What is left when live performance is over? Emilie Collyer traces the lingering effects of sitting in the dark
Without looking at images or reviews, try to remember
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A dark space
Bodies, women’s bodies, in swift movement
Genuflecting, caught in squares of light
The squares of light keep moving
The women seem to move with lightning speed
Keeping up with the light
There is something brutal in this action
Is it their breath?
Do they fall to their knees each time?
The sequence goes on for a long time
It is mesmerising, worrying, exhilarating
What does it say to me?
It says there is more than one Joan
It says there is beauty in obsession. Or obsessiveness. These are different.
It says this is not a play
It says verbal language does not have primacy here
It says make your own meaning
It says: are you breathing differently now? How are you sitting? Are you aware of the people around you? The theatre you are sitting in?
It says: what of your body? As a woman (me). What do you kneel for? Pray for?
What might you be punished for?
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Where do performance works live once they are over? I am remembering four Melbourne independent productions from the last four years. What lingers? What stays in the body and the mind? What echoes keep resonating?
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There are two bodies: young, fit bodies
I know the writer who is also one of the performers
She is a Sri-Lankan Australian woman
I don’t know the other person – a skinny white guy
Both performers are playing privileged young white dudes
Jeremy and Lucas
This excites me
A queering of body
A smashing of rules
The performers have bounding energy
They are boundless
There is a cap and baggy shorts
The words leap like fire crackers
It’s like a dance, this language
Sinewy and muscular and sexy
And fuck it’s funny
Funnier than theatre is supposed to be
Like real funny
Not carefully constructed comedy funny
Funny that kicks you
In the gut
In the dick
Or the cunt (am I allowed to say that? Write that? Why is “dick” more benign than “cunt”?)
Wherever you feel it most
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An apology is warranted, to all of the artists who made the works I am remembering. I will get it wrong. I will remember things incorrectly. Sometimes I don’t remember much at all. Mostly a feeling.
I looked for a pithy quote about memory and found this, from Primo Levy:
“Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument…. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.”
What do I erase from the performance works I have seen? What extraneous features do I add, and why? Is it so the memory of the work answers a need in me, or completes a narrative I want it to tell?
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It starts again with bodies
women’s bodies
jiggling
there is joy
there is playfulness
with gender tropes
something about watching
and being watched
and the quality of movement
something about
the difference
between how men watch and move
and how women watch and move
and a questioning of all of it
the rules
(again)
about who we are
and how we watch
and how we move
there is a twinkle
i think there are boobs
if not straight away
then at some point
yes
at some point
there are definitely boobs
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I won’t interrupt too much. It’s a way of grounding. Bringing myself back to the present as I ferret around the rooms of the past. What sticks with me? I am surprised already at how important bodies are. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. I am recalling live performance work after all, not pieces of visual art or literature or film. The whole point of these encounters is that I was in the room with the performers. We made the work together. We made the memory of the work together.
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It’s hot. Is it hot? No, it was last year that it was hot. One of those stifling summer days. This year it is cooler. I wear my new yellow pants. It is the first time I have worn them. I don’t know why that is important. Maybe because the event is social. It’s roaming. It’s about meeting and interacting. This is not a sit-in-the dark event, although there will be a few moments to sit at least in semi-dark. Why am I having trouble building the picture?
It’s outside. An open space. Little temporary huts set up. A roving ice-cream stand. Food trucks. People. Maps stuck to the wall. Timetables about what is happening in each space. It is a festival. A feast. I arrived alone but I know people here. I connect with a friend and we roam together. We are roaming through the imaginations of young people. The physical manifestations of their imaginations, created in rooms and huts and the open space. As art, as games, as activities, as talks, as performance. It bubbles.
I had the choice about what colour lanyard to wear, to indicate how much personal interaction I was up for. Last year I wore green. This year I choose red. I want to be more anonymous, metaphorically in the dark. Free to observe without the pressure of engagement. I feel a bit guilty about this. As if it’s not in the spirit. But the option is there. The generosity of that gesture by these young people. “You get to choose,” they say. As an antidote to all the times we don’t get to choose, or the time they didn’t get to choose. In this gesture, there is care.
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Why did I choose these four works, of the hundreds I’ve seen in the last few years? What narrative am I trying to shape about Melbourne theatre? Or about myself and my tastes?
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After the women in the light
After the kneeling
After the breath and the acceleration
There is a slow gathering of sticks
It is a labour
Joan is doing the labour
Building her own pile of sticks
The pile of sticks (I know because I know a little bit about her story) on which she will be burned
This is the magic of theatre
Not “theatre magic”, although there is that too
The magic of a form that allows multiple meanings.
At once.
From the same image.
Or moment.
Joan builds her own destruction.
She could stop.
Could she stop?
We could stop her.
Would we stop her?
Like the sequence of kneeling.
Of genuflecting.
Of squares of light dancing.
It carries on for some time.
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It is do with possibility. These are works that stayed with me because they showed me something in a new way, about making theatre, about putting words together. About power and politics. About ways to be together.
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There is a patch of fake grass
There is a life-size cardboard John Wayne
There is a giant dildo made of avocado
Is it real?
Is it a model?
There is definitely some real avocado
It is smashed
(Again, the smashing)
There are stories about what a father is
And what a man is
The cardboard John Wayne is the dad of one of the characters
Dad and son row a boat down a river
They shoot the breeze
In the comedy is pain.
Miscommunication.
The two characters fight
The young men
The friends
In an epic monologue
One of the characters
Tells a story
About an old woman he is caring for
About having sex with her
Is that right?
It is hilarious
It is terrible
There is pain in the re-telling
About how hard we try
To get it right
To connect
To feel something
About how hard we get it wrong
So often
In so many awful ways
The wrong is side-splitting
It splits
Open
What seems
And what is
It hurts
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I realise as I try and find words to describe the memories, that I am looking for an underlying tone. What is the music or rhythm of the work that has stayed with me? Memory lives in the body as much as the mind. These works that have stuck with me took up residence in my body. As labour, as laughter, as belonging, as pain.
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In the front row
I fizz with delight
as scenes
unfold
with limbs
and faces
spaghetti
and giraffes
sparkles
and sweat
wigs
and platform shoes
music
and dance
and all of it
a celebration
and
a “fuck you”
all at once
both
at the same time
jitterbugging
back
and forth
it is
a gift
we have all
been given
with
“fuck you”
joy
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These works made me feel part of a community, but they also extended my sense of community. They introduced me to new communities. Each in a different way, they welcomed other communities and people into spaces that can feel closed. We shouldn’t demand this of all work all the time, but this is important: this reaching out or opening up. This turning things around so new doors appear and new windows open.
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I am with my friend and she is feeling unwell. This is part of the memory. The intersection of vulnerability and creativity. The body and the community. There is a moment in one of the spaces. It’s a large square space that is an installation and performance work about young women and anger. In a dark room, school desks are placed in a circle, each in a spot of light. Each desk has a surface that can be drawn upon with chalk and each desk has a stick of chalk. The invitation is to write or draw while listening and watching.
We hear the voices of young women speaking about moments of pain and anger in their lives. In the centre of the circle of desks is a microphone. A young woman enters and delivers a monologue about anger. She is charming and funny. Before this, though: the moment. My friend lifts the lid of the desk she is sitting at and writes something furiously. Then she moves away from the desk, away from light, into the dark, and sits on the floor, head in hands. I don’t know what she wrote. She seems distressed. My heart clenches. I finish my drawing of burning stars and sit on the floor near her. “Are you okay?” I ask. She nods. Yes. Thanks. There is something profound in this room. In this place of light and dark, of listening and responding, of circles and squares.
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There is a section where a young woman’s genitals are examined
She stands still
An older woman lifts the younger woman’s skirt
She has medical equipment
She is testing whether the young woman is a virgin
On a screen above the stage we see the younger woman’s face and torso as this happens
We don’t see her genitals
It is invasive
It is calm
It is sanctioned
It is potentially triggering
For any person in the audience who has had unwanted attention or invasive procedures to their person
Particularly by someone in a position of authority
It stays in my body
It brings back the tight, taut scrape I associate with pap smears
It brings back excitement of first times
Hands and genitals
Especially those that were forbidden
But desired
Or dangerous
Where I was in danger
It opens memory doors
And flicks them closed
Back here
In this room
Watching
The young woman being probed
Again
None of us does anything
We don’t try to help her
(How many of us have been similarly not helped?)
These rules of theatre
Fascinate
Implicate
We are complicit
In this act
Of watching
It is important to history that Joan was a virgin
This moment asks:
Why is this important?
Why is the world so concerned about whether a young woman is a virgin or not?
What, even, is a “virgin”?
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This work demands
Who are you in all of this?
Where do you stand?
What do you think?
About white boys
And privilege
And dicks
And dildos
And who gets wealth
And who doesn’t
And what can any of us do
About it anyway?
Come on
What are you going to do?
I imagine the work playing to a group of teenage boys
Would they love it?
Find it funny?
Its in-your-faceness
Would it live on in them?
And if so
How?
Or what about
A group of older men
The kind of men
Who have all the things
The money
The power
The dicks
The houses
The patches of grass
The houses on the grass
The public spaces
The right to speak
The voice
The pussies to grab
Pussy seems like such an inferior word to
Cunt
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After the show
I wait
in the upstairs foyer
at Trades Hall
my friend knows the performers
and I want to meet them
and tell them
how the show
made me glow
it’s nice
to do that
share what moved you
with the people
who made it
this is how art
pulses through
the world
and
as sometimes happens
I am now a fan
I start to follow
these performers
and see
their other
shows
keen to see
how else
they are putting
that
“fuck you” joy
into the world
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There was a second-hand clothes stall in one of the huts. It had a dress out the front with a print of cowboys and horses. It caught my eye. When I first saw it I thought about trying it on. But I didn’t. Later, when I went past again, they were packing up the stall so I’d missed my opportunity. I thought a bit about that dress the following day. And I thought about the room of dress-ups and seeing Indigenous kids in that room mucking around and having fun and how rarely I see Indigenous kids in Melbourne theatre and arts spaces. There was a dance party at the end of the night. I didn’t stay for that. I watched the artists who had put the event on sing a song together and take a bow. And then I left. I slipped away and left them to their celebration.
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The works, variously, sometimes simultaneously, hold something difficult, examine it, play with it, or release it. This must be one of the reasons I go to theatre and write for theatre. This attempt, this engagement with difficulty: to hold, play, examine, and release.
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There is fire in the work
On stage
An attendant stands close by
A person not in the cast
Someone trained to monitor fire
This is a big deal in theatre
What with occupational health and safety regulations
They don’t burn the pile of the sticks
Or any of the actors
It is fire on a pole
Somehow
Later, each of the actors stands at a microphone
They each deliver a text
Each text is different
I can’t remember the texts
What I remember are:
The patches of light
The kneeling and breathing
The gathering of the sticks
The probing of the genitals
The fire on a pole
That burned with a flash
So bright
And was then
Extinguished
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2 comments
Thank you Emilie, this was such a pleasure to read and ponder.
Beautiful alternation of prose and poetry: the prose grounds, the poetry soars.
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