A suspended net and a gothic lament: Melbourne gets a welcome return

DANCE
Sheltering ★★★
Bangarra, Arts Centre Melbourne, until June 27

How lucky is Melbourne? In a normal year, we get only one visit from Sydney-based Bangarra Dance Theatre. Now, a mere three months since we last hosted them – for their spectacular collaboration with Australian Ballet – we get a welcome second visit.

The unusualness of this return is echoed in the unusualness of the programme: a triple bill featuring one newish short work, one long older work and a dance film. The highlight, however, is undoubtedly the long work – an almost gothic lament by Frances Rings.

Sheoak (2015) is ostensibly about cultural survival and ancestral connection, but it has a dark, rather gloomy sensibility. The black-and-white costumes in the first part suggest skeletal remains and long grey branches are used to evoke a vast ribcage.

The keeper of the scar tree (Chantelle Lee Lockhart) is in mourning. Her tree has fallen. Around her, the women are lifted by the men and then abruptly dropped – caught at the last moment and held just above the stage.

In another scene, male dancers in the ensemble gather in a tight spotlight which gradually dilates. With their backs bent parallel to the floor, they make sweeping arm gestures before throwing their heads back as if in pain.

It gets even darker. The skeleton costumes are changed for black rags with streaks of red that look like wounds. Cycles of community instability are translated into extravagant expressions of angst, culminating in a frenzied solo by Kassidy Waters.

The program’s other two works are by emerging choreographers. The first, Glory Tuohy-Daniell’s Keeping Grounded (2023) – a reflection on the need to return to earth in a tech-frazzled world – is staged around, under and inside a vast net suspended over the stage.

The net recalls Dalisa Pigrum’s Gudirr Gudirr, seen in this same venue at DanceX in 2022.

Here, however, it symbolises whatever stops you from being still and grounded. Perhaps it’s also a visual pun on the internet and a life lived always online.

The ensemble draws attention to the most interesting choreographic ideas. This is a company that can make any material seem vivid and full of inspiration. Here we get particularly powerful performances from Roxie Syron and Tamara Bouman.

The film, created by Cass Mortimer Eipper and company dancer Daniel Mateo, is screened between the two live performances. It looks very glossy and the text has its poignancies, but it’s no substitute for real presences.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE | CABARET
House of Rot ★★★★
Malthouse Theatre, until June 20

The documentary film Grey Gardens celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, and this new cabaret pays surreal and affectionate tribute to the two eccentric recluses immortalised, and catapulted to queer icon status, by what has become a landmark of direct cinema.

The doco follows Big and Little Edie, aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Despite being born to wealth, the two women fell on hard times, and over decades they retreated into their dilapidated house in an upscale New York neighbourhood, where they lived – happily enough – in poverty and appalling squalor.

As the two Edies banter and bicker and sing old favourites together, they invite the camera in with a playful attitude that they’ve long since adopted with each other as a survival strategy.

Performance, and the need for an audience, is essential to their humanity, and what struck me most, rewatching the film, is the private integrity of their collapsing world. That’s something House of Rot captures with great style and strangeness.

Co-creators Dino Dimitriades and Victoria Falconer amass an assortment of classic standards, contemporary pop music and original composition in a jumble of bold, sometimes quite mad musical oddities tailored to the inimitable talents of Paul Capsis (Big Edie) and Adam Noviello (Little Edie).

The show comes wrapped in a script that subverts rational interpretation. The Edies do toy with the audience through direct address, but the verbal exchanges between them resemble absurdist or surrealist drama, building a sense (even more than the original film) of a private language that extends organically, and achieves a transcendent quality, through song.

Some numbers arrive drenched in high camp: Capsis belts out the anthemic queer show tune I Am What I Am, and Lana Del Rey’s Young and Beautiful (which Del Rey fans will be aware was largely inspired by Grey Gardens) is reworked into a duet between mother and daughter.

Other songs press beyond camp into bewitching vocal experimentation which shouldn’t work at all but clicks in performance. A mash-up of Stephen Sondheim and The Cranberries, for instance, dares to present Send in the Clowns and Zombie sung in tandem – a deranging, and somehow electric, experience.

And one of Noviello’s finest moments – a nude performance of The Divinyls’ I Touch Myself – reconfigures the raunchy banger into a soaring ballad of loneliness, of lost love.

Capsis’ otherworldly presence and vocal versatility come to the fore, too, from screeching rock ’n’ roll to a song made famous by jazz and blues legend Dinah Washington. There’s even a tragicomic scene in which Big Edie chows down a supermarket chicken, idly masticating with a blank expression on her face as an extended viola solo is played onstage beside her.

The design is sparing but mostly effective, the lighting working overtime to carve out theatrical space, though dim projections feel superfluous given that you can’t take your eyes off the show’s stars.

Still, House of Rot is musically inventive and unabashedly idiosyncratic (to the point that it might confuse those unfamiliar with Grey Gardens) and a striking vehicle for two of our most distinctive and talented cabaret performers.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSICAL THEATRE
Stella: A New Australian Musical ★★★
Monash Performing Arts Centre, until June 20

Creating a musical from scratch is a difficult and laborious challenge. Stella refuses to set its sights low, and quite rightly. This musical odyssey is, after all, based on the life of that dauntless Australian literary pioneer, Stella Miles Franklin, and it reflects at least some of its subject’s boldness, determination, and passion for art.

Typically, biographical musicals focus on legends of popular music – the Tina Turners and Michael Jacksons of the world – though if you nudge the curtain of cultural amnesia that hangs over the Australian stage, you’ll find more adventurous indie nuggets.

All sorts of figures have been brought to all-singing, all-dancing life, from leaders in Australian politics (Keating! the Musical), to sport (Shane Warne the Musical), and even cookery (Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert).

Literature? Well, the author of My Brilliant Career (a book which has itself been adapted into a brilliant musical in recent years) is in another league.

Franklin wrote her most famous novel as a teenager – it was published with a glowing, if sexist, foreword by Henry Lawson in 1901 – and she lived until 1954, with a long, self-imposed exile in the United States and Britain, and a subsequent return to Australia that revived her literary fortunes.

There’s a wealth of material, and the main criticism of Stella is that the storytelling doesn’t have a consistent and compelling dramatic shape. Franklin’s early life (and complex relationship with her family) sets an intimate frame, mirroring that of her irrepressible heroine, Sybylla Melvyn. From there, the drama frays into a scattershot approach to the five decades between My Brilliant Career and the inauguration of the Miles Franklin Award upon the author’s death.

There isn’t quite a song for every sentence on Franklin’s Wikipedia page, but the musical is over-realised. And the desire to leave no stone unturned tends to dissipate its central emotional conflict between the demands of art and those of life.

Monique diMattina compensates with music. Her songs are often charming, with clever lyrics and a melodic approach that finds inspiration in colonial balladry, as well as music hall, cabaret and other popular styles from the first half of the 20th century.

Having the live orchestra onstage works well, and Geraldine Hakewill gives a luminous performance as Stella, especially opposite other women in the cast.

Indeed, you could argue that female friendships and rivalries alone could sustain the show. Highlights include affectionate scenes with Stella’s younger sister, Linda (Shubshri Kandiah), and turbulent ones with her mother (Johanna Allen), whose limited opportunities concentrate her daughter’s fierce feminism. Just as interesting is Stella’s complicated disdain for fellow writer Dame Mary Gilmore (Allen). The male characters (Joe Kosky, Kaya Byrne) are less convincing, with a rather sanitised portrayal of an alcoholic father, among other things.

Theatrically, Stella’s a bit of a mess, but it’s musically talented – and a defiant and daring attempt to channel the spirit of one of the most important figures in Australian literature.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Doric String Quartet and Lloyd Van’t Hoff ★★★★
Musica Viva, Melbourne Recital Centre, June 16

An unusual instrument gave a unique flavouring to otherwise standard programming by the UK-based Doric Quartet. Adelaide’s Lloyd Van’t Hoff brought the mellow sounds of his basset clarinet (a longer version of the standard instrument with an extended lower range) to a recent clarinet quintet.

Thomas Adès’ 2021 Alchymia was inspired by “the alchemical world of Elizabethan London”. Cast in four movements, this evocative score predominantly inhabits a soft-grained soundscape into which the basset clarinet has been effectively integrated.

Whether in the gentle sinking motives inspired by Shakespeare’s Full fathom five, the fluid take on a Tudor song or the heartfelt lamentation of a viol consort, Adès has an uncanny ability to entice the listener into his reimagined Elizabethan world.

A modernist feel pervades Divisions on a Lute-song, a finale that bends the listener’s ears with special effects and brings the clarinet to the fore. Here Van’t Hoff revelled in impressive virtuosity and astutely judged timbral effects.

Full of youthful athleticism and wit, Britten’s Three Divertimenti for String Quartet proved an attention-grabbing opener.

An artful work in which the composer was at pains to make all four instruments equal partners, Beethoven’s substantial “Razumovsky” String Quartet in F major, Op. 59, No. 1. allowed time to appreciate not only the virtuosity of each player but the enticing timbre of their historic instruments.

In a characterful account fusing elegance and passion, Beethoven’s inventive textures were clearly delineated. Rhythmic buoyancy sustained the opening Allegro, while the outsized scherzo never flagged. The sad intensity of the third movement contrasted the muscular finale based on a Russian tune admired by his noble patron.

For those who thought that it was a waste of Van’t Hoff’s considerable talent to appear only in piece, an encore of the slow movement from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet was sweet consolation.
Reviewed by Tony Way

THEATRE
The Wolves ★★★
Theatre Works, until June 20

As the curtain rises on the FIFA World Cup this week, Theatre Works brings us a striking American play that highlights the beautiful game.

Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves – shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017 – follows the fortunes of a girls’ high school soccer team. It’s structured around weekly training sessions, where the girls assemble on a soccer field to practise and play and gossip among themselves.

Inventive staging transforms the space in this production. The audience flanks a rectangular expanse of astroturf in two banks at right angles, as if arranged for the best possible view of a corner kick, and the action is peppered with soccer drills and choreographed exercise routines that ground all the chat in physical presence and prowess.

The performers seem to relish letting their feet do the talking, though it’s the intricacy of the overlapping ensemble dialogue that’s the play’s defining feature.

The Wolves is structured largely as naturalistic adolescent gossip. While director Belle Hansen makes a fair fist of orchestrating the dialogue so that it feels overheard, the venue’s challenging acoustics don’t make her task easier: some of the hubbub is difficult to comprehend, and occasional nuances in exposition are lost.

Yet, the central dynamic is animated precisely, as the girls navigate shifting goalposts between individual and collective identity, between working out who they are and how they behave, unconsciously or otherwise, as social beings.

Topics of conversation rove widely and snake from the global to personal and back again. A discussion about the trial of an elderly genocidaire from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge might yield to whispered speculation (behind other girls’ backs) about which team member had an abortion. Or why the new, homeschooled member of the team (Desiree Katakis) lives in a yurt. Or who can pull off a bicycle kick.

Each player carves out a distinctive niche, as friendships, rivalries and betrayals emerge.

A stalwart striker and her best friend (Bek Schilling and Shanu Sobti) fall out after a ski trip, the reliable team captain (Erin Perrey) tries to keep her motley bunch of likeable oddballs focused, and their goalie (Ellie Nunan) suffers serious anxiety disorder that will take the arrival of tragedy to cure.

One player won’t survive the season, and that revelation, when it comes, sees a piteous monologue from a grieving Soccer Mom (Emily Joy) reduce the group to stunned silence, and a recommitment from the team to honour their dead friend.

A final moving moment gets smudged a little, partly by design choices that don’t do enough to support the performances. It’s a valiant production, though, most involving when the cast relaxes into the absurdities and vulnerabilities of being a teenager, and its tragicomic view of adolescence should only grow and deepen through the season.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Isles of Light ★★★★
Australian Chamber Orchestra, Hamer Hall, June 14

English violist and violinist Lawrence Power was the perfect choice to lead the Australian Chamber Orchestra through this visionary celebration of British music.

Centred around Ralph Vaughan Williams’ groundbreaking Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, Power’s thoughtfully devised program began with an “English Mixtape” featuring music by Purcell, Jonny Greenwood, Kate Bush, Ivor Gurney, the Tallis tune on which the Fantasia is based, and finishing with the eleventh of Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

The remainder of the concert explored the spatial possibilities opened up by the Fantasia, which masterfully uses three distinct bodies of sound to create a haunting interplay of light and shade.

Partly commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and dedicated to Power, Irish-born composer-violist Garth Knox’s The Ancient Mariner: Concerto for Viola and String Orchestra is an enterprising recounting of Samuel Coleridge’s classic tale of transgression and redemption.

Playing the main protagonist, Power recites some of the poem while the players adopt various positions, sometimes looking like rowers on an ancient ship. The dead albatross is represented by a detuned viola hung around the soloist’s neck. This is a story told through visual imagery as much as through the effective but often sparsely textured musical material.

Inspired by Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells’ soulful Elegy for Viola, String Quartet and String Orchestra set the mood for an impassioned account of the Fantasia, in which Power (now taking up the violin) relished its chiaroscuro and revolutionary harmonies.

Vaughan Williams’ student Elizabeth Maconchy’s accomplished Symphony for Double String Orchestra was full of ear-catching detail, not least in Power’s cameos dispatched on his 1742 “ex Baillot” Francesco Stradivari violin.

Throughout the concert, Power demonstrated the extraordinary timbral capabilities available across the entire range of his 1580 Amati Brothers viola. His ardent expressivity and the eager collaboration of the Australian Chamber Orchestra made for a fascinating musical journey.
Reviewed by Tony Way

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.