Interpreting the New Dreaming
Come Out 89 Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Now that the eighth biennial Come Out Festival has come and gone there is time to reflect on what is a quite remarkable youth arts festival. For 16 years Adelaide has hosted a gathering of performers, participants and audiences which has become such a familiar part of the cultural landscape that it is almost taken for granted.
For that reason any commentary on Come Out should begin by praising the success of its vision and its logistics. The hamburger statistics are impressive. More than 55 program items were listed, involving hundreds of performers, with school and community participation said to number as high as 400,000. Even allowing for a touch of Munchausen in the figures, Come Out touches a lot of people. It is also clear that Come Out mobilises a fair chunk of the school population and enjoys an unprecedented level of co-operation and support from the Education Department in South Australia.
For a fortnight a veritable army goes on the move with yellow excursion buses criss-crossing the city to venues north at the Parks, centrally in every available performance space in the Festival Centre as well as novel locations such as Magpie’s Site 55 and outdoor venues such as Rymill Park. Undoubtedly Come Out’s various programs of theatre, music and dance, as well as the special focus on Aboriginal arts and values and the All write program (this time featuring author Roald Dahl) represent only one facet of the Festival. In schools and commumties in both the -metropolitan area and the regional centres, a chain reaction of activity takes place that is richly creative and socially constructive in ways that go untabulated and unheralded. As they say, you had to be there.
In all, Come Out provides a large canopy and, unsurprisingly, its very size brings with it problems and complaint. This year a combination of fiscal pressure and organizational expediency has meant that Director, Michael FitzGerald and Administrator, Louise Withers have, in consultation with various reference groups, assembled a smaller, more selective program, particularly as far as theatre is concerned. In keeping with FitzGerald’s theme of the “New Dreaming”, the program, “leaner” and less unwieldy than in the festivals in 1985 and 1987, was highlighting excellence, focusing on optimistic themes and taking particular note of indigenous Australian culture. In fact, while the latter intention was reflected in the Aboriginal arts program, the theatre and dance was for the most part Eurocentric. The New Dreaming dance project was an important beginning but more needs to be encouraged in future festivals. The main theatre and dance program consisted of 13 items plus five more school productions in the Over to Youth section and a fringe of ring-ins and freelances joining unofficially in the festivities.
It has to be said that the junior primary age group was particularly well served. Brisbane’s Kite Company offered sharp, imaginative work with Greg McCart’s exemplum of environmental consciousness, Whose Beach Is It Anyway? while sometime Castanet Club supremo Russell Cheek, with his mask narrative No Face Like Home, engaged warmly with young audiences who, when given opportunities to ask questions after the show demonstrated not only intelligence and perception but pleasure in performance and theatrics. Cheek’s show, while modest, offered the sort of mix of entertainment and instruction that others might envy.
The Adelaide-based Fools Company, consisting of David Erskine and Ruth Brittain, toured primary schools with their puppet, mask, magic and mime show, Galloping Grabbas, which similarly touched young audiences with skilful and affectionate theatre. The Fools are off to Hong Kong later on in the year as recognition of their work widens. A late entry to the program which proved a success with smaller fry was the Flinders University Drama Centre’s Greenthumb. Written, designed and directed by Gus Worby, Greenthumb pointed out the pleasures and virtues of growing your own and Yates’ garden supplies provided everyone with a dahlia bulb to take home and love. Enhanced by Jim Beasley’s music, a thoughtful text and well integrated audience participation, Greenthumb represented student performance work of high standard.
The offerings for upper secondary groups were generally less impressive. Patch Theatre’s Space Demons, adapted by Richard Tulloch from Adelaide author, Gillian Rubinstein’s best seller was energetically directed by Ariette Taylor and looked like a hyperactive pinball game (more canny design from Eamon D’Arcy) but seemed to distrust the audience’s willingness to consider the subtleties of its theme. The result was a boisterous attempt to emulate TV action rather than use the intimacy of theatre to explore the inner conflicts of the characters.
Magpie’s Couple of Kids by Julianne O’Brien and directed by Angela Chaplin, was an imaginative attempt to present adolescent angst but while it offered pleasures in design and text, in tackling the subject of teenage love it did not fully succeed in winning younger hearts and minds. It was a bold venture though, and made inventive use of Site 55.
It was in the dance program that real theatrical challenges were offered – in Lyndal Jones’s dance and text performance work, Pipe Dreaming which ambitiously threaded polemic, personal history and a haunting array of sights and sounds in front of often flabbergasted young audiences. Pipe Dreaming more than any other work in the Festival commendably ran the risk of inaccessibility or ‘difficulty’ in order to extend a sense of possibility in dance theatre forms. Too often work for young audiences panders to conventional tastes and expectations.
The Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s bold entry to this year’s Corne Out reflects credit on the Festival. Similarly, the visiting U.K. company Ludus’ uncompromising work Gobstopper, which many found hard to swallow gave Another opportunity for audiences to see current movement in dance was the ADT project. Nigel Fosdyke, This is Your Life, co-directed by Leigh Warren and Chris Willems, with excellent music by Stuart Day, effectively co-ordinated a collection of short works into a lively and appealing program. There were plenty of references to media pop but the standard of movement and production was high. In the tradition of Troupe’s Young Playwrights seasons, ADT have suitably showcased young ideas in dance in a format that might well be repeated in future festivals.
The philosophical and practical questions of youth arts for and by young people continue to crop up and sometimes in disagreeable contexts. The Over to Youth program was based around productions by Woodville, Urrbrae, Sacred Heart, Gepps Cross and Grant High Schools. These were offered as part of a public program but subjecting them to individual review in the local dailies is inappropriate. Particularly when the Gepps Cross production came in for a gratuitous mauling. Productions in Corne Out are not exempt from critical appraisal but it can be done without fangs.
Even so, a professional work such as Jigsaw’s Self Winding, in my view, properly deserved rebuke for its shoddy use of second eleven circus tricks to distract us from the fact that they’d filleted the Russell Hoban classic, The Mouse and His Child, for no good purpose. Curiously, this production Escaped unfavourable notice whereas a wholly non-professional work by teachers and students at Gepps was castigated. Since the ground rules are obviously not self-evident, we reviewers need to get it together better next time and a decision might be made to have more collective reporting and analysis instead of one-off notices – especially if they are going to be off.
Other productions such as Unley Youth’s Patterns highlighted issues for young women. Catherine Langman’s tight direction and crisp design standards compensated for occasional archness in the mother and daughter material. The Multicultural Youth Theatre’s In the Grand Hotel by Anne-Marie Mykyta, directed by Tessa Bremner, which dealt with the urgent plight of the young homeless, was an interesting instance of uneven, often artless production carried by the sincerity and conviction of the performers.
Director Michael FitzGerald is quite entitled to be pleased and proud of this year’s Come Out. He is also swift to praise Louise Withers’ achievement as Administrator. FitzGerald believes he has succeeded in creating a balanced and integrated festival and refutes, for instance, objections that the music program was not worthwhile. Nevertheless, he has some ideas about improvements for 1991. He thinks 55 events are too much for the Festival. He would have fewer, and better focus in their presentation.
“I’m clearer about why some things should be in the Festival,” he remarked. “Anything coming from outside the State needs to be more than just another example of good work. It needs to have some edge to it – like Kite’s work or Lyndal Jones’s Pipe Dreaming.”
Other questions arise, inevitably, about the relation Come Out has to the schools. For instance, while it is necessary from an organisational point of view to secure school bookings well before the Festival begins, many teachers and excursion planners felt they were picking activities out of a hat with only scant information available. Schools found particular events were booked out before they were even aware of them and this was especially problematic for the middle secondary group, a notoriously neglected group culturally.
It was unfortunate perhaps that the State Theatre’s production of The Tempest could not have been programmed during Come Out. Of course there are venue problems but the idea of presenting accessible classic works (such as Angela Chaplin’s production of Antigone) would give year ten, eleven and twelve students opportunities to see repertoire other than the predominantly issue-based TIE material.
When FitzGerald narrows his program further next festival it is vital that his selections are reliably of high calibre. To have a production such as Jigsaw’s Self Winding billed as suitable for ages nine to seventeen and then find it is generally infantile and undemanding is going to be frustrating for any Year 10 teacher with a busload of students primed on the works of Russell Hoban. With few items offering for this age range, if any prove disappointing it means a tooth goes missing from the Come Out smile.
The question of overlap into the school holidays is also a vexed one. Many feel strongly that Come Out winds up just when students have more unencumbered time to enjoy the range of offerings. Michael FitzGerald has taken advice from educators in deciding to stay in synch with the school term. It is attractive to imagine young people attending events with their families as an extension of the school excursion activity but, observing patchy attendances for public performances, it may be that with the expense for a whole family attending even a modestly priced show, it is wishful thinking to hope that Come Out could thrive on a substantially GP subscription. Already it is likely that the cost of admission, as well as transport costs, would limit school groups attending more than one or two events, and in some cases, none at all.
These are facts of economic recession for many Australians these days and while it is not Come Out’s fault it is bound to tilt the Festival towards the affluent. For this reason there is need for effective publicity, particularly for free public events at weekends for instance. Come Out operates on a very small publicity budget which can only inhibit the organisers in their efforts to reach the community. With media sponsorship already in the Festival there may be more penetrating ways to get the word through.
There is no doubt that the Come Out organisation is self-critical and responsive to calls for modification and improvement and as I have already indicated, there is ample reason for those concerned to look on their works with satisfaction. For that reason the final note should sound on Brompton Cirkidz’ Loui’s Problem. This production combined the acting, musical, juggling, highwire, fire-eating and generally effervescent talents of performers from primary school age to adult theatre professionals. With beasts, masks, stiltwalkers and a horde of zippy cockroaches all stirred together in a Meyerholdian ragout, director Charles Parkinson, writer Gavin Strawhan, talented designer Tony Hannan and the entire company embodied the mix of skill, intelligence, commitment and affection which characterises the best intentions of the Come Out Festival itself.
“Interpreting the New Dreaming”, Lowdown, Vol.11,No.3,pp.10-14.