Category Archive: LIFE
Cry Jailolo
Oz Asia Festival, “Cry Jailolo” (Dunstan Playhouse, Festival Theatre, Adelaide) (24/9/15) Jailolo, part of the Indonesian archipelago, has coughed-up a troupe of seven fit young men who (choreographed by Eko Supriyanto) present a genuinely novel dance sequence based on indigenous tribal myth from North Malaku, with modern overtones of environmental threat to a pristine local environment. Sinuous, mesmerizing, ephemeral and fluid, involving moves that are both new and alien, this is an interpretation that intrigues and engages lovers of dance and agnostics alike. Their unusual motion, use of light and shade, stillness, subtle use of hand and foot for percussion, and sense of space,…
Continue Reading →Winningness
It's About the Journey (from "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?")
Marcus Aurelius said “To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.”* Such a relief, then, to see that the Australian television industry is free from all malice, as they join hands and combine to serve us a homogenous array of competition drama. These are not reality shows, but rather a kind of existential reality where you idolise the biggest master who’s talent rules and mark their dance card with an X. These realities simulate contests but actually are, like life, far more varied, subtle, oblique, unfair and satisfying than any staged match, and describe life in their arbitrary and pre-ordained outcomes, which are classified and ritualised according to…
Continue Reading →Theatre of Embarrassment
Brent went home for his guitar (Photo Radio Times)
A very anglo-saxon form of comedy, the Theatre of Embarrassment makes one squirm as well as laugh, and the laugh is often through gritted teeth. It is hard to watch and even harder to believe, yet it unfolds before your very eyes, arch and formal as Kabuki, visceral as a knife-fight in an alleyway. When Norman Gunston asks Warren Beatty if “it’s true Miss Carly Simon wrote that song about you…?…The Impossible Dream…?” or mentions en passant to an interrupting Linda McCartney “It’s funny, you know, you don’t look Japanese,” you are at The Theatre. When Larry and Cheryl David,…
Continue Reading →Saved Cats
Top Cat
Out of the caged room wandered a tiny ginger kitten and nuzzled P’s leg. “He has made his choice.” The inside of his bat ears were green from microchip dye. He howled in his box on the passenger seat all the way home. He reprises this Allen Ginsburg-sized howl, learnt from early on, when he wants to eat or go outside. We called him ‘Miron’ after Sean Micallef’s accident-prone, French plasticine figure, a terrific parody of the old ‘Red and Blue’ euro-trash TV show. We were then living in a rented, rambling pile on the side of a hill and Miron often disappeared…
Continue Reading →Biggles Flies Away
Vale Graeme Bignell (1938-2015) A big crowd gathered at Adelaide Oval for a moving and friendly memorial service to farewell a Great of Glenelg who passed away recently, aged 77, after a long struggle with ill health. Graeme drove a cab in Melbourne as a young man and then took on a month by month job selling cars (if he sold 12 in a month, he kept his job), whilst bringing up 2 children on his own. Having become a phenomenal success at his chosen career, he moved to Adelaide in 1971 to take over the reigns of a failing Ford…
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