinary songs and uninspired dance.

I wanted to stand up like John McEnroe and shout, You can't be serious! Being a well-behaved little crrritic, I didn't. Alcohol was the only option. (This is why theatre can be so bad for you.) But onto the post mortem.

The text of Appetite seems, in fact, like a bad imitation of Moira Buffini's West End hit Dinner, which was produced by the MTC back in 2004. Dinner is the story of a woman who throws a celebratory dinner party for a representative bunch of friends, during which their hypocrisies and moral emptiness become manifest and the emptiness of their lives is exposed. I am almost going to sleep describing it, although to be fair it wasn't a bad couple of hours in the theatre. For all its superficiality, it was sharp and funny.

Take out Buffini's mordant, literate wit and throw in a good dose of moral sentiment, and you have the premise of Appetite. Catherine McClements plays a woman who is turning 39 and, in celebration, throws a dinner party with 39 courses - one for each year - for some badly chosen friends. As they consume various courses and drink excessively, they degenerate into an orgy of drug-taking and sex.

At about course 124, over the suckling pig, McClements begins to see the emptiness of her careless, middle class life and rediscovers her love for her husband. It ends with a cosy uxorial chat over the wrecked dinner table in which the happy couple croon truisms to each other about living each day as if you are falling in love, instead of doing the proper thing and shooting each other.

In between the excruciating dialogue, there were sequences of dance or almost dance that failed almost completely to exploit the accomplished dancers in the cast. The only interest I managed to get out of the evening were moments in which something in the movement began to come to life, but these were shortlived. Certainly, New Buffalo's trite songs (originally intended to be played live, but delivered as a recorded score due to the artist's illness) did little to enliven proceedings.

It was nicely lit and quite pretty. But seldom has decadence been so dull.

It's only fair to say that this show cued a lot of enthusiastic applause from the capacity audience. (My inner McEnroe stood up and shouted again). OK, I'm cantankerous, but my feeling of utter discouragement was quite real. There was not one point where the self-involvement of the characters on stage cracked open, not one point of imaginative contact where the script - and I blame Ross Mueller's text for this debacle - opened up into actual complexity. As an audient, I was expected to run along the rails of this moral fable to its banal revelation, when the playwright offered up the Meaning of Life as a reward for obediently making my way through the rat maze of Art. The only other possibility was total revolt.

So, gentle reader, I went out and was revolting. And then I wrote this purgative review.

Picture: Catherine McClements and Michelle Heaven in Appetite. Photo: Jeff Busby.

Festival diary #10: Wednesday

Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, directed by Oskaras Koršunovas. Designed by Jurate Paulekaite, costumes by Jolanta Rimkute, lighting design by Eugenijus Sabaliauskas, choreography Vesta Grabštaite, music composed by Antanas Jasenka. OKT/Vilnius City Theatre @ the Playhouse until October 25.

Freud would have a field day with this remarkable production of Romeo and Juliet. Oskaras Koršunovas, director of Lithuania’s OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, never permits a cigar just to be a cigar. A dizzying range of objects – a length of dough, a ladle, a knife, a tie - become ribald symbols of masculine power. Or, as the case might be, impotence.

However, this cheerful obscenity is far from gratuitous. Here Romeo and Juliet is a satirical and ultimately deadly critique of male violence. A theme that begins as a joke transforms inexorably into a savage attack on the macho culture of vendetta.


This is, of course, a prominent theme in Shakespeare’s play, but seldom drawn out with such theatrical power. Koršunovas’s rambunctious production is not concerned merely with telling the story of star-crossed lovers. Rather, the child lovers are stark symbols of a possible freedom that is murdered by the harsh exigencies of their warring society. It's a theme which has considerable contemporary poignancy.

The play is set in the kitchens of rival pizzerias, with a design cluttered with objects that reminded me of nothing so much as the surreal illustrations of Maurice Sendak. The stage becomes a setting for extreme theatrical and emotional transformations.

It begins with the cast looking blankly out into the audience, as if posing for a photograph. This pose is held so long one cast member falls asleep against another, stirring laughter at its audacity, until at a signal the stage is instantly alive with activity. The play ends with another still pose, only now this is the stillness of death, not life.

So much happens in between that it’s difficult to encompass in a review. This is a production of enormous detail that plays with extremes. The comedy does not relieve the tragedy so much as clash electrically against it, the pathos or passion or sheer uncanny beauty of some scenes heightened by the parodic clowning of others. The dramaturgy is driven by emotional shifts that turn on a knife edge: in a split second, the stage transforms from absolute stillness to frenetic movement, low comedy to high tragedy.

The first two acts are grotesquely playful satire that scrapes against the shy passion of the childish protagonists (one thing we never forget in this production is how young Romeo and Juliet are). There are gorgeously choreographed street scenes that are reminiscent of parts of The Godfather, leavened with a good deal of that lewd comedy. A sense of what is to come occurs during Mercutio's speech to Romeo before his fateful meeting with Juliet: a dramatic shift of lighting transforms the stage into a dreamlike moonscape, hinting of the inhuman workings of fate.

After interval the mood changes irrevocably: the stage becomes a memento mori adorned with skeletons and coffins. The final three acts are stunning, a danse macabre in which Romeo and Juliet’s doomed marriage is played out as nightmare. The comedy becomes a blackly sardonic note against which is played some startling stage images: when Romeo hears of Juliet's death, for example, it comes from a bestial spirit, a boar, in a scene that genuinely touches the uncanny. And the violence is disturbingly real, as in a brutal scene where Juliet's father - heretofore a mildly comic patriarch - demands that she marry Paris, in which the physical force that underlines his familial authority is revealed in an ugly enactment of domestic violence.

Koršunovas's employment of objects is dizzyingly imaginative, richly detailed and constantly surprising. In the first half there is much use of dough, a symbol of life. In the second, the performers use flour, most notably masking their faces white in a spookily effective image of death. When the mourning families gather on stage for the final scene, they sift flour onto the floor, like a constant fall of tears or rain. The final image of the dead young lovers slumping into the huge dough basin - an object which itself has been many things in the course of the play - is one of those indelible theatrical images that sear themselves into memory. It had the chilling finality of corpses being thrown into a pit.

The performances are fantastic, meeting the demanding extremities of the production. The only bother was the sound design, which was frankly naff, and only saved by its abrupt switches from one state to another: at no point did the sound seem integrated with the production, serving rather as sonic wallpaper. Compared to the rest of the production, it seemed surprisingly naive. The other minor irritation was the sometimes puzzlingly ill-spelt surtitles (a feature, as someone remarked last night, of many festival shows). But it's more than worth these glitches to experience Koršunovas’s depth of imagination and masterly command of theatrical image.

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

Talk among yourselves while Ms TN sits at her desk in strenuous attitudes of thought, wondering how to write about Oskaras Koršunovas's remarkable production of Romeo and Juliet, seen at the Arts Centre Playhouse last night, in 400 words. (TN review tomorrow, when my pithy note comes out in the Australian). See this if you can - it's more than worth the eye-watering struggle with surtitles, and this despite a very cheesy soundscape. (Appropriate, I guess, for a play set in a pizzeria.)

Three days from the end, Ms TN isn't holding up badly on her MIAF marathon, though I confess the daily treadmill of see-and-write has been rather (no, extremely) demanding. One has, after all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, a life as well. In my case, several lives, though I put the others on hold for the duration. I see other crrrritics around town with their eyes falling out of their heads. Thank god for spackle make-up, I say. Even the bloggers are flagging (where are you, Chris Boyd?) although Born Dancin' is still present and correct and well worth a visit, and Jana and I are having some friendly skirmishes at Mono no aware.

Meanwhile, in the Australian this morning I see that the Arts Centre is living up to its reputation for hard-hitting, cutting edge, courageous work by dropping a play about the Henson case from the upcoming Short & Sweet season, apparently on legal advice. I'm assuming it probably wouldn't be Henson who would want to sue. (Me, possibly? Luckily I have taken an oath never to speak to lawyers).

Festival diary #9: Monday

Beckett: Endgame/Bach: Chaconne by Samuel Beckett and JS Bach. Directed by Anne Thompson and William Henderson, designed by Julie Renton, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. With David Tredinnick, Peter Houghton, Evelyn Krape and Richard Bligh. Violin by Miwako Abe. The Eleventh Hour, Leicester St, Fitzroy, until October 25.

(Note: season extended to November 8, bookings 1300 136 166)

Every time I visit The Eleventh Hour's beautiful little theatre in Fitzroy, it seems to me that this company is just getting better. Over the past few years, directors Anne Thompson and William Henderson have built up a loyal audience with their vital productions of classic texts. The Eleventh Hour eschews museum performances, searching instead for the live spark of creation, and they've often taken a robust approach to the texts they've produced. Sometimes this has been less than successful, but you can never claim that they are not interesting.

They seek, as they say, "poetry in the theatre, theatre in the poetry" (it seems I can't avoid poetry in this year's Melbourne Festival). Hence their interest in the arch poet of the theatre, Samuel Beckett. This superb production of Endgame premiered two years ago as A Tribute to Samuel Beckett, and was justly lauded for its remarkable performances, which netted Peter Houghton a Best Actor gong in the 2006 Green Room Awards.


They've remounted Endgame for the Melbourne Festival, and among other things this production demonstrates the immense value of revisiting successful work after it's been seasoned in front of an audience. It gives a company a chance to deepen and refine their understandings, to make a clearer draft of something that was already good. And The Eleventh Hour has taken this opportunity and run with it.

This production has certainly evolved from its last outing, and has ironed out all its bumps. Originally it began with a showing of several scenes from Buster Keaton's films, which then segued into a live performance of a Chaconne from Bach's Partitas for solo violin, played by Miwako Abe. The play itself was introduced with an extract from Molly Bloom's monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses. The aim was to contextualise the work, but the effect was distracting and effectively destroyed the play's beginning, with knock-on effects on its rhythm. Beckett is such a stringent and unsparingly intelligent theatre writer that it's very difficult to depart from his vision without making it lesser.

This time, the contextualisation works just fine. The production opens and closes in total darkness, with the violin playing close by. Sitting in in the dark listening to a live performance of Bach is an experience I can recommend; you will seldom hear music with such sharpened ears. And Bach's stern, formal loveliness is an excellent counterpoint to Beckett's writing, a kind of aesthetic cleansing for what occurs in between.

Keaton now is a graceful allusion, rather than a didactic lecture. A brief film, Neighbours, plays above Clov's head as he appears as a grotesque still life framed in the doorway in the final few minutes of the Chaconne. The music ceases, the lights come up and the play begins.

Julie Renton's traverse design has been turned around, and is at once simpler and more essentially playable. At one end the door in the wall, which was basically ignored last time, becomes the door to Clov's kitchen and Hamm's chair (throne? cupboard?) is on a dais at the other, reached by a ramp. There's less white and more distressed grey around the walls.

But where the remount really pays off is in the detail of the performances. They were already blindingly good; now there are deeper resonances - the Shakespearean echoes in Beckett's text are, for instance, beautifully played - and a more confident theatricality. And as with Shakespeare, there are no small parts: Evelyn Krape and Richard Bligh as Nagg and Nell reprise the cruel comedy of their roles, with a shade more pathos this time; Nell if anything seemed more wistful, more despairingly bleak, in her impotent lustfulness.

David Tredinnick as Clov gives a performance of startling physicality, striding awkwardly around the stage on unbending legs, all savage clownishness. His final monologue - the only time when Clov really gets to be more than a peg to Hamm's mallet - is as finely honed acting as I've seen, each phrase edged with passionate bitterness that plays hard against his liberation from the game of life ("When I fall I'll weep for happiness").

But the night again belongs to Peter Houghton's portrayal of Hamm. I don't know how he managed to age 30 years for this production - it's not merely an effect of make-up - but that impatient, imperious, cruel profile dominates the production. It's a marvellous performance, rich in actorly flourish that exploits every nuance of Beckett's language.

If there's a criticism to be made, it's that occasionally in the vaudevillean to-and-fro the dialogue was a little rushed; sometimes I wanted a little more air. But I suspect that was an effect of opening night, as it abated as the play progressed. And that's really picking nits. This is a work of deep and thoughtful integrity, that finely balances Beckett's merciless humour with his profound compassion. You'll rarely see such a vital production of Beckett's work, and all those who managed to get their hands on tickets can feel justly smug.

My review of the original production (where I talk a little more about the play) is here.

Picture: Peter Houghton (Hamm) and David Tredinnick (Clov) in The Eleventh Hour's production of Endgame. Photo: Ponch Hawkes.

Festival diary #8: Sunday

Corridor choreographed by Lucy Guerin. Set design by Donald Holt, lighting design by Keith Tucker, costumes by Paula Levis, paper coats by Susie Gerraty, sound design by Haco. With Sara Black, Antony Hamilton, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, Harriet Ritchie and Lee Serle. Lucy Guerin Inc @ the North Melbourne Meat Market until October 25.

The more I watch contemporary dance, the more it seems to me the closest performing art to poetry. It might seem an obvious connection, but it's quite a complex thought, which I'll do my best to unpack in a few brief, well chosen words.

Like novels or short stories, theatre finds its poetic through narrative. The narrative might be displaced or distorted or multiple, or it might be absolutely linear; but however it appears, narrative is a tendency that the form must wrestle with, either to reject or to accept, to reveal or to distort. Poetry, on the other hand, need not deal with narrative at all: a poem might be an epic story like Paradise Lost, or it might be a vivid glimpse of a moment, as in Ezra Pound's In a Station of the Metro. It's up to the poet, a decision that can be freely asserted because of the nature of poetry itself.


What is primary in both poetry and dance is its materiality. Just as poetry foregrounds the sensuous and rhythmic qualities of language, so dance celebrates the sensuous and rhythmic qualities of gesture. Neither needs to be more than the dynamic and immediate movement of exchange between reader and page, singer and listener, audience and performer, and for each this contract is more easily grasped than in theatre or in novels, where the tending towards narrative and explication must be resisted with active violence.

In Corridor, Lucy Guerin makes this connection absolutely explicit by bringing language into dance. It's a preoccupation she's brought subtextually to other works - Aether, Love Me - but here she directly engages with the didactic function of words, their shaping and direction of reality. Corridor is a fascinating exploration of the contingencies of communication and the evolution of meaning. In this dance, as in poetry, there is a constant war between the legislative impulses of words and the incorrigible subversiveness of bodily experience and communication.

In particular, Guerin is concerned with instructions, the act of choreography itself - an instruction to a dancer to move in a particular way - expanding into larger questions about the instructions that saturate our daily lives with imperatives that inflect our behaviour. The dancers respond to directions that emerge from a variety of media - spoken instructions, iPods, mobile phones, words written on screens or paper. They vary from the possible (touch your head, twirl your finger, act as if something has bitten your neck) to the impossible (float, stop global warming, make sure no old person in the world feels lonely).

The dance occurs in the gaps between the possible and impossible. As promised by the title, the set is a long corridor, with the audience seated in a single row on each side facing each other on the narrow space. At either end are mirrored walls. If there is no place to hide for the audience, there is none for the dancers, either: they pass us close enough to touch, giving the performance a particular sense of intimacy, standing on the margin between the public and private.

It begins with one of the most effective transitions into performance I've seen. The dancers are seated anonymously among the audience, and people are still coming into the theatre and finding their seats. Suddenly, three people up from where I am sitting, a mobile phone rings and someone answers it. A man (Antony Hamilton) stands up, crouched around his mobile, and walks off from his chair in that bubble of privacy that mobile phones create, a strange obliviousness to the fact that they are in public space.

The muted rustle of irritation this causes in the audience is suddenly rebuked when you see that another dancer is doing the same thing, and then another, and understanding dawns that this is the beginning of the performance. The dancers roam up and down the corridor, each having inscrutable conversations. The lights dim and the dance begins to evolve.

The text itself - at least, that which is audible - is present as much for its sonic and dynamic qualities as its meanings. When Lee Serle issues spoken instructions to the dancers, for instance, his voice is distorted, so sometimes it is difficult to understand him. Sometimes it becomes, like the dance itself, something like pure form, as abstract and open to differing vectors of interpretation as the movement itself. Sometimes it is straight, direct and unambiguous, something that can only be brought under pressure by the dance itself. The question of intention is always in suspension.

Guerin builds meaning slyly, from one gesture to the next. Each sequence emerges from the banal or everyday to reach towards the mysterious, creating arcana of desire that can seem neurotic or despairing, or desperate grapples of eroticism, or simply the joy of danced flight. There's a disturbing sequence, for example, where Byron Perry is trapped by the other five dancers, who are running in martial formation up and down the strip, and Perry can neither merge with their rhythm nor escape it, and throws himself violently about the stage, muttering half audible, broken sentences. Or another where all six dancers are suddenly a group, dancing in a harmony that evolves seamlessly out of the various conflicts on stage. Or a comic duet comprised of minor pain - a hurt finger, vomiting - in which the involuntary, non-verbal body takes precedence.

It's a dense, intensely absorbing experience which demonstrates Guerin's command of space and focus and the skills of her dancers (especially the compulsively watchable Kirstie McCracken). Because of the shape of the stage, it is impossible to focus in one place; you are forced to choose what to watch, and are constantly becoming aware of shifts that are already in evolution. This slight disorientation is reinforced by Haco's extraordinary sound design, a mixture of ambient sound - foyer chatter, spruikers at a market - and music. The sound craftily shifts direction all the time; sometimes it's wholly environmental, coming from all directions at once, and often, rather disconcertingly, it seems to be emerging from the floor.

Perhaps what made Corridor most enjoyable was the play in it, how play escapes the fatalities of language, creating its own laws and order and beauty. The physically various bodies of these six very different dancers become battlefields of meaning and resistance, the dance constantly escaping from the limiting definitions of words. This struggle towards flight or liberation or simple gut-level physical disobedience makes Corridor a singularly joyous experience, a celebration of the innate subversiveness of the human body.

Picture: publicity shot for Corridor. Photo: Jeff Busby