Take Over 97
Australian Festival for Young People

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Come Out has a new name. After more than twenty years the festival and the concept have had a makeover and the Australian Festival for Young People has emerged anew – as Take Over, with a mission, as they say, to stimulate, entertain and challenge young people of all ages from 3-26. Artistic director Nigel Jamieson has taken on this daunting task, mounting a massive seventeen day festival.

The Come Out program was always large- especially with its community links, the over to schools activities, the Allwrite! literary program and the innovative First Site component which debuted in 1995. But if Come Out was big, Take Over is even more ambitious. This year Elder Park is the tent city hub, a young persons’ equivalent of the Red Square site which Jamieson managed with such success during the 1996 Adelaide Festival. The performing arts program is again extensive and internationalist with artists from Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Denmark, France, the US and Canada.

I have said before that describing a festival as expansive and varied as Take Over is rather like the predicament of the three blind men and the elephant. One confidently pronounces on an ear, another extrapolates from the trunk, a third, perhaps with less conviction, grasps at the tail. My selections from Take Over this time are a mix of local and international, performances for both littlies and adolescents. In other words, a bit of ear, some trunk, and, ah…watch your step, one or two items rather close to the tail.

Wake Baby from Company Skylark sees a return of the collaboration between writer Gillian Rubinstein and director Nigel Jamieson which produced Galax Arena for Come Out last time around. Operating as Company Skylight, Jamieson and Rubinstein teamed up with Handspan puppet whiz Peter Wilson and aerialist Scott Grayland to create Wake Baby for Brisbane’s Out of the Box festival last year.

In the Playhouse this time, it is Sofia Gibson as the eponymous baby performing acrobatics and cloudswings while Wilson and his talented associates create snaky rope illusions, flying milk bottles and snickersnack scissors in this dream narrative of fancies, fears and enormous changes at the last minute. There are some wonderful effects and Jamieson has created a fluidity in the piece which is quite hypnotic. Jeff Evans’ music is sublime and Gibson appealing in the role.

There are some odd shifts in the work though, which suggest that Gillian Rubenstein has substituted material or needed to extend the running time. After the playful and unpredictable rope and ball play, the dancing broom cupboard and other Handspan signatures, two suits of clothes enter, suggesting parent figures, and conflict of a social kind breaks in on the fantasy. Then, another performer appears- considerably perking up the under sixes in the audience, whose admiration was beginning to wane at around the forty minute mark. These shifts seem arbitrary and awkward in the scheme of things. Even though it is heading for extensive touring Wake Baby does not yet seem to have found its finished form, splendid though its ingredients are.

The Fly from Denmark’s Boatteater and Teater TT Company is also a mime for younger audiences. Actors Hans Ronne and Torkild Lindebjerg create a charming Laurel and Hardy routine around fishing rods, all-purpose satchels, a fish bowl and a red ball. The timing is terrific and the gentleness of the piece is enhanced with a seamless supply of piano works including Brahms and Beethoven. The Fly is a comic delight, marred only by some some padding in the fourth quarter. After so much simple invention, the slo-mo boxing routine is disappointingly hackneyed.

Patch Theatre’s The Boy with the Bamboo Flute, written and performed by Ta Duy Binh and Tevi Fanning and directed by Dave Brown, is a reminder that well-wrought storytelling is still a captivating form of theatre- particularly for the under-sixes. This thriftily staged story of a peasant boy who rescues a princess from a demon effectively combines music, dance, martial arts and mask work. The young audience is galvanised. Even wriggly little boys are agog when the Boy pulls out a monster sword. That it is guile and mental courage which prevails, not scimitars and kung fu, only adds to the delight of this well-judged production.

Less elegantly focused is Arena Theatre’s Autopsy, an ambitious multimedia soapie from directors Rosemary Myers and Bruce Gladwin, designers Maria Kozic and Ben Cobham and composers Hugh Covill and The Band of Hope. The theme is an honourable one- the gulfs of communication in modern urban life- and the high school audience seemed quite enthralled. But Autopsy is a melange of effects, over-writing and cardboard acting. The hyperactive lighting, blitzkreig music and snappy scene changes keep the pace but Maria Kozic’s cryptic inflatables and the sheer complexity of plot meant that, for me, Autopsy was dead on arrival.

Respectable Shoes, also from Patch, is a better shot at similar material and more likely to hold the attention of the notoriously fickle mid-teen audience. Propelled by Heather Frahn, Marty Williams, Mel Watson and Catherine Oates, Respectable Shoes is a heart-tugging tale of young woman whose mother has died in a car crash, leaving her to the care of her estranged father.

Presented as a song cycle by a rock band, the narrative is augmented with back-projections and voice-overs, particularly from Triple J presenters Helen Razer and Mikey Robins. Our heroine, Lucy, writes a song against her father and persuades Triple J to play it on air. The chance to record and take her private war public creates a crisis for Lucy-and the band- and in the resolution comes a clearer sense of identity and responsibility. It is a moral tale and an affecting one. Respectable Shoes, remounted for Take Over, is a show which definitely has legs.

Also successful with older high school audiences is The Challenge from Dynamo Theatre in Canada. Directed by Alan Fournier and written by Gilbert Dupuis The Challenge is reminiscent of Nigel Jamieson’s own work with Legs on the Wall. It is a relentlessly acrobatic collision between four young people involved in the exquisitely cruel rituals of school yard interaction. Loyalties are created and betrayed, humiliations and triumphs apppear in quick succession, alienation and unhappiness slip all too easily into the absolutes of suicide.

The Challenge is an excellent example of the much vaunted notion of physical theatre. The movement is intelligently conceived and crisply performed and the work, though by no means linear in exposition, has a focus and emotional impact which is both poignant and memorable. Sitting among a restive high school audience absurdly over-sensitive to every possible sexual nuance between the performers, I heard some students express irritated bewilderment with the show and its meaning. Others, noisy in their final applause, rose enthusiastically to the challenge.

My slice of Take Over has been a limited one but my impressions are of work of high standard and considerable sensitivity to the Take Over audience. It is clear that young audiences are better served and overall more receptive than older adolescent ones- but what’s new about that ? And Take Over has, like Magpie, a difficult charter when it goes so purposefully beyond the school leaver age group. After all, what do twenty five year olds seek in arts programs not already provided in the general ruck of entertainment available in Adelaide ?

The upper high schoolers are a different matter, however . And they had some excellent and imaginative work to consider. Of course there is much pandering to Youth Coolness, endless prattle about the Internet and so on, but Nigel Jamieson has shown with Take Over that the huge diversity of the performing arts has something not just for the Jessicas and Sarahs but for Beavis and Butthead as well.

The Adelaide Review, May 1997.