Encounter #0001: Maude Davey

by Matt Crosby

Rehearsal photos at

Big Fish Design,

taken by 

Kazuto Shimamoto

Maude Davey

It's early morning, Maude Davey has agreed to an interview for one hour before rehearsal for a cabaret she is directing on the subject of the perception of HIV in society. And as I write up the interview two months later, I'm rehearsing with her in a play called Everyman & the Pole Dancers by Polish writer director Lech Mackiewicz opening October 2 in the Melbourne Fringe. So my concentration is split between the present wildness of her experiments on the rehearsal floor and back then, her larrikin intensity discussing theatre in the VCA coffee-shop. Only a short time after 'her-lankiness-of-the-flowing-black-hair-and-piercing-eye' arrived, we were deep in theatre.

“I always think it's really important to mean something, I do. I'm not very impressed with theatre which doesn't. I used to talk in the 90's about this importation into the Melbourne cultural ecology of the idea that meaningless parades of images were enough... of confronting, disturbing, shocking, beautiful images – and I feel like that's just taken hold. It's grafted very strongly. It's a weed and it's taken over.”

The muffin Maude brought, sits on paper between us, it's cracked open with an offer to share. Gulps of coffee, contemplation in the early morning student rush, I can feel her concentration leaning towards her rehearsals in 50 minutes. The meeting is a gift of time I don't want to abuse so after proceeding through appraisals of Melbourne theatre together, I get to a point.

'Political theatre is heady, doesn't operate in a sensory way', I offer.

She demurs sharp yet graceful, “but it can – if you think about Genet it does.'

'Does your theatre?'

The response is plaintive, 'I wish it would. You know, that's what I fear most, that it doesn't operate in a sensory way, because I talk too much – because text comes first and most easily. But what I find most wonderful is when the text is the least of the signifiers – and yet what is signified is comprehensible.”

Maude Davey graduated from VCA over 25 years ago. In a conversation one hears at least twice that she has turned 50, that her body is decaying that performing in the nude changes when those inevitable changes happen. The career isn't limited to theatre or to acting. She writes, directs, she performs across all forms: film, television and theatre, of course including cabaret and burlesque. Her performances in Anna Kokkinnos' film Only the Brave (1994) and Matthew Saville's Noise (2007) are remembered. In Adelaide she is known for a major body of work creating for Vital Statistics. But most famously, over the last 10 years, Maude has cut a path through the burlesque world performing nationally and internationally with Finucane/Smith's The Burlesque Hour. It's a continuation of her extended solo exploration of the body as a performative object.

Somewhat ingenuously I ask her, 'but why do people perform with no clothes on?'

'If it didn't create unease, disturbance and release, you wouldn't do it: but it does. In an audience. Take your clothes off... ripples;' eyes shine, fingers stretch out and over the heads of her imagined spectators.

After skirting around the appeal, the diversity within the form, the success of Finucane/Smith in cutting into a mainstream market with a subversive art-form, as though relenting, Maude launches into her 'version' of why not just burlesque, but simply performing in the nude is as she puts it, revelatory.

'There's a part of us that hates and fears the body – our body, our own body, loathes... Partly because we're filled with shame about our own – because we're held up to standards which are meaningless and unrealistic in terms of what's a good body, what's an attractive body, what's a body that's worthwhile; in another way we loathe our own body because to be confronted with one's own death – with one's own mortality, let's face it, what we have and what we are is a decaying bag of bones and guts. And so to have somebody take their clothes off onstage, if done properly it enables us to look past the things that get in the way of looking at it like (Marilyn hush) “Oh do I look as good as that? Oh do I look better than that? Does she look good?” All the nude bodies that flash into your mind, the porn magazines, the art shots, the ones you see at your friends, your mother's, your father's, your children's and then eventually you get to looking at the body and “you” release me from my own shame... that's what I think happens.'

Maude Davey, Matt Crosby & Lech Mackiewicz, writer director of Everyman & the Pole Dancers

And hearing all this, and having watched Maude's fearless, go-anywhere do-anything approach up to now, and rehearsing with her surprising twist, shocking fall, raucous laugh or demonic glare, every other moment, I realise her performance, her practice is breathing rarified air. It's not the nudity, it's not the exposure of flesh that releases us from our self-loathing, from the shame, though there is that too, no... the experience and wonder, the anger and... the... blistering honesty of her approach levels all before. Audiences are staggered that she is able to expose herself so utterly and yet remain enigmatic.

Plus Sign Attached was a cabaret the graduating students of VCA co-created with Maude in May this year. Based on interviews set up by Living Positive Victoria with people who are HIV positive. She introduces me to the difficulties of bringing such an issue to the stage – the stake-holders,

'whose objectives are we servicing?' Audience, actors, teachers, myself? What about our collaborators who have come in to speak with us, who are living positive?' and that the show has been set up to address stigma surrounding living positive.

I interrupt when she comes to stigma, because it's not something that I think is (should be?) an issue in Australia. I say, 'but when you say HIV to me I go, okay, Africa, generic drugs, religious beliefs, they're the things that come to me.

Maude counters

'and I go, blood, bodily fluids, sex, death, sex equals death...' 

The recorder is recording, we are speaking of perceptions surrounding AIDs and of the politics of the stake-holders in polite grown-up language and she wakes me from my civility when I posit that Australian society broadly no longer stigmatises AIDs-sufferers by saying “it's this thing – you get it by fucking”.

Her language has punch. It's the footlight-delivery that has intrigued, enthralled and scandalised over many years. She channels a youth she interviewed, speaks his thoughts, voices his guilt.“You did bad fucking”.

Maude gets inside the 'living-positive' research, into ordinary lives. Empathy for her subjects infuses, her blood pressure rises as she unravels a story of a youth run off the rails. Even though it's early in the day, I see an actor building an emotional bridge between a source and her performative practice. The cells of Maude's skin, the acute focus of her gaze demands notice, it's as though I receive a private performance, channeling the youth's story, as though, through her I receive the youth first-hand.

She checks around that she's not overheard, leans in close so I'm handcuffed by her stare. She quotes the man's thoughts as she imagines them, “I don't want to feel that I'm a morally reprehensible individual because I got this disease, but every time I say, “by the way I'm HIV”, he sees it flash... but what he also sees when he says it – I am putting words into his mouth, is “I deserve it, I deserve this disease, this is my punishment for having behaved so badly.”

This putting words in the mouth of the subject in one sense is the artist's creative process. Extrapolating from the given and digging under the skin to expose that which was not expressed, that which might have been felt but was not annunciated is nurtured forth, written down, the unspoken thoughts the sub-text publicised.

We've been watching Maude produce the sub-text for the stage for many years now. Her charisma might be based around her struggle to set the train of thought on the rails, accurately, like a poet seeking the word. Between the felt thought and its expression, it's in that moment of stasis that Maude allows her audience into the creative spark. In that moment of chemistry jumping synapse that she lays herself bare, vulnerable, shamanic, as though she invites an audience to find the word for her... though she never allows us the chance, mischievously it's snatched from our lips, as though she points the finger triumphantly, “too slow you were!”

Any artist suffers self-doubt, it's a process of reflection, of striving to better and Maude doubts.

Keina Denda & Maude Davey

'It's one of my great fears that my work is too naively political... Oh my god, why don't people want this show, it's too overt, it's too direct, I say what I mean too much... you're not suppose to do that, you're not supposed to say what you mean. In fact meaning anything is not particularly popular – populist, you really shouldn't mean anything. “They get married and live happily ever after” why would I be interested in that story. No. I'm not interested.'

She pauses, I imagine the many avenues of disinterest. It's a charismatic, a somatic rumination that draws me in, and the manifestation bursts like sour-power.

'Why don't I want to do it?- I don't care.' Purses her lips with distaste, shakes her hair with disdain, 'Don't care. Much more interested in the abject, the problematic experience of living in the world. Difficulty.

Me: 'So Lech's show isn't political, is it? Is it political?' In raising a segue to Everyman & the Pole Dancers I reflect how lame is the linkage to the political because writer/director Lech Mackiewicz  would never describe his work directly as political.

Maude jumps me, mercy, but not much. 'Why isn't it political? Because to a certain extent it's political in the way that Becket's theatre is political. It asserts desperate times doesn't it? It starts from the assertion that this is untenable, the way we live. That's a political premise. And like a performance poet she launches into paraphrase of Everyman's first speech of Lech's play: 

'This is the end of times, we have exploited and manipulated and ravaged this planet to such an extent that it is all over, God is now... you know, it is done for us. We cannot learn from our mistakes. It's over for us so let's tell a story about the end of days – that's political.'

She quotes Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr from 1849, 'plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose” - the more things change, the more they stay the same. The absurdists came along and described a ravaged world, in order to re-learn how to... I don't know if they were "in-order-toing" anything, but “Never again” is the cry, isn't it... and here we are... here we are.

The hour flew by. I remember Maude throwing glances behind her to the rehearsal that was calling. As I write now, her bearded Everyman comes to me. I'm trying to find the words, Phyllis Diller meets Mephistopheles? John Cleese meets Medea? But the collisions miss. They seem misplaced because actually, as the world at large has been coming to know, Maude is her own woman, combining dress-up with political cant, degradation with refinement. I return to the Burlesque Hour shows and my recall of her monologues, but mostly of the glint in her eye. She interrupts with a good hip-and-shoulder, 'Yeah, but you know, sometimes I think that that's just cheap... you know, charm is my stock-in-trade. I've been deploying it for years... and I've become reasonably good at it.'

She has. The life-time journey of an artist deploying research, genius and craft to unpick a cross-stitched world continues, and her audience takes nourishment, consideration and delight in it.

Maude Davey stars as Everyman in Everyman & the Pole Dancers by Lech Mackiewicz,

presented by Auto Da Fe, Theatre Melbourne and Shinjuku Ryozanpaku, Tokyo.

October 1-11

Metanoia Theatre at The Mechanics Institute

Brunswick, Melbourne.

WEEK ONE via Melbourne Fringe

WEEK TWO via www.trybooking.com/EOBS

FOLEY ART

In our twice weekly training and explorations with Suzuki training at Melbourne Suzuki, we have been doing improvisations with moving & changing statues, and playing with tempi and relation... all sorts of things that I won't go into because that's not my point. Just training and improvising without an overall objective has become insufficient. So I've written a play called Mute about the beauty of silence and a woman who cuts tongues, for our regular participants so that we can work towards a performance derived from our explorations. It may not be a text book reason to write a play, but hey. I'd like to include it in the Auto Da Fe Theatre program.

In the play I have a character named the Foley Artist who will be creating the wind and other sound effects. The idea started because actors wearing microphones are eew and mixing electronic sound with acoustic - eewer. It's like there are two competing stages. So I thought if a foley artist could produce effects like they used to do in the radio days we could still have the 'wind blowing through the dark forest' without recourse to amplification and just include that creative magic in the performance act. 

I actually worked in radio-drama in the '60's (that old huh?) at the ABC in Sydney on Forbes Street when I was a kid. A series called the Hamburg Secret - from memory produced by David Cahill?... kind of like The Famous Five - we were two kids who discovered how the Germans were hiding a submarine in our local estuary. I was entranced by the foley booths. Fake doors, tea-cups, bells, guns, hammers... The technician was always telling me to leave it alone.  I was a passive smoker back then. All the actors instructing me in correct studio protocol, cryptic crosswords by the ash tray, smoking Pall Mall... Camel Plains saving a cough till the end of a take. That's my grandfather Marshall Crosby on the left there

he was a radio days star - had a series called 'Officer Crosby' I believe. He was long gone before I came along.

 I'm looking forward to the challenge of scrunching grease-proof paper for walking through forest undergrowth, dress-scissors through linen for cutting a tongue with the mix of voice and the wind balanced live... mm, creating the wind... we could all blow through our lips? 

Recently I've been combining the statues exercise with a response to visual art.

Arthur Boyd:

Guo Jian:

Donald Friend:

and others. It's been liberating. After doing the training this long, the challenge to achieve the form of the exercises, seems to have become insufficient. Maybe I'm bored, or maybe I've lost the ability to examine my own technique. Whenever the statues exercise is taught, the analogy of the sculptor creating an aesthetic from a piece of stone is used. That the artist can see the statue even though they are looking at a hunk of rock. The process of cutting away is a process of trying to reach the kernel, the essence of the idea that they see in their mind's eye. And so if you look at just one tiny part of the statue you will be able to experience the whole. That is if the artist has been successful. So the statues exercise is framed in terms of visual art in the first place. I don't think I'm stepping too far away from the basic tenets of the exercise in using these prompts. I once heard a member of SCOT say that just before they strike a statue they might be thinking of an adjective like red or black, or compressed or stretched, push or pull, front or back. Like it was a condition that was put in place before the statue was struck. In that sense, it's pre-meditation. But why should we be so obsessed with spontaneity anyhow? Spontaneity is merely the act of staying within the moment. The steps, the dialogue, the sequence of a performance are all pre-determined but each night they are performed as if for the first time. So I guess I'm bringing that ethic into the training. So I've been choosing just one painter per night. I look at quite a few of the paintings and I try to study details, or get things that strike me, that inspire me. Then when we do statues, in those moments in the ready position, I let the feeling of the painting invade me. As though the inspiration behind the painting is the state of potential for the next statue. I've been excited by the results. One of the ideas behind doing statues is that an actor can notice well-worn habits. 'Oh my god, how many times can I do that statue where the hand is bent like that and the head is tilted'. But with this injection of visual-art, those very technical ticks have been dropping away. It's as though all parts and each moment holding or moving a statue have found a single spark. I suppose it means that statues on a given night will not be distinct, rather a series on a given theme. I guess I'm okay with that. I could explore this line for a while couldn't I?