Opal Vapour

Opal Vapour  Dance created and performed by Jade Dewi Tyas Tungaal.  Composer and music performer, Ria Soemardjo. Set design, Paula van Beek. The Street Theatre, Canberra, June 14-15, 2013

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 14

A mesmerising, slow, sinuous dance begins as a body lying on a plinth.  Covering shrouds are gently removed by a musician who has entered from the audience tinkling tiny bells as if in mourning.  But a hand begins to dance in isolation, lit from below, and slowly, the body comes to life, reproduced as a writhing shadow on a screen.  It is an awakening.

The figure remains at floor level for a long period, seeming to go through a series of reptile and animal-like incarnations, until finally rising to standing human form, dressing in clothing at first simple in style and then more sophisticated and formal.

This life goes through several stages, including what seems to be a period of mental difficulties back writhing on the floor – perhaps finally attaining a peaceful death.

I am not qualified to judge or analyse the details of the choreography, but found this work interesting in concept, combining the creators’ Indonesian heritage with Western modern dance.  For me the slow and steady movement was absorbing, rather in the way that I might look at a large painting and gradually become aware of all its different elements.

The music is Javanese in style – some gamelan, some as if the sounds of dry grass and wind, some sung in haunting notes, some bowed on a stringed instrument, perhaps reminiscent of the Hindu origins of the culture that we saw in much of the dance in the body shapes, hand and eye movements.  Both performers were precise and disciplined.

This is an original work, not so much cross-cultural but integrating elements of the Australian and Indonesian cultures to which these Melbourne performers belong.  Interesting and worthwhile to see.

"G"

 

Australian Dance Theatre Canberra Theatre  - 13^th and 14^th June 2013

Reviewed by Bill Stephens

Following on the world premiere in Canberra of Garry Stewart’s newest work, “Monument”, for the Australian Ballet, it was fascinating to have the opportunity to see one of his earlier works just a matter of weeks later, with the images of “Monument” still remaining fresh in the memory.  It was also rewarding to see  “G” performed by the company on which it was created, The Australian Dance Theatre which Stewart now heads, and in the presence of the A.D.T. founder, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman who now heads Mirramu Dance Company in the Canberra region.   

Though “G” had its first performances in Adelaide in 2008 and has toured widely, it has since been significantly revised by the choreographer, and as seen in Canberra for the first time, remains a brilliantly powerful, provocative and testing work, both for the dancers and the audience.

Using the classical ballet “Giselle” as his starting point, Stewart has explored, in contemporary dance vocabulary, a number of propositions arising from the psychological, emotional and narrative structure of the ballet. “G” is performed in front of a huge LED screen suspended at the back of the stage above the dancers.  At various points it spells out the names of characters from “Giselle” as well as random words and phrases, so that the audience is kept informed and reminded of the source of the work.  This LED screen also changes colour constantly, presumably to reflect the emotions being portrayed by the dancers.

Throughout the piece the 10 dancers move continuously across a narrow brilliantly- lit strip of stage, occasionally performing short solos or duets to a remorseless sound score composed by Luke Smiles. At various points some dancers are dressed in bright green tulle skirts reminiscent of the Wilis in “Giselle”. At other times they wear green track suits or bikinis designed by Daniel Jaber and Gaelle Mellis. In one section a woman dances topless, as do all of the men at other times.  Despite all the clues though, it’s often difficult to recognise the connection between what is being performed and the source material. That aside, “G” , with Stewarts brilliantly inventive and stunningly executed choreography provides a remarkable showcase for ten exceptionally brave and talented dancers and a thrilling dance experience for its audience.

 

 

 

Phèdre by Jean Racine

Catherine McClements - Phèdre

Juli Forsyth - Oenone

Bert LaBonte - Théramène

Edmund Lembke-Hogan - Hippolytus

Abby Earl - Aricia

Phèdre by Jean Racine (1639-99), trans. Ted Hughes.  Bell Shakespeare directed by Peter Evans; designed by Anna Cordingley; composer: Kelly Ryall.  Sydney Opera House Playhouse June 6-29, 2013

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12

Peter Evans has created an intense theatre experience of the tragedy of unfortunate misunderstanding and deliberate but understandable intrigue which, in this high drama, leads to deaths – by guilty suicide, pride and self-destructive bravado, and insurmountable mental stress.  Though the family concerned is of Ancient Greek royalty, mortals whose forebears are Olympian gods, it is not difficult to relate this story and the psychology to any modern family.  For Queen Phèdre this was absolutely her Annus Horribilis.  For our Queen Elizabeth this was 1992, just five years before the accidental death of Princess Diana.

For Bell Shakespeare, Evans brings a new style as well as a new interest in plays beyond the Shakespeare canon, this time from France where Racine was the major tragedian of the later 17th Century.  The experiment is a thorough success.

Be prepared to be frightened, as the theatre suddenly blacks out and loud alarums sound, at a level and clarity that the best of modern electronic sound systems can produce.  Attention is at once fixed and focussed on the spotlit unmoving figures on stage whose words, spoken with precision of imagery and emotion, tell us the story as each character sees it.  This is the style some call ‘presentational theatre’ which may well have been how Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed, and was certainly the way the main characters were presented in Ancient Greek tragedies by, say, Sophocles or Euripides.

But Racine did not use the relieving comedy of Macbeth’s porter, nor the change of pace of a singing and dancing chorus as the Greeks had done.  His play takes the myth – of King Theseus (Marco Chiappi), his second wife Phèdre (Catherine McClements), her step-son Hippolytus (Edmund Lembke-Hogan) and Theseus’ beautiful young captive Aricia (Abby Earl) – into an ever-deepening vortex of disaster: a black hole indeed for the King who was so famous for having succeeded in destroying the Minotaur with the help of Phèdre’s sister Ariadne, who provided the thread by which he was guided back to safety out of the labyrinth.

Racine’s ‘chorus’ consists of just four ordinary mortals – Oenone, Phèdre’s nurse (Julie Forsyth); Théramène, Hippolytus’ adviser (Bert LaBonte); and two messengers Ismène (Olivia Monticciolo) and Panope (Caroline Lee).  Each has an essential role in this drama as commentator, analyst and critical adviser, and Evans’ direction nicely judges the fine points of the relationships of each in the status positions they hold.

The result is that, in what is essentially story-telling with minimum action, relying almost entirely on quality of voice and spoken expression, every actor needs equal skills – and every actor comes up to the mark.

Yet it has to be said that Catherine McClements, Julie Forsyth and Bert LaBonte stood out for me, perhaps because their parts were given more emotional qualities in Ted Hughes’ script.

Hippolytus’ pride in self-restraint compared with his father’s womanising and monster-killing seems to soften his character, making him more hesitant in revealing his love for Aricia until the situation forces him into action, and making it surprising when Théramène describes how, reckless and without restraint, Hippolytus faces up to the monster created by Neptune which kills him – as Theseus had asked Neptune to do.  Hughes’ modern poetic language – almost pentameter in form – I think made it more difficult for Lembke-Hogan to establish the strength of aggression which comes through Racine’s basically four-beat couplet lines in French. 

A nice example is when Hippolytus exclaims, in response to Phèdre’s revelation of her love for him:

Dieux!  qu’est-ce que j’entends?  Madame, oubliez-vous
Que Thésée est mon père, et qu’il est votre époux?

For the other characters Hughes’ English heightens the poetic to good effect, and in the end, after LaBonte’s wonderful dramatic telling of how Hipploytus died and of Aricia’s mourning for her true love, we feel all the sympathy we should for the young couple, and satisfied that Theseus at last recognises his mistakes and gives Aricia her due.

The whole evening, in its almost monumental set yet with characters in modern dress, is fascinating for the linkage created beween the ancient and mythical, the Renaissance and Romantic, and the modern psychological life.  An intense experience, not to be missed – or easily forgotten.

The Maids by Jean Genet

Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert
All photos by Lisa Tomasetti

 The Maids by Jean Genet, trans. by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton.  Directed by Benedict Andrews; designer: Alice Babidge; video designer: Sean Bacon; composer: Oren Ambarchi; lighting designer: Nick Schlieper; sound designer: Luke Smiles.  Sydney Theatre Company, June 4 – July 20, 2013.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12

Watching The Maids is terrifying enough.  Daring to write a review ....

But, like Solange, in the end I have to follow through.

Isabelle Huppert as Solange, Cate Blanchett as Claire in rehearsal

It would be easy to say the performances of Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth Debicki go without saying.  But that would only be because their extraordinary command of their voices seemed to come so easily.  It takes a little while to catch the details in Huppert’s French-accented English, but the new translation leaves no doubt about Solange’s meaning.

Huppert creates a delightful, at times almost whimsical character, and therefore all the more tragic in the end.  Blanchett’s Claire was exquisite – a character as demanding of her sister as the Mistress is of Claire. 

I could say these two were as I expected, considering the last performance I saw by Blanchett in Uncle Vanya and Huppert’s films over the years, but Debicki’s Mistress was an equal to her more experienced colleagues’ quality.

The point made – that Claire and Mistress were parallel personalities in different universes – was beautifully, even magically, reinforced in the similarities in movement, voice, physical likeness and moody energy of these two actrices.  For visual and emotional display, the ripping off their stands of the huge array of dresses and furs in an enormous flurry of frustration was a great example.

Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress

When Claire declared that she was exhausted!, there was laughter in recognition – even in sympathy.  But by the time the Mistress had taken us through her wild destructive phase, and Claire demanded her tea of Solange – the tea laced with Nembutal meant for the Mistress whose role Claire had now taken on for real, no longer as a game – we found ourselves equally exhausted.  Not laughing, just applauding.

There is much more than the acting to applaud in this production.  There is the taking of new risks: in bringing a play of the immediate post-war 1940s to a modern Australian audience, and in the originality of the use of live camera and amplified voice.

The latter was a highly successful device (in contrast to many multimedia failures I have witnessed in other shows).  Here the screen above the action brings the details of facial expression, of objects of significance, and oddly humorous angles which enhance and often enlighten – including for those of us, like me, squeezed by massive bookings months ago into the Circle.  The scenes in the almost off-stage bathroom became intriguing with directly observed glimpses of private behaviour selectively showing in wide shot or close-up at the same time.  Our perception – both of what we were literally seeing and what was really going on – became part of the ‘game’.  Here was a technical device being used to elucidate the concept of different universes in parallel.

Technology, which was not available or probably even thought of by Genet in 1947, has today brought us to the understanding of ideas like ‘quantum leap’ in physics and how there may be copies or versions of ourselves existing in different universes at the same time, but never accessible from one to another.

This is, for me at least, what brought this play into the modern era.  In Genet’s day, and in Europe especially, the basically feudal tradition of servants as trusted retainers, almost family of the autocratic rich, was still close enough for The Maids to be immediately relevant (and why I wrote actrices rather than ‘actressess’).  Even decades later, friends of mine were employed by ultra-rich Europeans as chef and housekeeper.  They came back disgusted after a year, with stories like being sent to Harrods to pick up up a dress, worth only £10,000, or on Majorca (or maybe Capri) having to prepare banquets daily which were hardly touched, but then not being allowed to pass perfectly good food on to local poverty stricken villagers.  It must be thrown away, they were ordered.

Perhaps the final straw for this couple was when a ‘radical’ daughter, of a similar age to them, visited the family.  The daughter talked to the couple on an equal basis, but was then instructed by her parents not to talk to the servants, or she would be banished.  What she did, I don’t know, but my friends came back to our parallel universe in Australia.

But, of course, Genet’s maids had nowhere else to go, no other employment (except, one supposes, in another placement just as bad as the last) – in other words no freedom from their low position in the status power game.  Maybe, a lesson might be learnt by a certain Australian mining family whose Mistress has suggested paying workers $2 a day, and whose children (let alone any maids we do not get to hear about) are struggling to keep up their position. 

But that kind of family’s story is perhaps more relevant in my following review of another French play – Racine’s Phèdre, which I saw in the same extraordinary day in Sydney.

It may not be easy, considering the bookings, but if you can get to see The Maids the trip will be well worth the effort.

Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert (Solange) in performance

Isabelle Huppert and Cate Blanchett

Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress

The Maids set in performance (upstage bathroom blacked out at this point), bird's-eye view on screen
showing Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert as Solange wearing rubber gloves

 

Solange (Isabelle Huppert) watches from outside the apartment (shown on screen)
as Claire (Cate Blanchett) is left holding the poisoned tea that Mistress has refused to drink

RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET

The Return to the Forbidden Planet ensemble 
Photo: Rebecca Doyle

 

Queanbeyan Players

The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre - 7 – 22^nd June

Reviewed by Bill Stephens

Despite a terrific light-show, a fresh young cast, colourful costumes, and a score of familiar songs, this musical, set in a space ship and based very loosely on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, takes a long time to actually take flight.  Following an over-long audience participation opening, followed by a couple of well-staged ensemble routines, the show settles into a series of solos, delivered centre-stage by various of the principal characters.   

There is little of Stephen Pike’s usual inventive direction in evidence, and for much of the show the ensemble just sit around watching the principals come and go. Most of these principals struggle to find a cohesive delivery style for the faux -Shakespearean dialogue losing many of the jokes through dropped cues and insecure delivery.

 Ruth Albertson-Kill as Miranda
Photo : Rebecca Doyle

However there are good performances from Dave Evans as Captain Tempest, Veronica Thwaites-Brown as the Science Officer, and John Kelly as Ariel the Robot. Both Ruth Albertson-Kill as the winsome Miranda, and Lachlan Whan whose manic solo in the second act provides one of the highlights, will be even more effective as they finesse their roles.  Alicia Da Costa impressed in a small role as Navigation Officer.

Nicholas Griffin leads the excellent band, and though it needs more bells and whistles to convince as the inside of a space-ship, Thompson Quan Wing’ s set  is attractive and functional. It’s not there yet, but a couple of performances may be all it takes for this production to become the hilarious romp intended.

 

 ( An edited version of this review appears in June 13-    19 edition of  'CITY NEWS" )

RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET

Written by Bob Carlton
Directed by Stephen Pike
Musical Direction by Nicholas Griffin
Queanbeyan Players at The Q, Queanbeyan
June 7 to 22, 2013

Review by Len Power 7 June 2013

The planets must have been aligned in some special way for Bob Carlton’s jukebox musical, ‘Return To the Forbidden Planet’ to be the success it was when it opened in London’s West End in 1989.  It’s hard to believe it won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical for both 1989 and 1990, beating shows like ‘Miss Saigon’ and ‘Aspects of Love’.

It’s a jukebox musical based on Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’ and the 1950s science fiction film ‘Forbidden Planet’ (which in turn was based on ‘The Tempest’).  The script uses quotes from various Shakespeare plays to advance the story between songs.  The songs are good ones ranging across forty years or so of the rock and roll era.

Stephen Pike, the director, has fashioned a production for the Queanbeyan Players that almost overcomes the deficiencies of the script.  On an excellent spaceship set designed by Thompson Quan Wing and the customary brilliance of Eclipse Lighting and Sound, the director keeps the show moving at a fast pace, keeping our minds off the script as much as possible.

The cast of excellent singers do more than justice to the songs.  However, there is little consistency of style in their delivery of the dialogue.  Some of the cast read the Shakespearean lines too fast with no attempt at understanding what they’re saying.  Others stood there and declaimed in an old-fashioned Shakespearean way that was just boring.  Dave Evans, who plays Captain Tempest, does get it right.  He understands what he’s saying and plays with a touch of melodrama and a constant twinkle in his eye.  We know the show is meant to be just a romp but if the rest of the cast had followed Dave Evans, it would have worked much better.

Apart from that aspect, there were good performances by Veronica Thwaites-Brown as the Science Officer with her fruity Russian accent, David Kavanagh as a very appealing Scottish Bosun, a curious role that starts off nicely but, as written, doesn’t really go anywhere much, John Kelly as Ariel, the Robot and Alicia Da Costa, who made the most of the smaller role of Navigation Officer.  She also came closest to matching Dave Evans’ performance style.

Costumes by Christine Pawlicki were very well done, especially the silver costume for Ariel, the Robot.  Musical Director, Nicholas Griffin, produced a very fine sound from his band.  It was also well-balanced with the singers.  Makeup by Janette Humphrey was imaginative and suited the costumes and characters perfectly.  Choreography by Nikole Neal was performed well by the cast, but here was a chance to come up with some original, futuristic dances, rather than the predictable routines on display here.

The music in this show and the production values make it an entertaining evening.  Just be prepared to sit ‘like patience on a monument’ through the dialogue.  There’ll be another good song along in a minute.....

Originally broadcast on Artsound FM 92.7 ‘Dress Circle’ program on Sunday 9 June 2013

INFLIGHT

Marnie Palomares - Miranda Wheen -Alison Plevey - Melanie Palomares

 

Presented by LIZ LEA & CO

National Library of Australia,

May 31^st - June 1^st 2013

Reviewed by Bill Stephens

Aviation may seem an unlikely source of dance inspiration but with “InFlight” choreographer Liz Lea has created an elegant, inventive, highly original and entertaining dance work with which to celebrate Australian aviation achievements. 

In the style of a dance-doco the first act depicts two sisters (Marnie and Melanie Palomares), first met performing a cute and clever burlesque fan-dance to “Red Red Robin”. Vintage archival images and sound, clever lighting and excellent period costuming combine to recreate a world fascinated by the exploits of aviators,  Amelia Earhart and Charles Kingsford Smith, and the sisters quickly become absorbed into the world of flying machines. A plane is built onstage, which eventually crashes, providing an affecting conclusion with the four dancers moving among the wreckage.

The abstract second act explores the world of birds. The four dancers wear gracefully draped, feathered costumes to execute an intriguing choreographic repertoire of stylised bird movements. Inhabiting a feathery environment designed by Naomi Ota and moving to an atmospheric soundscape, they strut, preen, quarrel and eventually unite in a beautifully realised finale.  Miranda Wheen, Alison Plevey, Marnie and Melanie Palomares each shine in individual solos, and dance superbly in the unison passages.  

Despite the theatrical limitations of the National Library lecture theatre, “InFlight” is a beautifully conceived and immaculately detailed dance work which constantly delights the eye, intrigues the mind and excites the imagination.

                    (An edited version of this review appears in CITY NEWS 5th June edition)