Genesi From the Museum of Sleep. Photo: Gabriele Pellegrini.
Melbourne Festival wrap-up
07 November 2002
Our tireless reviewer, Carol Middleton, has spent the past fortnight with her critical eye glued to the Melbourne Festival. Here are the reviews we haven’t yet published.
Same, same but different
Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre
30 October 2002
The Playhouse was packed for the first night of Same, same but different, an all-Australian production that explores, mainly through contact dance, the phenomenon of the couple. Unpretentious and easy to comprehend, it came as a welcome relief after attending several less digestible, experimental theatrical events of the Melbourne Festival. Its strengths lie in the entertainment value, the theatrical and dynamic movement, and the successful interaction of film imagery with onstage action.
Director Kate Champion uses a light touch to direct the choreography, working closely with the eight performers of her newly created company Force Majeure, in a non-stop 70-minute performance that combines dance, film, music and text. The three principal couples (Roz Hervey, Kirstie McCracken, Veronica Neave, Shaun Parker, Byron Perry and Nathan Page) work in male/female couples or in groups to explore the dynamics of relationships. One older couple (Arianthe Galani and Brian Harrison) acts as a soft counterpoint to the energy of the young couples.
The lightweight, often humorous, text and the use of vaudeville or sentimental music highlights the real essence of the performance – the exceptional dancing and choreography, complemented by Brigid Kitchin’s appropriate use of film. The back projections add both a physical and emotional dimension to the onstage movement of the dancers. Our perception of the relationships shifts as the camera frames and zooms in on the action: our focus shifts from the small screen to the wide screen to the real-time, real-life figures.
It is amazing what can be done with a table and two sets of stairs, particularly when used in conjunction with projected silhouettes. These are used in Same, same but different to explore the ups and downs and changing allegiances and feelings within relationships. When the six main characters (three called Mary and three called John) are on stage, the momentum flows, bounces and swirls from one body to another, leaving the impression of bodies in slow motion suspended in mid-air. It looks effortless, but requires precision and strength, trust and teamwork.
The pace eases off when only one couple is on stage. Each couple takes turns in the spotlight for a series of theatrical vignettes, influenced by one of Champion’s favourite films When Harry Met Sally. Here, the truth about the relationship comes out. Each couple acts out their feelings through movement and facial expressions, as they sit side by side, while their thoughts are often spoken by another actor in shadow. The device works well. Each actor/dancer has his or her own style and each vignette brings an element of surprise and a great sense of fun.
At other times the approach is more serious and emotional. In the dance marathon in the final scene, the couple repeats a sequence of movements over and over again until the record winds down, the movements lose their impetus , the tension unravels and the connection softens. This is the marathon of a long-term relationship – the focus cuts in and out to the older couple, underlining the loving intimacy of this closing scene.
Even before the audience showed its heartfelt appreciation at the Melbourne Festival,
Same, same but different had already received very positive feedback. The show, commissioned by the Melbourne Festival and Sydney Festival, won the 2002 Helpmann Award for Best Visual or Physical Theatre. A seemingly artless production, it cleverly appeals to audiences who have been brought up on a diet of screen images and popular music, melding several media into a seamless work of art.
Louis Sclavis Quintet
Melbourne Concert Hall
29 October 2002
The French clarinet and sax legend, Louis Sclavis, has finally made it to Australia. He brings with him four equally brilliant players, all classically trained, to explore his jazz compositions onstage, starting with his recent work L’Affrontement Des Pretendants. There is the geniality of Jean-Luc Cappozzo on trumpet, the sublimity of Dominique Pifarely on violin, the cool dynamism of Bruno Chevillon on double bass and the delicate precision of Francois Merville on drums.
Clarinet is a very vocal instrument, and Sclavis makes it grunt, growl and sing by turn. His favourite is the bass clarinet, which has the reedy tone of the clarinet with the resonance of a saxophone. At one point he takes off the mouthpiece and rests the instrument against the microphone as he plays the keys. But, for the most part, his playing is without trickery, dexterous and fast, with trilling phrases and staccato funk.
Funk and bebop seem to be the strongest influences in his music, with occasional references to Celtic and folk traditions. The music is essentially cerebral white jazz, with a density that owes much to the classical training of each player. There is no deference given to the audience, few repetitions of phrases, no earthy grooves, just a constant change of tempo and mood.
Yet the rhythm is all-important, with every instrument having a percussive role to play. The drums and bass are as much in the forefront of the compositions as the other instruments, and the violin functions as a rhythm instrument as much as a melodic one. This is definitely violin, not fiddle, played with every timbre from the painfully scratchy to the exquisitely soaring.
Most popular with the audience was Bruno Chevillon, who stretches the limits of his double bass with enthusiasm, his long fingers leaping great strides, straddling huge chords, bowing and plucking, or sounding notes with one hand. Favouring the top strings and a trebly rather than bassy tone, he explores the harmonic outreaches of his instrument.
Through it all, Francois Merville stays calm and composed at his drum-kit, a magician with sticks and whatever else comes to hand - shakers and shells, brushes and egg-whisks, all used to charm new sounds out of his drum skins. He produces a clean, precise sound, never over-loud, with a complexity of rhythm and texture that requires only subtle changes of volume.
This is experimental and dramatic jazz that defies labels, played by musicians of the highest calibre. The quintet is just one of the ensembles Sclavis plays with, although Chevillon and Pifarely have worked with him since the early 1980s. The eclectic nature of his music takes him into different creative arenas: as well as leading jazz outfits, he has composed music for film, theatre and dance. The possibilities are endless, and that is what makes this music so exciting.
Genesi From the Museum of Sleep
State Theatre
Victorian Arts Centre
24 October 2002
Bewildered, overwhelmed, shocked and awed, the audience drifted from the State Theatre, after experiencing the Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s monumental work Genesi From the Museum of Sleep. We had been visually and orally confronted by imagery and sound that peeled away the layers that normally act as filters to our senses, and been exposed to the cacophony of chaos, the rawness of creation and the pain of human existence.
The search for meaning in this Italian production, based on the story of Genesis, became a frustrating exercise. We could only surrender to the visceral experience, absorbing the imagery through the physical senses, rather than subjecting it to mental analysis. The mesmerising sets were like vast three-dimensional paintings, peopled by shadowy figures, roaming dogs, or instruments of destruction, and highlighted by subtle chiaroscuro effects. Raffaello Sanzio, in the company’s name, is a direct reference to the Renaissance painter Raphael, and the conceptual approach of Genesi’s creator and director Romeo Castellucci is essentially that of a painter.
Romeo Castellucci and his co-creators, Chiara Guido and Claudia Castellucci, are all graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna, where they combined their artistic sensibilities to establish this iconoclastic theatre company in 1981. Romeo Castellucci, who studied scenic design and painting at the Academy, creates the visual environment, while Claudia Castellucci creates the choreography and Chiara Guidi the vocal score and dramatic rhythm, using mostly original synthesised music by Scott Gibbons.
Genesi has three acts. In the first act, At the beginning, the figure of Mme Curie emerges from a sepia-toned, veiled tableau, to hand the toxic element of radium to the painfully tall, thin figure of Lucifer. The sound of the Hebrew text of Genesis cuts through the sepia to unleash the powers of creation and destruction. Underscored by a soundscape that assaults the ears, Lucifer’s pain is palpable as he squeezes through the narrow door from one abyss to another. The text has by now given way to sound and movement and we are swept into a vortex where words are superfluous. We meet Adam, a contortionist whose bones crack mercilessly as he writhes in a suspended tank. Eve drags herself, wrinkled, with one breast, sobbing, across the stage.
The existential pain of the first act makes way for the cold-blooded second act Auschwitz, set, by contrast, in a white-washed environment, with six white-clad children, some of them Castellucci’s own offspring, playing in the concentration camp. The musical score is unbearably sweet, as we await the inevitable – the turning on of the showers. The effect is chilling as the innocents play, unaware, in a senseless void where God is silent.
In the third act, we are back in the Old Testament, where death and murder enter the consciousness of humankind when Cain kills his brother Abel and is unable to reverse his deed. Castellucci again makes use of a physical anomaly, using an actor with a stunted arm to play Cain. Choreographer and director have worked together to express through these unusual bodies an intensity of emotion that is beyond words. “All art is disturbing,” Castellucci has said. “Genesi scares me more than the Apocalypse, the terror of sheer possibility, the open sea of every possibility.”
There is some hope: in the third act death brings with it a promise of new life. In a brief moment of relief from the hellish realms, the stage is bathed in gold light and the music of Henry Gorecki soars joyously. As we left the theatre, we were handed a red flyer with what promised to be an explanation by the director. It was obscure, fragmented, more confusing than clarifying, and told us more about the mind of the director than about the work itself.
Romeo Castellucci has been at the helm of Societas Raffaello Sanzio for twenty years and is an acclaimed director, with a dedicated following in Europe, particularly in France. He was awarded the Grand Prix de la Critique-Paris for the staging of Genesi From the Museum of Sleep, which was first produced in 1999. It is exciting to witness his work in Melbourne, to feel the boundaries of the theatrical experience shift, and to wonder whether this elemental and epic theatre will have an impact on the work of our own dramatists.
Remembrance of things past
Space 28
Southbank
23 October - 10 November 2002
Remembrance of things past is an epic seven-volume work by Marcel Proust, regarded as a masterpiece, but rarely read in its entirety. Harold Pinter, the English playwright, adapted it in 1972 for the film producer Joseph Losey, but the film was never made. The English stage director, Di Trevis, took up the screenplay in 1996 and made it into a stage version. When Remembrance of things past finished its run at London’s National Theatre, Robyn Archer invited Trevis to bring it to this year’s Melbourne Festival.
The result is a production of the play by final year students of the Victorian College of the Arts, directed by Trevis. With a huge cast of 28, this was an ingenious way of dealing with the logistics of staging the play in Melbourne. The stage version was originally workshopped by LAMDA students in London, so Trevis is experienced in bringing out the talent of young actors. She pays great attention to detail, so that every waiter, every minor part, is played with as much care as a major role.
Remembrance of things past is the first production to be performed in the VCA’s new theatre - Space 28 in Dodds Street, Southbank,. Barely finished, the theatre is a huge and versatile space, with a large, low stage under banks of lights. The audience was relegated to rows of very uncomfortable collapsible seats.
We were treated to a subtly lit evocation of Proust’s fecund imagination, a dream-like sequence of characters and memories, set in the Parisian society of the late 19th century. The script has little of the lyrical, poetic quality of the original novel, although it does attempt to move forward and backwards in time in the same vein as the book. Only the conclusion evokes the original, as the main character of Marcel re-examines his life as a work of art in front of Vermeer’s painting View of Delft.
Richard Pyros plays Marcel with an open expressive face and an engaging softness and innocence. He captures the sense of wonderment and bewilderment that this character experiences as he faces each twist of fate. His is just one of many outstanding performances by these young actors, names to watch as their careers unfold. Karlis Zaid, Sophie Kelly, Darren Natale, Katherine Anderson, Anica Koprivec are just a few.
When Trevis first worked on the stage version, she began with the waltz scene and developed some of the strongest images from that starting point. It is the imagery – the one coloured frock in a sea of black ball-gowns, the band of bathing girls at Balbec, the boys in thebrothel – that lingers after the show is over. There is a breathtaking use of tableaux, where the action is frozen like a painting. This is particularly effective in the concert scenes, where the solo musician and audience are locked into their absurd individual raptures.
The costumes for the lavish court scenes and the sunny scenes at Balbec are superb. They add to the illusion of 19th century France and highlight the attitudes of the time, especially among the gentry, to homosexuals, lesbians, prostitutes and artists.
This production, with its colourful parade of characters, is eminently suited to showcasing our upcoming talent. It adds a nice touch to the Melbourne Festival, which this year focuses on text-based work, bringing us back to where world-class theatre begins – in our own backyard.
The Mystery of Charles Dickens
Athenaeum Theatre
Victorian Arts Centre
31 October 2002
Simon Callow is a star. A familiar face to filmgoers, particularly after his memorable performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral, he is also a significant figure in British theatre. This one-man production is a fine showcase for his talents, and he brings to it a huge range of emotions, vocal versatility and physicality.
The Athenaeum Theatre is a rather jaded beauty, perfect for this production, which relies on traditional staging and presentation to recreate the life and times of Charles Dickens. With no changes of costume and a single set comprising two picture frames, one set at an acute angle, the momentum was carried forward by the alacrity with which Callow switched from narrator to Dickens to fictional character and back again.
The script, written by Peter Ackroyd, takes us through the whole life of Dickens, from his idyllic early years, through his horrific exposure to child labour in London at the age of ten, to his lucky escape from drudgery to become a popular writer at a very young age. The text is alive with the experiences that shaped his writing and the people who acted as moulds for his characters. Callow plucks these characters out of the text and breathes life into them, contracting and expanding his body and voice to fit. At times, energised by the characterisations, he seems to shed years onstage.
We follow Dickens in his nightly walks around London town, meeting his characters-to-be – Fagin, Mr Micawber, Oliver Twist, Miss Haversham and Mrs Gamp. We are caught up in Dickens’ fire and enthusiasm and his love of the dramatic – his first ambition was as an actor – and the manic need for popularity that finally drove him to the grave.
The mystery, the darker side, of Dickens slowly comes to light through the text and through Callow’s interpretation. In the second act he takes on the role of Dickens, re-enacting his last, exhausting reading tour around Europe and the writer’s increasing mania. Callow gives us the characters as Dickens might have played them, full-blown, larger than life, culminating in the horrific murder scene from Oliver Twist, playing both Bill Sikes and Nancy.
Dickens is a complex character and this extended monologue succeeds in conveying much about his life that is not generally known. It demonstrates his huge talent, his enormous popularity, his failure as a husband and his far-reaching influence in social reform. It was directly due to his exposure of working-class life that conditions began to improve in Victorian times.
Callow takes every opportunity to bring colour and variety to the story, playing to the gallery in a great display of his virtuosity. At times I found he overstated the obvious, maybe pausing too long before delivering the clinching word, or articulating a phrase with almost too much precision. An occasional throw-away line or understatement might have added a lighter touch to this relentless dramatic tour de force. But the brilliance is undeniable, and what better subject for drama than the arch-dramatist himself, Charles Dickens?
Carol Middleton
