In the Victorian country town of Yea, I once saw an old photograph of a Mountain Ash tree; around which, fifteen men, arms outstretched and axes connected handle to handle, could only manage to encircle two thirds of the recently felled monster's trunk. Of course, you will never see a tree this size in East Gippsland, or any other part of Australia, ever again. Acquired for and exterminated by industrial need, it is a quietly devastating experience to remember that the landscape we reside in, both physical and imaginative, has been irretrievably altered and will never be the same again.
Little wonder then that I somehow managed to muck-up two previously confirmed bookings to catch Branch theatre's production of Aviary. Whatever forces were at play among the planets, it would appear that this show and my presence at it were destined not to occur. Disappointed in my failure to observe what is normally an obsessive approach to punctuality, the planets finally aligned and thankfully, I found myself among the audience for one of Aviary's last shows. And what was I confronted by upon entertaining a reversed, yet refreshing perspective of a performance played out before La Mama's north wall ? Not just a cut-out tree constructed out of pine, but a manifestation of a forest and the entire natural world, its presence in our past, its absence in the future, all compressed within an urban space that can barely accommodate an audience of fifty people.
Aviary might be comprised of three short plays by three new writers, but there are some wise heads here churning out verbal interpolations upon personal disfigurement, social amnesia, the qualitative effect of hyperrealism, environmental apocalypse, postmodern narrative and the irretrievable loss of intimacy between human beings overwhelmed by economic ideologies. Heady stuff to be sure, but as any theatremaker knows, if ideas cannot be staged and therefore communicated to an audience then, like deforestation, they become lost opportunities simply shoved aside and forgotten.
At work in Aviary is a cunning director-design interplay that immerses its performers in a stimulating space, thereby de-emphasising the sacred role of the script and rightly reducing such to a balanced evaluation of every element of theatre. It's smart stuff drawn straight from Environmental theatre. Stimulate the performers by requesting they respond to the temporal-spatial implications of actual performance, rather than an abstract and unreliable version of reality constructed from a fading English language inscribed in stone. (Or should I say paper, the often forgotten end product of cutting down a tree). But this is not to say that Aviary's three scripts are not well written. Yet each in its own idiosyncratic way bastardises the word in a manner more consistent with high-modern priests such as Stein and Joyce. The resulting clipped language has little concern for correct syntax, the right dispersal of verbs and nouns, or the logical progression of thought. Instead, the audience is opened up to the mad scramble that occurs when a writer attempts to express what is going on in his or her indecipherable brain. Squawking images, cool reverberating sounds, the pleasure of the text as it stalls on the tongue's tip, before being lost to eternity. This is what theatrical writing should be. Inscribe the chaos of the mind on paper, stimulate the theatremaker, then let God sort it out. Or, for those existentially inclined, the forces present in the natural world and the power of a single tree...
Anna Barnes' Revelation or Bust is at the extreme end of a disfiguration of the English language. The writer's quite natural inability to find the right word becomes in each performer's physical oeuvre a haunting commentary upon climate change paralysis and Kevin Rudd's stalled emissions trading scheme. Consistently thwarted by the hesitation implicit in political opportunism, as well as an inability to accept the facts of climate change by the many and varied eco-technological interests, the performers twitch and forget, recapitulate yet fail to remember, while all the time remaining mesmerised by the duplicitous vision of a young girl being thrown off a bridge. You and I both know climate change is actual. Its cause now is irrelevant. Whether the fault of economic interests or natural forces, the 2009 Victorian bushfires tell us that ecological devastation is arbitrary. Revelation or Bust is an expression of frustration at the procrastination that continues to infect a debate that by absolute necessity, should have been resolved in the late twentieth century.
Dan Giovannoni's Edmund & Grace is a similar rumination upon social amnesia, although in this play the setting is a forest. Unreliable brothers, one male the other female, walk the talk along a path of artificial turf boxing on about the presence of an Old Man who may be a mythological hermit living in the woods, or an ancient tree. Each brother searches for, argues against, and interprets the shattered remnants of a story without end. Giovannoni's elliptical narrative underpins this story that consistently presents as a tale characterised as one variation upon infinite versions of the real. Amnesia is an essential characteristic of the hyperreal. Less important than what a person remembers, is what we, as individuals dominated by the all consuming power of twenty first century Capitalism, have forgotten. Giovannoni's characters are similarly ensnared not by an inability to tell their story, but by an inability to remember the story being told. Getting the detail right, by turn, becomes the right detail in a story that lost its initial impetus eons ago. Once again, you and I both know that climate change is the pressing issue of our time. But post the economic downturn, and families with less money in their pockets and too many mouths to feed, well then, what was that pressing issue once again..?
Ming-Zhu Hii's Small Movements for Three Actors goes for the jugular, using the forlorn figure of the father paralysed by dementia to invoke sympathy for the plight of the elderly. However, recontextualised by director-designer team Melanie Beddie and Daryl Cordell, along with their none too subtle concern with environmental issues, Hii's 'Old Man', a term often used to describe ancient trees, becomes Giovannoni's searched for but never found 'Old Man' of the forest; one consistent with Anna Barne's provocation toward opening our eyes and understanding that deforestation, or the mindless destruction of "Old Men' Mountain Ash such as the Yea example that prompted this review, on a global scale, must end if the effects of climate change are to be dealt with and overcome. And what does Ming-Zhu Hii's "Old Man' hanker for just prior to his death ? An imaginary woman named Olive, or, considered metaphorically, peace with an ecology that has over many years been wracked and torn, decimated and destroyed by the virtue of enterprise and simple, straightforward, selfish human beings. That is to say that all of us together need to remember that the human species cannot continue on this path, because the 'Old Man' can no longer tolerate environmental destruction on a global scale. Remember to forget yes, but do not forget to remember that Aviary, a humble show about the survival of the planet, may very well be the most important theatrical performance to be seen in Melbourne this year.
Aviary: New Writing for the Near Future
Writers: Anna Barnes, Dan Giovannoni
& Ming-Zhu Hii
Director: Melanie Beddie
Performers: Chloe Gordon, Hai Ha Le
& Carl Nilsson Polias
Design: Darryl Cordell
Musical Composition: Natasha Anderson
Light & Stage Management: Bronwyn Pringle
Assistant Director: Amy Turton
Publicity: Samantha Chater
July 15 - August 2, La Mama, Melb.
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