Pipeline - Works in Progress: The Nameless Dead by Judith Crispin Cresswell; The Count by Emma Newman, Dora Kordakis, David Michel and Mary Sutherland; "Dualities of dance" improvisation by Trevor Patrick and Peter Trotman; The Mechanics of Love by Neil Roach; Performance Art "ACME in the Dining Hall". Presented by The Jigsaw Company in association with the Festival of Contemporary Arts and the Choreographic Centre, Gorman House, October 15, 1999.
These five pieces "in the pipeline" were very uneven packets of information travelling in quite different directions down the optic fibre of life. My modem connected but my software couldn't unscramble all the code.
The Count was too easy to understand. If it's going to develop into substantial theatre, the text needs to be much more original for successful satire of the way love is ruled by technology - yet bits of the movement, when close to real dance, showed some strength of imagination.
Neil Roach, on the other hand, has an excellent text - Flacco-esque in its actors playing mechanics in industrial gear, manipulating our idea of love via carrots, celery, steam trains and a film projector. He intends to turn it into live action, but I felt happier for the script to remain a storytelling experience which stimulates the listener's imagination more than concrete realisation.
ACME's restaurant, full of obsessive compulsives - woman with household cleansers, violinist with unfinished variations, girl who must keep off the floor (and becomes an angel), drunkard building a tower of champagne glasses, lovers focussed on the kiss, poet who spouts, woman in tutu, waiter who grinds the roses, real people from the audience who eat a pizza (delivered by a real pizza deliverer) and the ultimate builder of a ten-foot sponge cake tower with real cream, chocolate sauce and candles - was often very funny. But not very original, or new in theatrical terms.
I found Trotman and Patrick's improvisation of independent yet oddly parallel existences either side of a wall, with brief contact at the end, too predictable. It might the basis of a fuller choreography, but I also could not discern a definitive style or complexity of relationships to build on. Clarity and toughness are missing as yet.
The only work with excellent stamped on it is The Nameless Dead. When this Mahler / Richard Strauss / Brechtian / Japanese opera - very powerfully presented by Stopera (with no funding support!) in this oratorio preview - comes to full production next year, don't miss it. Judith Crispin Cresswell tells me Larry Sitsky accused her of writing too much Verdi, so this is her answer: an unsentimental representation of a Buddhist dream of death, percussive yet strangely tuneful, with delicate cadences and silences which will translate on stage into an inescapable drama.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
No comments:
Post a Comment