Wednesday, August 09, 2006

More Things

Your faithful blogger is again hosting Things on Sunday at the Malthouse Theatre on, yep, Sunday. The topic is "The Empty Space", and I'll be hearing from Gideon Obarzanek of Chunky Move, Malthouse Theatre AD Michael Kantor and Juliana Engberg from the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) as they discuss space and design and their relationship to dance, theatre and visual art.

August 13, 2.30pm. Cost: $10, free for Malthouse Theatre subscribers
Bookings highly recommended: Box Office (03) 9685 5111

And while we're on things Malthouse, Chris Boyd has a radically different response to Not Like Beckett, demonstrating that beautiful ability of theatre to polarise audiences:
For the first time in my life, I climbed over people to get out of a theatre. Climbed? I almost fell over people to get out.
Me, I went again last night (I was being Peter Clarke, who was unable to host the Time To Talk session because of family problems) and was able to review my response - it still works for me, especially when - say, 15 minutes in - it ceases to be a homage to our Sam. Chris, I think you missed the good bits...

3 comments:

  1. Hmmm...I haven't seen Beckett yet, but I read the script a while back and was bowled over. Can see how both your reaction and Chris' are quite possible, and could probably comfortably co-exist. Which is partially why I was so impressed by the piece, which is so far from the grating literalism of so much new Australian theatre.

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  2. Quite, Born Dancin' - I usually take it as a good sign when a work provokes such differing responses!

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  3. Funnily enough, at the last edit, before hitting the publish button, I deleted a remark about Dykstra looking like a rabbit in the headlights. A bit cruel, I thought. But he looked rattled at the performance I saw.

    There was only one person laughing in the entire theatre -- a persistent chuckler who found the lighting changes amusing -- and everyone else was nonplussed.

    At the very least, Alison, we can agree on this: The slightest doubt, the smallest hesitation, and the entire performance would collapse into embarrassment...

    It did.

    P.S. I hope I can make it to your Sunday session. I've just written a piece for the Fin Review about "relative dimension in space"... about the sculptures of James Angus, not Doctor Who! He's the dude who put a full-blown hot air balloon inside a sail of the Opera House... upside down.

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