It's been a couple of weeks since I posted anything, and since I just stepped through the door after coming home from a new dance work, and since I have at least an hour before I head out to a party at a local bar I hang out at, I thought it was time I wrote some further rambling observations about life, art and everything.
Currently listening to: Second Storey, Art of Fighting
My friend Jeff e-mailed me last week to ask if I would go and see a new dance work with him tonight. Contemporary dance is not something I'm big on - partially because it's so outside my comfort zone that I don't know how to react, review, critique or process it. It's not totally unfamiliar to me: I actually did a year or two's classes in modern dance back in the 1980's while I was still in high school (and yes, I was the only boy in the class, but what else do you expect in a country town in the tail end of the last century?), but it's so far removed from what I'm familiar with that I don't know how to relate to it half the time.
Okay confession: it wasn't really 'modern dance', that's far too highbrow a term for what I did. Back then it was called jazz ballet, but compared to what I knew of dance as a gawky, insecure gay teenager in a redneck country town, it seemed pretty modern to me...
Anyway, tonight's show was called 'High Maintenance' and was a work in progress supported by the modern dance company Chunky Move. It seemed to revolve around the theme of how people behanve at parties - drunken fights between best mates, sensuality, orgiastic dancing, that sort of thing. It only went for about half an hour, and I actually liked it: on a physical level, the movements of the three dancers were quite remarkable, and there were some sequences that were both clever and telling.
We ran into Marcus Westbury there, who is the Artistic Director of Next Wave, a biennial youth arts festival: www.nextwave.org.au
I've known Marcus since about 1997, when he helped stage the first ever National Young Writers' Festival www.youngwritersfestival.org
in Newcastle, a regional city in New South Wales that had until then been dominated by heavy industry (and which is now best known for its rugby league team, the Newcastle Knights, who like most rugby teams in Australia were involved in yet another sexual assault case a couple of weeks ago; charming fellows these thugby players - not that AFL is much better).
Today 'Newie' is best known - at least among my circle - as the home of This Is Not Art www.thisisnotart.org - an annual festival which incorporates the NYWF, and several other festivals including Electrofringe, and which is largely - as far as I know - Marcus' brainchild.
I have a strange relationship with Marcus - I wouldn't say we were friends, as I feel that there's a degree of distance between the two of us, and I'm not sure where that distance comes from. Is it because we're both essentially shy, insecure types? I know I am, although I apparently overcompensate beautifully, especially when I've had a few lines of speed or several drinks.
I know we both tend to think of ourselves as outsiders and observers, but I know that from my side there's a degree of intimidation that prevents me from being as close to Marcus as I'd like to be. He's one of the most effortlessly intellectual people I know, capable of the most astonishingly profound statements about art, culture and society which he appears to utter without even thinking, as if such astute observations are a natural state for him. I just blink, and nod, and mutter nervous agreement and sip another glass of wine, or gulp another stubby of cider.
Anyway, it was nice to run into him, even though the restaurant in Chinatown the three of us went to afterwards was crap. It was just nice to go out and have one of those evenings where we talk about art and culture without feeling like wankers. It's nice to hang out with people who are on the same level as yourself sometimes.
I've only known Jeff for just over a year, but he's becoming a close friend. I'll write more about him in my next post I think; in fact I might write in detail about my relationships and friendships next time, as there's quite a lot I want to say - not about Jeff, but about how I interact with people generally. Suffice it to say I really like Jeff - and you should all go and check out the website for Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, which is where he works: www.gertrude.org.au
To bring this long and rambling post to a close, last weekend I went to see the Canadian band The Dears play at the inaugural St Jeromes' Laneway Festival (which was indeed held in a lane in the Melbourne CBD) and they were astoundingly good. Go and listen to their second album No Cities Left now, and rejoice at what you hear.
Last night, I was even more deeply moved by a local production by the Act-O-Matic 3000 (a small, independent theatre company) of the play The Laramie Project, about (among other things) the fatal gay-bashing of 21 year old university student Matthew Shepard. It moved me to tears, and was truly wonderful. Here's my formal review of the show, written for the website www.theprogram.net.au - I hope you like it, and if you live in Melbourne, that you get the chance to go and see the show:
The Laramie Project
By Richard Watts
A composite map of suffering and small town life, and a moving and magnificent theatrical experience.
Following the brutal hate-crime murder of 21 year-old Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998, Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theatre Project made repeated visits to the town, interviewing its residents and documenting the impact Shepard’s death had upon them. The resulting documentary-style play is a composite picture of the responses and reactions of Laramie’s citizens to a particularly brutal murder.
It is not a play about a crime, but a play about the place where a crime took place; about the people who live there and how they feel about the murder of a young gay man. It is also a personal response by the Tectonic Theatre Company to Shepard’s murder, as well as a reaction again the sometimes stagnant language of theatre, which has too often remained mired in the traditions of previous centuries instead of finding new ways of telling the stories affecting us all.
This stark new production of The Laramie Project by independent Melbourne theatre company The Act-O-Matic 3000 is directed by Chris Baldock, and stars eight actors who play an average of eight roles each. The minimalist staging focuses audience attention on the text and performances: instead of marvelling at the artifice of the production we are made to focus upon the lines delivered by each actor in turn. These lines are sometimes moving, sometimes clumsy, but in remembering that these were words spoken by real people struggling to describe the pain and confusion they felt over young Matthew’s premature death, their awkwardness becomes all the more engaging and convincing.
While all the cast are strong, Brett Whittingham as hire-car driver Doc O’Connor is particularly memorable (although the engaging character of Doc goes a fair way towards aiding his performance; he is equally impressive as the venomously anti-gay Reverend Fred Phelps, who picketed Shepard’s funeral). Act-O-Matic co-founder Olivia Hogan (who among her roles plays Shepard’s friend Romaine Patterson, and in an especially moving performance, Aaron Kreifels, the young cyclist who found Shepard after the attack), and Paula McDonald (whose performance in a range of roles, notably as Officer Reggie Fluty, the first official on the crime scene was flawless) are both outstanding. Ron Kofler, who plays Matthew Shepard’s father Denis in one of the final scenes in the play, is also tremendous.
While the play occasionally falls into self-indulgence and loses a little momentum in the second act, this is the fault of the text itself and not this production. The Act-O-Matic 3000’s presentation of The Laramie Project is heartfelt and intensely moving, as evidenced by the tears in the eyes of the actors as much of those dampening the cheeks of the audience (and especially this reviewer). Having suffered through much mediocre theatre in the past 12 months, especially productions mounted by Melbourne’s largest and best-funded theatre companies, it delights me enormously to be able to say that The Laramie Project is the first must-see theatrical production of 2005.
Links: http://www.tectonictheaterproject.org/Laramie/Laramie.htm
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