A new drama is about to unfold at the Australian National University. Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Drama and Theatre Studies, Dr Geoffrey Borny, has taken advantage of the restructuring of the University - so much a matter of contention especially in the Arts Faculty. Drama is on the move.
Theatre people are nothing if not eclectic gatherers of any opportunity. Drama began at ANU some 10 years ago when a position became available in the Department of Modern European Languages. "Post-Modern" was in the offing, and semiotics, including the semiotics of theatre, was all the go. Therefore Theatre was a Modern European Language! Especially when there was a job vacancy in that department, but not in the English Department. So Professor Stephen Prickett, Head of English at the time, put up a third of the cost, while MEL paid the rest. The Drama job was supposed to be a kind of service provider to literature and language courses so that students reading plays would learn something about how play production worked. ANU was just catching up with the movement to study the practice of theatre which began in the late 1970's in other academic institutions.
Until Borny arrived in 1991, the purpose of Drama at ANU was a matter of fuzzy logic. Coming from 3 years as Head of Theatre Studies at University of New England, Borny fitted easily into the culture of an Australian university town. Dr Borny prefers to be known as Geoffrey, being open to all students with an interest in theatre from the shy introspective theoretician to the budding professional practitioner. His egalitarian attitudes have seen the enrolments in Drama at ANU increase over the years as the total university enrolment has decreased.
Within the Modern European Languages Department Borny has had independence as the only expert in theatre, building up a small department of his own with Lecturer Tony Turner and part time staff Cathie Clelland, Hilary Taylor and Eulea Kiraly, all well-known locally in their own right. Why should he move?
ANU's internal politics in a time of cuts, especially in the climate of the new ideology which sees building up Business Administration (with an emphasis on Asia) as essential but Arts and apparently Modern European Languages in particular as expendable, have fortuitously re-directed Borny's attention to an English Department which now includes three expert theatre academicians: Professor Iain Wright, Dr Gillian Russell and Dr Jacqueline Lo.
The agreements are in writing and shortly we will see a new Department of English and Theatre Studies. For Geoffrey Borny this is a step in his plan to create at ANU a high profile, firmly based Theatre Studies institution.
This amalgamation offers students a wider and deeper range of opportunities at undergraduate, honours and doctoral levels of study, on the understanding that ANU does not pretend to be a training institution in professional theatre. Borny sees three equally important focusses in theatre studies. Professional training is highly technical, for the few who are sincerely dedicated to the practice (and who can expect to take up the limited employment opportunities). At the theoretical end is the study of texts and texts in production for the themes they explore: literary themes, sociological ideas, philosophies.
Borny takes a middle way, the crossover focus examining the conventions of theatre. He takes his students through the production process as they study a text, using the Drama Lab and the mainstage at the ANU Arts Centre, and putting on productions for the public through the vehicle of Papermoon Theatre, always with both the engagement / entertainment values of theatre and an educational purpose in mind. Often research into a past theatrical convention is tested on a modern audience: does Tennessee Williams' use of visual projections still work in The Glass Menagerie; or the use of direct address to the audience in Othello? Genre studies can mean studying farce via Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear. The need to see important plays which no-one else would present in Canberra led to the production last year of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts.
Now Drama at ANU has a clear logical place between the experience of secondary college drama and mature age training at institutions like NIDA. Dr Borny offers to develop the knowledge base and depth of understanding required of the modern actor or the modern drama teacher. There is a parallel with the new approach to medical training: take a degree first and then add the training. The result should be more erudite professionals, but, Geoffrey Borny will insist, never at the expense of the enjoyment of theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 26 February 1998
Thursday, 19 February 1998
1998: At the Crossroads by Jan Cornall
At the Crossroads by Jan Cornall. Women on a Shoestring directed by Camilla Blunden at the Street Theatre Studio, 8.30 pm February 18 - 28, 1998. Professional.
This is Australian theatre of the best traditional kind: entertaining in a slightly larrikin way, encouraging the audience to clap, cheer and whistle, while also eliciting silent appreciation of the reality of people's lives in the bush. A travelling show like the melodramas and music halls of last century, with a touch of Dad and Dave, At the Crossroads has a long touring future in the Northern Territory first up, with the other states to follow.
Justine Saunders plays Bernice, an educated middle class person whose Aboriginal mother was denied her rightful inheritance. In an unexpected twist of history, Bernice becomes the legal owner of the land at the Crossroads "in the middle of nowhere".
Alice (Chrissie Shaw) is a traditionalist farmer's wife: great organiser in dust, flood and fire. Liliana (Maria De Marco), banana farmer, has all the social ebullience of her original Italian village. Charmaine (Julie Ross) is educated and green, married her farmer for love and works for a sustainable future on the land.
Now that Beryl is dead, though not forgotten - she was the President and Secretary and everything else of the CWA, the Bush Fire Brigade, the local Red Cross and all the hundred or so other organisations run by country women - who should now be elected President at this Extraordinary General Meeting? Through song, story and dance we find out the truth behind each candidate, take part in the vote, and discover the power of the deceased Beryl.
At the Crossroads is polished theatre from a longstanding, very experienced team, designed to be toured to city and country venues around Australia. Issues are confronted through the women's stories, gathered in research across the nation, not in an ideological way but with humanity, humour and sensitivity to how complex are the questions of land ownership, ecological degradation, love, loyalty and spirituality. The perfect antidote to the Pauline Hanson black spectre view of history for country and city audiences alike. Not to be missed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
This is Australian theatre of the best traditional kind: entertaining in a slightly larrikin way, encouraging the audience to clap, cheer and whistle, while also eliciting silent appreciation of the reality of people's lives in the bush. A travelling show like the melodramas and music halls of last century, with a touch of Dad and Dave, At the Crossroads has a long touring future in the Northern Territory first up, with the other states to follow.
Justine Saunders plays Bernice, an educated middle class person whose Aboriginal mother was denied her rightful inheritance. In an unexpected twist of history, Bernice becomes the legal owner of the land at the Crossroads "in the middle of nowhere".
Alice (Chrissie Shaw) is a traditionalist farmer's wife: great organiser in dust, flood and fire. Liliana (Maria De Marco), banana farmer, has all the social ebullience of her original Italian village. Charmaine (Julie Ross) is educated and green, married her farmer for love and works for a sustainable future on the land.
Now that Beryl is dead, though not forgotten - she was the President and Secretary and everything else of the CWA, the Bush Fire Brigade, the local Red Cross and all the hundred or so other organisations run by country women - who should now be elected President at this Extraordinary General Meeting? Through song, story and dance we find out the truth behind each candidate, take part in the vote, and discover the power of the deceased Beryl.
At the Crossroads is polished theatre from a longstanding, very experienced team, designed to be toured to city and country venues around Australia. Issues are confronted through the women's stories, gathered in research across the nation, not in an ideological way but with humanity, humour and sensitivity to how complex are the questions of land ownership, ecological degradation, love, loyalty and spirituality. The perfect antidote to the Pauline Hanson black spectre view of history for country and city audiences alike. Not to be missed.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 18 February 1998
1998: Preview article for The Ghost Sonata by Judith Crispin-Creswell, directed by David Atfield
Australian opera, according to composer Judith Crispin-Creswell, is more complex than traditional European work, because composers can have more faith in their audience being intelligent and literate here.
On the other hand, funding bodies such as the ACT Cultural Council, perhaps more influenced by bums on seats and previous successes, find it difficult to put money up for brand new work like The Ghost Sonata, Crispin-Creswell's adaptation of the 1907 play by August Strindberg. So, without financial support, we will see a professional production at the ANU Arts Centre (February 26 - 28) in which none of the performers will be paid and the production team will receive very little.
Singers in the main roles - including Tom Layton (The Old Man), Kent McIntosh (The Student) and Erika Tolano (The Mummy) - are mainly graduates of the Canberra School of Music, where Larry Sitsky is the force behind the composition course. Crispin-Creswell is completing honours degrees in both composition and opera singing and appears to be the first such student in Australia to produce a complete opera. Her director for The Ghost Sonata is David Atfield, winner of a Canberra Critics' Circle Award last year for his powerful production of Furious by Michael Gow at The Street Theatre.
Between composer and director there could easily be conflict, as we have seen between the conductor and director of Wagner's Tannhauser in Sydney, but the contrasts between Crispin-Creswell and Atfield will create an interesting interplay between colour and mood in the music and social commentary in the staging. Atfield has found the imagery in Strindberg's original - a house has just collapsed as the play begins, while the house on stage seems to offer hope, but is found to contain moral collapse within - can represent our modern conundrum called economic rationalism. Publicly it is touted as our saviour, while it destroys the fabric of society.
Crispin-Creswell's music, which she says uses melody and leit motifs in ways which other "strictly modern" composers may feel are too beautiful, will be supported by David Longmuir's set design, which wraps and lights the physical objects to make them dream-like, allowing the singers to take the stage. Atfield, at the same time, is treating the singers as actors, focussing his direction on the Stanislawski method. In this way the objectives of characters will reveal both the social and class issues in the drama and develop strong motivations in the way they relate to each other.
The music emphasises the personal hopes and sense of failure which led to Strindberg's sonata of ghosts, and seems to me to hang the play together better than the original words alone. The set, including Longmuir's intuitive hands-on lighting which will respond to the music and acting, will give visual form to the moods in the music. The acting, using perhaps a quarter of Strindberg's words, will give us the outer shell for the inner feelings. This is sure to be an exciting, though demanding, experience for an audience looking for a new form of opera.
You can't have opera without a chorus, of course - one reason why opera is even more expensive to produce than straight plays - and Crispin-Creswell uses her Chorus to expand on one of Strindberg's dramatic ideas. He was perhaps the originator of splitting a character into several different aspects, each one presented on stage to confront the central character (The Student in The Ghost Sonata) with his own hopes, fears and guilt. In this opera, the Chorus, singing from the pit, present The Student with the warnings he needs to heed as he questions, tries to understand, and hopes to set up a successful life. But they sing in languages and musical forms which, though he can hear and feel, he cannot understand. He continues to hope throughout, but the end is just another beginning and the Chorus's efforts, in the tradition of Greek tragedy, will be never-ending.
The Student sings: "Wrong that was wrought in moments of anger / Never by added wrong can be righted". Judith Crispin-Creswell and David Atfield are an exciting combination of mood and motivation who may, in art, achieve what The Student hopes for in life. Public funding ought, of course, to support them. In its absence, professionals will still present this work because, as the economic rationalists would say, the fundamentals are in place.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
On the other hand, funding bodies such as the ACT Cultural Council, perhaps more influenced by bums on seats and previous successes, find it difficult to put money up for brand new work like The Ghost Sonata, Crispin-Creswell's adaptation of the 1907 play by August Strindberg. So, without financial support, we will see a professional production at the ANU Arts Centre (February 26 - 28) in which none of the performers will be paid and the production team will receive very little.
Singers in the main roles - including Tom Layton (The Old Man), Kent McIntosh (The Student) and Erika Tolano (The Mummy) - are mainly graduates of the Canberra School of Music, where Larry Sitsky is the force behind the composition course. Crispin-Creswell is completing honours degrees in both composition and opera singing and appears to be the first such student in Australia to produce a complete opera. Her director for The Ghost Sonata is David Atfield, winner of a Canberra Critics' Circle Award last year for his powerful production of Furious by Michael Gow at The Street Theatre.
Between composer and director there could easily be conflict, as we have seen between the conductor and director of Wagner's Tannhauser in Sydney, but the contrasts between Crispin-Creswell and Atfield will create an interesting interplay between colour and mood in the music and social commentary in the staging. Atfield has found the imagery in Strindberg's original - a house has just collapsed as the play begins, while the house on stage seems to offer hope, but is found to contain moral collapse within - can represent our modern conundrum called economic rationalism. Publicly it is touted as our saviour, while it destroys the fabric of society.
Crispin-Creswell's music, which she says uses melody and leit motifs in ways which other "strictly modern" composers may feel are too beautiful, will be supported by David Longmuir's set design, which wraps and lights the physical objects to make them dream-like, allowing the singers to take the stage. Atfield, at the same time, is treating the singers as actors, focussing his direction on the Stanislawski method. In this way the objectives of characters will reveal both the social and class issues in the drama and develop strong motivations in the way they relate to each other.
The music emphasises the personal hopes and sense of failure which led to Strindberg's sonata of ghosts, and seems to me to hang the play together better than the original words alone. The set, including Longmuir's intuitive hands-on lighting which will respond to the music and acting, will give visual form to the moods in the music. The acting, using perhaps a quarter of Strindberg's words, will give us the outer shell for the inner feelings. This is sure to be an exciting, though demanding, experience for an audience looking for a new form of opera.
You can't have opera without a chorus, of course - one reason why opera is even more expensive to produce than straight plays - and Crispin-Creswell uses her Chorus to expand on one of Strindberg's dramatic ideas. He was perhaps the originator of splitting a character into several different aspects, each one presented on stage to confront the central character (The Student in The Ghost Sonata) with his own hopes, fears and guilt. In this opera, the Chorus, singing from the pit, present The Student with the warnings he needs to heed as he questions, tries to understand, and hopes to set up a successful life. But they sing in languages and musical forms which, though he can hear and feel, he cannot understand. He continues to hope throughout, but the end is just another beginning and the Chorus's efforts, in the tradition of Greek tragedy, will be never-ending.
The Student sings: "Wrong that was wrought in moments of anger / Never by added wrong can be righted". Judith Crispin-Creswell and David Atfield are an exciting combination of mood and motivation who may, in art, achieve what The Student hopes for in life. Public funding ought, of course, to support them. In its absence, professionals will still present this work because, as the economic rationalists would say, the fundamentals are in place.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 1 February 1998
1998: Ubuntu by Golden Future Faces
Ubuntu created and performed by South African youth theatre company Golden Future Faces. Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Sunday February 1.
"Ubuntu" means "all people together". The theme of their songs, dances and acting was reflected not only in their use of classical traditions from Xhosa, Zulu and Bantu cultures, but in the multicultural mix of the audience in the bright, new and exciting Tuggeranong Arts Centre. Golden Future Faces is a coup for Domenic Mico, artistic director of Tuggeranong Community Arts, which he says has been only one among many equally thrilling events in the National Multicultural Arts Festival.
The young people's skills, coming from cultures in which rhythm, dance and storytelling are endemic, put to shame the traditional Anglo cultural inhibitions. Spontaneous applause for the drumming, the drink can dance by the girls and the wellington boot dance by the boys could not be held back by the afternoon heat, occasionally tempered by a brief southerly buster across the lake.
The hour long show took us from the past to the present, and looked to the future. The classical past needs preserving in a changing world, and the present is not a happy place. The strength of social criticism, not only of apartheid but nowadays even more of the violence among black Africans, made the central scenes highly confrontational. I felt some embarrassment in the audience as we realised what these young people had to face in their lives: Sharpeville Day; the isolation from their families of the mineworkers; the prayer "We pray for happiness, so that once again our children can play in the streets - with no fear, with no fear, with no fear."
"Those killers, they must go", they sang. I feared for their safety when performing in South Africa with such direct messages, but no, they told me, no-one has tried to interfere. This is brave youth theatre, the quality of the performance strengthened by the commitment to Ubuntu. Extended applause and the giving of gifts from the Tuggeranong community gives hope that cultural exchange is no longer politely applauding exotic art. The South Africans, like Daniel Williams, Ngunnawal arts administration trainee who welcomed us on the didgeridoo, were here "to stamp our authority on the existence of our identity".
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"Ubuntu" means "all people together". The theme of their songs, dances and acting was reflected not only in their use of classical traditions from Xhosa, Zulu and Bantu cultures, but in the multicultural mix of the audience in the bright, new and exciting Tuggeranong Arts Centre. Golden Future Faces is a coup for Domenic Mico, artistic director of Tuggeranong Community Arts, which he says has been only one among many equally thrilling events in the National Multicultural Arts Festival.
The young people's skills, coming from cultures in which rhythm, dance and storytelling are endemic, put to shame the traditional Anglo cultural inhibitions. Spontaneous applause for the drumming, the drink can dance by the girls and the wellington boot dance by the boys could not be held back by the afternoon heat, occasionally tempered by a brief southerly buster across the lake.
The hour long show took us from the past to the present, and looked to the future. The classical past needs preserving in a changing world, and the present is not a happy place. The strength of social criticism, not only of apartheid but nowadays even more of the violence among black Africans, made the central scenes highly confrontational. I felt some embarrassment in the audience as we realised what these young people had to face in their lives: Sharpeville Day; the isolation from their families of the mineworkers; the prayer "We pray for happiness, so that once again our children can play in the streets - with no fear, with no fear, with no fear."
"Those killers, they must go", they sang. I feared for their safety when performing in South Africa with such direct messages, but no, they told me, no-one has tried to interfere. This is brave youth theatre, the quality of the performance strengthened by the commitment to Ubuntu. Extended applause and the giving of gifts from the Tuggeranong community gives hope that cultural exchange is no longer politely applauding exotic art. The South Africans, like Daniel Williams, Ngunnawal arts administration trainee who welcomed us on the didgeridoo, were here "to stamp our authority on the existence of our identity".
© Frank McKone, Canberra
1998: Man Friday by Adrian Mitchell
Man Friday by Adrian Mitchell. The Acting Company at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, February 1 - 8, 1998.
The value of a festival, like the National Multicultural Festival, is having comparisons thrust upon you. Having in the afternoon seen Golden Future Faces, a youth theatre from South Africa whose energy and commitment is drawn directly from the real experience of oppression, Adrian Mitchell's rather superficial, though politically correct, play appears no more than a mild philosophical argy-bargy. Written in the 1960's, even though during real race riots in Britain, Mitchell's less than worldly idealism shines through.
Alexander Selkirk, the real shipwrecked sailor who was Defoe's model for Robinson Crusoe, apparently had no companion through all the years isolated on his island. Defoe invented Man Friday to give his story some extra life. Unfortunately Adrian Mitchell's Friday is so much the noble enlightened quick-witted indigene, and his Crusoe so much the guilt ridden Christian imperialist capitalist racist, that the actors Adam McConvell and Phil Roberts, and director Estelle Muspratt, must be praised for keeping the piece moving for nearly an hour and a half.
In the end the question becomes clear: should Friday's people do the right thing and accept Crusoe, or is the risk of cultural pollution even from this one source so great that Crusoe must be sent back to his island, to live alone forever. But in getting to this point, Friday is so mellifluous and Crusoe so harsh that McConvell gets all our sympathy and Roberts has no choice but to rant loudly and often.
As an issues play for young people, there is value in seeing this production. The set, lighting and sound are all competently handled, extracting as much mood as the piece will allow, but in the end the script simply hasn't got the depth of humanity in the characters which the issue of racism deserves. The young South Africans showed the difference in their presentation, Ubuntu - all people together. Nothing is just black or white, accept or reject. In the real world there is no island where we can leave Crusoe safely in isolation.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
The value of a festival, like the National Multicultural Festival, is having comparisons thrust upon you. Having in the afternoon seen Golden Future Faces, a youth theatre from South Africa whose energy and commitment is drawn directly from the real experience of oppression, Adrian Mitchell's rather superficial, though politically correct, play appears no more than a mild philosophical argy-bargy. Written in the 1960's, even though during real race riots in Britain, Mitchell's less than worldly idealism shines through.
Alexander Selkirk, the real shipwrecked sailor who was Defoe's model for Robinson Crusoe, apparently had no companion through all the years isolated on his island. Defoe invented Man Friday to give his story some extra life. Unfortunately Adrian Mitchell's Friday is so much the noble enlightened quick-witted indigene, and his Crusoe so much the guilt ridden Christian imperialist capitalist racist, that the actors Adam McConvell and Phil Roberts, and director Estelle Muspratt, must be praised for keeping the piece moving for nearly an hour and a half.
In the end the question becomes clear: should Friday's people do the right thing and accept Crusoe, or is the risk of cultural pollution even from this one source so great that Crusoe must be sent back to his island, to live alone forever. But in getting to this point, Friday is so mellifluous and Crusoe so harsh that McConvell gets all our sympathy and Roberts has no choice but to rant loudly and often.
As an issues play for young people, there is value in seeing this production. The set, lighting and sound are all competently handled, extracting as much mood as the piece will allow, but in the end the script simply hasn't got the depth of humanity in the characters which the issue of racism deserves. The young South Africans showed the difference in their presentation, Ubuntu - all people together. Nothing is just black or white, accept or reject. In the real world there is no island where we can leave Crusoe safely in isolation.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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