Aftermath

Compassion fatigue afflicts many in the western world due to prolonged exposure to suffering via the media. Already encouraged to think, during wartime, of an enemy as ‘other’, as something less than human, our concern and empathy for victims of war and natural disaster further diminishes when we are saturated with images of tragedy in newspapers, magazines, on television and online.

Aftermath, by the writer/director team of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, was originally developed by the New York Theatre Workshop in 2009. Based on a series of interviews Blank and Jensen conducted with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, the play is a remarkable exercise in humanising the people of Iraq, and a powerful antidote to compassion fatigue.

On a stage bare save for a series of chairs, eight actors take on the roles of real Iraqis: a theatre director and his artist wife; a pharmacist; an Imam; a dermatologist; a housewife and mother; a married couple, both cooks; and a translator who learned English playing computer games. The stories they tell are carefully interwoven and dramatically rich; revealing simple details of their daily lives, the chaos that followed the downfall of Saddam Hussein, and the impact and horrors of war.

A roadside bomb that kills almost every member of one character’s family; religious conflicts that seek to turn neighbour against neighbour; fundamentalists who consider artists worthy only of death; and the unspeakable indignities of Abu Ghraib; the topics explored in Aftermath are not for the faint hearted, though the script is judiciously leavened with humour at certain points, and often leaves the worst details unsaid. It is a dignified, deeply humanising piece of theatre.

Subtle lighting and sound design add to the impact of the play, and performances are, without exception, excellent. The script is careful to establish the normality of the characters’ lives in detail, gradually and deliberately building towards the more confronting elements of the work. Its impact comes like a blow to the heart that left this reviewer wiping away tears and gasping for breath.

Documentary theatre at its best, this carefully constructed, remarkably moving play is a highlight of the 2011 Melbourne Festival.

Rating: Four and a half stars

Aftermath
Text: Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
Director: Jessica Blank
Executive Producer: Arktype/Thomas O. Kriegsmann
Production Stage Manager: Larry K. Ash
Production Manager / Technical Director: Justin Partier
Costume Designer: Gabriel Berry
Scenic Design: Richard Hoover
Based on a Lighting Design by David Lander
Produced by The New York Theatre Workshop
Original Music & Sound Designer: David Robbins
Cast: Barzin Akhavan, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Leila Buck, Daoud Heidami, Lameece Issaq, Omar Koury, Ryan Shams, Ted Sod, Rasha Zamamiri

Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
October 11 – 14

Melbourne Festival
October 6 – 22

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on October 14th 2011.

More thoughts on MIAF 2009 (part two)

In which I finally get around to briefly blogging about the rest of the performances I saw at this year's Melbourne International Arts Festival. I haven't blogged about any of the visual arts events this year as I didn't see very many of them, save for Callum Morton's Valhalla, which was a great piece of work though I think the location it was placed, and the fact that it was placed on a plinth, did it a diservice.

These last few notes are perforce brief, written more as a reminder to myself than for any other reason, so you might want to skip this unless you're especially fascinated by the festival, or my life...

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

This transcendent work was a piece of verbatim theatre, a collage of Melbourne mapped out through a series of real life conversations on trains that were recorded and then turned into a script performed by Heather Bolton, Christopher Brown, Rita Kalnejais and James Wardlaw. Violence and threat rubbed shoulders with comedy and surrealism, and expressions of age and difference, hope and desire played out over the course of an hour. Created and directed by Anna Tregloan, with a sound design by J. David Franzke, and co-presented by MIAF, Arts House and the Store Room Theatre (where I am a member of the interim advisory committee), this was a simple but sublime work that allowed the audience to find their own meaning in the text.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Great doco about Iraq's only performing heavy metal band and their travails, though the screening suffered from some sound issues in the Forum, as the PA appeared to be tuned for the bands who followed, which made some of the interviewees a bit hard to understand. I've reviewed the film in more detail here, at Arts Hub.

Chunky Move - Black Marrow

Wow. Not always successful, but a fascinating and imaginative piece of dance theatre centred around apocalyptic themes.

The Black Arm Band - dirtsong

A bit middle of the road for my tastes, musically, though nonetheless a passionate and heartfelt evening of song. You can read my detailed review of the gig on Arts Hub if you're a member...

Ramallah Underground

My final festival performance for MIAF 2009 was this vibrant, excellent Palestinian hip-hop trio, Ramallah Underground. They rock. Check out their Myspace page.

Some thoughts on MIAF (part the first)

Finally, with Brett Sheehy's first Melbourne International Arts Festival now officially over as of last night, I am at last finding the time to jot down some thoughts about some of the events I saw. Better late than never, I suppose!

The Abbey Theatre - Terminus

Ireland's national theatre company presented this powerful and surprising work by playwright Mark O'Rowe at The Malthouse, a gritty and grotesque piece of dark magic realism written and performed as a series of three interlinking monologues. An older woman working at a telephone counselling service and her alienated and unhappy adult daughter are caught up in the affairs of a vicious serial killer who goes on a murderous rampage after selling his soul to the Devil and getting cheated in process.

Written in lyrical verse evoking both the language of the street and gothic fantasy, this was an engaging albeit grim piece of entertainment, and featured an outstanding performance from Karl Shiels as the sweet-voiced killer. Earthy language, unpredictable meter and creative wordplay reminiscent of Irish writers such as Joyce and Jamie O’Neill resulted in an enthralling text, balanced out by intense performances and dramatic storytelling, with the sonorous score and simple but effective staging rounding out the work.


The Hofesh Shechter Company - Uprising/In Your Rooms

These two outstanding contemporary dance works were one of my absolute highlights for the festival.

The masculine physicality of Uprising, which was inspired by the 2006 Paris riots, was ably and beautifully conveyed by seven male dancers: slaps on the back turned into blows, bodies prowled ape-like across the stage, tender embraces became wrestling matches, both tender and competitive; their movements accompanied by a tribal, industrially percussive score that fitted perfectly with scenes where the performers were marshalled and drilled like soldiers or assembly-line workers.

In Your Rooms, featuring 11 male and female performers, evoked the risks and delights of relationships, alienation and compassion, with dancers plunging from light into shadow accompanied by a dynamic live soundtrack which, like the score for Uprising, was also composed by the Israeli-born Hofesh Shechter.

Shechter also contributes to In Your Rooms in voice-over, musing upon the macrocosm and microcosm and the connections, both personal and impersonal, between the two; while the score is played live by a band who are elevated above the dancers at the rear of the stage. A sample of the Sigur Ros track 'Takk...' was woven into the score, to great effect.

Viewed together, these were masterful, moving and beautiful dance works.

Transe Express - Mischievous Bells

This much-hyped work - part of the festival's free opening night celebrations - left me cold. Performers went up, they went around, they banged drums and rang bells, all the while suspended from a flower-like mechanical structure that gradually unfolded around them as it carried them on high. Repetitive and tedious once the initial 'awww' factor had worn off.

Rembrandt's J'Accuse

Peter Greenaway claims that Rembrandt's famous 1642 painting The Night Watch is "an indictment ... an accusation", and in this didactic and hectoring film the British filmmaker sets out to prove his point, while simultaneously asserting his argument that modern culture is visually illiterate. It's ironic then, that Greenaway has made such a talky, text-heavy film - in almost every frame the filmmaker is lecturing in voiceover or popping up as a talking head to ram his point home: that The Night Watch holds the clues to a murder.

You can read my detailed review of J'Accuse here, at Arts Hub. If you're not an Arts Hub member (why not?) I can summarise by saying that not only is Greenaway's film a somewhat dry and rather pompous lecture, it also selectively ignores established facts which don't fit with Greenaway's claims.

As leading Australian art critic Robert Nelson recently wrote in The Age:

‘Visual literacy consists not in inventing things that aren't there, but connecting the things that are. While reproaching the visually illiterate who only see what they want to see, Greenaway plunges into the very fallacy that he scorns.’

Science in the Dark: Elemental

I really, really wanted to like this work. Its creator, poet alicia sometimes, has been a friend of mine for many years, and I'm also good friends with the other three poets involved in the creation of the work, Sean M. Whelan, Emilie Zoey Baker and Paul Mitchell. Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to be able to rave about this show - an exploration of the mysteries of the universe through poetry, music and video projection, performed in the unique setting of Melbourne's Planetarium in Spotswood - it really didn't work for me, at least not as much as I'd hoped.

Musically and poetically it was great, especially Baker's, sometimes' and Whelan's work - I especially enjoyed Baker's science-meets-Buddhism take on the universe - but too many of the visual elements seemed simplistic and out of place, particularly during Baker's work. Had the performance utilised more of the star-scape projections of the planetarium proper, it would have been more effective, I think, and captured more of the coupling of art and science that the program promised. Too, I felt to much of the evening lacked the edge provided by live performance: pre-recorded, the poems sounded smooth but lacked the zest and variety that comes with live delivery.

More Fringe, the start of MIAF

Just a quick note to say that I will be trying to catch up with some micro-reviews of the remaining shows I saw at the Melbourne Fringe Festival over the weekend (I saw 32 shows in all this year, so have been struggling to find the time to write about them) as well as the first couple of MIAF shows I've seen, the Abbey Theatre's gorgeously grotesque Terminus and the Hofesh Schecter Company's dance works Uprising and In Your Rooms, both of which I very much enjoyed.

So far so good for MIAF, in fact, though I was interested to see Peter Greenaway's take on The Last Supper, and his claims about visual literacy, roundly criticised by Robert Nelson in today''s Age. I suspect Greenaway might have a bit to say about that tonight at the Q+A after the screening of his film J'Accuse!

MIAF 2009

The program for the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) was launched earlier this week, and is already generating significant debate in the blogosphere.

Over at Born Dancin' you can read the author's concerns about the apparent lack of cultural diversity in the festival program, and further thoughts about the festival's desire for exclusivity; while the crew at Spark Online note how the new Festival Director, Brett Sheehy, comes with a certain amount of baggage ("The new Artistic Director’s bio carefully stresses the numbers, reading like a corporate profile," they write) and, like Born Dancin', they also note the "culturally homogenous program dynamic". Ultimtely, though, their conclusion is "We are not at all disappointed" with MIAF 2009.

Over at Theatrenotes, Alison Croggon views the program in a far more positive light. "MIAF 2009 promises to be a really interesting festival, and will attract a wide range of people," she writes.

What I think will be explored below.

To begin with, some of you will be able to read my own thoughts over at Arts Hub, where I describe incoming Artistic Director Brett Sheehy's first MIAF program as 'Euro-centric ... considered and safe'.

It was an interesting piece to write, as Sheehy was unavailable to speak to me about his festival program, unlike the directors of the Darwin and Brisbane Festivals, who have also launched their programs in recent weeks. I would have preferred that Sheehy speak for himself about the range of works, the strengths and weaknesses of his program, but that turned out not to be possible. (Nor did Sheehy take questions from the assembled media at a MIAF media briefing a few weeks prior to the launch, which did strike me as a bit odd, quite frankly. Why have a media briefing at all if you're not going to discuss the program, and your reasoning behind including or excluding certain events, with the assembled journalists?)

But anyway, let's concentrate on the program.

The Good

There are numerous events in the program which have caught my eye, including...

A very strong visual arts program, programmed by Simon Maidment, which unites artist-run initiatives like Conical, commercial galleries such as Anna Schwartz, and state-supported venues such as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces. Artists from Australia, South Africa, Brazil, the UK and other countries are presented across a range of media, including film, installation, photography and design.

Beck's Rumpus Room showcases the cultural diversity I would have liked to have seen spread across the entire program. Bands such as Fischerspooner (UK) Melt Banana (Japan), My Disco (Australia) and Ramallah Underground (Palestine) can be seen for $15 a night, which is an absolute bargain. Definitely somewhere I will be spending a few of my nights I suspect!

Dance fans will find much to interest them in the program. The more I read about the UK-based Hofesh Shechter Company, the more I look forward to seeing them, with In your rooms described by The Guardian as "probably the most important new dance work to be created in Britain since the millennium". And it features Sigur Ros on the soundtrack - yay! I'm not much of an opera fan, so I'm less exited by Sasha Waltz's Medea, but I do look forward to seeing Körper, given the amazing reviews that Waltz and her dancers are generating.

From Ireland, the Abbey Theatre's Terminus is going to be a must-see for me, given that it won The Scotsman newspaper's Edinburgh Fringe First Award - high praise indeed given the scale and strengths of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; and likewise, the two works presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company, Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling and Lally Katz's Apocalypse Bear Trilogy are also high on my list.

And I will also have to check out a gig at the Planetarium, Elemental, which merges sound art, video art and poetry, especially because the four poets involved - alicia sometimes, Sean M. Whelan, Emilie Zoe Baker and Paul Mitchell - are all old friends of mine.

The Bad

As with Born Dancin' and Spark Online, the Euro-centric nature of much of the performance program concerns me.

It is homogenous, with the festival's major acts drawn from a handful of countries - France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, the USA, Germany, Germany again, the UK again, Iceland, Belgium, Belgium, the UK, Germany yet again...

There are, however, plenty of Australian acts in amongst them, though the inclusion of Chunky Move strikes me as predictable, and perhaps a little unimaginative, given the strengths of the local dance sector.

I'm also a bit dismayed by the dominance of music over other artforms, especially orchestral and classical music. You've got the London Philharmonic, the Australian String Quartet, Vocalconsort Berlin, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, a Back marathon, and a series of concerts based on three religiously-themed classical music works, to name just some of the works on show.

Brett Sheehy's public statements valuing 'exclusivity' are also concerning to me. Dialogue and cultural exchange are experiences I greatly value, and a key part of making art in any city, but especially in Melbourne. That said, as someone who has worked professionally in the arts industry on and off since 1999, I recognise the economic imperatives which might drive such measures: it doesn't mean I have to agree with them though.

And I'm also suprised by the lack of projects which would lead to a lasting impact for the local arts sector. I can find no mention of workshops by visiting artists in the program which might lead to a legacy beyond successful box office takings; and the Artists' Bar, where local and visiting artists could rub shoulders and share experiences and ideas is no more. (That said, there will be a series of forums and talks at the Arts Centre Fairfax Studio throughout the festival, which I hope will provide some stimulating discussion.)

Finally, at the media launch, Sheehy spoke about wanting to ensure his festival engages with regional Victoria, but instead of actually programming events in the regions, or helping create partnerships between regional artists and those from Melbourne or overseas, his solution has been simply to bus people in from regional centres such as Ballarat and Bendigo. Again, not something that nurtures the local arts ecology in any meaningful or lasting way.

* * *

So there you have it. There are aspects of the festival that appeal to me, and others that I definitely find problematic. Those of you reading this will also, naturally, have your own point of view - especially those of you who work for MIAF, and trust me I will know when you visit and leave anonymous comments, thanks to my statcounter - and I look forward to reading your thoughts. Especiall yours, Brett Sheehy, if you're around!

Most of all, I look forward to seeing some art that moves and excites me, and leads to stimulating conversations with the people around me, whether it's at MIAF or MIFF or Fringe or the latest, dazzling work by BalletLab, which I saw last night and which I hope to find time to blog about tomorrow.

On with the show!

The Melbourne International Arts Festival runs from October 9 - 24.
www.melbournefestival.com.au

Culture corner

It's been a busy week, with a few memorable events in the social diary. To whit:


The opening of the MTC Theatre

The Melbourne Theatre Company has long been without a home of its own. Now, after many years, they've officially opened a new home on Southbank, beside the new Recital Centre. So, last Saturday night I trooped along (albeit glowing with sunburn after an afternoon playing in a charity soccer tournament - and oh, my aching thighs and calves the nest day!) to check out their new digs.

The venue itself is very impressive, and an excellent match to the new recital centre next door; I'm particularly impressed by the lack of a balcony in the theatre proper, as I find being seated in the balcony has a distancing effect that removes me physically and emotionally from the performance. The aesthetic of the theatre, with its walls illuminated by lines of text from Australian classics, is also impressive. I also appreciated the nod to the MTC's former home in Russell Street, it's size and tattered state recreated on stage at the start of the show.

That said, the performances proper at this opening night were a bit naff - I mean, Rhonda Burchmore? Twice? Puh-leaze. It struck me as a wasted opportunity to look to the future and celebrate what is to come in the years ahead; instead we got a performance that wallowed in the past. Still, kudos to Geoffrey Rush for programming the revue-style opening night show in six weeks flat (and for playing an excellent Lady Bracknell - could we please have him starring in a revival of Earnest in 2010 please, Simon?), and congratulations to the MTC Chairman, Ian Renard, for allowing himself to be so completely the butt of the joke on stage after his speech.


New MIAF AD comes out

Brett Sheehy, the new Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF), had his public 'coming out' in the old-fashioned sense of the word at Comme (formerly Miettas) on Tuesday night; one of several corporate schmooze-fests happening simultaneously that evening. (I attended another, thrown by the City of Melbourne, earlier that same evening at Transit, overlooking the temporary Homeless World Cup stadium that's been erected at Federation Square.)

Full points to Sheehy for being so forthright about his desire to make MIAF Australia's pre-emminent arts festival, and for the audacity to speak so bluntly of money in front of a corporate and political crowd - I had a direct sightline of the Arts Minister's face and her smile faded rapidly at that point, I can tell you!

Unfortanately, too much of Sheehy's speech seemed to consist of arts buzzwords, with too few real details of his 'artistic vision for Melbourne and the festival' (as promised by the invitation) actually revealed on the night. He also lost me by waxing lyrical about opening his festival with opera and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra: it was as if his speech was contrived to please The Age's conservative chief arts scribe Robin Usher (whose antipathy for the programming of former festival AD Kristy Edmunds is well documented).

Still, until specific details of Sheehy's program are announced, I'll try not to form an opinion of the man and his programming either way. One things for certain, he's a great public speaker, and has energy to burn.


J.J. Abrams' Star Trek preview

I was never a huge fan of Star Trek, although I do remember watching episodes of the original series on Saturday afternoons back in the late 70s and early 80s; and I have seen at least a couple of the big screen adaptations actually at the cinema, such was my interest in the franchise. But I long lost any real interest in Star Trek, which meant that Next Generation and all its subsequent sequels and prequels failed to kindle my imagination. But having read enough interwebs geek-goss on Ain't It Cool and related sites about the rebooting of the franchise by Lost wunderkind J.J. Abrams, I have to admit to being intrigued by his forthcoming Star Trek. Which is why I jumped at the chance to see a few sneak preview snippets of the movie on Tuesday morning.

And - wow. OMG, like WOW! The four seperate scenes that we watched at the Crown Village cinemas were startling and exciting; both a homage to Gene Rodberry's original Star Trek stories and an entirely new story. We meet James Tiberius Kirk (Chris Pine) for the first time; an angry young man who tries to pick up an equally young Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in a bar before getting involved in a brawl. We see him smuggled onto the Enterprise by Bones McCoy (perfectly played by Kiwi actor Karl Urban: no only does he gets the character's voice right, but even the body language, noted fellow RRR broadcaster Rob Jan, who was seated next to me at the screening) where he has a run-in with the Vulcan, Spock (Zachary Quinto from Heroes). In the third scene, Kirk meets up with an elderly Spock from the future (Leonard Nimoy) and has his first encounter with engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg). The fourth and final scene was a big action set piece featuring Kirk, Sulu (John Cho) and a hapless red-shirt.

Like I said, I was never a big Star Trek fan; but there's an energy, a vigour about the four scenes we were shown on Tuesday, that got me really excited to see more. Bring on May 7, 2009!

Secrets

I am all a-quiver with excitement about the program for this year's Melbourne International Arts Festival, having attended a media briefing at the festival office on Wednesday, but unfortunately I am bound to secrecy and cannot, nay, must not blog about its contents for another month.

Suffice to say that Kristy's final festival program, her fourth, looks fantastic; with an array of local and international guests that already has me salivating. Sadly I'll have to miss the festival's last five days, as I'll be jaunting off to Morocco, but I reckon I'll be able to squeeze in a fair bit of fun before I go!

Melbourne International Arts Festival: October 9 - 25 2008

Time to usher Usher out

In an Age article today entitled 'Arts festival nearer to choosing new head', increasingly out-of-touch arts scribe Robin Usher once again displays just his reactionary outlook with the following comments in a piece about the process of appointing the next MIAF Artistic Director:

"It is understood the short list also includes Adelaide Festival's director, Brett Sheehy, who appears a more obvious choice [than Mark Yeoman].

Not only does he have vastly more experience of Australian conditions — he was director of the Sydney Festival before moving to Adelaide — but also he is more likely to return the Melbourne Festival to its traditional programming mix."

Now, forgive me if I fail to grasp your logic here, Robin - but why should a "traditional" approach to programming - which in your eyes includes opera and symphony orchestras, as you don't hesitate to suggest - make Sheehy the 'obvious choice' to take over from Kristy Edmunds?

Obvious in your eyes, perhaps, given your evident worship of hidebound artforms that have their place in the greater scheme of things; but which, to my mind at least, have little place in a festival such as MIAF, which celebrates and highlights the very best in contemporary art practice.

Usher than goes on to belittle Yeoman, currently employed at Groningen's multi-disciplinary theatre festival Noorderzon in the Netherlands, because he is the director of a "small-town" festival in a city "with a population of less than 200,000". Since when did scale have anything to do with innovative programming and artistic excellence? From a quick look at the program Yeoman put together for this year's festival, I'd say he has an intuitive and broad-ranging approach to programming; so how about we consider these candidates on their merits, instead of sneering at the size of the cities they work in, hey Robin?

Festival Roundup

It's been a mad month, with Fringe segueing straight into the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and not enough time to blog about it all. As well as the shows I've already detailed on this here blog, I also managed to catch:

• an array of visual arts, from oribotics to Riceboy Sleeps.
  

• Barrie Kosky's The Tell Tale Heart, which I admired for its attempt to convey the heightened senses of the insane narrator of the original Poe story in a theatrical setting, but whose - dramatic - pauses - began to pall for me after the first half hour. Nonetheless an exquisite aesthetic experience, even though I wasn't always fully engaged.
  
  
• Laurie Anderson's Homeland, a festival commission, which washed over me in waves of haunting electronica as I struggled to stay awake in my seat. Loved her evocation of 'the Underwear Gods' - the idea of the photos of giant billboard models striding around the city - but was less enamored of her more polemic pieces, which struck me as unnecessarily strident (though I did appreciate their increased tempo, which helped me stay awake on a particularly low-energy night).

• Kinky, a band from Mexico who played at the Meat Market, bored me - sounding too much like the Red Hot Chili Peppers in their opening songs, so I left; going instead to the Arthouse to see a new punk band before pushing on to a debauched and dissolute warehouse party in Abbotsford, hurrah!

• And closing the festival with Merce Cunningham's Program B, which featured as part of its program the long-awaited Split Sides, featuring vivid, beautiful dancing; a Radiohead score for half the work, and also a live score by Sigur Ros. Oh bliss! Oh joy! Oh rapture! I'm not going to go into a long and detailed review here, as sadly I don't have time, being at work and all (and also because I have to juggle several other committments today, including my Fringe hat, RRR and a few other things into the bargain) but god it was good, from the costumes and set, through to the palpable buzz in the audience the moment Cunningham himself and guests appeared on stage to randomise the presentation of the post-interval performances.

It's been an extremely enjoyable festival for me; though coming hot on the heels of Fringe means I'm always a little art-ed out by this time of year; too much of a rich diet can sometimes spoil your appetite (which is why I've been sitting at home the last couple of nights watching Hollywood action-trash as an antidote; the Transformers movie and the first Resident Evil if you must know - both of which don't translate well to the small screen, it must be said).

I also managed to catch the opening night show by La Clique at The Famous Spiegeltent on Sunday night, in the company of a Hibernian mate who'd never seen them before, which was an added thrill - there's something about glancing sideways at someone's wide-eyed delight which I find quite inspiring: a vicarious thrill which adds to my own already delighted enjoyment of proceedings.

The new acts to join the show this year aren't especially memorable, though there was some utterly sublime aerial work on show, some clever puppetry, and an amusing spot of juggling; and of course, bathtub boy David O'Mer (pictured above) is still as hot as ever... but La Clique is still a great night out, even if you have seen it before: it's fast, funny, risky and risque; and above all, damn entertaining.

But now it's back to my usual routine, and my normal life, in the absence of Melbourne Fringe and the Melbourne International Arts Centre. Not that my normal life is at all drab and grey, of course: coming up in the next few days I'm going to try and see the latest production from Red Stitch, a Hollywood farce called The Little Dog Laughed; and also Melburnalia, five short plays by Melbourne writers including Lally Katz and Tee O'Neil about life in different aspects of Melbourne, staged at 45 Downstairs by White Whale.

Then there's the Festival of Jewish Cinema opening next week, with a live score for the silent 1920 masterpiece The Golem...

It never stops - for which, of course, I am utterly thankful. Here's to art!!

On listening to Sigur Ros' Hvarf-Heim

If you know me, whether it's because we've been friends for years or from occasionally reading this blog, or from listening to SmartArts on 3RRR; you'll know that the music of Iceland's Sigur Rós moves me to tears of joy. Right now I'm listening to a preview copy of the band's new album Hvarf-Heim, and loving it. (Thank you EMI, and no, I promise I won't burn it and distribute it to the world via the net: I lack the technical skills to do so even if I wanted to!).

The album, which is released in November, is an aural accompaniment to the band's concert film, Heima, which is screening at The Forum this Sunday; and which is a documentation of a two week tour Sigur Rós took around Iceland last year that featured both grand scale concerts and intimate gigs for friends and family. If you go to see the film on Sunday, you'll also see the band playing a short accoustic set and doing a Q+A with fans; following on from the live performance of Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do, accompanying the Merce Cuningham dance troupe, they're performing as part of MIAF the previous night.

Hvarf ('Disappeared') consists of five (mostly) previously unrecorded tracks: 'Salka'; the gorgeous 'Hljomalind'; 'I Gaer'; the title track of their first album, 'Von'; and the live favourite 'Hafsol', previously released as a B-side on the 'Hoppipola' single.

Heim ('Home') is a series of six intimate, still beautiful but less orchestrated versions of tracks I know and love: 'Samskeyti', 'Staralfur' (which I'm listening to right now, loving the track's rich keyboards), 'Vaka', 'Ahaetis Byrjun', 'Heysatan' and 'Von', again. In many ways these songs are even more remarkable than the band's usual, life-affirming concerts; there's a subdued beauty to them that highlights the tenderness of Jonsi's voice, the vibrancy of the music; the throbbing sweep of emotions contained within each song.

Look, it's a fucking beuatiful album, ok? And you can read more about it, the band, and Heima here, in the UK newspaper The Guardian. And if you're a fan of the band, please leave a message: myself and a mate, Darren, are going to the gig on Saturday night, and I hope to get along on Sunday as well: maybe we can meet up for an impromptu Sigur Rós appreciation society drink before or after the shows?

Wonderfully wicked

I saw, without doubt, not only my absolute MIAF highlight on Monday night, but also the most wonderfully wicked cabaret show I've ever witnessed: Kiki and Herb: the Year of Magical Drinking; at North Melbourne's Meat Market Arts House.

Kiki is an aging, alcoholic chanteuse; Herb her equally withered pianist and straight-man - an irony given that both are gay men; performed respectively by vocalist Justin Bond (who may perhaps be familiar to you from John Cameron Mitchell's superb Shortbus) and pianist Kenny Mellman.

Part of the point behind the duo's performance is to demonstrate that cabaret need not be stuck in the first half of the 20th century: as demonstrated with versatility, pathos, wit and flair last night, a medly of Velvet Underground songs, and the songs of Jarvis Cocker and Kate Bush have just as much resonance as Piaf or Brecht - and perhaps, for modern audiences, even more relevance.

Equally, though, the pair delight in skewering and satirising the cliches of cabaret, such as a wonderful routine where an alcohol-sodden Kiki staggered around the stage trying to embody the sinuous sexuality of a panther, with a definite, naughty nod to the likes of an aged Eartha Kitt beyond her prime. Mreeow! Just as Judy Garland turned into a tragic travesty, Kiki slurs, staggers and swears beneath the spotlights; in between joking about rape, child abuse ("I always say, if you weren't abused as a kid, you must have been one hell of an ugly child!") and Hitler. Herb, meanwhile, mutters and giggles at the keyboard. Both rise to the occasion when levity is no longer required, twisting laughs into gasps of admiration and disbelief as they take a song like The Eagles' 'Hotel California' and turn it into a magnificently melancholic gothic melodrama.

They were also capable of deliciously dark wit; jokes that teetered on the edge of totally wrong (such as Kiki's comment about Qantas loosing her luggage, only to find her suitcase floating in a Sydney pond a few days later, the body of a dead toddler contained within: looking around I saw smiles sag into sickly frowns, and convulsions of laughter transform into cross-armed frowns at such a point, while elsewhere in the room others shrieked with mirth).

I hooted, I giggled, and I was moved to tears at various times throughout the night. Had I been more financial I would have raced off to the festival's Artists' Lounge after the show in the hope that Bond and Mellman might have materialised, so that I shower them with praise and alcohol. Instead, together with Josh, and my poor tired housemate, who fell asleep on more than one occasion at our table while steadfastly claiming afterwards he enjoyed the show, I walked home through the darkened streets of Melbourne-town, thence to bed; a wry and wicked smile still flickering about my lips when I thought about what I'd just heard and seen.

For presenting such a magnificently macabre and magical evening as part of your third festival, Kristy Edmunds, I salute you - and I shall kiss you the next time I see you!!

Wonderful whimsy

Daniel Kitson blew me away earlier this year with his Barry Award-winning comedy festival show, It's the Fireworks Talking, and I'm delighted to report that his MIAF show C90 is equally delightful, although somewhat less frenetic than his stand-up gigs are want to be.

In the company of the lovely MsKP, freshly returned from her replenishing stint in Queensland but still not blogging much (the curse of Facebook, perhaps?), we wandered down into the bowels of the Arts Centre, and into the intime confines of the Fairfax Studio. Even this small space is almost too large for this show, which would have worked best, I think, at somewhere like the Tower Theatre at the Malthouse, or even The Store Room, but thankfully our seats were well situated, so this didn't really impact on our evening.

The premise of the show is a simple one: Kitson plays Henry Leonard Bodley, the about-to-retire-today librarian of a library of mix tapes, which no-one makes any more thanks to digital equipment, making Henry's job redundent. Kitson also plays a range of people in the village in which the librarian lives, all of whom have their own unique quirks and traits, strange yet totally believeable eccentricities, such as baking cakes to feed to birds, or always addressing people by their full name - middle name included.

The arrival of two mysterious packages at Henry's work is the catalyst for a story of change and renewal which had me grinning with pure, simple glee as the production unfolded. Gradually, as Kitson intercuts between the various characters, we begin to build up a sense of community, of concern, of the value of joy in our lives, and of the delight that compassion and engagement with those around us can bring to ourselves and others.

As with Kitson's stand-up shows, elements which seemed at first to be throw-away references in the opening moments of the show are later seen to be incredibly significant: Kitson's seemingly meandering path proves to be an elliptical journey that ends with the audience so much more enriched for the experience.

Clever, warm-hearted, and whimsical without being twee, Kitson's C90 was a gentle yet thoroughly satisfying delight. I'm so glad I saw it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go bake a cake for the birds...

Sporadically Sublime

"Sporadically sublime" is the phrase I've been using to describe my Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) 2007 experience so far, as well as some of the specific events I've seen at MIAF; so I figured I may as well kill two Andrew 'lesbians ruined my festival' Bolts with one stone and use the phrase as the title of this blog post as well.

Those readers who feel compelled to point out that, as a writer and commentator, I should perhaps be more able to coin multiple phrases rather than overusing the one, will be politely directed towards the fact that I'm simultaneously:

• Trying to write a 2500 essay about Jack Kerouac's contribution to modernist literature while seeing as much of MIAF as I can;
  
• Juggling the demands of my day job as a newspaper editor;
  
• Chairing the Arts Development: Creation funding panel at Arts Victoria over the last couple of days (I'm sworn to secrecy about the outcomes of the meeting and which applicants will receive funding, of course: bribes should be presented in increments of $1000);
  
• Looking for a new General Manager at Melbourne Fringe while wearing my Chairman of the Fringe Board hat; and,
  
• Contemplating the fourth draft of my novel after letting it simmer away at the back of mind for the last couple of months.

God, I'm exhausted just reading all that. No wonder I was crawling into bed by 9pm for the first few nights of the week this week.

Anyway, given that this post is supposed to be about my experiences at MIAF to date, rather than me justifying the paucity of my words in this particular blog entry, I suppose I should get on with it, shouldn't I?

Due to the usual chaos which is my life (see above) and a slight bout of festival burnout post-Fringe, I haven't been MIAFing as frenetically as I'd planned, but fear not gentle reader - those events I've been unable to attend have not seen my tickets wasted, thanks to the joy of SMS technology and a direct line to the festival publicity office...

But enough late-afternoon three-hours sleep brain-wandering waffle: ART!


We begin, gentle reader, with the opening night of the festival proper, last Thursday (yes, I know I'm behind in posting, I am trying to catch up, ok?) and the opening night of Robert Wilson and Bernice Johnson Reagon's The Temptation of St Anthony, which was followed by an excellent opening night party at the Melbourne Town Hall, which I sadly left relatively early due to work committments the next day.

I'm not here to review the nibbles and drinkies and conversations though (which Born Dancin' used to do before his blog got all high-falutin' and/or surreallistically You-Tubey) but to discuss the show. So I'll try - and without many more of these tangential asides, which are starting to get quite silly.

Based on Gustave Flaubert's story of the ascetic St Anthony, whose travails have also been illustrated by the likes of Hieronymous Bosch, among other medieval artists; and who believed that isolation is the truest form of worship, this was a rich, luscious production in which the subtle grandeur of the cathedral-nave-like set contrasted beautifully with evocative lighting, costumes and sound. Using gospel music to highlight the battle between faith and reason struck me as a delightful conceit, although I was less taken by the staging, which felt somewhat old fashioned in the way that the performers were arrayed: almost clumsily or awkwardly blocked. It's a stylistic thing of Wilson's, I know, but it left me unthrilled.

This was the first production at MIAF I described as 'sporadically sublime', because there were moments of truely transcendent beauty on display; at other times, due to the lack of a defined narrative and my lack of familiarity with the story, I drifted, letting the show sweep over me rather than focussing upon its details. In short, I was occasionally engaged, once or twice transported, but also a little restless at various times.

And did I mention the party?

Festival fever

I can feel it building.... I've just submitted my list of media complementary ticketing requests for the Melbourne International Arts Festival; and this Saturday I have a meeting with my fellow Melbourne Fringe Festival judges to thrash out a schedule for the multiplicity of events I have to see.

Night after night of circus, dance, cabaret, comedy, visual arts, puppetry, floating silver pillows, Sigur Ros and Merce Cunningham, passionate conversations in The Famous Spiegeletent, indescribable art hybrids from around the corner and overseas...

I can't wait!

Attention Sigur Ros fans!

Just received this from the publicity team at the Melbourne International Arts Festival:

"Attention Sigur Ros fans - Melbourne International Arts Festival announces a change to Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Program B: Views on Stage/Split Sides. Due to international scheduling conflicts, Sigur Ros will now only be performing in Split Sides on Saturday 27 October. The two parts of the score for Split Sides were composed by British alternative rock band Radiohead and Sigur Ros, who will perform their part of the score live."