life on screen: eyton road

In contemporary performance the faculty of memory is often conceived of as an abode comprised of transparent and ever shifting partitions. Always elusive and forever sublime, each division of mental space is characterised by a transient image that conceals a second then a third image and so on... Involuntary memory receding into the back brain, uncovering the dark matter of the unconscious mind engaged in desperate dealings with a life lived in a Technocratic world. 

Talya Chalef & Andrew Gray's Eyton Road is a performance comprised of fragmented plasterboard upon which are projected images from the memories of 2 lives lived on 3 continents - Australia, Africa and Europe - and spanning several generations of each performer's family and their migratory origins. Displaced by war, prejudice, racial hatred and the search for an authentic Home, Chalef & Gray consider their own identities in relation to the forced upheaval of their forebears. With the potential for so much political terror and resulting grief circulating within and around each performer's personal history - the Holocaust, Mussolini's fascist Italy, Apartheid South Africa and the Jewish diaspora - there is an expectation that Eyton Road will grapple with the personal and political consequences of a world in crisis. But auto-performance is a difficult beast to master, and it is the perfomers themselves who must decide which aspect of a person's life can be concealed, or revealed. Understandably, self-censorship is a constant temptation... And this appears to be the case in Eyton Road.

Most intriguing about this work is an absence of all the above: no grief or fear, no terror or guilt, no expressions of love and hate or the human tendency toward eliciting hope from lives trapped within circumstances characterised by deep despair. Instead, the audience receives a tour of each performer's psyche; Chalef's search for her origins amidst feelings of displacement, Gray's stoic deflection of life's difficulties... Very safe, very general, and very, very secure. 

Even so, Chalef and Gray are traversing an exciting, if not difficult path. Eyton Road is a hybrid of projected image, sound, movement and text. It brings to the theatre a sensory interpretation of lives expressed via the multimedia form. La Mama in particular is to be congratulated for daring to grapple with new theatrical mediums that no longer rely solely upon text based modes of communication. 

There is a big show striving to burst forth from Eyton Road. What its creators need to do is return to the emotional impulses that gave rise to its initial conception, and grapple with that which disturbs them most about their personal histories. (We saw some of this grappling in Chalef's 2008 work In Other Words). Most importantly, auto-performance requires each performer reveal to their expecting audience the absolute terror that accompanies stripping yourself bare before a group of people who you will then have to confront in the courtyard post-show. Contrary to popular belief, this is what an audience expects from the theatre. A cruel and vicious dialectic this may be, but Eyton Road was at its most powerful when the audience experienced the emotional suffering of the performers; a suffering that is an essential characteristic of the personal made political, expressed via the medium of theatre. 

Eyton Road

Animateur: Talya Chalef

Performers: Talya Chalef & Andrew Gray

Light: Bromwyn Pringle

Sound: Jared Davis

Stage Manager: Pippa Wright

Dramaturge: Kelly Somes

La Mama, Melbourne, Feb. 4 - 15.

www.lamama.com.au