In the 1960s so-called Performance Artists began carrying out mundane actions as part of what is now known as "live art." The general public was unimpressed. Nevertheless, this approach to art making, where everything one did could take on a certain theatrical tension, in which the performing arts came to be judged in terms of how they deployed sculptural, sonic, textural or coloristic ideas previously seen as proper to the visual arts, and in which the ordinariness of daily activity was awarded poetic value, exerted enormous influence on theatre. During a trip across Australia from Sydney to Perth and Melbourne, I encountered several works which reflected some of these uneasy alliances between theatre, other art forms, and the aesthetics of the everyday.

Cat Hope / Abe Sada 

My own favourite was an event which seemed furthest from theatre: the work of sound artist Cat Hope in her guise as extreme bass guitar player, Abe Sada. Hope’s project is to play sounds which hover around the level at which one can sometimes hear them, but at other times are so low in tonality that one does not hear them at all, but only feels them. This might seem closer to music than theatre, but as Hope pointed out at the Australasian Drama Studies Association Conference in Perth, these notes are so low that no domestic sound system can reproduce them. One must therefore play them live on specialised equipment. They vibrate buildings and objects in the space, effectively "playing the room," and generating a special kind of "theatrical" experience—a sonic-vibrational one or aural massage. In Sydney, Hope played her gargantuan sound waves (bass tones make BIG waves; high frequencies, teeny ones) to a bemused audience whilst she crouched under the seating bank: a performance of absence, where the room and the audience’s bodies did the performing. Australasian Drama Studies acknowledged Hope’s unique take on performance with a prize for her conference paper, illustrating how important it remains today to explore every aspect of what "liveness" means in the theatre.

Matt Lutton’s The Duel; after Dostoyevsky; Sydney & Perth

Unlike Hope’s oeuvre, few would question whether director Matthew Lutton’s productions constitute performances. Rather, he bears the burden of being identified as the latest Australian enfant terrible or radical bright young thing, of whom the now greying Barrie Kosky (currently based in Europe) was the last exemplar. Lutton’s previous shows were characterised by a striking use of mobile set devices, deeply shadowy lighting, and other effects which led some to wonder if this was a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

In Cats and The Lion King, no one seems to mind if such performative "sound and fury" signifies not very much, but in the rarefied world of subsidised theatre, this can still be seen as a problem. Perhaps responding to such critics, Lutton’s latest script was adapted by Kosky’s former collaborator, Tom Wright, from a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This deeply philosophic text deals with the acquisition of empathy and compassion by a dissolute, selfish and manipulative young Russian officer who orchestrates a duel with an inferior opponent to satisfy his ego and to spite a former amour. The night before the exchange, though, he has an epiphany and stands, Christ-like, apologetic and unguarded before his enemy.

The text was performed within a white, barren, shallow box, thrusting the actors directly before the audience, with nowhere to retire from view. Other than a large window covered by blinds, the space contained little else: a cheap couch, a shabby cupboard, a tacky CD player. The piece begins with an extended lull, the four actors glancing at each other and the audience with a mixture of nervousness and contentment. Brian Lipson as a character later named as "the Mysterious Stranger" seems particularly comfortable, a tall figure whose easy command of space places him at a remove from the others.

A stark white cube which self-consciously frames actors as actors has become a leitmotif of recent Australian theatre, notably in a piece by another of the country’s rising stars, Benedict Andrews (Moving Target, 2008) and by the Cortese brothers, Adriano and Raimondo (Holiday, 2008). Lutton’s use of this device recalls both. The unrelenting banality and grime of his mise en scène is similar to that of Andrews’ dark suburban comedy. Convulsive smoking and sudden bursts of discomfort erupt into a manic search for the right CD to play, punctuating the action and giving a nervous, episodic feel to act one of The Duel. 

Luke Mullins as Zosima, the protagonist who relates his story to us, is particularly effective, his fine bony form and almost classical use of hand and arm gestures signifying giving, receiving and offering makes him an increasingly quiet centre about which these physical ticks accumulate. The piece later falls into a quiet rhythm, allowing the whiteness of the stage to transform from a disturbingly blank-slate against which every human infirmity is exaggerated, into a glowing aura signifying an emptying out of tensions and generating a quasi-religious luminosity in the characters. This in turn recalls the gentle, radiating whiteness of the Corteses’ stage, in their earlier production about the warm, relaxed state of a Summer holiday. 

The performative ordinariness and scenographic flourishes of Luttton’s approach is here mediated by a strong emphasis on the text and its philosophic concerns. Framing devices such as the set or the CD player are blatant and exaggerated, employed in single, gigantic punches or marks, with those words and ideas which support the script’s larger dramaturgy hovering within these structures, sustaining an often all but vacant on-stage space. 

The majority of the piece is focused on an extended afterword in which the Mysterious Stranger confesses to Zosima that he once murdered someone, and the Stranger asks if he should confess this ancient crime. Lipson is exceptional in his delivery, each line enunciated as an elongated plateau of tonality, his voice rising in pitch and force as he relates his actions via extended passages of aural sustain. Recalling a horrible organ in which each key is held just long enough to grate, before the next note rushes forward to replace its predecessor, Lipson’s fervid mannerism generates a disturbing sense of avowed confession tinged with a desire to kill again. 

The Duel was a surprising piece from a director known for his scenographic extravagance, let alone from Wright, who flippantly told this reviewer many years ago that theatre was anything but story-telling ("If you want to tell a story," a younger Wright once enthused over drinks, "then just sit on stage and read a fucking book out loud!"). Lutton’s latest work perhaps suggests an accommodation between those Young (and Old) Turks of the theatre who have tended to look towards performativity, physicality and staging, now welded with an more venerable, oratorical mode of drama. 

Margaret Cameron’s Care Instructions; Malthouse, Melbourne 

Director Margaret Cameron’s Care Instructions initially seems firmly located in the world of the performative. It is played amidst oversized, whitish-beige washing bags. Three performers—Liz Jones, Caroline Lee and Jane Bayly—make their first appearance as columnar bags themselves, their bodies sheathed in sacks, which later transform into shapeless dresses. The audience is addressed by an image of Jones’ vociferous head, projected onto the glass window of a centrally located, front-loading washing machine. This opening tableau imparts a sculptural aesthetic to the performance, albeit one closer to Robert Rauschenberg’s floppy, sewed soft-pieces, than to earlier sculptures’ conventionally heroic, sharply-carved works of marble or of bronze.

This sums up my ambivalence about Cameron’s piece. I attended a preview performance of Care Instructions, but nothing I have read since suggested that the production significantly altered. Care Instructions is a strangely shapeless work. Cameron is a legend of the Australian avant-garde, a poetess-performer who moulds life’s banalities into comic Existentialism and enacts contorted pieces of near-confessional, embodied action (a woman in high heels uncomfortably caught beneath a café-table, speaking of her sexual longings, in Knowledge and Melancholy, 1997; a figure in a wet dress perched on a rock recalls a night as a child when she saw her drunken father hosed down inside the family house, in The Proscenium, 2005). Although critics such as Alison Croggon have suggested that author Cynthia Troup’s use of metaphors about washing, sexuality and identity echoes James Joyce (http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2009/07/review-happy-days-care-instructions.html), there seems a more limited repertoire of textual allusion at play here.

These Existential washerwomen intermittently ally their ramblings to the story of the witch who cursed Sleeping Beauty, and indeed, the piece often has a sleepy ambience, like the pillowy bags which cushion the performers. But it does not go beyond this. Joyce re-ordered the entire history of Western literature, the Bible and Dublin’s labyrinthine structures in Ulysses. Care Instructions’ washing metaphors were slight by comparison.

Nevertheless, if one follows the staging’s performative logic and focuses less on Troup’s text than upon the simple pleasures of the performance, there is much to enjoy. Lee has one of Melbourne great voices. A crackle underpins her most mellifluous tones, suggesting a voice perpetually on the verge of collapse, which makes her measured, intensely enunciated speech a joy to attend. Jones, by contrast, is artistic director of Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre (birthplace of much Australian drama), who rarely performs, and then largely within the anarchic neo-Dadaism of Lloyd Jones’ works. Liz’s unique mixture of non-acting and acting, a perpetual oscillation between enthusiasm and a childish, furrowed-browed annoyance, makes her a joy to observe. I am less familiar with Bayly’s easy, resonant presence, but her vocal and physical inflection was also one of Care Instructions’ strengths.

It is this ordinariness which makes Cameron’s latest work effective. The textual poetics is appealing, but washing as caressing, as rejecting, as pleasure, as love, and as pain, only takes one so far before it becomes simply an excuse to watch Australia’s most engaging performers strut their stuff amidst a pile of invitingly soporific bags.

Dance: Moving Works at Theatreworks, Melbourne 

I concluded my Australian travels with curator Rochelle Carmichael’s dance program, entitled Moving Works. Melbournians often call their city "the dance capital of Australia," and it is satisfying to see an institution like Theatreworks, better known for drama, playing an important role here. The bill featured works by artists who, whilst often experienced performers, have only recently begun to choreograph.

Dance’s relation to theatre has been characterised by at least two major trends. The first is an admixture of the two traditions as "dance theatre," an uneasy alliance of emotional and psychological expressiveness with a mute body. Most of the works drew on this approach, varying from pleasantly slight, comic pieces focused around silent clowning (Daniel Cole and Michael Foster), as well as more overtly Expressionist pieces in which the arched female body suggests a soul reaching out from a deep well or pit of emotional turmoil (Jay Bailey and Carmichael).

The alternative mode in which dance has tended to be blended with theatre draws on the banal, sculptural styles of Performance Art, such as were staged at the New York’s Judson Church in the 1960s. Here art works, styles and bodies rest alongside each other whilst maintaining a certain quiddity. Relatively ordinary or "inexpressive" movement is coordinated within a space defined by sculptural or musical values or other concerns, generating tensions in terms of how one might read the piece, rather than suggesting that the performer offers emotional authenticity located deep within her (or more rarely his) body.

Three works within the program were closer to this approach than to Expressionism, mime or conventional dance theatre. Gulsen Ozer’s somewhat opaque mediation on landscape produces a body which never quite becomes a sign for something else such as emotion, politics, an idea, or a character. The body as body, then, standing and gesturing before us. Dancer Michaela Pegum’s tendency to perform in profile suggests an indifference to dramatic models, turning the performance into a concrete manifestation of what embodiment can mean.

It was however Simone Litchfield’s Hoops With Strings which most directly evoked the Judson heritage. A cello sits before the stage proper, whilst projections of Litchfield repeatedly bowing a violin loops behind her, and Jen Anderson’s arch string-music fills the theatre.

Litchfield describes the piece’s movement and ambience as a "vortex." There is a circling about a central, curved space, together with a clarity of bodily line and intense attention to details running from the shoulders through to the fingertips, that gives a sense of tensed precision, of a gathering of energies and affect in a manner both turbulent yet quietly measured.

Whilst the body is metaphorically compared to the cello, the full affect of this work is not reducible to models of character or of this single metaphoric allusion. This is as much a sculptural or sonic piece as it is a dramatic or choreographic work, an articulation of charged space, line and tempo.

My personal favourite though was Intimate Alien from Taurus Ashley and Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal—largely because it did not make sense. The program note read as if from William Burroughs during one of his more extreme poetic hallucinations, referring to "cobalt freedom," "dissonant doubt" and "alien" possession. 

Each performer begins with a short solo, Tunggal’s costuming suggesting a Goth, Harajuku chic, whilst arcs of her body swing close to the ground. Ashley’s movement, delivered from a standing position, is distinct: more internalised and fragmentary, as in butoh. Even so, his style lacks the full plasticity of butoh such as might suggest a body formed from a provisional cloud of particulate matter. Ashley’s style is both angularly constrained and tremulously dispersive.

When the pair come together, Tunggal occupies most of the space, whilst Ashley creeps behind her, his body a pillar topped by a V-shape made from his elbows jutting out and up from his shoulders, his palms folded together under his nose. He stares at the audience as an alien presence. Compared to the Expressionist vocabulary which dominates dance theatre, this is a post-human creation, a body defined by chaotic amalgamation rather than by a hidden depth of being or of soul which radiates outwards.

Intimate Alien might not have "meant" anything in conventional dramatic terms, but as a set of images with little precedent outside of Georges Bataille’s darker Surrealist ramblings, this was a striking piece.

These and other works show that drama and its close, often fractious sibling called "performance," are alive and well in Australia. What further changelings might be generated by their endless, incestuous coupling and testing of each other’s mutual boundaries, remains to be seen.
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