by Matt Crosby
Rehearsal photos at
Big Fish Design,
taken by
Kazuto Shimamoto
 |
| Maude Davey |
“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
