Melbourne Festival Diary #5

Holding note: Sometimes I find that all that emerges from my fingertips is a sludge of meh. This can particularly happen when I've been knocked out by a work: all those responses just won't clarify into something coherent. I've been struggling for two hours now, and getting nowhere. So for the meantime: let me simply recommend that you see, if at all possible, Akram Khan's solo dance DESH (closing on Sunday) and Chunky Move's An Act of Now (Anouk van Dijk's first work as artistic director, which opened last night). Longer responses are, my subconscious assures me, in the mail.

Melbourne Festival Diary #4

Some notes on Orlando

White. No colour, every colour; plenty and absence at once. The empty page awaiting inscription, the page which may be shredded or burned. The colour of milk, the colour of semen, the colour of fertility. The imaginary of European Empire, the sterile fictions of race, purity, virginity. The hymeneal bride, the deuil blanc of mediaeval mourning. The colour of deep freeze, of immobility, of the Great Frosts of Elizabethan London, when the river Thames was sheeted with ice eleven inches thick. Arsenic. The nuclear heart of a star, the colour of absolute cold. The colour of The Rabble's Orlando.

Mary Helen Sassman and Dana Miltins in Orlando. Photo: Sarah Walker

In Kate Davis's design, the stage is a shallow pool of white liquid, enclosed above by a low ceiling outlined by lights, and backstage by a huge mirror. Before the actors appear, it is absolutely still: it seems a solid white floor, a sheet of ice. As the actors wade ankle-deep through the liquid (milk? semen? both? neither?), the surface becomes a chaos of ripples, their white costumes become sodden. It is impure, this white.

The imagined shade of absolute clarity. The white-out of a snowstorm, in which every thing is obscured.

*

It's certainly been an interesting, if not especially edifying, fortnight for women. A popular resurgence in feminism, which in Australia has remained largely beneath the radar, collided head-on with the received wisdom of mainstream political commentary.  Julia Gillard's Question Time speech in which, turning on a rhetorical sixpence, she took Tony Abbott's hypocritical borrowing of feminist feathers and shoved them so far down his throat that he choked, became the focal point of a blizzard of debate. Suddenly sexism and misogyny were the words of the moment. Feminism? Not so much.

Melbourne Festival Diary #3

It may have only opened on Thursday, but the Melbourne Festival is now well into its stride. Aside from the Forsythe Dance Company, my highlight so far has been Orlando, a hallucinatory theatrical riff on Virginia Woolf's novel from independent Melbourne company The Rabble, which is at the Malthouse as part of its Helium season. Beautiful, obscene, wickedly funny, wilfully theatrical, this is The Rabble's best work yet. When I work out what happened I'll write about it further, but it occurs to me that this might be what contemporary feminist theatre looks like.

Frustratingly, I've missed what were reportedly the two ovational events of the opening week: Nilaja Sun’s No Child..., a one-woman show at Theatre Works about the failures of the US education system, and Antony and the Johnsons' Swanlights at Hamer Hall. No Child..., oddly, wasn't on the invitation list that was sent out to media, which might explain my first oversight; although picking from a festival program often feels like playing Tetris with your diary, and inevitably you miss something important. There is talk of a return season, so keep your eyes peeled.

After Life, Michel Van der Aa

I simply wasn't issued tickets for Antony, which suggests that TN might have slipped onto some pr Z-list*: an impression strengthened, it must be said, by the seats I had for the opening event of the festival, Dutch composer/director Michel Van der Aa's After Life. Up in the gods at the Regent Theatre minus binoculars was not the way to see this opera. This isn't simply privileged whinging (although, to be honest, it partly is). Critics tend to be fussy about seats: if you're writing about a show, and especially if you didn't enjoy it, you feel that, in fairness to the artist, you ought to have experienced it at its best. On the other hand, anyone who pays for a show ought to have a good experience, even if they are at the back of the theatre. That many didn't was evidenced by the dress circle walkouts during the final hour of the show: I stopped counting at about thirty.

The fact is that the Regent Theatre was entirely the wrong venue to do this work justice: its over-the-top Renaissance kitsch might be a brilliant frame for musical spectacle, such as the upcoming King Kong, but it dwarfed the austere set of Van der Aa's opera and completely flattened the possibility of emotional response. This is a major problem: as Van der Aa says in the program: "For me, opera only makes sense if we find subjects and librettos that connect to an audience here and now." This opera, which is based on a 2001 film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda, depends on emotional connection; without it, the result is a kind of epic bathos.

The conceit of After Life is that we are in a metaphysical limbo, in which the souls of the recently dead are met by purgatorial bureaucrats who must determine with them the defining memory of their lives. The lower stage is cluttered with piles of domestic objects, a kind of mnemonic warehouse through which the various characters rummage until they find the memory they will take with them to eternity. The characters - three live on stage, three on film - have a week to decide on this defining moment. The drama of the libretto itself turns on the relationship between the bureaucrat Aidan (Roderick Williams) and his client, Mr Walter (Richard Suart), who turn out to have history in common.

Van der Aa complicates the original scenario with documentary footage of several people asked about their most significant memory. These interviews, projected on the large screen back stage, have the complex feeling that the libretto signally lacks: when Flint, a little boy of surpassing sweetness, talks about his favourite dog, or Bert remembers working with his eccentric grandfather in a basement making a perpetual motion machine, it heightens the lack of affect in the opera proper. And this in turn begs the question: can there be such a thing as an opera which depends on naturalistic identification? Despite the tricky interactions of video and stage presences, these elements neither integrate nor fruitfully contrast: the overwhelming feeling is of watching two different kinds of work, a documentary film and an opera, jammed together on a single stage.

This isn't helped by the staging: as a director, Van der Aa strikes me as a very good composer. It's overwhelmingly static, even conservative. As soon as I realised, early into the show, that the opera was going to finish when the stage was emptied of objects, I couldn't help noting their departure as one by one piles of clutter - lounge suites and bicycles, park benches and standard lamps - were wheeled off stage. This feeling of marking duration was heightened by an increasing indignation at the banality of the libretto and, in particular, a growing feeling of disbelief at its simplistic treatment of something as complex and evanescent as human memory. Given (say) Proust, how is it seriously possible to reduce the sensual interiority of lived memory to a kind of MTV video? Perhaps this conceit might have worked in the original film, which I haven't seen: for me, the effect was a baffling sentimentality.

Once the various characters decide on their defining memory, the moment with which they will live for eternity, the operatic bureaucrats set about re-enacting and filming it. Here, I supposed, we were witnessing the artifice of memory, how it reconstructs the past into a present fiction; instead, it seemed to me that we were being shown a kind of poverty, the leaching of the multiple richness of memory by visual mediation. The emotional pay-off of the opera is the projection of these recaptured memories as films at the end, when they are given a sense of reality by the illusions of artfulness; by then I couldn't but feel that being condemned to watch a single piece of footage for ever and ever would, indeed, be a kind of purgatory. But I don't believe that irony was intentional.

Like his mentor, Louis Andriessen, Van der Aa's music mixes contemporary electronica influences and jazz with more traditional classical instruments: notably in this case, woodwind and harpsichord. The score reminds me of a kinder, less discordant Andriessen, with clear lyrical lines and a focus on melody: there is little drama in the music, which relies on subtler musical interactions that again were largely lost in the space of the Regent. I had no complaints with any of the performances, from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra nor from the singers. I suspect in a more sympathetic theatre, such as the Playhouse, After Life might have been a different experience: for me, the Regent exposed its weaknesses and cruelly dissipated its potential strengths.

* I should add a postscript: I have been hastily assured by the Melbourne Festival that this is not the case. And also, despite my caviling here, I can't help wondering sometimes whether it's a good idea for critics not to be privileged...

After Life, after Hirokazu Kore-eda, composition, stage and video direction and text by Michel Van der Aa. De Nederlandse Opera, Melbourne Festival, at the Regent Theatre. Until October 27.

Melbourne Festival Diary #2

I Don't Believe in Outer Space, Forsythe Dance Company; Never Did Me Any Harm, Force Majeure.
 
I used to say that I enjoyed seeing dance because it gave me a break from words. As I Don't Believe in Outer Space and Never Did Me Any Harm demonstrate, this is less and less the case. Language is now such a common dynamic in contemporary dance that wordless movement is almost an exception: the word is everywhere, as sonic texture, rhythmic device, vocalised meaning, instruction, play, choreographic punctuation, visual cue and so on. It is almost always language stripped of the prosaic freight of narrative or dramatic meaning; often, and most satisfyingly for me, dance liberates language as pure poem.

I Don't Believe in Outer Space, The Forsythe Company. Photo: Dominik Mentzos

William Forsythe is exemplary. I Don't Believe in Outer Space, ultimately a meditation on mortality, is a joyously traumatic work. From beginning to end it is heavy with language. This is a language which is heavily in question: no transparent vehicle of meaning, it becomes a gestural aspect of Forythe's neuroticised choreography. Forsythe's dancers are grotesquely distorted in angular, counter-intuitive gestures that somehow are haunted by an echo of the everyday, a feeling heightened by the casual dress of the dancers. This means that the work balances acutely between comedy - much of it is laugh-out-loud hilarious - and an abiding sense of anxiety, even of menace.

The empty stage is littered with round objects that at first look like shiny volcanic boulders, but which turn out to be balls of rolled-up gaffer tape. They become many things in the course of the dance: endowed randomly with qualities of lightness or heaviness, they demonstrate the ambiguities of appearance. They are images of the behaviour of matter, from the pull of gravity to the Big Bang and particle physics. They are a locus of anxiety (I worried at first about the dancers' ankles) and objects of play and chance. The balls are kicked casually around the stage by the dancers, or thrown, or swept up by their bodies, or shoved inside costumes to distort the shapes of bodies.

Festival Diary #1

The Melbourne Festival officially opens tonight, but a couple of pre-opening events have already tempted Ms TN out of her burrow. Over the past two nights, I've seen two contemporary dance works, Force Majeure's Never Did Me Any Harm and The Forsythe Company's I Don't Believe in Outer Space. Both are recommended: William Forsythe's work in particular is astounding. I'll be uploading meditations on both: but I find that before I can write properly about them I need to clear my mental decks.

As regular readers know, a few weeks ago I put up the blinds and shut shop, pleading theatrical burnout. Of course, I've been busy: my novel Black Spring finally landed in bookshops last week, I am plodding along on another novel, reviewing Mallarmé, writing columns, and so on and so forth. This time out meant I saw almost none of the Fringe Festival, which cost me some twinges; but all the same, it's been an excellent thing to stay home and reflect. In particular: what is this burnout of which I speak? Is it merely a personal thing, or does it reflect a wider feeling of stress?

In the past couple of weeks I've had a few interesting conversations about theatre criticism in Melbourne. This navel-gazing is an occupational hazard worldwide: the New York Times last week launched yet another round table, Do We Need Professional Critics?, prompting Age critic and blogger Rebecca Harkins Cross to tweet: "Do we need another debate about whether we need critics?" I've lost count of how many panels I've sat on to debate the same question over the years: the last was during the Melbourne Writers Festival in August. In part, this crisis of professionalism is a response to the tsunami of digital culture, which for some people suggests that serious criticism is over. Needless to say, I don't agree: but I do sometimes wonder where that criticism is going to come from.

Know someone who's made an outstanding contribution to the Australian performing arts? I thought so. You should be nominating them for the 2012 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards. Right now, as nominations close on November 9. The annual awards were created in 1984 by the Trustees of the Sidney Myer Fund to recognise outstanding achievements in dance, drama, comedy, music, opera, circus and puppetry. The are national, and comprise:

• The Individual Award - $50,000 
• The Group Award - $80,000 
• The Facilitator’s Prize - $20,000

Details and a handy online nomination form can be found at the Myer Foundation website. Hop to it!

As we all know, three members of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot were recently imprisoned after a farcical trial in which they were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. In response, English PEN's Writers at Risk is hosting Poems for Pussy Riot, initiated by writer and editor Sophie Mayer, to collect poems, translate them into Russian, and send them to the band as a gesture of support and protest against censorship. Poems for Pussy Riot will also be an ebook. My contribution, Dance of the Seven Veils, is here.

Okay, okay, I know I swore that I was writing no reviews for a month. But just this one, because it's important.

I was completely unprepared for the emotional impact of watching Jenny Kemp's brilliant production of Top Girls. It was as if an abscess of grief and anger were lanced deep inside me: all the things I already know, that are reconfirmed in the media every day, in casual conversation and trivial encounters, in a lifetime's experience of being a woman, were given form and focus and represented anew. It's a long time since I've read or seen this play, perhaps the most famous of Caryl Churchill's extraordinary oeuvre: but as Kemp and her team so lucidly demonstrate, it remains as powerful as it was when it was first performed in the 1980s, at the height of Thatcher's Britain.

L-R: Li-Leng Au, Anita Hegh and Maria Theodorakis in Top Girls. Photo: Jeff Busby

Most of all, Top Girls released an overpowering sadness. To be a woman in a male-dominated world is to be the second sex: millennia of cultural conditioning can't be overthrown in a generation, or even in a century. And what this play argues, with unwavering pitilessness, is that the subjugation of women can't be separated from the subjugation of class. It's a play driven by the "shuddering horror" described in a letter to her lover by Rosa Luxemburg, which the British poet Keston Sutherland recently quoted in a paper on Revolution and Being Really Alive:

"[T]his feeling of shuddering horror does not let go of me […] Especially when I lie down to sleep, this fact [of my mother’s death] immediately arises again before my eyes, and I have to groan out loud from pain. I don’t know how it is with you but I don’t suffer mainly from longing anymore and I don’t suffer on my own account, but what makes me shudder every time is this one thought: what kind of life was that! What has this person lived through, what is the point of a life like that! I don’t know of any thought that is so dreadful for me as this one; I feel as though it would tear me apart if I began to think about it, and yet it comes to me under the most surprising circumstances, at any moment."

There's some dialogue in the second half of Top Girls that so precisely echoes Luxemburg's letter, that I wonder if it is one of the seeds of the play itself. What kind of a life is that? And the passion and horror of this question tears apart the shallowness of popular critiques of feminism. It's all too easy for the western middle class - and especially for men and women who argue that feminism is over, that women are quite equal enough - to ignore the poverties that the west has outsourced to so-called "developing" countries, and even to ignore those that exist closer to home. Yet these poverties - physical, economic and intellectual - exist everywhere, inflicting their damage of millions of lives. And, as study after study has shown, it is women who bear the brunt. What can equality possibly mean if the glamorous board room success of a few does nothing to change the lives of the many?

Dear everybody: as we all know, good intentions are the road to hell. And Ms TN is full of good intentions. I wrote them all out this morning, having cleared some space to catch up on the shows I've seen and not written about. And I realised I have to face the fact that I simply can't do everything I would like to: it's not really a question of time, but of mental energy. The truth is, as I have said in serial posts, that this has been a crazy year, and I have been writing like a maniac, and the sort of tiredness this induces is cumulative. The past month has been especially bonkers. Which isn't helped by sudden obsessions, like writing this review on Poetry, truthfulness and political speech.

For the past few months I've been trying to keep all the balls in the air, but a big part of the problem for me is that I just can't see the point of half-doing anything. I hate half-doing this blog, which is what has been happening because of everything else.

So here are the shows I've seen and not reviewed: Doku Rai at North Melbourne Arts House, Pale Blue Dot at Helium at the Malthouse, Angela's Kitchen at Malthouse Theatre, Happy Ending at the Melbourne Theatre Company, and the Eifman Ballet's Anna Karenin and Tchaikovsky. All of them were interesting, and deserve proper responses. I recommend all the shows that are still on: Angela's Kitchen begins as a conventional immigrant story about Paul Capsis's Maltese background and ends in a wholly unexpected place, both theatrically and emotionally, as a meditation on transience and grief; Pale Blue Dot is a fascinating movement piece which cuts together meditations on photography, film, space exploration to create a theatrical picture of consciousness and memory; Happy Ending is a slyly hilarious play about sexuality, women and cultural misunderstanding. I'm also booked to see Pinnochio at the Malthouse and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls this week, and the Melbourne Fringe is about to launch like a juggernaut.

Also, not unimportantly, I have this novel to write, and that has been suffering most of all. So I've made a stern and, in truth, rather difficult decision: TN will close down for the next month, and I won't be posting until the Melbourne Festival opens on October 11. I'll do my usual blanket coverage of festival shows, and then perhaps I might be able to strike some kind of (ha!) balance. I still have to finish this novel, and I have to make it a first priority. I'm happy to be asked to shows, for future reference: but for the meantime I won't be writing about them. Don't take this as a statement of intention about Theatre Notes: it's not. But I'm going fishing.

PS: Yes, I'll still be on twitter at @alisoncroggon. And will tweet any shows I see.  No substitute for considered comment, I know, but less exhausting!

'Tis the season for theatre launches, which gives Ms TN ample opportunity to exploit her genius for SNAFU. Recently my trigger finger gave the MTC's pr department conniptions by blithely tweeting their entire Neon season before its formal announcement. (Lucky you can delete tweets, huh?) The Malthouse wisely emailed the preview of its season with a big sign saying EMBARGO that even I couldn't miss. In this case I told everybody that I was going to the launch last Thursday, when it was in fact last night. This tells you everything you need to know about my present state of mental dishabille. Anyway, I have checked the date three times and am almost sure that I can now write about it.

Meredith Penman and Karen Sibbing in Adena Jacob's Persona

2013 features some eye-catching shows. It looks like Marion Potts's strongest, and certainly most diverse, season so far. To almost nobody's surprise, given the persistent rumours that Persona would return next year (and given it wasn't in the MTC's season), Adena Jacob's brilliant production is getting a run at the Beckett. If you missed its Theatre Works season (or even if you didn't), this is a must see: it's probably my show of the year so far, even with some stiff competition. Michael Kantor is back at his old stamping ground with an ambitious reworking of King Lear, The Shadow King. This will be performed in a mixture of Indigenous languages and modern English, and has been created in close collaboration with Elders. Again, a must-see. Likewise, mark your diaries for a new show on superheroes by Back to Back Theatre, Laser Beak Man, which promises "parallel realities": well, that's what you always get with Back to Back, surely our most significant independent theatre company.

There's a wide range of plays, which together reflect an overt political engagement. The season opens with the timely return of Stephen Sewell's 1990s play Hate, a work that critiques the dynasties of political and corporate power. Look out for Matt Lutton's production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Dance of Death. Darkly, wickedly, despairingly funny, Dürrenmatt is yet another playwright done all too seldom on our stages. Marion Potts is directing Evgeny Shvarz's The Dragon, a play and playwright with which I am completely unfamiliar. This was premiered in 1944, at the height of Soviet Stalinism, and is a fairytale satire on totalitarianism. Also reaching beyond the Anglosphere is a premiere of Iranian Nassim Soleimanpour's White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, which appears to be an exploration of scripted improvisation. On the feminist front, Van Badham has adapted Angela Carter's explorations of the legend of Bluebeard for The Bloody Chamber.

Intriguingly, Lally Katz is stepping forward as a performer, and presenting a one-woman show, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person. I have no idea at all what that will be like, but I can't imagine that anyone will want to miss it. Other performance includes a puppetry show for young people, Hard Rubbish, by Men of Steel, which pits Ikea against old, unloved furniture. And excitingly, Dance Massive is back, with works by Chunky Move's new director Anouk van Dijk, 247 Days, and Larissa McGowan, Skeleton.

In short, get to it. You can explore the Season 2013 online here.