Dancing on Your Grave, a Cholmondeley and Featherstonehaugh's production images courtesy PIAF |
A handful of dead souls who rev up life in a pub of zero intoxication and intone freedom from pancreatic tracts might turn tensions between life and death on their head. Unfortunately, the framing gag of a spectral music-hall with its tight staging, small cast and banjo-strummed ballads sits at odds with the wide-flung technicolour skyline of Perth on a balmy night. How could the imported UK mortuary wit, however clever in its intimacy and comedic lyrics, compete with the external spectacle of nature provided free by the city? In director-choreographer Lea Anderson’s Dancing on Your Grave, the Cholmondeleys (an all-female contemporary dance company) and the Featherstonehaughs (its male equivalent) were in short supply which only emphasised the show’s reliance on Burch and Blake’s original songs delivered live at Beck’s Music Box. Lusciously opening out onto The Esplanade, Beck’s Box lacked the necessary ambience of enclosure, crowds and unruliness to realise the production’s odd Dickensian humour.
Les Sept Planches de la Ruse (Seven Boards of Skill) image courtesy PIAF |
Life and Fate, Maly Drama Theatre, St Petersburg image courtesy PIAF |
The Maly actors skilfully inhabit a stage conflated in time and location, which is at once pre- and post-Stalinist apartment crossed by the symbolic wires of encampment and annihilation. Both life and vodka are cheap and drained in a moment. The significance of this state becomes increasingly clear in the second half which culminates in the barbed belittlement of a band of denuded humanity literally playing the final chords of their condemned lives. It is an extraordinary moment wherein music and bare flesh fuse and are extinguished. The echo of that poignancy-crushed-in-violence emanates through the mother’s final letter just before she too leaves life to her son and his conscience.
Robyn Orlin photo Olivier Pascaud |
Good Morning, Mr Gershwin presented by Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu from France, rapped nostalgia into explosive exuberance and rhythmical virtuosity. “I got rhythm” speed-splintered through every conceivable nook and cranny of the body, bouncing across dance techniques and spatial configurations like nerve-ends in frenzied delight. Fusion was further promoted in the cast mix of African, Arabic, Asian and European performers and the final Porgy and Bess sequence. While possibly paying too much credence to Gershwin’s political tolerance, Porgy provoked powerful performances from the women whose anguish shuddered bodily, banishing all vestiges of feminine frailty. In overview, playfulness flipped with desire and protest in the same way that Gershwin may have skittered across the piano’s black and white keys. The message resoundingly unified divisive fragments into melodies that are difficult to resist.
Death images struck down by mere humans who refuse to doubt the immortality of song linger after the festival and the orchestrated harmonies of its performances. Perhaps that is what any festival should achieve, an impossible celebration against the odds.
2010 Perth International Arts Festival: The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs, Dancing on Your Grave, director, choreographer Lea Anderson, Beck’s Music Box, Feb 23, 24; Les Sept Planches de la Ruse, conception, stage designer, director Aurélien Bory, producers Compagnie 111m Scènes de la Terre, performers Dalian Beijing Opera, Regal Theatre, Feb 5-March 1; Maly Drama Theatre, St Petersburg, Life and Fate, based on the novel by Vasily Grossman, adaptation, direction Lev Dodin, His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 17–23; Strut, Meet Robyn Orlin, facilitator Bianca Martin, Kings St Arts Centre, Feb 26; Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu, Good Morning, Mr Gershwin, choreography José Montalvom Dominique Hervieu, music George Gershwin, His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 26-28
For more on the Perth International Arts Festival see the review of Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski’s Nanomandala on page 24.
RealTime issue #96 April-May 2010 pg. 12
© Maggi Phillips; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]