Adelaide Festival
\nTheatre<\/p>\n
Film star\u2019s guide to creaturely sex<\/p>\n
Green Porno
\nIsabella Rossellini
\nText by Isabella Rossellini and Jean-Claude Carriere
\nTranslated by Julia Groopman
\nHer Majesty\u2019s Theatre, 58 Grote Street.
\nDuration 1 hour 15 minutes
\nMarch 12.
\nTouring other Australian cities in March.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am a method actress,\u201d declares Isabella Rossellini, star of catwalk and screen, \u201cand I like to slide into the skin of animals.\u201d Green Porno<\/i>, a closing attraction in the final weekend of the Adelaide Festival, opens up new vistas as Rossellini stands at her lectern delivering a show about the weird and even weirder world of animal sexuality.<\/p>\n
Looking over her bookish spectacles, our narrator reassures us that her subject is not pornography but it is obscene, and depending on our proclivities, perhaps erotic. I don\u2019t think the delighted audience thought it was either, rather, it is an energetic, shrewdly-framed panegyric to biodiversity.<\/p>\n
Originating as a series of short films produced for Robert Redford\u2019s Sundance TV Channel, Green Porno<\/i> features the impish Rossellini in colourful animated vignettes, mingling in oceans, swamps and on land, zanily dressed as earthworms, mother ducks, mantises and hamsters, all involved in a bewildering variety of evolutionary behaviours from asexual cloning to eating their surplus young.<\/p>\n
Rossellini\u2019s genial presence is crucial to the success of the presentation which could easily have coasted on a series of amusing video skits. The lecture is serious in its intentions, just as Rossellini, who went back to university to learn more about her subject, brings the enthusiasm of a researcher to the enterprise. It is like watching David Attenborough, uncannily resembling Ingrid Bergman dressed as a hamster, explaining parturition and courtship rituals.
\nCharles Darwin presides importantly over the occasion. Citing his theories of natural selection and sexual selection, Rossillini reminds us that male peacocks may not be dressed for their everyday habitat but they make a fetching sight on the dance floor. There are plenty of fascinating factoids; how \u201csneaky\u201d males, those weedy specimens among the elephant seals, hide among the female harem for an opportunistic leg-over, about the headbanging erotomania of toads, and – illustrated by tape measure- the penile dimensions of the animal world. Spoiler alert: barnacles are impressive, gorillas surprisingly modest.<\/p>\n
In all this natural history the notion of something being \u201cagainst nature\u201d is given new scrutiny. From polymorphously perverse dolphins to the gender changing crepidula fornicata<\/i>, Isabella Rossellini has a life-affirming exhibit for every occasion.<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
Published as \u201cFilm star\u2019s guide to creaturely sex\u201d The Australian, March 17, 2014, p.14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Adelaide Festival Theatre Film star\u2019s guide to creaturely sex Green Porno Isabella Rossellini Text by Isabella Rossellini and Jean-Claude Carriere Translated by Julia Groopman Her Majesty\u2019s Theatre, 58 Grote Street. Duration 1 hour 15 minutes March 12. Touring other Australian cities in March. \u201cI am a method actress,\u201d declares Isabella Rossellini, star of catwalk and screen, \u201cand I like to slide into the skin of animals.\u201d Green Porno, a closing attraction in the final weekend of the Adelaide Festival, opens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,5,19,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-31","category-archive","category-international","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2414,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions\/2414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}