avatara: molecular synthesis

Normally illuminated by the powerful lens belonging to a pathologist's electromagnetic microscope, the last place a theatre patron would expect to see a molecule is in Space 28 at the Victorian College of the Arts. Deliberately, members of an orchestra, each dressed in uniform white, enter from stage right. Their funereal march complete, each takes a seat in one corner of the performance space. Clarinets are raised, double bass' positioned, and a french horn trumpets the beginning of Avatara; an opera based upon the actual stories of cancer victims and their families. 

Theater itself is a collision of disparate forms, sometimes human and vocal, sometimes sonic and cinematic. Four performers and two puppeteers venture forward from the withering design of a dystrophic molecular structure. Indirectly confronting the man responsible for curing the mutation of cell and emotion that debilitates cancer victims and their families, each demands of a prim, authoritarian doctor a diagnosis of the unbearable arbitrariness of life. He sits in a specialised corner, one leg crossing the other, pronouncing judgement upon each case study with intractable objectivity. Meanwhile, a puppeteer circulates around, through and between this vexed dilemma, raising aloft an illuminated tortoise; one life lived in less ethereal, earthbound terms that has since transcended to a spiritual plain. Then across the floor is projected a cancer victim's scintillating red vascularity. A fork of arterial lightning, it is completed by an esoteric crimson pyramid levitating upon a rear screen. If the ugly, fibrous mystery that is a mutating human cell can have aesthetic form, then it is an alien monument of uncertain origin that descends from the heavens upon unsuspecting victims. Consuming all that goes before it, whether human tissue or the theatre patron's gaze, this grandiloquent pyramid and its insatiable appetite is destruction epitomised. Human cells reproduce toward birth, proliferate during life, and disintegrate in death. So too does the molecular synthesis of theatre, and Avatara is no exception. Disparate forms repel and attract their disparate other in the same way a cantankerous cell desires all, but only succeeds in annihilating the human being that housed its initial reproduction. Birth, life and death; we can be fairly certain that this is one dreamcycle circulating within, and alongside, many others As for any final ascent to a spiritual plain, well, we'll just have to wait and see about that...

One certainty is that opera can be a priggish form. Like the medical profession, it assumes the power of life and death; although this conceit is cultural, and unvetted presumptions of superior taste can and should be readily dismissed. During its early scenes Avatara is a specialised performance in danger of alienating its audience. This is not the fault of the project, but more the fault of opera itself. Emanating a tendency to sing its audience into submission, Avatara quickly corrects itself. The puppeteers bring to this stern, sometimes authoritarian art form a child's playfulness, and its consequent devastating insight. The puppet itself does not wear costume. Not does it have any readily identifiable features. It is reminiscent of Ettienne Decroux's promethean mime, and its veiled, archetypal figure that haunts the lower cerebral cortex with images of work contextualised by a sequence of universal tableau. The puppet walks across stage. Then, quite simply, it flies. William Gibson famously said: "The street finds its own use for things". In Avatara, puppetry tempers opera's iron fist, thereby allowing its audience to not only forge an understanding of the libretto's technical demands, but to participate and receive that which is too readily forgotten in the performing arts. Audiences attend shows because they want to be entertained. Communication is characterised by audiences receiving information, as well as contributing their own information. Just as an avatar is a simulated medium between cyberspace and the actual world, Avatara succeeds in difficult terrain because it fulfills the essential requirement of any performing art. Avatara tells a story. 

Cancer is an incurable malaise that impacts upon us all, even those who are not directly involved with a cancer patient's decline. But speak to a pathologist involved in finding a cure for this mysterious ailment, and they will tell of their utter fascination with a cancerous cell's capacity to become a near perfect mutating form. An entropic cannibal captivated by the destruction of healthy human cells. A molecular synthesis driven toward death by the irreversible power of Thanatos. Avatara however, is a synthesis of disparate forms and disturbing content that combined, is an uplifting tale of the human capacity for forgiveness, derived from the therapeutic power of community storytelling.

Avatara the Opera

Performers: Judith Dodsworth,

Michael Bishop, Emma O'brien,

Merilyn Quaife & Ian Cousins

Puppeteers: Jacob Williams & 

Sarah Kriegler

Video: Ivanka Sokol 

Design: Ina Indira Shanahan

Light: Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist

Composer: Emma Obrien

Music Director: Mark Shiell

Director: Robert Draffin

Space 28, Victorian College of

the Arts, April 16-19, Melb.

 

beckett shorts: watt's word to the wise

It is entirely appropriate that a production staged in memory of Samuel Beckett begins with the sound of an anonymous person popping their cheek with an index finger. Beckett himself was hostile to analysis of his work that espoused the theological dilemma confronting Christianity when pelted by the existential horrors of the 20th century. Inherently theatrical, a finger popping a cheek can be interpreted as a sardonic representation of time; its cruel seepage dripping away at a monotonous rate, and taking our lives with it. But perhaps it also was a simple action that Beckett himself performed. Famous for desiring nothing more than to sit on his arse and think and fart, a similar desire is present and repeated in much of his theatrical writing. Humour is the essence of Beckett's work. Popping a cheek with an index finger is an action a naughty schoolboy might perform. Alternatively, one of Beckett's ruined leech gatherers, several of which are present in this production, may be marking time as each sits on the cusp of death, waiting for life's cruel joke to end, listening to the relentless chatter of Watt's word haunting the hypothalamus, as each prepares for the grave. 

It should be said that this very stylish production is equally troubled by the words of the so-called wise Mr Watt. Beckett's estate makes extraordinary demands upon those wishing to perform his plays. Along with the sound of finger popping there is projected upon a length of fabric a thunderous Absolute in words structured like an act of parliament. Furthermore, rather than leave Beckett's excruciating stage directions on the page, the two performers extract a subtle yet sardonic delight in delivering these to the audience. In Breath, these stage directions have been meticulously followed. Beckett's demand for scattered rubbish is minimalised as 10 or 12 fragments of crimson paper collected in an unsettling pile. And even though the director's desire for each performer to verbally express that which can already be seen is a cohesive device, it also assaults the nerves. No director appreciates being told how to stage a production, especially when this dictum is spouted by the Director's arch rival, the writer. But ridiculing the requirements of Beckett's estate, his writing, and Beckett himself, no matter how subtle the scorn, contains the same surly demeanour present in that same adolescent schoolboy. An unintended consequence perhaps, but a consequence nevertheless. Yet I live in hope that ridicule wasn't the only intention. 

There is much to admire in this carefully crafted, contemplative show. The problem posed by the monologue of Not I being entirely performed by a mouth is solved by an economic use of light. And even though there is the odd moment or two when each performer seems unsure of exactly what they are saying, the production's images counterpoint any generality of words. Dark space, lonely and despairing. Yet space providing moments of humour and self illumination as each character's is seen at their most vulnerable. An outrageous grey wig swamping the forlorn head of That Time's fumbling male protagonist. The tragedy of a death foretold in the sumptuous black lace belonging to a dress worn for the final time in Rockaby. (If you have never watched a person die alone, as we all ultimately will, no matter who or how many surround us as the eyelids fall, see Rockaby and experience the inexplicable finality of death as it slowly unfolds). Or the seductive, yet chilling counterpoint present in A Piece of Monologue, in which a cranky old geezer wearing long socks and nightshirt is accompanied stage right by a slender, yet silent lamp; the lamp saying nothing and everything simultaneously, simply because of its spatial configuration and objective presence. The shining light of Modernism slowly fading, only to be replaced by the incandescent brilliance of the technocratic, Postmodern world. 

Beckett had a lot to say about the so called digital revolution. From wheelchairs to tape recorders, or interior voice partitioned into separately positioned speakers, as they are in this production. Always, it seems, there resides in his plays characters in need of augmentation. Shuffling about in the dark or buried in an incremental pile of purposeless shit. Individuals born into this world with specific wants and needs, only to discover an arbitrary existence that cares not for our petty vanities and egotistical dribble. I have read descriptions of Beckett's work, plays, novels, poetry, film scripts and criticism, as antihumanistic. And why not ? The world we live in may be conducive to human existence. But watch a lonely old woman die in Rockaby, or the metaphorical grasp of a solitary wheeze contained by 2 party whistles in Breath, one in birth the other in death, and the inexplicable understanding that accompanies the knowledge that you yourself are one person among 6.5 billion people, on a planet populated by organisms that live and die along with the sound of an index finger popping a cheek, and you will understand the essence of Samuel Beckett. And so it is with this very stylish and successful production of 6 of Beckett's short writings for the stage. 

Beckett's Shorts: Breath, Not I, That Time, 

Rockaby, A Piece of Monologue &

What is the Word

Performers: Uschi Felix & Dion Mills

Director: Andre' Bastian

Set Design: Peter Mumford

Lighting Design: Stelios Karagiannis

Stage Manager, Light & Sound 

Amanda Prado

Costume: Olga Makeeva

Photography: Jodie Hutchinson

April 14 - 25, La Mama, Melb.

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