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.

Sometimes a gal just has to do the bullet-point thang, even if I'm not quite sure how to get a bullet point on blogger and have to settle for an asterix instead. Here's a catch-up list of interesting stuff that I've been noticing around the FaceTubes:

* Fringe: As y'all know, Melbourne has donned its party hats for the Fringe. Ms TN has done her share of reviewing, with more to come, but (praise the Lord!), despite rumours to the contrary, she is not the entire Internetz! For more reviews of more shows, check out my blogger colleagues John Bailey at Capital Idea, Neandellus, Crikey's Curtain Call, The Groggy Squirrel or Drew Review. And feel free to post other links, if you know of them, in the comments.

* Did I tell you that Edward Albee is coming to Melbourne? One of the major figures of contemporary American drama, Edward Albee will be discussing his half century of working in the theatre at the Melbourne Theatre Company at 3pm on October 17. Expect sparks - Albee often delivers them. The event is free, but bookings are essential.

* The SMH's Jason Blake offers up an interesting analysis of the Sydney Fringe, which made its debut this month to a mixed reception. The comments are also worth reading.

* Don't miss George Hunka's moving tribute to one of my own favourite critics, Jan Kott, on Superfluities Redux:

There are a lot of walks in Kott’s more autobiographical essays: walks with friends, through old neighborhoods. Bearing Kott’s thoughts within my own on my walks through the streets of New York, even as I lack the resources or the status to see all of the theatre I might like to see (and as indigent dramatists do, I borrowed this book from the public library too), he accompanies me and teaches me to see, as he does, the theatre in the everyday, the everyday in theatre...

* From the sublime to... well, other critics, anyway. Those who don't start twitching at the mere whisper of "internet v print" might be interested in checking out Chris Wilkinson's latest response to the Woodhead/Croggon wrangle on the Guardian Theatre Blog. (They might be even more interested when they read the headline - "Why Sex Is Better In The Theatre"... though sadly it's not as exciting as it sounds). Meanwhile, the Thread That Will Never Die: The Sequel continues on TN... though there are far more interesting conversations elsewhere.

* Among these conversations are those sparked by a recent Blogging Unconference hosted by the Wheeler Centre (check for report and follow-up links), a follow-up to the Wheeler Centre's Critical Failure series, which started the whole damn thing. Best of all, the busy pencil of Crikey's Culture Mulcher, W.H. Chong, captured us all in glorious black and white; which, we all agreed, the interwebs most certainly are not.

* And finally, the social pages: Angela Meyer of Literary Minded reports on the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, where your humble blogger was hobnobbing as an instamatic hipster on Tuesday night.

Direct your browsers this instant to Marion Potts's robust and optimistic Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, delivered yesterday, which is now online at the Malthouse site (pdf file). Aside from giving a glimpse into the creative philosophies that will be powering the Malthouse 2011 season (due to be announced in November), Potts casts her eye over a rapidly changing theatrical landscape, in which many major theatres will be seeing changes of artistic leadership next year.

"How often," asks Potts, "do we see the brilliance of an idea undermined, not by the limits of our imagination, or our lack of talent, but by the pressured environment of its creation, by insufficient interrogation, lacklustre thinking?" She looks instead to what we can aspire to be, arguing for a diverse and rigorous culture, and most of all for a theatre of agency and transformation, in which practice embodies value.

And I almost forgot - the big news is that Matt Lutton, AD of Perth company ThinIce whose work was seen here most recently in The Trial, will be Potts's associate director.

You can tell it's spring, because the ants are co-ordinating a spirited insurgency in the bathroom, and bare branches everywhere are bursting into blossom. Most tellingly, the Town Hall in North Melbourne is overrun with young people in black eyeliner, who are spilling down the steps and colonising the pavement cafes.


Ms TN has been slapping on her eyeliner with the rest of them and thronging the halls, albeit in a sober fashion suitable to her advancing years. I read a couple of years ago that Guardian critic Lyn Gardner sees six shows a day during the Edinburgh Fringe. I couldn't do anything remotely like that without the inside of my skull turning into something like mashed banana. So there's inevitably a chance element to the few shows I see out of the several hundred on offer, and they can hardly be thought of as representative: for those contemplating Fringe visits, the wisest strategy is to grab a program or browse the website.

Also, the performing arts continue outside the Fringe. I saw Bangarra Dance Theatre's Of Earth and Sky on the weekend: if you can beg, borrow or steal a ticket (or possibly buy one at the box office) before it closes next Saturday, do so. It's extraordinarily beautiful. I'm hoping to write more on Of Earth and Sky later this week, if I can think of the words: but today, let me briefly bring you up to speed on Ms TN's Adventures at the Fringe So Far. And I mean briefly. Ms TN is unseasonally under the weather today.

The Arrival


Shaun Tan’s moving graphic novel about the experience of immigration, The Arrival, is adapted for the stage by new company Mutation Theatre, under the eyes of emerging directors Sam Mackie and Patrick McCarthy. Getting to the venue was an adventure in itself: as the skies darkened over the surreal landscape of Docklands, half industrial chic and half just industrial, we encountered lonely bowler-hatted figures waving signs in the dark, to guide us to Shed 4. It almost - but not quite - felt like being on a strange film set, half Coppola, half Tati.

The show takes place in a gigantic metal warehouse, in which is erected a tent-like structure. Around 18 bowler-hatted young actors enact - now with carnivalesque excess, now with lyrical poignancy – Tan’s simple story of a man arriving in a strange country, having left his family behind. Tan's drawings are projected onto the ceiling of tent, as a counterpoint to the performances on stage. The result is an ambitious work of physical theatre that is often completely enchanting. Its strengths make you forgive its unncessary length and lack of focus as youthful excess. If this is the new generation of theatre makers, the future is looking good. Sadly, closed.

Home?


Written and directed by Jono Burns, Home? must be one of the slyest shows of the Fringe. An unapologetically autobiographical account of Burns's time at New York's Actor's Studio, it is a hilarious take-down of the pretensions and absurdities of the acting life and, in particular, method acting. Burns gives a tour de force performance, embodying around a dozen unlikely characters, from Phillip ("Do you know how many red-haired Jewish gays there are in Minnesota? Eight!") to an abrasive busker in Central Park. It gradually becomes clear, however, that Home? is more than a fond satire of an interesting and sometimes confronting time: it's also a moving account of coming to terms with loss.

Ably supported by musicians Sunny Leunig and Cathryn Kohn, Burns gices a virtuosic performance: turning on a dime from hilarity to real poignancy, he compels your unwavering attention for the hour-long show without missing a beat. Given the similarities to some of Peter Houghton's one-man shows, it's not surprising that Houghton's collaborator Anne Browning should have directed it with such a deft hand. Small, but perfectly formed. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

The Endarkenment

The Endarkenment, a post-apocalyptic musical by young writer/actor Fregmonto Stokes with score by Angus Leslie and Julius Millar, is the sort of rude, disorderly show that embodies the spirit of the Fringe. It makes almost no sense at all, has some of the most absurd costumes I've seen, and is powered by a rough, irreverent energy (and three cyclists, who every now and then cycle up the watts for a couple of torches). A spirited piss-take of online worlds such as Second Life, here called Corporate Life, it takes the form of a liturgy in which the high priest, Bugsy (Peter J. Reid) conducts a ceremony designed to appease the angry post-capitalist gods Imacdonald, Harvey Norman and Old King Coal. His three acolytes Swatch (Amy Turton), Flappy (Rueben Brown) and Zak Pidd (Goose) enact their fall of from grace and the subsequent Minor Economic Correction that saw the world fall into darkness.

Accompanied by a band of what appear to be pixies playing some very wonky pop, the performers belt out some fun numbers with ferocious gusto. Its satire of 21st century excess is limited to a basic attack on the alienation of virtual life, and some (admittedly enjoyable) wordplay on internet acronyms, but there are a couple of moments that pierce through the nonsense into something genuinely uncomfortable. Fringe Hub, until October 1.

Testimony


Testimony opens with a riveting image: we walk into the theatre to see a grotesque figure, dressed in what appear to be filthy white rags, standing on a podium, his back to the audience. When the lights go down, he turns to face us, and we see that he is abject indeed: his testicles, the size of grapefuits, dangle between his legs, forcing him to stand bowlegged, and his face is marred with what appears to be some terrible skin disease. This creature is, we learn, Octavio Asterius, the degraded modern remnant of the minotaur, the monster in the labyrinth of the contemporary imagination. Here, using an old convention of the theatre, he is on trial, with the audience as his jury and judge.

Graham Henderson's monologue was originally written as prose, and despite the best efforts of performer Matt Crosby and director Suzanne Chaundy, its transposition to theatre isn't entirely successful. The staging is simple: Crosby is framed by projections manipulated live on stage from a light projector, which are ingeniously various. Crosby's performance is detailed, brave and physically impressive; but his undoubted commitment is let down by some indifferent dramaturgy.

Testimony shows little grasp of dramatic structure, which means its energy really begins to sag in the final 20 minutes. Worse, the prose segues without warning from epiphanies of soaring poetic to moments of bathetic banality that recall nothing so much as a yoga meditation. If the text could be excised of its increasingly turgid repetitions, and could solve its problematically simplistic relationship to the audience, it might make a brilliant, albeit rather shorter, show. As it is, it founders under its own weight. Fringe Hub, until October 9.