Review: Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this review contains the name of a deceased person.

Many people will have first encountered the Chooky Dancers on YouTube. Their hilariously unlikely Yolngu version of Zorba the Greek became a viral hit, scoring 1.5 million viewers.

They come from Elcho Island (Galiwin’ku), which is north east of Arnhemland. They live in a poverty which ought to make all Australians ashamed: 25 people share a house where the wiring is falling out of the walls, and where there is often not enough food to ensure that people do not go hungry. People die every week from the many complications of poverty: as if to illustrate this, Frank Garawirrtja, the mentor behind the Chooky Dancers and the Wrong Skin project, died during the process of making the show. Wrong Skin in fact features footage from his funeral.

In 2007, the Howard Government launched the aggressive military intervention policy, which was imposed without consultation with the communities involved. This paternalism – continued under Labor – was supposedly to combat Indigenous deprivation, but its effect has only been to further disenfranchise an already scandalously deprived community. As many community leaders have protested, their rights have been taken away, and many claim it’s part of a larger policy to extinguish land rights and Indigenous culture.

Nigel Jamieson canvasses all these issues in Wrong Skin. It’s a show that emerges from a community little understood in wider Australia, and like Honour Bound – Jamieson’s physical theatre piece about the Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks – it is driven by a profound political anger. But what you come away with is a vital joyousness, the rebellious humour and resilience of the Yolngu people, that shows the other side of the doom-laden headlines. Indigneous people have often responded to their situations with subversive humour, and the Chooky Dancers are no exception.

This is a difficult show to write about, not least because it requires complicated explanation that the show itself manages to eschew, reaching into the immediacy and vitality of performance to make its various points. Jamieson has put together a multimedia spectacular that enacts the cultural contradictions of contemporary globalism, where Yolgnu in one of the most remote regions of Australia download Bollywood and hiphop to their mobile phones and cheerfully appropriate Singin’ in the Rain into traditional dance. The whole is strung together by a simple Romeo and Juliet story of forbidden love between Yolgnu of the same Yirridja moiety (a relationship which is strictly forbidden), illustrating the tensions between western ideas of individual freedom and traditional law.

Very little of the narration is in English (English hasn’t been taught in remote schools since the 1970s, and many Yolgnu don’t speak it)*. But the action, assisted by some miraculous use of multi-media, is crystal clear. The dancers each introduce themselves, identifying their clans and moieties, and then introduce the story. The rest is a kind of patchwork of song and dance and film, woven together to enact a mimesis of life on Elcho Island: its sorrows and imprisonments – which are starkly demonstrated – and its delights – dance, fishing, play.

To the European mind, the complexities of kinship in Indigenous society is mind-boggling. Skin names or moieties and clan affiliations govern your language, your totem, your clan and every aspect of social interaction with other people and with the land. Your skin name determines who you can marry, and who you are forbidden to even speak to. To complicate things further, the cyclical kinship patterns mean that your great-grandmother can be your child, and your great-grandchild your mother.

Take, for example, the term “Yolngu”. Yolngu means “person”, and can mean someone specifically from East Arnhemland, or simply an Aboriginal person. The term Yolngu Matha covers the more than 100 languages spoken by the clans of East Arnhemland. According to anthropologist Emma Kowel, Yolngu inherit their language from their father, but adults generally speak at least five languages, and often understand 15 or more. In short, to understand what any 10-year-old Yolngu knows is a life-time study for an outsider. I can’t quite get my head around this stuff: this is a culture that challenges basic western notions of possession and relationship, and which blurs together into a holistic and collective world view concepts that in western traditions are clearly distinguished from each other.

Jamieson employs all the resources of the stage to communicate some of this complexity, and along the way creates spectacular theatre. There are extraordinarily beautiful scenes which seamlessly meld film and live performance, such as those set in the actual home of the Chooky Dancers. The camera climbs up the rotting steps, enters the dark hallways, lingers over the holes in the walls, and wakes up the boys, who rise from the stage floor, turn on the tv to see a Bollywood film – which they turn into their own dance routine (something really to be seen). The result is a powerful mixture of documentary realism and the joyous celebration of live performance.

Perhaps the real triumph of Wrong Skin is how it opens a small window on this world, while managing to avoid the falsities of worthiness or patronisation. Being there is a delight: the sheer exuberance of the young dancers carries the day. Its tragedy is enacted lucidly, although it occurs outside the cultural referents I understand; and the whole show powerfully reveals the beauty of this ancient culture, its adaptiveness and curiosity, while unsparingly showing the conditions in which it survives. I liked too how the process of making this work – clearly a complex and difficult one – is folded into the work itself. Not to be missed.

Top: The Chooky Dancers on YouTube. Bottom: The Chooky Dancers in Wrong Skin. Photo: Matt Nettheim

Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin), written, directed and designed by Nigel Jamieson in association with the company. Associate director/movement, Gavin Robins; associate director/community and cultural liaison Joshua Bond; costumes by Mathew McCall; film and video design by Scott Anderson, video production by Mic Gruchy, lighting designer Trudy Dalgleish, composition and sound design David Page and Basil Hogios, film footage by Gavin Robins, Scott Anderson, Alan Dowler and Nigel Jamieson. Malthouse Theatre until March 28.

Performers: Djakapurra Munyarrun, Djali Donald Ganambarr, Frances Djulibing, Rarriwuy Hick, Anthony Djamangi, Lionel Dhulmanawuy and Anthony Djamangi.

Chooky Dancers: Aaron Djimilkinya, Daren Matan, Nathan Guymangura, Gerald Dhamarrandji and Wakara Gondarra.

*See Mark Lawrence’s comment below for a correction.

Review: Structure and Sadness

The melancholy of modernity

There’s a poignancy in looking down over a city from a plane that in certain moods can be overwhelming. The structures that dominate and shape our lives are suddenly rendered minature by perspective and – especially at night, when the lights give it a shimmering unity – a city seems a live creature, a single organism that pulses and consumes and excretes. A parasitic organism perhaps, cankering the landscape like a feral moss or a luminous fungus, but still with its own fragile beauty.

Flying into Melbourne on a clear evening you can see human habitats with the same eye that perceives the web of an orb weaver or the scarring aridity of rabbit warrens, as functions of us. We are animals who build. The structures we make are at once intimate (“a house is a skin”) and alienating, our private selves intersecting with the implacable machine of capitalism, our social beings and collective imagination exteriorised and made concrete.

We trust those structures: we will not admit our fragility, our contingency, our smallness, since if we did, if we really knew it in our bones, how would we get out of bed every morning?

The tower will stand tall. The bridge will not fall down.

Fulcrum: passion and intellect

Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness is about Melbourne, and its performance here has a particular poignancy of recognition. The collapse of the West Gate Bridge is part of our story: we all, however tangentially, know that history. From my house I can walk to the memorial for the thirty five men who died when it fell into the Maribyrnong River. Many people still remember what they were doing when they heard the news. That famous tale of how the editor of the Age took a call in his Spencer St office from a reporter who told him the bridge was down. “Don’t be stupid,” he said, and hung up. Then he turned around and looked out of his window.

The perspectives in Structure and Sadness are close up and far away. Like so much of Guerin’s work, it is a weaving of duets, of relationship: these six bodies meet under stress, desire and repulse each other, moving in rhythmic harmonies of yearning that dissolve into solitude. In the first half, Gerald Mair’s score is an abstract electronic score woven with the sounds of materials – wood, concrete, steel – creaking under stress. It opens with a solo dance with a flexible board, the dancer at once in total control, fluidly manipulating the board, and vulnerable, his body hanging like a corpse over a deadly edge. The dances embody vectors of force and balance; they are geometric and precise, leaning into each other, straining against each other. Objects – an elastic, a stick – are at once tools of expressiveness, extending their bodies, and harbingers of danger, capable of piercing the skin, hard against a visceral softness.

Behind these duets the other dancers gradually, patiently, build a house of cards, triangular structures made of rectangles of wood that slowly cover the stage, slowly rise into a tower. It looks unsettlingly like Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel. We know it will fall down, that is part of the narrative before the show begins, but when it does, it is wholly unexpected: one little piece is knocked over and the whole thing folds like a row of dominoes, amplifying disaster until the whole stage is covered in litter, the potential energy of the fragile triangulations of wood dissipated in collapse.

In the centre is a bold glimpse of realism, the ethical core of the show. To speak of any event which cost thirty five lives as if it is merely an occasion for aesthetic tinkering is beyond heartless. On the other hand, to be constrained in a documentary verity is imprisoning, a courting of artistic coarseness. Guerin finds the fulcrum in the centre of the dance, where she invokes the reality of grief head-on with a moment of literal domestic banality. A woman is doing the washing up, singing along to the radio, when the broadcast is interrupted by a news report about the West Gate Bridge.

The dance tips now into an elegy, an evocation of mourning that has the emotional simplicity and restraint of Greek tragedy. The three women dance with their dead men, reaching out to ghosts who vanish from their embrace: the men are summoned by their burning longing, but will never come back. It is a dance with the bitter beauty of Philip Larkin’s poem The Explosion, an account of an accident in a mine when men went to work in the morning and didn’t return. A common enough story, a common enough grief:

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face –

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed –
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

Coda

In the final sequence the dances of the first half are reprised, this time as a chorus work, the molten significance of grief informing the dancers’ gestures. An abstract pattern of neon lights on the back wall is selectively turned off to reveal the West Gate Bridge, complete and undamaged: it is ambiguous, we don’t know whether it has been rebuilt or if, in the impossible dream of return, it has never been broken.

Dance is always impure in Guerin’s work, its precision intersected with the unruliness of chance and the literalness of narrative bodies; yet through a thickness of encroaching meaning it reaches moments of lyrical purity, sheerly beautiful movement that escapes itself and lifts its resonance out of its specific time and place. Celebration and elegy are two sides of the same coin, just as death is the subtext of civilisation.

The final image is breathtaking in its simplicity: the dancers lie in a diagonal line on the ground and a plank is placed on top of them. The last dancer walks over the plank, into the darkness at the edge of the stage.

Once human sacrifice was a sacred ritual, a consecration of a building. Sacrificed bodies have been found in the foundations of Roman buildings; some ancient keystones are said to be red because they are mortared with human blood, and legends of immurement are rife in Serbian history. Our modern cities still demand their sacrifices.

It is said they never found all the bodies, that some are still embedded in the West Gate Bridge. And every day we drive over them.

Picture: Structure and Sadness. Photo: Jeff Busby

Structure and Sadness, choreography and direction by Lucy Guerin. Composition by Gerald Mair, set and lighting design by Bluebottle: Ben Cobham and Andrew Livingston, motion graphics by Michaela French, costumes by Paula Levis. With Fiona Cameron, Kyle Kremerskothen, Lina Limosani, Byron Perry, Harriet Ritchie and Lee Serle.

Vale Hilary Crampton

Sad news this morning on Chloe Smethurst’s blog: dance critic Hilary Crampton died on the weekend. Crampton was a passionate educator and an influential and astute shaper of arts policy as well as a perceptive dance critic: she reviewed for the Age from 1997 until just before her death. A tribute on the Ausdance site lists her many achievements. “While Hilary was best known as a writer, educator and advocate,” it says, “she primarily saw herself as an artist and an arts practitioner who could write, a sentiment well reflected in her insightful writing.”

Merce Cunningham dies

This morning I read, via George Hunka at Superfluities Redux, that Merce Cunningham died on Sunday night, aged 90. Cunningham was one of the giant figures of modern dance over a career that lasted for nearly seven decades: he revolutionised the art, and his lifelong partnership with John Cage was one of the key artistic engines of the 20th century. As Alastair Macaulay writes in the New York Times, “Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography, posing a series of ‘But’ and ‘What if?’ questions over a career of nearly seven decades… In his final years he became almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest choreographer. For many, he had simply been the greatest living artist since Samuel Beckett.”

We were lucky enough to see him here in Melbourne two years ago, when he was the centre of a residency at the Melbourne Festival that celebrated the far-reaching influence of his work: on the final night of the festival, Cunningham came on stage to a full-hearted standing ovation from the capacity State Theatre crowd. Vale, Mr Cunningham; and thank you.

Reviews: Gatz, Clickity Clack & Aoroi, The Wonderful World of Dissocia

At first blush, the idea of reading the entire text of The Great Gatsby on stage seems intriguing. Rather than approaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel through the inevitable reductiveness of adaptation, New York’s Elevator Repair Service would, presumably, present us with the Real Thing in Gatz. All seven hours of it.

Novels are mostly read in silence, their imaginings populating the fluid stage of the mind, but there remains a child-like pleasure in being read to. All the same, writing for the stage has different imperatives to those of prose; as Peter Brook points out, speaking of the particular problem of writing for the theatre, words on the stage “are only powerful in proportion to what they create in the language of theatre”. An author “is compelled to begin at the very root – by facing the problem of the very nature of dramatic utterance. There is no way out.”

I suppose I arrived with expectations. Foremost was that this exercise would force the company to face the question of language in the theatre “at the very root”. How would they deal with the interior imaginings of prose in the exterior world of theatre? What would this exercise reveal about language on the stage? About theatre itself? And in the end, this is my disappointment with the show. Instead of bringing the novel to life, Elevator Repair Service turned it into a fetish object. Yes, every word, down to the last “and”, was there. Why it was necessary or interesting to do this escaped me entirely.

It begins promisingly enough. Louisa Thompson’s set is a hyper-realistic, dingy office (perhaps a business selling bonds, like Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway). On one side are shelves of dilapidated files, in the centre a desk with an ancient computer, to the back a windowed wall with a door, and a glassed reception area. A rumpled man (Scott Shepherd) enters with a take-away coffee and begins his working day. He hangs up his coat and turns on his computer, but it won’t start. He presses the reset button, takes a swig from his coffee, opens a file and discovers a battered paperback copy of The Great Gatsby. Out of boredom and curiosity, he begins to read it out loud as the office comes to life around him.

Stroke by stroke, the office workers become the characters in the book, the fictional reality gradually inhabiting the humdrum world of the office until it takes over entirely. This transition, which takes place slowly (some might say, unremittingly) over the four parts of the show, might have had more power if the world of the office had had more reality in the first place. I began to get twitchy in the first twenty minutes: the actions of the workers made no sense at all. Every gesture was incomplete: the performers opened files and closed them, they waved bits of paper in each other’s faces, they made inaudible phone calls. Shepherd kept pressing his reset button, but without waiting for the necessary time for his computer to reboot. (I once had a computer just like that). I began, even then, to wonder how deeply thought this production was.

Part of my impatience stems from having recently seen Daniel Schlusser’s Peer Gynt, which similarly posited two simultaneous stage realities, a mundane present and a fictional imagining. In this case, the relationship between the two realities was complex and shifting; both were highly stylised, but each had its own integrity, a quality emerging in part from some profound theatrical thinking about the source text and its relationship to the present, and by focused performances. The approach in Gatz seemed, in comparison, startlingly tame and unthought. The office world looked more and more like a gimmick which never paid off: it was abandoned early, with scarcely a glance back, and the novel took over. This sense of uncertainty was intensified by the uneven performances, which ranged from Gary Wilmes’s powerful evocation of Tom Buchanan to shallow and obvious parody which involved a lot of mugging to the audience.

By part two, the company was – with occasional meaningless office interruptions – “acting out” the novel. Shepherd read every word of the narrative, with the actors providing the dialogue, down to the last “he said”. (This particularly bothered me, and is part of what I mean by their fetishising the prose. Why not cut these phrases? The tautological joke was funny for ten minutes but soon became merely tedious: dialogue indicators in novels are designed to be invisible to the reading eye, necessary pointers that become wholly redundant on stage). I began to suffer from a strange sort of double vision: every action described in the prose was slavishly illustrated by the performers. I began to long for the actors to do something different from the writing, for a little bit of spin or wit. Or anything, really. But no. This went on for the next three thousand hours.

You have to admire the athletic persistence of the actors, and it must be said that Shepherd has a nice reading style, although with a tendency, forgivable perhaps, to lose himself in the hypnotic rhythms of the prose. To be fair, there were times, amounting to perhaps an hour or two of the whole show, when I began to see how this approach might make exciting theatre – but these moments were always the most dramatic parts of the novel, where the dialogue was closest to a conventional play. The theatre presented was, in the end, informed by wholly conventional ideas and never questioned anything, beyond some obvious grammatical jokes, about the qualities of written or spoken language.

What saved me was the novel itself, which remains as brilliant as it ever was. But Gatsby’s tragedy and the “foul trash” floating in the wake of the American dream remain all Fitzgerald’s vision. If anything, Gatz demonstrates how futile the idea of geekish fidelity can be on stage. Or how contradictory it is: this faithfulness, if it did anything at all, merely diminished Fitzgerald’s prose.

It was a relief, then, to see Rochelle Carmichael’s Clickity Clack and Aoroi, two short dance pieces presented at Theatreworks. They are backed by a miscellany of music, including the soundtracks from The Matrix and Donnie Darko, a strange mulch that I ended up enjoying more than I expected. Combining circus, black light puppetry and physical theatre, Clickity Clack is a witty take on the erotics of dress with some wonderful costumes – a skirt levitated by red helium balloons, a cut-out paper business suit with a huge bow tie – and some fun reveals. Aoroi seems to be a concept taken straight from a fantasy art website, with fairies creeping out from beneath a curtain, half insect, half human, to play their amoral and predatory games. Despite some muddy movement, which took the edge off a little, these are seductive pieces, with a touch of the exuberant embrace of popular kitsch that animates so much of BalletLab’s work.

Lastly, I made an unplanned visit to the STC’s production of The Wonderful World of Dissocia, Anthony Neilson’s play about the psychotic breakdown of a woman called Lisa Jones (Justine Clarke). There’s something brilliantly crude about this work: the first half is a subjective enactment of delusional reality, the second a starkly minimal picture of its consequences. The excess of the first half is characterised by over-the-top, cabaret theatricality, delivered through some first-class performances. Lisa’s journey through Dissocia shows us a world that, like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, is at once funny, disorientating and darkly violent, a place where words have their own sinister life, like the ambiguous smile of a Cheshire cat. The second half shifts to another kind of theatre altogether, a minimal and unsparing realism that is all the more powerful for its contrast to what has happened earlier.

Marion Pott’s production is beautifully modulated. She catches the surreality of the first half through some hilarious and inventive theatre-making (with the help of some truly eye-burning costumes by Tess Schofield and Nick Schlieper’s lighting). After interval, the grassy field that constitutes the first stage lifts to become the oppressively low ceiling of the second set, lit with a neon harshness. Lisa’s bed and bedside table huddle forlornly in the corner, and the various staff and visitors who interact with her – making sure she takes her medication, confiscating her Walkman, blaming her for her lack of responsibility – have to walk in and out for the length of the stage. These scenes were delicately handled and cumulatively very moving. I don’t think I’ve seen a more compelling evocation of the isolating loneliness and disempowerment of mental illness.

Pictures: top: Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz; bottom: The Wonderful World of Dissocia, STC.

Gatz, from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Directed by John Collins, set by Louisa Thimpson, lighting design by Mark Barton, sound design by Ben Williams. With Scott Shepherd, Jim Fletcher, Kate Scelsa, Sibyl Kempson, Lucy Taylor, Gary Wilmes, Vin Knight, Frank Boyd, Annie McNamara, Ben Williams, Laurena Allan, Mike Iveson and Ross Fletcher, Elevator Repair Service @ the Sydney Opera House until May 31.

Clickity Clack and Aroi, directed and co-choregraphed by Rochelle Carmichael. Lighting design by Thomas Lambert, costumes by Rochelle Carmichael, Michael Kopp, Sera Carmichael and Christina Smith. Danced by Kathryn Newnham, Caroline Meaden, Alice Dixon and Michael Kopp. Liquid Skin @ Theatreworks until May 31.

The Wonderful World of Dissocia by Anthony Nielson, directed by Marion Potts. Set design by Alice Babidge, costumes by Tess Schofield, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, music composed by Alan John, sound design by David Franzke. With Kate Box, Justine Clarke, Matt Day, Michelle Doake, Russell Dykstra, Socratis Otto, Justin Smith and Matthew Whittet. Sydney Theatre Company, closed.

That was the year that was

I don’t know what happened to 2007. One moment it was shining before me, bright with everything that new years are supposed to be bright with, and then suddenly it was a long shadow streaming behind me. It’s the sort of thing that makes you come over all philosophical, though I think some mischievous god has been playing with time.

2007 has been a big year for Little Alison. After seven years hard labour, I finished my fantasy quartet, all 2000 pages of it. I also completed my next collection of poetry, called (with only a smidgeon of irony) Theatre, which is coming out with Salt Publishing next year. The blog’s had a good year – in 2007, TN had around 165,000 unique visitors (almost quarter of a million hits), an average of about 20,000 a month, almost tripling the traffic from last year.

I’ve gone full circle and ended up where I started, back in the hurly-burly of daily newspapers (where, as Stella Gibbons memorably remarked, one’s style, like one’s life, is nasty, brutish and short): I became Melbourne theatre reviewer for the Australian, and began doing the odd gig for the Guardian. And then Howard was voted out of government and I accidentally deleted four years of email. No wonder I’m tired.

In between all that, as a quick glance at a list of my reviews will reveal, I saw, and wrote about, almost 100 shows. Which seems like a lot to me, though battle-hardened veterans (I’m looking at you, Mr Boyd) might snort dismissively: a proper critic sees six shows a week, and tots up a total of something like 300. In my defence, I can only say that I’ve never pretended to be anything but an improper critic.

While I’m crunching the numbers – it’s kind of fun and, in its own limited way, revealing – I count around 30 of those shows as things I wouldn’t have missed for the world, making an excellence rating of about 30 per cent. That’s pretty good going with something as volatile as theatre. This heads up to about 15 duds, shows that bravely challenged the trend of time’s quickening and made it run like a river of porridge. This leaves around 55 per cent in the “good” category, shows I enjoyed without their blowing me away.

I’ve never been in a position to see everything on in Melbourne, and all through the year there have been shows I couldn’t get to, and which – after hearing breathless reports from my extensive network of theatre spies – I’m sorry I ended up missing. But all the same, it’s a fairly decent sampling. And it seems to me that, generally speaking, Melbourne theatre passes the medical with flying colours. The hue is rosy, the limbs are making lively gestures, the renaissance is on. There are those who like their culture dead, the chief zombie being Robin Usher of the Age, but me, I prefer to leave the theatre with my heart beating.

This liveliness has been driven by three major institutions – the Malthouse, the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Victorian College of the Arts – with strong support from the independent theatre and dance scenes.

The Malthouse has had a year of consolidation, with an eye turned to crowd-pleasers like Geoffrey Rush in Ionesco’s Exit The King or Sleeping Beauty, and return seasons of successful shows from the independent theatre scene – The Pitch, from La Mama, The Eisteddfod, from the Store Room, or A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, from everywhere.

But it’s also found space for experimental gems like Anna Tregloan’s Black, the Bessie-winning dance/theatre piece Tense Dave, or the unruly anarchy of Uncle Semolina & Friends with OT. They put on a cabaret season, including the incomparable Paul Capsis, and they produced one of the Melbourne Festival’s highlights, Barrie Kosky’s The Tell-Tale Heart.

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen there this year – it’s been various, stimulating, controversial and fun – and I can’t say that about anywhere else. I’m not going to argue with any of those who are saying that the Malthouse is the most exciting theatre company in Australia.

And then there’s the Melbourne Festival. Well, a lot of words have been spent on MIAF, so I’ll just say that for this bright-eyed rabbit, this year’s festival was, taken as a single event, the highlight of the year. Artistic director Kristy Edmunds delivered the goods bigtime: I spent 17 days buzzing around on a permanent high. If I lived in Singapore, I would have been arrested and sentenced to flogging. Aside from The Tell-Tale Heart, my highlights were Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On, Dood Paard’s Titus and Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead (though Laurie Anderson was pretty cool…)

One of the peculiarities of Melbourne is that some of the best theatre here is made by students. The VCA sucks in talented youth, trains it within an inch of its life, and then gets the most interesting directors around town to throw it at fabulous texts. Ambition is the byword. The VCA production of Hélène Cixous’s The Perjured City was one of this year’s top shows. Their end-of-year productions of King Lear and A Dollhouse weren’t far behind and I’m told that Yes, which regrettably I couldn’t get to, was equally impressive.

This year dance indelibly entered my theatrical lexicon. It was, on the whole, a year to catch up – I saw several wonderful remounts. I’ve already mentioned Tense Dave, but there was also Lucy Guerin’s Love Me and Aether, Chunky Move’s Glow, and, courtesy of MIAF, a retrospective of Merce Cunningham. I might be learning something… Among the new work, last week’s Brindabella from BalletLab was a knockout, and La Mama also hosted a memorable performance of Deborah Levy’s B-File.

Outside the institutions, my top shows were Little Death’s notable production of Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, Simon Stone’s wonderful adaptation of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Ranters Theatre’s gorgeous Holiday. Outside Melbourne, a tiny Adelaide company, Floogle, enterprisingly flew me over to see their production of Pinter’s The Homecoming, which was as elegant a reading of that play as I am likely to see. There was Eleventh Hour’s rivetingly erotic retelling of Othello. And – sacre bleu! – one of my theatre highlights was seen at the Melbourne International Film Festival – A Poor Theatre’s The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, which counts because I saw it first as a play and because it’s part of the Malthouse’s first season next year.

In fact, there was a lot of Shakespeare around in 2007, with a decidedly mixed hit rate. Bell Shakespeare made me eat my words by putting on a good production of Othello, but the much-anticipated RSC production of King Lear, with Sir Ian McKellen notoriously shedding his underpants, was one of this year’s huge disappointments. I was forced to watch Peter Brook’s film to remind myself that the play really is more than a comic opera.

So it wasn’t all champagne and skittles. Which brings me to the Melbourne Theatre Company, currently looking like the ailing limb in an otherwise rather fit theatrical body.

To be fair, it wasn’t all bad. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was a straight production of a classic that went like a train, although I admit that contrary reports from many reliable sources of the subsequent season made me wonder if the cast had reserved all their vim for opening night. I thought the MTC’s production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the most moving of the three I saw this year, and Thom Pain was a delightful surprise. I had a long argument with Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, but I felt it was worth doing all the same.

The rest was a mixture of the forgettable, the competent and the plain awful. The MTC served up some of the worst nights I’ve spent in the theatre this year. It began the year ominously with the bafflingly bad production of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, and ended with what is my vote for worst show of the year, Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot. Midyear there was the ineffably sentimental tedium of The Glass Soldier, one of the bottom five low-points of TN’s theatrical year. It’s notable that all three of these shows were directed by artistic director Simon Phillips.

I guess Phillips has had a distracting year – not only is the MTC building a new theatre, but he’s been out and about in the commercial world. But given the liveliness and invention of the theatre culture around it, our state company ought to be doing better. Much better. To go back to the dubious number crunching: if the dud percentage of theatre generally was 15 per cent, the MTC’s individual dud percentage was around a third. And although several shows made my “good” category, not one blew me away.

Next year’s program is, in prospect at least, similarly uninspired. But to finish on a positive note, next month the MTC is importing the STC’s magnificent production of The Season at Sarsaparilla, so Melbourne will have a chance to see what happens when a state theatre company attempts to make theatre, instead of just putting on plays.

Well, that was my 2007. It was a vintage year, and it’s brought me a great deal of pleasure. I want to thank all the theatre companies who kindly provided me with tickets, the many people who have encouraged me through the year, my blogger colleagues and, most of all, my readers and commenters (especially those who take issue with me). I’ve had a brilliant time, and I hope it’s mutual.

TN is now taking some badly-needed time off, and will be back refreshed and – theoretically, at least – raring to go in the New Year. Me, I’m heading back to my poetic roots over the Yuletide break, and writing a new translation of Beowulf. (I don’t know why, but sometimes one can’t help these things). So a happy solstice to all of you, and I’ll see you in 2008.

Pictures from top: Glow, by Chunky Move; Luke Mullins in Little Death’s Mercury Fur; Geoffrey Rush and Julie Forsyth in Exit the King, Malthouse; Black by Anna Tregloan, Malthouse; Kagemi, Sankai Juku, Melbourne Festival; Ben Hjorth in the VCA’s King Lear; Ian McKellen in the RSC’s King Lear; Don’s Party, MTC; The Season at Sarsaparilla, STC.

Review: Aether / Brindabella

Brindabella, choreographed by Phillip Adams and Miguel Gutierrez, composed by David Chisholm. Set and lighting design by Andrew Livingston, Ben Cisterne and Ben Cobham of Bluebottle, costume design by Doyle Barrow. With Derrick Amanatidis, Tim Harvey, Luke George and Brooke Stamp. Music performed by Lachlan Dent, Peter Dumsday, Timothy Phillips and Nic Synot. BalletLab and Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse until December 8. Bookings: 9685 5111.

Aether, choreographed by Lucy Guerin, composed by Gerald Mair. Motion graphics by Michaela French, costumes by Paula Levis, lighting by Keith Tucker. With Antony Hamilton, Kyle Kremerskothen, Stephanie Lake, Lina Limosani, Harriet Ritchie and Lee Serle. Lucy Guerin Inc and Malthouse Theatre, Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse.

Last week the Croggon wordhoard collapsed in a heap of disconnected vowels. This poor minstrel stood in the halls of the thane – I’m speaking metaphorically, of course – and could spit out nary a hwæt. (Ok, I admit it: I’ve been reading Beowulf and the Geats have got to me). It was in this mode that your disconsolate bard took herself to the Malthouse to see Lucy Guerin Inc and BalletLab.

A major reason I enjoy dance is that it doesn’t have words in it. Or if it does have words in it – both Brindabella and Aether have a few – it doesn’t tend to have very many; and they function, as in poetry, as much in their texture and rhythm as in their meaning. So the conjunction of the wordhoard going awol and two pieces of contemporary dance was, as you might imagine, a happy one.

On the other hand, dance – being a medium that employs meanings and articulations very far from words – is, at the best of times, very difficult to write about. At the hoardless times, it’s just about impossible. And there are other considerations highlighted by dance that haunt all the writing I do on theatre.

Writing about performance of any kind is always an act of uncertain translation, a recording of complex sensory and emotional impressions that will, always and inevitably, falsify the experience. Words are slippery; they betray the wordsmith, they lock down the multiplicity of experience, they elide memory, they deceive and seduce into their own reality.

The act of writing is a translation, among other things, of the present into the past tense. This is one reason it’s so much easier to write about language-based art: anything written down is, a priori, in the past tense (this is why writers have a tragic view of life). It’s hardest of all to write about work that exists in time; unlike, say, a painting, it can’t be contemplated and returned to. All these things add up to a constant addressing of the impossible. The certainty of failure is, of course, no reason to refuse the attempt. In a way, this blog is a record of such attempts – as Eliot said:

…every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

Enough of the apologia, I hear you cry… So I’ll get down to that business of attempting the impossible, and tell you about the dances. Description will have to suffice. So hwæt, my little athelings.

The first thing is that these two pieces, run in tandem as a short dance festival at the Malthouse, are an exercise in contrast. Aether is all subtlety and complex motion, where Brindabella is a crude and sumptuous excess; the beauty of Aether is cool, intelligent and restrained, the passion throbbing beneath the icy discipline, while that of Brindabella is about the frank unleashing of the anarchies of sexuality.

As its name suggests, Aether – an ancient word for air – is a meditation on the medium of communication. Speech, written language, the technological means of communicating, are all (as I have suggested above) a third thing, neither what is said nor what is heard, and have their own determinations. To quote another poet (it’s a week for poets), Giuseppe Ungaretti:

Between this flower picked and the other given
the inexpressible nothingness.

Aether, with a deal of comedy and poignancy, explores this nothingness, a space that in the 21st century is overloaded with noise, and rather bleakly suggests that humans, for all their technological ingenuity, are still alone, still halted in bewilderment before the threshold that separates self from self.

The dance is divided into two parts, the first roughly about the medium of technology, the second about human attempts to communicate. When we wander into the theatre, the dancers are already on stage, idly fiddling with torn up pieces of newspaper that are arranged in coiling patterns on the stage floor. Even before Aether begins, Guerin is dividing our attention: it is impossible to watch all the dancers at once, and so you watch one and then another. The number of dancers on stage kept changing, as if by magic: I continually missed their entrances.

When the dance proper begins, some words creep across the bottom of the blank screen that dominates the back of the stage, as if unseen hands are typing them. Gradually the writing creeps up the screen, becoming more and more fragmented, and the screen fills up with numbers and graphics, obscuring the text until it becomes unreadable, one more broken sign among too many others.

Meanwhile the dancers, dressed in unisex tunics, perform increasingly complex movements, creating continual eddies of harmony that break into arrhythmic disruptions. There is a particularly beautiful sequence where the dancers link hands and weave in and out of each other’s bodies in a continually surprising fluidity, like a human Möbius strip. The dance demands that you choose where to watch – complex things are happening at extreme ends of the stage – mimicking the effect of information overload. And it’s beautifully detailed: in particular, you notice the subtleties of hands – fingers are compellingly expressive in Aether.

The screen narrows to a slit and then vanishes, signalling the second half, which concerns itself with the less abstract physicalisation of human communication. I mean no disrespect when I say that parts of this reminded me of Mr Bean: there are elements of clowning, especially in Antony Hamilton’s brilliant and disturbing performance of a man struggling to speak to others. Speech is evoked by wordless noises and intricate movements that mimic the patterns of conversation. But speech itself is not absent: there is another very funny sequence where, speaking in precise chorus, the dancers tell us about the vagaries of rehearsal.

Perhaps the most beautiful dance is created by a stroke of lighting genius. Keith Tucker opens a strip of white light across the darkened stage, as if using the shutter of a very big slide projector. It begins with lighting a single undulating finger, and gradually widens until the beam of light illuminates a strip of the whole stage, about a metre deep and a short distance above the floor. Only parts of the dancers are illuminated: their legs or their arms rise from a sea of darkness and dip back in, or a man sits up and is startlingly headless. The final image of Aether returns to darkness, the light dwindling until it illuminates one finger.

It’s compelling, intelligent work that moves you at obscure and unexpected levels of consciousness. And I was glad there was an intervening week before I saw Brindabella, which is an entirely different pickle. If nothing else, these two works indicate the depth and variousness of contemporary dance in Melbourne now.

It occasionally happens that a performance can produce a strange sense of dissonance. You realise that you have no idea whether it’s good or bad; all you know is that you can’t stop watching it. (This is, admittedly, true of a car crash: but I associate this feeling with some of the most exciting theatre I’ve seen). Moments in Brindabella, a collaboration between BalletLab’s Phillip Adams and New York choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, made me reflect that, although I had no idea if it was any good, I was quite sure that it was brilliant.

Loosely based on the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast, it cheerfully destabilises aesthetic judgement, pillaging influences as diverse as Jean Cocteau, Disney and porn flicks. Yet the effect is far from a flippant post-modern irony. It is, rather, a passionate work that at times attains the anarchic energy of a pagan ritual. It’s perhaps most like a 21st century Dionysian mystery, a kind of contemporary Bacchanal that releases bestial and divine energies through ecstatic dance.

Through its three acts – La Belle, L’Amour and La Bête – we witness a complex process of playful destruction. The four dancers gradually strip away their social dress, even their gender, until they are four possessed, erotic bodies, personifying the anarchies, clumsiness and beauty of raw sexual desire.

Bluebottle’s lighting and design is one of the stars of this show: it’s nothing short of stunning. The only design elements are the huge curtain – actually white, but painted with light and lifted or ruched in various ways (the curtain technician was working very hard) – and light itself. Behind the curtain is an utterly bare stage, and at one point the huge back door is opened to the yard outside, giving even deeper perspectives.

Brindabella begins with a coup de théâtre. The three musicians, in an orchestra pit before the brothel-red curtain that dominates the stage, begin the prologue to David Chisholm’s continually surprising score, in this case a sensual scraping of cello and percussion. The opening dance is the fascinating play of the musicians’ shadows across the curtain. Then the dancers step onto the forestage. The sole woman, Brooke Stamp, is dressed in a ball gown that is a Cocteau fantasia, holding a hand mirror, while the three men – Derrick Amanatidis, Tim Harvey and Luke George – dressed as elegant Beasts, whirl around her, in a dance that is a parody of the narcissism of Beauty. Finally the curtain lifts, and Beauty vanishes into the cavernous darkness behind.

The dance moves from an almost (but not quite) parodic evocation of classical dance towards an athletic nakedness, the beast inside the beauty. The transitional dance is a long and strangely compelling sequence where the four dancers simply jog around the stage. Their running is oddly formal – they are almost always facing the audience – but otherwise it is just running, an exhausting physical effort. As they run, they gradually strip off their clothes down to their underwear, throwing their garments into the audience in a dissociated strip tease, and gradually their unity begins to fragment, the physical effort becomes harder, one dancer outstrips the other in a burst of energy. Maenads, I thought. It must be my classical education.

Another highlight is a comically dark dance in which the dancers have pine trees strapped to their backs and howl like wolves, that again suggested an obscure pagan ritual; something perhaps to do with a winter festival of death and rebirth. There’s a gesture towards gay porn that involves assembling a surreal bicycle enhanced with dildos, and a long sequence to a screaming electric guitar and kitsch lights that is, well, simply about fucking. It is somehow glorious, transcending its own self-conscious tackiness to become a celebration of sexual bodies.

The final sequence is a brief coda of ethereal beauty in which the naked dancers, adorned with feathers that gradually are shed around the stage, are silhouetted against a golden light. It has a disembodied serenity that suggests the mystic edge of the erotic.

It’s a commonplace for artists to claim that they are exploring the nature of desire, but it is quite rare for someone to actually attain it. In this dizzyingly various dance, walking a very narrow line between self-conscious parody and the extremities of passion, Phillips and Gutierrez have made a genuinely erotic work.

Picture: Aether by Lucy Guerin. Photo: Rachelle Roberts

Review: Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Melbourne Festival #12

Programs A and B, Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Choreography by Merce Cunningham, musical direction by Takehisa Kasugi. Danced by Jonah Bokaer, Lisa Boudreau, Julie Cunningham, Brandon Callwes, Emma Desjardins, Halley Farmer, Jennifer Goggans, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, Koji Mizuta, Marcie Munnerlyn, Daniel Squire, Robert Swinston and Andrea Weber. State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre.

Program A: Suite For Five (1956), music by John Cage, costumes by Robert Rauschenberg, lighting by Beverly Emmons. eyeSpace (2006), music by Mikel Rouse, design by Daniel Arsham, lighting by Josh Johnson. Biped (1999), music by Gavin Bryars, design by Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser, costumes by Suzanne Gallo, lighting by Aaron Capp.

Program B: Views on Stage (2004), music by John Cage, design by Ernesto Neto, costumes by James Hall, lighting by Josh Johnson. Split Sides (2003), music by Radiohead and Sigur Rós, design by Robert Heishman and Catherine Yass, costumes by James Hall, lighting by James F. Ingalls.

It was a fitting ending to what has been a triumphantly successful Melbourne Festival. As Merce Cunningham emerged on stage last night at the end of Split Sides, a frail figure in his wheelchair, the entire State Theatre rose to its feet, whooping and clapping. It was a totally exhilarating moment: I think everyone there floated out on a cloud of high. I know I did.

I was standing as much out of admiration for this artist who, at 88, has never stopped thinking and wondering over more than half a century of work. Dammit, the man’s an inspiration. And Cunningham’s residency here was always the jewel in the crown of the 2007 festival. It was a chance to actually see for ourselves a revolutionary and seminal force in modern dance. A bit like going to see Rothko or Pollock at the art gallery, only with the artist himself still working on the painting. How cool is that?

Quite cool, as it turned out. I use the painting metaphor advisedly: I found it absolutely impossible to watch Program A without thinking about painting. De Kooning, Matisse, Gorky… and, insistently, the plastic arts of classical Greece, especially the pottery. And, as with painting, it is a challenge to write about anything as wordless as dance; I fear this review will simply be a long list of associations that floated up while I was watching, transfixed by the dynamic form that was unfolding before my eyes.

Perhaps it was only compensation for this wordlessness that an insistent subtext was the poetry of the New York School – poets like John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, even Frank O’Hara. I decided later that this association was a function of the rhythms Cunningham exploits in his choreography, a certain interrupted grace that makes a larger beauty. And I guess also that Cunningham’s long artistic partnership with John Cage embodies a certain aspect of New York culture that is practically legend now.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Cunningham’s approach to movement and form, so radical and modern then in its dissociation, for example, of music from choreography, looks classical now. This is very clear in the 1956 piece Suite for Five, accompanied by John Cage’s minimalist Music for Pianos 4-19, which is absolutely of its time, but still startling in the rigor of its pure movement. It was a series of dances – solos, trios, quintets – each defined from the other by a moment of blackout, which would then lift to reveal the next dancer on the stage as Cage’s piano trickled its silence uninterruptedly throughout.

Suite for Five was the acme of style as bare simplicity – no decoration on stage, the dancers in Rauschenberg’s citrus-coloured leotards that revealed every contour of their bodies. In its exquisite judgements of spatial relationships it was pure form, pure celebration of the classically beautiful human body. Perhaps this dance will stay with me most, lodging itself next to the poems of HD as an exquisite expression of a certain mode of classically rigorous modernism.

It was followed by eyeSpace, a dance dating from exactly five decades later, that featured the notorious i-Pod shuffles (dutifully picked up from a desk beforehand). At a signal from the conductor, every audience member pressed their button, and was immediately isolated in his or her personal earphones, listening to randomly selected tracks by Mikel Rouse – kitschy salsa music, for the most part, with a sense of subliminal menace.

If you took the i-Pods off, as some rebellious souls did, it revealed an ambient urban soundscape, which could be heard faintly through the headphones for those who kept them on. Much as what happens when you wear headphones on a train or when walking through the city. On stage was what appeared to be a sunken (perhaps post-apocalyptic?) railway station, and the dancers were clad in metallic costumes, rather like escapees from Star Trek. The dance here seemed less sharp to me, even at times distractingly loose, detracting from Cunningham’s stern formality.

The last piece of the night, and the most spectacularly beautiful, was Biped, choregraphed to Gavin Bryars’s sombre lyricism of low strings and woodwind. In front of the stage was a scrim which I didn’t notice at first, so when the first projection – a blue bar – flashed up subliminally, I thought my eyes were playing tricks. This scrim permits Cunningham the full canvas of the stage – onto it are projected abstract drawings of dancers, that pirouette through the air in bright blues, reds and yellows, as well as a series of abtract patterns – lines, sweeping scans that run horizontally or vertically across the stage space, large dots. The virtual dancers were created by motion capture technology, which permits an exact mimicry of human movement, so effectively this piece exploits a double choreography of the projected body and living flesh.

In Biped, the pas de deux is a feature. As the men and women kept combining into strangely beautiful shapes of attraction and repulsion, melding sometimes into a single eight-limbed body, I kept thinking of Plato’s story about how the original androgyne was split in two, fated to search eternally for its other half.

Program B, interestingly, didn’t make me think of painting at all, although the dances – Views on Stage and Split Sides – were no less visual. Perhaps I had already thought enough about painting, or perhaps these dances focused less on the painterly aspects of space and bodies on a stage and more on the relationships of movement between the dancers. In any case, there was a palpable buzz of excitement beforehand outside the Arts Centre, and a noticeable sprinkling of Sigur Rós fans, there to see their Icelandic heroes. I must say, I couldn’t help wondering what they would make of John Cage. I’d still love to know.

Unlike several others, I enjoyed the abstract beauties of Views on Stage, accompanied by a Cage score for piano and violin again notable for its silences. Again there was a classical edge – this time I kept thinking of those statues of Greek athletes or young maidens – reinforced by the short white skirts and bare arms and shoulders of both sexes. Gesture here was almost Egyptian at times, with a ritualistic, hieratic quality.

But the event of the night was, of course, Split Sides. It’s introduced by Cunningham and a cast of dice rollers, including Kristy Edmunds and several festival artists, who determine the make-up of the piece. It is, as the title suggests, in two parts, each of them interchangable, and odd or even rolls determine the order of the music, by Sigur Rós or Radiohead, and which backdrops, costumes, lighting designs and dances will come first. Thus, for the mathematicians among you, leading to any number of possible combinations.

In this performance, Radiohead was first, which seemed somehow serendipitious: the electronic urban angst of Radiohead dissolved into the icy fantasies of Sigur Rós. We got the black and white background first, with the coloured, wierdly 70s costumes (reversed in part 2, which follows from the first without pause, to black-and-white costumes against a coloured background). And it was spellbinding, although to be honest I am really not sure why. The bewitching Icelandic electronica of Sigur Rós was accompanied by a strange kind of wooden clockwork sound, as if the stage were a rather anarchic music box, and the dancers themselves the wooden figures come desiringly alive.

Through these two programs, I began to evolve a theory that Cunningham is a master of the pas de deux, though I could be talking through my hat. In fact, I loved the pas de deux in all the works I saw: of all the dance passages, save for an enchanting trio in Suite for Five that made me think of the Three Graces, they were what most compelled me. Through his series of alienating strategies – chance, projections, use of the camera and computer technology – Cunningham strips back gesture and movement to something that at times seems like a pure expression of desire. The kind of thing Matisse can do with a single drawn line. It’s probably very Romantic of me to say so, but there we are.

Photograph: Suite for Five. Photo: Tony Dougherty

Review: Glow

Melbourne Festival #11

Glow, conceived and choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek. Concept and interactive design system by Frieder Weiß. Original music and sound design by Luke Smiles, additional music by Ben Frost. Dancers: Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, Amber Haines and Bonnie Paskas. Chunky Move @ Chunky Move Studio, until tonight.

After 16 days solid theatre-going, TN is at the point where, when the program announces that a show is “30 mins, no interval”, she gives a little skip and thinks hungrily of an early night. Appalling, I know, since this is the surfeit of privilege. But so it is. And Glow demonstrates that the length of a show is no measure of substance.

A collaboration between the endlessly ingenious Gideon Obarzanek and theatrical computer wizard Frieder Weiß, it’s a richly detailed dance solo that exploits the technology of motion tracking, permitting the lighting to be responsive to the movements of the dancer’s body. Performed on a white square with seating on four sides, it has the intimacy and some of the agon of a boxing arena.

When the lights go down, strips of light flash across the floor and vanish into darkness. And then a dancer, dressed in a simple white costume that suggests scales, scrabbles to the edge of the floor like some exotic sea creature. She writhes, contorts her limbs, utters inarticulate noises, as if she were an entity in the process of becoming.

For all its technological ingenuity, Glow, which is mostly performed on the floor, is an intensely visceral experience. It becomes a fascinating battle between the dancer’s body and light and shadow: the luminous patterns enclose her, possess her, stalk her, stake her out. Her movements leave traces that fade out, gorgeous geometrical afterimages of gesture.

She cannot escape the light, because her body is defining and controlling it: it is like trying to escape one’s own shadow. At one point as she lies on the floor, the purple strip of light around her body is exactly the shape of a coffin. At another, she is enclosed, even crushed, in moving grids of light. She is scanned and pinned, defined and darkened, or illuminated by auras that follow her every gesture. At times she is absorbed by the patterning, as if she is scarcely human, scarcely there at all; at others, we hear her panting, or the scuffle of her legs on the floor, and are made suddenly and intensely aware of her sensual body.

Perhaps the most compelling sequence is where the writhing dancer leaves body imprints of shadow on the white floor, which then coalesce into inky demons that stalk and repossess her. When the shadow leaps and shrinks into an ordinary shadow under her feet, she screams, and lunges desperately across the floor to rid herself again of her darkness. It is a startlingly nightmarish image, as if we are watching her soul being gobbled up.

For a dance-illiterate like me, it was fascinating to see Merce Cunningham the night before seeing Glow. Obarzanek is almost at the other end of the spectrum: where Cunningham creates form with the classical purity of a Greek vase, Obarzanek’s choreography reminds me of the asymmetries and grotesqueness, the complex and unpredictable rhythms, the vulnerabilities, of the human body. The idealism of Cunningham here gives way to a darker but surprisingly humane vision.

Picture: A moment from Glow. Photo: Rom Anthonis

Review: Homeland/Kagemi

Melbourne Festival #6

Homeland by Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson with Eyvind Kang, Jamshied Sharifi and Skuli Sverrisson. Hamer Hall until October 19.

Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphor of Mirrors, directed, choreographed and designed by Ushio Amagatsu. Music by Takashi Kako and Yoichiro Yoshikawa. Dancers Ushio Amagatsu, Semimaru, Sho Takeuchi, Akihito Ichihara, Taiyo Tochiaki, Ichiro Hasegawa and Dai Matsuoka. Sankai Juku, State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre until October 20.

Well, my dears, I know things are happening out there. Election campaigns, terrorist attacks, bodies in suitcases, arrested footballers… But TN’s world has been wall-to-wall art since last Thursday. I’ve selflessly sacrificed the cosy domestic circle every night, furrowing my brow to bring you the goods on the Melbourne Festival. (OK, maybe I haven’t been that selfless; let’s say that I am acutely aware of my privilege here.)

The festival is now at the half-way mark, and it looks like a brilliant success to me. The air is abuzz, the mood is festive, little children are carolling in the streets. As for me – I know you are anxious – I’m holding up well. Next week is just as heavy, so I like those early sessions. Why, sometimes I’ve seen a show and still been home in time for dinner.

I’m a bit tired from all that brow-furrowing – it’s more exhausting than you might think – but I attribute my general well-being to having seen so much good work. Bitter experience has led me to agree with Catullus that bad art can have a deleterious effect on one’s immune system. So I’m thanking the gods – or Kristy Edmunds, which might be the same thing by now – that this year’s program has been such a blast. If I were seeing soul-deadening shows at this pace, I’d surely have already been hospitalised.

Thursday and Friday brought two more winners – Sankai Juku’s miraculous Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors and Laurie Anderson’s Homeland. I fear my reports will be briefer than these shows deserve – I’m not joking about the tiredness – but I will do my best.

Homeland is a bit of a coup: a festival co-commission of a major new work by Laurie Anderson, electronic rhapsodist extraordinaire. I use the word rhapsodist advisedly: Homeland is essentially an epic poem, delivered with Anderson’s trademark restrained passion and cool, intelligent irony, about contemporary America.

“Homeland” is a charged word: in the 20th century, the Homeland, Heimat, was the blood and soil of the Third Reich. In the 21st, it’s at the heart of George Bush’s rhetoric on the War on Terror, and the Department of Homeland Security, which now has the power to eavesdrop on the private phonecalls and emails of ordinary US citizens, is tasked to “preserve” America’s freedom.

Anderson is one of a number of prominent Americans who are reclaiming the patriotism of their Founding Fathers from the authoritarian slogans of the Far Right. Like Naomi Wolf’s urgent (and surprisingly excellent) pamphlet The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Anderson quotes the revolutionary Tom Paine – one of those who fought against the British Crown for America’s independence from imperial tyranny. She invokes the American Constitution, the inspiring rollcall of freedom that guarantees all citizens the rights of free speech, fair trial and habeas corpus – and asks ironically, “was our Constitution written in invisible ink?” “Have we,” she wants to know, “forgotten how to think?”

And like Bruce Springsteen’s recent album, Magic, Anderson portrays a new, uneasy US, a US where the heart seems to be missing, a US where the average citizen is 1.3 paychecks from homelessness. For all its intelligent political edge, which is at once subtle and to the point, this is a show infused with personal longing and pain. When that famous voice whispers: “Welcome to the American night”, your heart chills with menace; when she laments the loss of truth in public and private speech in The Lost Art of Conversation, you feel the space of sadness open beneath your ribs.

It’s performed on a stage covered with tealight candles, and sumptuously lit. And the music – featuring Eyvind Kang on viola and Anderson on electric violin – is wound through with lyrical echoes of Celtic and Arabic music, giving a wild edge of lament to Anderson’s electronic cool. Their rhythms are underlined by Skuli Sverrisson’s mean six-stringed bass, and Jamsied Sharifi on keyboards. The mood is personal, acoustic, reaching for the heart. Homeland is a warning about the worst impulses of America and, in its passionate defence of its freedoms, a reminder of what has always been best.

Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors is, it’s fair to say, a complete contrast. For one thing, it’s about as deeply Japanese as Anderson’s show is deeply American. But it also represents a fusion of east and west: the butoh master Ushio Amagatsu fascinatingly infuses the avant garde ethos of butoh with classical western dance.

Kagemi is inspired by ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, and in particular by the work of the Japanese ikebana master Riho Senba. It reminds you that in Japan, the annual blossoming of the cherry trees is a major public event, and flower arranging is a kind of theatre. Indeed, of the demonstrations at the Ikebana International Ninth World Convention, it was noted that “the task of projecting out to fill a huge stage as well as capturing and holding an audience of over 1,000 experienced ikebana people is hardly easy. Clever theater is helpful but only goes so far, content and art must be present and take the lead. And at some point the magic appears, and, if we are lucky, it will enhance our lives.”

This might as well have been written of Kagemi. It’s the kind of work that so refuses words it’s very hard to write about: this is art that emerges from the silence and stillness of contemplation, opening doors of perception that are usually blurred shut by the speed of contemporary life. It’s full of the rhythms and grace of the vegetable world, here stylised to an exquisite abstraction: each tiny movement of each finger of each dancer is pregnant with significance. I can’t say I understood specific meanings, not being literate in either ikebana or butoh, but what I did understand was its dynamic harmony, the constant tension on stage between stillness and movement, creation and destruction, growth and decay, self and reflection.

Against a score that includes urgent drum rhythms, classical piano, traditional Japanese music and contemporary electonics, Amagatsu works an austerely minimal palette of gesture and colour; much of the the time the only colours he uses are black and white. But he finds in this austerity a nuance and depth that is wholly compelling. It was, as my theatre partner said, as if gods were dancing on stage.

It took a few minutes for Kagemi to work its spell, largely because the opening dance, a solo backed by minimal strings, was accompanied by such an outbreak of coughing and hacking that it was astounding that paramedics didn’t rush the State Theatre. I felt like personally issuing every patron with my theatre emergency kit of Anticols and tissues. But once the meditative rhythms took hold, the coughing stopped, and Kagemi was a totally immersive experience. It was also notable for the most beautifully choreographed curtain calls I have seen, when the audience made up for its earlier emphysemic behaviour with a tempest of applause.

Picture: Kagemi by Sankai Juku. Photo: Jacques Denarnaud