Fernanda Takai

Geese: FLYING IN THE FACE OF TRADITION

Prepare to have your reality questioned and your beliefs challenged. Shadow House Pits’ new original production, GEESE promises to attack your senses from all sides and leave you wondering how you could have survived before. Written and directed by Artistic Director, Joe Woodward, Geese will be taking over The Courtyard Studio at the Canberra Theatre Centre from Tuesday April 26 – Saturday April 30.

Shadow House Pits originated in 1995, and is a direct descendant of the old Pie In The Sky Theatre and Bar, infamous as the P.I.T.S. which operated for just over two years in the 1980s. Run by David Bates (who went on to develop the famous Spiegeltent) and Joe Woodward, the P.I.T.S. was the kind of music and theatre venue you would want to tell your kids about, but they would never believe you could have been that cool (well, that’s what it sounds like. I’m clearly too young to actually know…). Woodward’s Shadow House Pits is now Canberra’s centre for experimental and alternative theatre, theatre that aims to inspire and educate audience and participants, “theatre from the cracks in the psyche of culture”. It is the kind of theatre that divides audiences; either you love it or you hate it, but you can’t argue that it isn’t compelling.

Geese is a performance inspired by the life, work and philosophies of the French playwright, actor, poet and director Antonin Artaud. Artaud was an exponent of what he called the “Theatre of Cruelty”, he believed that the theatre should emotionally affect the audience as much as possible and employed obscure and disturbing lighting, sound and staging effects to best achieve this result. For Artaud, the “cruelty” of the theatre was to submerge his audience in an unfamiliar and shocking performance to break them out of the complacency of their experience and bring them face to face with the dangers of life. His performances would transcend the mere recitation of words and incorporate every sensation of the performer; every movement should have significance in order to affect our reality. To achieve this effect he was inspired by and utilised the ritualized movements of Eastern dance forms, particularly Balinese dance.

Stylistically Geese is inspired by the unusual and often disconcerting work of Artaud, but the issues it addresses relate to our current world and experiences. Primarily Woodward is focusing on an aspect of Australian history, the left wing radicalism that was prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s. Geese is a cultural allegory for a leftist mindset and an inescapable shedding of culture. Through the main character of Simon Weigl, the play questions how Australia has changed in the decades since and what has happened to our sense of radicalism.

The play follows Weigl, exploring his relationships with the three most important women in his life and the effect they have had on him at pivotal moments. As Woodward explains of his character Weigl, “The three key women in his life were all concerned with forms of sacrifice: the mother as a kind of suffering martyr for her Jewish faith; the radical girl, Eva, sharing his journey from Maoist revolutionary and the extreme left to the ultimate sacrifice of death; and Green who sought transformation of self through art as a revolutionary act in the tradition of Antonin Artaud.”

Woodward describes how in opposition to contemporary society’s obsession with looking to the past and reclaiming cultural heritage, the character of Weigl is constantly shedding his past, his family and his cultural heritage, “until there is nothing left to shed”. By erasing his past Weigl aims to transform himself into a new person, free of biological and cultural attachment. The events of the play come to a head in 2002, at the time of the Bali bombings when Weigl loses someone very close to him and struggles to cope with the loss that ultimately prevents his intellectual cleansing.

Woodward argues in this work that a lot of left wing radicalism represented in the character of Weigl disappeared after the tragedies of the September 11 terrorism attacks and the Bali bombings. The consequences of extreme idealism and death as a possible solution for a cause are looked at through the lens of Weigl’s experiences and what happens to those of us who choose to step outside what is considered normal.

Geese promises to be mesmerizing, perplexing, exciting and overall an innovative piece of theatre for Canberra audiences, employing Balinese dance, Butoh, poetic and metaphorical text and original music by Damien Foley. Woodward hopes audiences will leave with “a sense of shock that this is an original play from Australia, a type of experimental and innovative theatre that we don’t necessarily see in Australia anymore”. He wants audiences to “unlock or explode those things that appear to be solid fact”, an awareness and questioning of the world and facts is the message Woodward wants you to take away from this performance, in the spirit of Artaud.

So basically, expect to have your mind bewildered and/or blown by Geese. Personally, I can’t wait to see how it all comes together.

Geese will be showing at The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre from April 26th – 30th. Tickets are available through The Canberra Theatre Centre. For more information visit www.shadowhousepits.com.au.

The Gift of Ann Lewis:

Almanac: The Gift of Ann Lewis AO
The Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University
Showing Thursday February 17 – Sunday April 3, curated by Glenn Barkley MCA, Sydney

The pieces are coming together at Almanac in the Drill Hall Gallery. Beyond reproach the works of Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Sally Gabori stand guard.

During 1964-83 Ann Lewis oversaw and collected works that encouraged the artists of Gallery Ain Sydney to abandon depictive art and look to European modernism. As a result, the thrust of Lewis’s collection was marked by experimentation and ‘futuristic’ ideas. Paint became the subject of art.

The black background of Kngwarreye’s The body painting series, 1996, is disturbed by large sweeping strokes of white applied with the speed and sureness of an intuitive hand. Echoing the ceremonial body paint worn by indigenous women, the work is a vehicle for cultural expression and demonstrates that paint alone can suggest the human body, flesh and its movement.

Although largely an exhibition without figures, the body is front and centre in Rosella Namok’s work. As if talking with her hands, she scratches, digs and drips paint onto the surface of Para Way, other way, 2001. The static medium of paint communicates the history of a people, laying the land, so to speak.

The next room sees the genesis of this kind of storytelling. Playing with oil for oil’s sake; with its thickness, flat pallor and hidden properties Ralph Balson’s Constructive No. 24,1953, comes alive. Balson saw a link between rigidly applied paint and our impulses.

Similarly Callum Innes thins the oil of his canvases with turpentine. He toys with the properties of paint to illustrate that its application takes precedent over a narrative or subject.

As almanacs are used to understand diverse phenomena it is no surprise that the show contains a breadth of themes. Thoughts on the environment versus man-made objects are found in the work of Rosalie Gascoigne and Janet Dawson. Ricky Swallow paints a picturesque impression of emerging technology. Themes of ceremony and chance are embedded in the work of Curley Barduguba and Robert Rauschenberg.

This outstanding private collection has been generously donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where it will return as a potent reminder of Sydney’s foray into abstraction and willingness to experiment.