Recent explorations in Tokyo - Naree Vachananda and friends

my favourite contemporary dancer, Naree Vachananda

sphere from Naree Vachananda on Vimeo.

Melita Jurisic and Metalycee

Here is my favourite music video

Metalycée - Mad Tom Song from Ralf Jacobs on Vimeo.

the hamlet apocalypse by steven mitchell wright... the danger ensemble

It’s no more than fifteen minutes ago that the actors finished onstage at La Mamma (Melbourne) in The Hamlet Apocalypse and I feel compelled to tell somebody. F!#$!@ing fantastic guys. It’s with a sense of trepidation that you go to see some interpretation of Hamlet because with many, you wonder why they didn’t just do Hamlet... that is to say, the interpretation never gets beyond a change in syntax. With Apocalypse, you get a different play – one that is about a group of (am I that old?), very young performers who gather to rehearse, or perform Hamlet in the last moments of their life. Someone who operates the green light and the noise has decided that when the 10 to 1 countdown happens, their lives are over – I guess that’s the apocalypse. So we see actors face the audience, introduce themselves with their real names, tell us why they want to be actors or what would be the last thing they to do in their life; play out the reality of their lives within the dusty confines of Shakespeare’s play. The reality of their countdown situation continually over-runs the performance of Hamlet - it seems more urgent to speak simply and true than to perform an old play. And yet, the relevance of the ghost wandering, of the truth of love, of the nature of existence which is the meat of Hamlet, is never too far from the present consideration. There is a great convergence of the relations, themes and imagery between the real play and the Shakespeare. Ophelia and Hamlet actually love each other... that is the actors do. The woman playing Laertes and Polonius ‘will never have children’ and the guy playing Claudius says he is ‘not such a bad guy.’ To be honest, I’m a complete old fart, because in the beginning I thought that there was going to be messing with Shakespeare for NO GOOD REASON. But there was... (good reason). What I saw tonight was the dystopia of the ‘now’ generation – handed a world on the edge of death, of the abyss – contemplating the end of it all, contemplating, as Hamlet does, the nature of this life and death. There’s a meaningful twist at the end when Hamlet’s speech is conflated... I’m not checking the source here, but something like, “to sleep, to dream...” cut to “...no more.” A more meaningful contemporary working of the text couldn’t be found. Well, I’ve kind of lost the head of steam now, but having seen a wonderful film on tele last night called Reconstruction from Denmark – a re-work of the Orpheo myth, and now this, I think I’ll just go out and howl at the full moon for a few hours. Wow!

performed by Lloyd Allison-Young, Peta Ward, Katrina Cornwell, Mark Hill, Tora Hylands, Robbie O'Brien.produced by Anniene Stockton

voice and suzuki training

...finished teaching six days of Suzuki Actor Training workshop last Saturday, 18^th here in Melbourne, Australia. There were many things of note such as the approach to vocal training.

Because it's easy for such highly demanding physical exercises which focus on isolating effort in the 'centre' (the abdomen) - and this so happens to be where the voice is centred - actors who have done the work for a while can get into the habit of losing control and over-projecting their voice, thereby losing the ability to vary pitch, rhythm and tone associated with shifts in meaning, geography or body.

One way to practice variation (and by no means the only one), is to pay attention to the direction and distance of the focal point... I mean in terms of voice, the point to which one is speaking. I think I could perceive variation in the resonant volume and quality of the voice when the imagined distance between the actor and their focal point varied.

I have often wondered at the idea that if one is doing the Suzuki exercises truly, the body becomes energised; and because the voice is produced from the body, it too becomes energised. And I have seen it happen many times, that some kind of fakery is associated with this. That is, that actors are instructed to produce the voice with energy and this is interpreted to mean, speak with volume and that this volume may not be directly associated with the aesthetic of the body’s centre.

In some ways, Suzuki training is in opposition to the New York “method” based on Stanislavski's principle of social realism and the process of text analysis where variation to the rhythm and 'weight' of words according to meaning is done based on psychological tenets. In my own work, and having studied, in the West, the more traditional Stanislavski method of acting first, I often wondered if a contradiction in fact existed.

Meaning is important to communication and important to freeing the actor's voice. Tadashi Suzuki has developed training exercises which give the actor an alternative to the usual tools employed in mainstream Western theatre traditions. They are aimed at opening the door to a more archetypal existence onstage. I know from personal experience that it is possible to enjoy the communication of the meaning of text while adhering to the hyper-charged (!) modes of Suzuki training... is there a contradiction?

I think perhaps, the advent of shouted voice production seen in the Australian context of Suzuki training (and others?), is just a failure to analyse the real connection between voice and a communicative body.

To my view, it's more of a test, if in the first place, the voice is left to its own devices. Ask the inexperienced student to use their natural voice and see how the successful engagement of the body with Suzuki exercises varies the production of the voice.

In this way, the actor can analyse the difference between vocal production with and without the engagement of the natural animism of the body. In this workshop, short though it was, I think this idea started to show the signs of a true engagement.

It's dangerous territory. Because actor's walk into a workshop with many pre-conceptions about what their theatre is. The small world of naturalism that actors regurgitate so readily because they have been raised on non-sweating television fodder rears its pathetic head too easily.

But it is a worthy experiment if only to attempt to break actors from vocal habits in the same way that the ‘statues’ and other or all of the exercises help to analyse the habits of actors.

To me, it was of great value to see people approaching the work for the first time and paying attention to the vocal aspect of the body from the outset. I think it was certainly rewarding to establish consideration of the relationship of vocal technique with the body early.

It’s an investigation to be continued, but it may be a topic for discussion? I would imagine many others have faced this issue in the past?

regards

Matt

p.s. if you're in the States here's where you do Suzuki training:

http://siti.org/training/

...finished teaching six days of Suzuki Actor Training workshop last Saturday, 18th. There were many things of note such as the approach to vocal training that we took.

Because it's easy for such highly demanding physical exercises which focus on isolating effort in the 'centre' (the abdomen) - and this so happens to be where the voice is centred - actors who have done the work for a while can get into the habit of losing control and over-projecting their voice, thereby losing the ability to vary pitch, rhythm and tone asssociated with shifts in meaning.

One way to practice variation (and by no means the only one), is to pay attention to the direction and distance of the focal point... the point to which one is speaking... in the workshop just finished, it was good to see that by changing the imagined distance between the actor and their focal point the resonant volume and quality of the voice varied.

I have often wondered at the idea that if one is doing the Suzuki exercises truly, the body becomes energised, and because the voice is produced from the body, it too becomes energised. And I have seen it happen many times, that some kind of fakery is associated with this. That is, that actors are instructed to produce the voice with energy and this is interpreted to mean, speak with volume.

In some ways, Suzuki training is in opposition to the New York method based on Stanislavski's principle of social realism and the process of text analysis where variation to the rhythm and 'weight' of words according to meaning is done based on psychological tenets. In my own work, and having studied, in the West, the more traditional Stanislavski method of acting first, I often wondered if such a contradiction in fact existed.

Meaning is important to communication and important to freeing the actor's voice. Mr. Suzuki has developed training exercises which give the actor an alternative to the usual tools employed in mainstream Western theatre traditions. They are aimed at opening the door to a more archetypal existence onstage.

I know from personal experience that it is possible to pay attention to the communication of the meaning of text while adhering to the modes of Suzuki training... I don't see a contradiction. I think perhaps, the advent of shouted voice production so often seen in the Australian context of Suzuki training (and others?), is just a failure to analyse the real connection between the voice and the body.

To my view, it's more of a test, if the voice is left to it's own devices. Tell the inexperienced student to use their natural voice and see how the successful engagement of the body with Suzuki exercises varies the production of the voice. In this workshop, short though it was, I think this idea started to show the signs of a true engagement.

It's dangerous territory. Because actor's walk into a workshop with many pre-conceptions about what their theatre is. The small world of naturalism that actors regurgitate so readily because they have been raised on non-sweating television acting, rears its pathetic head too easily.

But it is a worthy experiment if only to attempt to break actors from vocal habits in the same way that the statues (and other) exercises help to analyse the habits of actors.

To me, it was of great value to see people approaching the work for the first time and paying attention to the vocal aspect of the body from the outset. This is surely an investigation to be continued, but it may be an a topic for discussion? I would imagine many others have faced this issue in the past?

regards

Matt

I will continue this at some later stage.

happy days

just saw happy days at Malthouse. Beckett wrote this 1960-61 and it is still deliciously devastating. I think the delicious is because Julie Forsyth is so deadly good... the idea that someone is buried in a mound of earth and must pass the time filing one's nails... leave the revolver nearby in case you get the courage... wait for exactly the right impulse to sing the song or tell the favourite story before the bell rings signaling sun-down, lights out... is dire. So Happy Days is ironic yes? Julie, dear Julie gives us; no, she gives Beckett's most crushing statement on existence with twinkle. The set_Anna Cordingly, lighting _Paul Jackson, direction_Michael Kantor... and Julie's offsider Peter Carroll coalesce into a fairground living hell. I saw Julie do this play at Anthill... a looooong time ago; I was impressed with her then, (was it the first time I saw her perform?), and I'm super, uber-impressed now. Not that anyone reads blogs... but if just one person were to read this, then I say to you - GO SEE IT!! This must be seen. Truly. It is one of the great renditions of one of the great plays of the 'modern' era.

un-sustainable rort

It's time!

Set stringent targets for the carbon trade scheme of 40% from the outset and provide no , that’s right ZERO incentives for carbon-based industries to pollute. Yes, this will send shock waves through our economy, yes jobs will be lost in those industries, yes share prices will plummet, yes the stock exchange indices will head South, but we have reached an opportune tipping point NOW.

It's time not to give quarter to polluters but to invest in research and development aimed at making solar, thermal, wind and wave power base-load capable.

Am I daft? To me there is a beautiful simplicity to the relationship of the global economic downturn (read crisis) and the environmental catastrophe approaching. One solves the other.

If Rudd and cohort (including those pesky independents) provide base-load investment with the objective of achieving base-load alternative energy, where alternative energy industries become the major players of the 21st century economy, then jobs will be created and the stock market will once more be of a Northerly persuasion - guaranteeing happy futures for the Macquarie millionaires – maybe even privately-funded superannuants. Win for investors; win for the environment.

Look, this isn’t rocket science. In the first place, use the billions currently ear-marked to prop up old styles of industry, to establish state-run solar facilities. Go down to the banks of the Murray where all those farmers are no longer able to farm due to current levels of warming, salination and loss of water supply, buy their land and start erecting solar cells – billions of them. Or else ask the farmers to farm energy instead of cotton. The workers that are being sacked from carbon-based industries can work there! That’s a tough re-deployment I know, but these are and will be increasingly tough times. Hell, I’ll go down and work there if you need me to. (So long as they have fibre-optics).

If that is done in concert with an injection of infrastructural support to alternative energy research facilities, then in ten years time, maybe less, these alternative energy sources, or perhaps ones not yet imagined, will become base-load capable.

The alternative is that in 2050, my 18 year-old son will be sitting in a city-sized apartment block (not of itself such a bad idea) in a Blade Runner distopia, with his permanent respirator, condensing drinking water from a container he filled in Port Phillip bay, and not breeding with his wife because he knows his generation will be the last on the planet.

It’s time to act now. Stop bowing to the carbon lobby and make some forthright decisions for our children’s future. I voted Labour at the last election not because I wanted a thousand bucks, but because I thought Labour was serious about two-things, industrial reform, and forthright action on the environment.

Carbon-based industries SHOULD NOT be making a profit from polluting the environment – alternative energy industry should.

• Carbon-based industry SHOULD NOT receive any pollution permits.
• Projected expenditure for pollution permits SHOULD be re-deployed to postive inititiatives such as alternative energy research and development.
• Stringent targets SHOULD be set – 40% is a good place to start; 5% would be laughable if it wasn’t sickening.
• Major investment in alternative energy facilities and research and development SHOULD be started TODAY – allocate 20 billion TODAY.

What “ordinary middle income families” want is a sustainable future; that is what the Rudd government was mandated to do – so do it.

As a post-script, nuclear energy is not an option. The plants require enormous amounts of carbon-based energy to run and after all this time, scientists and nuclear energy execs have still no idea what to do with the waste produced.

Lisa Roet's exhibition

Today I went to see Lisa Roet's exhibition at the Karen Woodbury Gallery http://www.kwgallery.com/

Lisa has been studying and rendering apes ... do you call them primates? for lots of years, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see gigantic bronze sculptures of primate hands in the centre of the gallery floor; or charcoal on paper, wall-size, of hands of a primate... the renders are disturbing because they are life-like yet oversized, such detailed up-scale studies, truncated at the wrist... one can feel the age in the wrinkles, sense some experience through the shadow, understand something of the life of a creature whose attributes seem close to our own in the life-lines rendered here.

It's been many years since I last saw a roet exhibition, the concern is the same, but the manifestations are evolving. There's a kind of kitsch political... the work was political way-back, I remember that. Just seeing such careful study brought to the viewer... the muscle yet minutiae of the charcoal on the rough paper... I remember that; but now, there are neon style lights surrounding life-like gorilla heads. Like these critters are on display for us - catch them quick before they disappear! they seem to shout.

I don't know my primates very well, so I have to call them primates - instead of macaccas or orang-utans - I've been to Malaysia, so I know orang-utan means something like original man... makes you think. I think of this because one of the works, Target 1 has an Asian looking man - a kind of death mask, eyes closed... meditating? dead? surrounded by neon lit rifle cross-hairs... and the sculputre is repeated several times, with different apes at the centre of the cross-hairs.

I suppose merely by associating the ape to the human Lisa Roet makes statement about the ephemerality of our exhistence? that if we think the apes are on their way out because we cut down so much of their habitat, then by logic, we would be next?

Or else, this is an indegenous Malay (Roet has lived in Malaysia, done residencies in the jungle I think), and the statement is about the dissappearence of their ways... as the Kuala Lumpur urban encroaches further and furtherer into the depths of the jungle.

The exhibition is only on for a few more days, go check it - really worth the time.

some people don't like pea and ham soup

Is it swine flu? is it the colour? is it the fat? is it the pig skin? is it because of religious sensitivities? If you go to your local supermarket, to the deli section, and ask the person wearing the mandatory surgical headwear for three nice sized pieces of bacon bones, then go to the 'grains' aisle and buy yourself some split green peas, celery head, one carrot and one onion, then take them home, put them in a pot for a many hours simmering, you will have the most wholesome, cheap, easy to cook meal that can sit in your fridge FOR A WEEK, getting thick and stodgy. And the farts... you have no idea.

But some people don't like this. It's clear. Some people have told me they like vegetable and ham soup. That's a poor cousin. That's like asking for pastrami and rye on white bread. The green peas... now here's a point for the biologists, are green peas that you buy in the supermarket in packets the same as green peas that grow in satchels on trees only dry?

pea and ham soup. I finished ours up last night and I'm off to the super to get the makings for another batch. I better buy some incense.

waiting for godot a la mamma

I saw the production of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett last night, May 2nd, 2009 at La Mamma Theatre Melbourne, directed by Laurence Strangio with John Flaus, Robing Cuming, Peter Finlay, Alex Pinder and Phelix Strangio, designed by Meg White. La Mamma is a small theatre in Carlton, an inner city suburb and is an old two story house converted into a theatre - so the venue holds about 50 tops. I love La Mamma because of the intimacy and the demands for truth it places on the performers. Last night's Godot was no exception.

This is the third time I've scene Godot - I saw it at Jane Street Theatre in 1980 with Robert Menzies, Mel Gibson, Vivienne Garrett, John Clayton and Geoffrey Rush and the Dublin Gate Theatre at Melbourne Interntational Arts Festival in 1998. Both of those productions were great, different, but I guess shared something of the clown in their approach - the characters were 'performed'. At the time that I saw both productions, I loved them. Then I saw the La Mamma version.

John Flaus and Robin Cuming must be well into their seventies I guess - you look at two tramps, dirty, down and out no-hopers who fit in perfectly to the La Mamma world. The stage is empty apart from the iconic La Mamma wooden coat rack/chair in which Estragon sits, and Vladamir enters from the back lane where bottles are emptied from the restaurants into bins - loudly. (This veritae is neatly worked into the sound design by Roger Alsop because a low-volume bottle emptying presages the cataclysmic and continuing 'bottle emptying into recycle bin' that occurred just on the other side of the back door to the playing space in the second act; how Flaus was able to stay on track while he delivered the longest speech in the play I'll never know).

The raw truth and fragility of these two actors brings Beckett's text to you like a mullet to the forehead - it's a slap I didn't expect. The soft, understatement of Cuming, as he waits for some end to the deluded confusion that envelopes him - like the world around him is spinning so fast that he just can't quite maintain a recogniseable focal point - is quite disturbing to watch. This vulnerability is matched with the throw-away acceptance of their situation by Flaus.

Beckett provides clear deliniation that Vladamir is the leader and Estragon the led. So Flaus' gruff bass suits Cuming's quavering voice; Flaus' height fits Cuming's short; there is of course a grand scheme of characterisation at work in their performances and their pairing, but that's not obvious - it comes across as if Strangio has cast brilliantly, though that may also be the case.

I read an early review of this production in the Age that said the production will run itself in, and I know that, with the death of actor Reg Evans, and Robin Cuming taking over, that rehearsal time was shortened. So glad I was to see it second to last night, because this performance demonstrated the wonder of layering that actors produce.

Peter Finlay plays Pozzo and Alex Pinder Lucky. I'm sure Beckett intends the entry of these two as an event to alleviate the boredom, as red herring to the appearance of Godot, as an alternative reading of the idea of god - that god is a disfunctional slave driver who is losing his mind, or that our lives are actually merely parts of circus performance if only we knew, we could leave the stage and go home to something more meaningful.

So I wouldn't normally write my thoughts down about a production on the internet, except that I've been playing around with my own site, and started a blog, so it seemed like a good opportunity. The second reason is that I was moved to publish something about my experience last night because it was so shattering. It would have been effecting had I seen some version (an illegal one it would have to have been) that cut Pozzo and Lucky from the text.

But with the surgical entry of these two into the tiny playing space - remember that Pozzo is pulled by Lucky harnessed to a rope - that in this case is about five metres long, so Lucky enters from the the stage right door exits through the stage left door, the rope extends across the space and then Pozzo enters, then Pozzo pulls Lucky back into the space - a new cadaver is put on show for us to analyse.

With Finlay's vocal resonance and shamanistic presence and Pinder's Lucky- mute nothingness, beaten, bidden, without hope both pretty apt interpretations from the text in my view another eternal pair is performed.

I could go on and on about it, but I'm tiring of writing now; oh, the tree is a piece of 4x4 probably oak or jarrah with bent nails and useless recesses cut; it was a post from the old La Mamma stairway and it's in two pieces, broken along the vertical line. Then old La Mamma fence palings emanate at right angle from the apex of the pole along the underside of the beams of the second floor of the theatre - it's as though the tree and indeed the whole production has been performing at La Mamma ever since she was built - what would that be, one hundred years ago at least.

Drawing all these crazy threads together in an article is useless - you should have been there. A production of such a great yet difficult play that succeeds in showing me my own dreadful mortality, that summons the questions of existence that Baeckett and Satre first questioned way back when in Paris, provides a link from one human to another. In seeing the absolute dire necessity of Gogo for Didi and vice versa, one understands that ultimately Godot is a play about hope, but that the only hope to be found is in the solace provided between fellow travellers.

As long as I live, I will never forget the the picture of Cuming, Flaus, Finlay and Pinder, with my steeply raked seating position enabling pretty much an overhead view of them scrabbling aboutor asleep or unconscious or watching together on the floor, struggling but unable to rise, with Pozzo screaming as if from a kilometre away "Help me"; a tawdry morass of filthy human flesh... urgh!

Strangio assembled a magnifiscent cast and facilitated a memorable interpretation of Godot - and by the way, his son Phelix provided us the necessary innocence and neutrality that the boy needs to inject.

Not often you have a night in the theatre such as that, and guess what: YOU MISSED IT!!