Festival Notes

Murray Bramwell

With daylight saving over and the nights, as they say, drawing in, the Adelaide Festival, just two weeks after being squeezed back in its box, seems rather like a dream. But it was not. We do not but slumber here. It happened, and with considerable distinction.

There are a number of factors which made Robyn Archer’s 1998 event such a success. The first is that again, the festival captured the attention and enthusiasm of the city. Of course, late 20th century utilitarianism requires a preamble reminding us that the festival is good for tourism, vendors, money changers and the State’s bottom line. Recent history requires that the Deficit be expunged. Current ettiquette demands that the artistic director be conspicuously appreciative of sponsorship and all that that entails. But once that was attended to, the populace actually got on with the business of having a good time.

And Robyn Archer was very good on the free stuff. Thirty- something thousand trooped into the city for Flamma Flamma and for many, who saw a lot else in the program, it was a highlight. I was at The Seven Streams of Ota at the time- and not sorry to be in a theatre for longer than it takes to fly to Singapore- but I wished I could have seen Nigel Jameson’s spectacle, a major public commission with sterling support from the ASO, the State Opera Chorus and numerous distinguished soloists. That a similar number turned out to Elder Park the next night for the Symphony Under the Stars and then every reader and their penguin bag was gathered for a week of literary plumage display at the Writers Week tents, were further proofs that the agora was jumping.

Unlike 1996 where Barrie Kosky constructed a program on somewhat opaque precepts- remember them ? Ecstacy, Utopia and Map ?- Robyn Archer went for a more fundamental binary. The sacred and the profane. Well not the profane, actually. You might say the troubling, the unresolved and the unjust. Grace and disgrace, harmony and chaos, transcendence and obsession.

Those elements all featured in the first weekend, with Ota, Va Yomer Va Yelech and The Architect’s Walk. But, for me, the polarities were most evident between the Belgian productions, from Needcompany and Les Ballets C de la B, and the Taiwanese Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.

Putting the ph g back in Flemish both companies presented painfully abrasive works. Ballets C de la B’s La Tristeza Complice -the Shared Sorrow- was as confrontational as it was accomplished. Set to the vocal music of Purcell, accompanied by a jury of accordionists, this shared sorrow is actually complicit. The images of these underclass children and misfits, painfully similar to those we avoid in our own city, is deeply disturbing, yet the physical skill and the invention of Alain Patel’s choreography is also exhilarating. Needcompany’s Snakesong on the other hand, turns the interrogation first on the problematic legend of Leda and the Swan and then, in Act Two, on a dysfunctional bourgeois family in full self-eviceration.

These two works, like Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods and DV8 in the 1996 program, gave us difficult, uncomfortable images to gnaw on. Luckily the sheer spectacle of Cloud Gate’s The Song of the Wanderers, which I saw at a matinee in the second weekend, provided the kind of restorative nourishment we also need in a festival. The work, devised by Lin Hwai-min, is perhaps not as profound as its Buddhist reference and the invocation of Hesse’s Siddhartha suggests, but the experience of the mesmerically slow movement, the melancholy harmonies of the Georgian choir and the indescribable effect of the curtains of rice, side-lit with washes of golden light, was enough to rinse the senses.

Festivals are always a mix of international hits and new works from home. And as ever, the strike rate was mixed. State Theatre’s Playbox collaboration, Natural Life , was a tiresome mess which only exasperated more for suggesting connection to Marcus Clarke’s novel. Director Michael Kantor and adaptor Humphrey Bower, despite the evident talents of designer Tomek Komen and composer Tyrone Landau, presented a work that is both cryptic and disagreeably mannered. The Queens Theatre, an airless sauna the night I went, probably hasn’t seen worse for the term of its own very long, natural life.

Masterkey, devised and designed by Mary Moore and adapted from Masako Togawa’s novel by Moore and Miriel Lenore, used Richard Back’s multimedia elements with flair, and the combined Japanese and Australian cast gave us both a thriller and a vivid mood piece on the lives of women in a Tokyo boarding house. The visual effects, supervised by former Handspan whiz and now Patch director, Ken Evans, were often magical and the use of wardrobes to describe and define the solitary lives of the women was inspired.

Also carefully realised was Imaggini D’Addio/Tracking Time from Doppio Teatro/Parallelo. Inventively using public/private space at the Railway Station, James Coulter’s stylish design was, however, let down by the undeveloped text and the lack of quality in the performances. Tracking Time was more like marking time.

With Possessed, the Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre returned to their Barossa Music Festival collaboration with the Balanescu Quartet. The stainless steel wine vats remained but the work now writ large for the Ridley Centre at Wayville, Possessed has gained a new composition from Alexander Balanescu and Tankard has extended the work for her reconstituted troupe. Over-extended, at times you might say. There were some thrilling aeronautics and dazzling tableaux but frequently the dancers seemed apprehensive and under-rehearsed and the live sound from the quartet, diminished greatly by the absence of Clare Connors, was in the first half, lamentably poor.

Not so for Black on White, the Heiner Goebbels project with Ensemble Modern. Rarely have I heard complex performed sound so splendidly managed and the fluency and unexpected playfulness of the musicians caught me off guard. I was braced for something rather more earnest and programmatic, so the whimsies of whistling kettles and self perpetuating kotos, combined with varied but accessible musical styles from Miles Davis funk to acoustic percussion to brass and accordion chamber work, proved as pleasurable as they were surprising.

Festivals are, by their very nature volatile, events. And rarely do we experience so much, and so many contrasts, in such a short time. Unlike our usual serial consumption of performances at other periods in the year, during a festival everything tumbles into everything else and as the week progresses so do our expectations and standards. It is a rapid curve and that is why judgements are often brisk and unequivocal. Not everything is easily assimilated. the Belgian works are still bubbling away in the back of my mind for instance, as are the various and variable remnants I have of The Seven Streams of the River Ota.

Unlike many I talked to, I found Fiona Shaw’s rendition of Eliot’s The Waste Land, over-theatricalised, imperceptive of the text and worryingly complict with the poet’s supercilious and well-documented cruelty. No-one can change the lines in A Game of Chess, but Ms Shaw might have presented the speech about Lil and her troubles with less music hall cliche than Eliot himself did. The lighting was delectable and the opening section bode well but The Waste Land, as Pound’s edit revealed, is not improved by doing the police in so many different voices.

Another disappointment for me was Wendy Houston’s Haunted Daunted and Flaunted. With her credentials from DV8, I was enticed but despite her dexetrous movement I found the use of script irritating and undeveloped. I should have been warned by the clumsy assonance in the title. Houston moved well, but we had a problem. The text clunked, plunked and flunked.

Festivals are always one person’s fish and someone else’s poisson. That’s what makes them so stimulating and memorable. They are also important for what they do for a city’s sense of itself. Elder Park never saw so many fireballs, artists, weddings, loaves and tommy ruffs . And this time the image abroad was not of the Hills hoist but the accordion. A friend recently sent me a Larson cartoon. Welcome to Heaven, here is your harp, read the first frame. Welcome to Hell here is your accordion the second. Well, before the Festival, that was me. Now, after the Squeezebox, another hugely successful monument to the strategic beneficence of giving something away in order to refuel interest in the ticketed offerings, I am converted to this, the Toyota Crown of musical instruments. What next, Robyn Archer, for the now much-awaited Festival 2000 ? Will you be teaching us how to yodel ?

The Adelaide Review, April, 1998.