I leave this show with my body still humming from the standing ovation and raucous laughter of a packed out audience. I’m thinking a lot about genre as I search for an angle to ground myself in a review. Liv Tennet is accurately described in the media release for this work as a multi-hyphenate artist. In For you to know and me to find out, she brings her immense skills as a dancer in multiple styles; and as an actor, writer, theatre-maker and all-round live-artist, into a punchy and tightly-crafted work of physical comedy exploring the tensions of trying to sustain an artistic identity after becoming a parent.  

Clown, comedy and even cabaret are words that hang around a quality of genre-fluidity in this show. They come up when I think of the tone and energetic structure of the work, which unfolds in vignettes, each depicting aspects of parenthood, often with pre-recorded text, spoken by Tennet, played beforehand to set the theme. The choreography and storytelling of each vignette, which builds towards a dramatic climax or a punchline, is closely tied to clever and often surprising uses of prop, costume and sound (which includes a variety of pop music and some instrumental compositions overseen by Tom Broome). The set and prop design brings an absurdist quality that underpins the clown energy; it includes a washing basket full of small childrens’ clothes, scatterings of singing childrens’ toys whose music becomes an amusing choreographic provocation for Tennet, a dressing gown with comically long arms and enormous cartoon-hands, and a headless pillow figure who begins the show sitting on a plinth of white boxes, often representing Tennet’s partner and co-parent to her child.

Tennet’s masterful physicality combined with her weaving of the stagecraft – with dramaturgical input by Barnie Duncan – culminates in a number of vignettes that have the audience in fits of laughter. My favourites include the impression of hypersocial Mums fast-walking in stilettos that they are not used to wearing during a night out on the town, a squeamishly effective use of a dressing gown which cuts through the mushy and sentimental depictions of motherhood with a depiction of the life-cycles of mother spiders, and a scene where Tennet attends a commercial dance audition run by her son, with his wacky choreographic demands spoken over pre-recorded audio. The depiction of intense audition etiquette and energy in this scene is relatable for me as a dancer and hilariously delivered. It’s a moment where the show shifts deftly from high comedy and parody to a deeper commentary on how the vulnerabilities of parenthood and show-biz cross-over in their dealings with inevitable experiences of rejection – often all the more brutal in their casualness after demanding one gives and invests everything one’s got into fulfilling someone else’s creative whims – which can be as changeable as a toddlers! The power with which Tennet dances and repeats the fantasy of her “f**k you” to the audition panel after this rejection is a peak moment in the show where the more tender underlying themes surrounding the frustration and loss that accompany the shift of identity involved parenthood come to the fore. 

The tone shift in this peak is where the genre-mashing in this work, moving from clown and comedy into more abstract expressions of dance-theatre, flows most fluidly and impactfully for me. This is seconded by a motif in the work where suddenly, in the middle of another scene, however engrossing, the lighting state changes to one resembling light flooding from an opened door from the back corner, and a child’s voice asks “Mum?” to which Tennet immediately stops what she is doing and shifts focus to her child, with the sense that even in her own solo show, her focus must remain split. 

There are other scenes in the show that diverge from a clown and comedy tone and move towards capturing perhaps more ambiguous states of experience. The opening scene, where Tennet wears a long-haired wig and performs a dance that seems to shapeshift between a shuddering, glitching robot-doll and glimpses of a Madonna figure, builds a more abstract choreography. Later, choreographies responding to text about the tensions of two artist parents balancing their creative careers with child-raising, and the mixture of loss and opportunity when a child becomes old enough to go to school, also refrain from the comedy focus and bring qualities of softness and reflection into the work. In these moments I feel the genre shift into spaces of contemporary dance-theatre, and other desires grow for me as an audience member – I want to see the wig come back and transform somehow, I want to see these more messy and ambiguous aspects of the show’s theme given more space. At the same time, I wonder if doing that would puncture the energetic flow of the work’s very successful comedy-vignette structure; and so I return to my ponderings about genre and how it builds and manages our expectations as audience. One of the aspects of comedy, and especially clown, in all its celebration of not-knowing and failure, is a paradoxical reality of underlying performer mastery. Tennet’s ability to make stumbles, gaffs and complex moments of contradiction pop, involves a precision in timing and the agency of performer instincts honed over years of practice. This mastery makes for richness and hilarity, and also somewhat restrains the aspects of the show that move towards embodying those more ambiguous, awkward and uncertain spaces of unmastery that accompany the process of identity loss and transformation. I leave the show thus thinking about the way that genres expand and limit possibilities of expression, while simultaneously  feeling appreciative of Tennet’s willingness to experiment with genre and test its capacities.

Ultimately, For you to know and me to find out is a tightly-crafted, entertaining and delightful show in which a seasoned performer tells her own story. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a fun and uplifting night out. 

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