Festival Dairy #2

Keen observers might notice that TN is wilting a little. I'm not complaining - far from it - but I'm thinking rather wistfully of the long-departed elasticity of youth, when I could party all night and work all day and still keep going (four days was the limit, as I recall, before I collapsed into brutish slumber). However, before anyone starts spitting on me for whingeing about my privileged existence, I will gracefully segue into What Little Alison Saw At MIAF Last Week.

Ngapartji Ngapartji (I give you something, you give me something). Key performer/co-creator Trevor Jamieson, writer/director Scott Rankin. Design by Genevieve Dugard, lighting design by Neil Simpson, choreography by Yumi Umiumare. With Pantjiti McKenzie, Jennifer Mitchell, Lorna Wilson, Iris Ajax, Nami Kulyuru, Rhoda Tjitayi, Dora Haggie, Elton Wirri, Julie Miller, Sadie Richards, Nathaniel Garrawurra, Mervin Adamson, Yumi Umiumare, Lex Marinos, Najeeba Azimi, Saira Luther, Damian Mason, Andrew McGregor. Big hART @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre

In the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its chilliest, the British Government asked permission from the Prime Minister Robert Menzies to perform nuclear tests on Australian soil. Menzies more or less said, go for it, boys! And subsequently nuclear bombs were dropped on a variety of sites in northern and southern Australia, most notably at Maralinga.

In a continuation of the de facto policy of Terra Nullius, nobody asked the permission of the traditional owners of the land. Thousands of Indigenous people were forcibly removed and placed in refugee camps, and an unknown number were never found by the Aboriginal Protectors and died on their lands. The tests spread radioactive clouds as far as Adelaide, but there are no records of their impact on the area's inhabitants: back then, Indigenous people were not counted in the Census or in medical records. Notoriously, signs warning people to keep off the polluted country were posted in English.

Trevor Jamieson, the charismatic performer at the centre of this show, is from Spinifex country in the Western desert, the supposedly waste lands on which these bombs were tested, and Ngapartji Ngapartji is, among other things, the story of his family and how they lost their traditional lands in the most violent and irretrievable way imaginable. It's yet another story of the dispossession of colonisation, this time with a nuclear twist. But this show is much more than an enactment of that loss.

Ngapartji Ngapartji means, "I give you something, you give me something", a literalisation of what is always an implicit exchange in the act of theatre. As soon as you see that the stage, which is covered with black sand, is actually a dancing ring, it becomes clear that this is theatre that calls on its ritual roots. You are not buying a ticket to a show: you are being invited to participate in a ceremony.

Big hArt is a community theatre company that works with marginalised people in small communities around Australia on long term projects which are then taken to national and international arts festivals. Like communities themselves, it is fluid and multiple: Ngapartji Ngapartji is only one of seven projects it is currently running around the country. This piece of theatre is itself part of a larger work that includes an online site that teaches Pitjantjatjara and is a focus for weekly meetings between young people and elders of various communities in the Northern Territory and South Australia.

The show begins with introductions: you meet Trevor and his sister and his Mum, and all the members of the cast, including the Pitjantjatjara Choir, and are taught a few words of Pitjantjatjara with a children's song. Tried and true audience participation, Wiggles style, but curiously unembarrassing, perhaps because it is so transparently friendly. It is, in the way of these things, faintly shambolic, but switches rapidly to honed, riveting performance, an oscillation that continues through the show.

Trevor Jamieson and writer/director Scott Rankin incorporate Western, Indigenous and Asian theatre traditions to create what is almost utopian enactment of cross-cultural understanding. The story of the dispossessed desert peoples is interspersed with other narratives of exile: the Japanese mother who was caught in the blast at Hiroshima, the Middle Eastern mother fleeing her country with her daughters, trying desperately to reach her husband in Australia. One remarkable aspect of this work is that it is never narrow or accusatory in its focus. Jamieson remembers, for instance, that when the bones of dead children were taken without their parents' permission and ground up by medical authorities to test their levels of radioactivity, they were from both white and black families.

The stories are told through a mixture of shadow puppetry, straight narration, dance, song (including a Talking Heads song in Pitjantjatjara) and movement. It's a moving and involving work that authentically achieves what it sets out to do. It is at once a lament for the dead, a joyous celebration of survival and an extraordinary expression of reconciliation. This kind of theatre is often done badly, relying on the goodwill and sympathy of an audience to get it through the shaky bits. Ngapartji Ngapartji miraculously avoids any such trying of patience: what could easily be sentimentality or just plain dagginess becomes, instead, a pure gift.

La Fille de Cirque, Camille, Hamer Hall, Victorian Arts Centre

Like many Melburnians, I last saw Camille in the intimate space of the Speigeltent as part of the hit burlesque La Clique. So I was curious to see how this creature of delicate raunch would go in the far less intimate Hamer Hall - would she be lost in the vastness of it all?

Not a chance. She filled it up, and then some. The ghost of cabaret clings to the act, all the same: some privileged audience members were on stage, drinking at candlelit tables, and Camille wandered off into the stalls more than once to pour herself seductively into the lap of some embarrassedly delighted man.

Camille is the real thing, make no mistake. Like Tom Waits, her show is sheer theatre. Ably backed by her sharp six-piece band, she doesn't sing songs, she performs them: that enchanting voice is put wholly at the service of expressiveness, dropping to a whisper or opening to a full-throated rock and roll roar. She sashays through a repertoire of songs by Jacques Brel, Nick Cave and Tom Waits, invoking the tenderness of old lovers, the brutal business of a whorehouse in Amsterdam, the thoughts of a condemned man. Her lack of inhibition makes her spell-bindingly sexy: she is not afraid of crawling on the ground, or of transforming into a grotesque and angry clown.

Anyone looking for flawless museum renditions of French torch songs is going to be very disappointed. Part of what is riveting about this show is the immediacy Camille generates on stage; she is passionate, abject, tender, with a bracing tang of bitter irony. She drinks constantly, at one point knocking over a bottle of wine. It's all artifice, but it's also not artifice at all: there is a dangerous edge of the real underneath everything she does, a sense that anything at all might happen, including the chanteuse being carried out on a stretcher. It's a quality common to singers like Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Edith Piaf or Patti Smith; like these stars, Camille soars beyond virtuosity into the imperfection of true greatness.

Black Medea by Wesley Enoch, directed by the writer. Designed by Christina Smith, lighting by Rachel Burke, sound design by Jethro Woodward. With Margaret Harvey, Aaron Pedersen, Michael Morgan/Jesse Rotumah-Gardiner and Justine Saunders. Beckett Theatre @ The Malthouse, until June 5.

A while back, around Nietzsche, the gods deserted classical tragedy. They were scaled back to psychological symbols: the Furies became externalisations of Orestes' guilt, and Oedipus' fate - to kill his father and marry his mother - became an expression of subconscious desires.



These interpretations are a reasonable response by post-Enlightenment culture to the questions posed by these capricious arbiters of human fate. To the rationalist West, pagan gods could seem perilously silly. But it can be argued that tragedy lost as much as it gained by the psychological domestication of the gods: the sacred and the divine are as much part of the tragic experience as catastrophe.

One of the fascinating aspects of Wesley Enoch's adaptation of Medea is that the gods are back, as potent, implacable and bloody as ever. Enoch has freely transposed the legend of Medea to indigenous themes, and his muscularly poetic text excavates an often obscured aspect of its chthonic energy. Here Cypris (Aphrodite), the main mover of events in Euripides' play, is replaced by the vengeful ancestral spirits of Central Australia. Since the ancestral spirits are also the land, they have a literal potency that can resonate with even the most secular white.

Like the original, Enoch's Medea (Margaret Harvey) is a wise woman, a witch privy to the magical traditions of her people who betrays her heritage for the love of Jason (Aaron Pedersen). She leaves her desert home to marry a handsome, ambitious Aboriginal from the city, her "ticket out". By marrying the stranger she violates the complex kinship codes of her people, and she compounds her crime by selling her knowledge of the land to mining companies, leading them to the sacred places where she knows they will find ore.

Jason is, however, as much an exile as Medea. What destroys their relationship - as much businesslike pact as passionate sexual love - is the desert wind brought into his house, unwittingly, by Medea herself; a fate that howls through the front door and which speaks to him, through Medea's ancestral spirits, as his madness. His faithlessness is in some ways more profound than the original Jason's; he doesn't marry another, but instead completely loses touch with himself. He can't keep a job or support his family, and descends into a cycle of alcoholism and violence; a fate, it becomes clear, also suffered by his father.

Finally, despite Jason's deep emotional dependence on Medea, he obeys the promptings of the elder spirit (Justine Saunders) and throws Medea out of the marital home. Medea, who no longer has a home to return to, and who can see for her son only the same future as his father, murders her own child in revenge and despair, savagely ending the paternal cycle of violence.

Medea's act seems, interestingly, also a revenge on those spirits that drive her husband mad and demand that she bring her son home to the desert: she will hand her son over neither to his father nor to her own people, where he will suffer only another kind of disposession. It's a startlingly bleak expression of the conflict between traditional and urban indigenous cultures, offering no chink of hope. Perhaps what makes this story genuinely a tragedy is that there is no hint of moral judgement: Medea and Jason are trapped in the tension between conflicting imperatives which are both, on their own terms, in the right. The spiral towards catastrophe unravels from the wider injustice of their situation.

Enoch's production is unapologetically theatrical. As Medea, Margaret Harvey is skin-tighteningly compelling; the force of her curse literally gave me goosebumps. Harvey's full-blooded cry "I am Medea!" stands with "I am the Duchess of Malfi still!" as a great theatrical moment of defiance against fate. Aaron Pedersen's performance matches Harvey's, switching between terrifying violence and snivelling weakness. Justine Saunders plays a double role, as Old Medea narrating the story and the tribal spirit manipulating Medea and Jason, and her performance shifts from benign comedy to implacability.

Christina Smith's claustrophobic corrugated iron set, spectacularly lit by Rachel Burke, frames the story in brooding darkness. Among the most potent scenes are a number of swift, wordless vignettes, flashing out of the dark to a driving score, that give poignant glimpses of a disintegrating family. For all its classical provenance, Black Medea is powerfully contemporary. Enoch seamlessly weaves together with naturalism the heiratic, ritualised action of classical tragedy, giving the play both the intimacy of a domestic drama and the grand, extreme gestures of tragedy. It makes thrilling theatre.


Picture: Margaret Harvey and Aaron Pedersen in Black Medea

Malthouse Theatre

The Sapphires by Tony Briggs, directed by Wesley Enoch. With Wayne Blair, Rachel Maza, Ursula Yovich, Lisa Flanagan, Deborah Mailman, Stephen Lovatt, Aljin Abella and Chris Kirby. MTC at the Arts Centre Playhouse, until December 18.

My thoughts about The Sapphires were complicated by a huge argument I had afterwards with a friend. This friend, who shall remain nameless, had not actually seen the show. But he pointed at the photograph of the the four lead actors posing in sequinned frocks Supremes-style on the front of the program, and said: "Well, that's the only way you can get Aboriginal actors onto the main stages. Don't talk about anything difficult - just get them to dress up like Americans. Lots of singing and dancing. Very worthy. Pack 'em in."



There's enough of a cruel truth in this response to give pause. It's difficult to imagine the MTC producing a play that, for example, deals front-on with the problem of domestic abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. Or, on the other hand, matter-of-factly casting a hot young Aboriginal actor as Hamlet.

And The Sapphires is as close as anything I've seen to a sure-fire hit. Its energy, from the moment Wayne Blair steps onto the stage and revs up the audience, is irresistible, and its narrative - that of four young working class Aboriginal sisters in the 1960s, who form a girl group and tour Vietnam - is appealingly up-beat, toughened by some black (forgive the pun) humour. It's something to see the usually staid MTC audience whooping and yelling like teens at a rock concert.

The Sapphires is, in many ways, light-weight theatre. But it has a lot of redeeming features, not the least of them being its complete lack of po-faced "worthiness". Probably the most obvious comparison is with Minefields and Miniskirts, a music theatre piece about the Vietnam War produced by Playbox earlier this year. Where Minefields and Miniskirts was leaden with the weight of its own significance, The Sapphires brashly bounces in, grabs you by the lapels and forcibly reminds you that Aboriginality is about more than victimhood. The note of special pleading dies in its first big number.

After all, the notion that Aboriginal artists should be solely concerned with the social problems of their people is an imprisonment in itself, a circular dilemma which is familiar to most thoughtful feminists. The Sapphires joyously kicks over these chains, showing an aspect of Aboriginal culture which is less familiar than it ought to be. Popular music - rock and roll, motown, country, blues and soul - is deeply embedded in contemporary Aboriginal culture; in Central Australia, children learn to play guitar almost as soon as they can walk. For those kids, and for the women in The Sapphires, music is the doorway to dreams. And sometimes, it works.

The story is economically told, between gutsy performances of classics like (Love is like a) Heatwave, Think and Heard it Through the Grapevine. It concerns four Koori sisters, Gail (Rachel Maza), Kay (Lisa Flanagan), Cynthia (Deborah Mailman) and Julie (Ursula Yovich), most of whom work boring factory jobs in Melbourne. Their little sister Julie, clearly miserably pregnant, has run away from home to live with her sisters, who with typical sibling cruelty leave her at home while they sail out in their bright dresses to a talent quest in a nightclub. But of course, Julie follows them, and proves to have the best voice of the lot...And so they get their first big gig - touring Vietnam to entertain the troops.

Tony Briggs' rapid-delivery dialogue relies on sardonic humour; when Cynthia says that she wants to be a model, her sister bursts out laughing. "A model? Haven't you noticed? You're black! The only time we get photographed is when we're arrested." This writing does exactly what is required, without doing any more; and it reveals the tougher details of these women's lives - Kay's horrific abortion at 14, which has left her sterile or, in one particularly good scene, Julie's terror when she wanders into a trench full of US soldiers and the air is suddenly thick with the threat of rape - with a direct realism which forbids self pity.

There's a well-handled sub-plot about a young Vietnamese boy, Joe (Aljin Abella), searching for his family, three different comic romances, and a tragic ending which is swallowed up, inexplicably I think, by a sudden swing into a song. Perhaps this is a fear of ending on too depressing a note, but it left me feeling slightly cheated - The Sapphires had cut itself enough slack to play its tragedy as well as its celebration.

Wesley Enoch's production is characterised by very slick staging, helped by good use of a revolve and curtains: the stage is stripped to its bare essentials, focusing on the band, with stylised elements of each scene (a kitchen sink and door, an army jeep) sweeping in and out as required. But most of all I liked its robust theatricality. This is great popular theatre, which is confident enough to take no prisoners. And the singing is fabulous.

Melbourne Theatre Company