It’s Fringe Fever time in Melbourne and I’ve been reviewing shows for The Age. I was particularly pleased to be able to cover so many disabled performers for the festival; our sector is going from strength to strength.
Computers and their algorithms are ubiquitous in our lives and with a disarmingly warm delivery McKenzie mines this successfully to connect with his audience. I’m not keen on being hacked, but I’m keen on seeing this show as it develops.
Rarely does bedtime for two-to-12-year-olds involve chaos, cows and peals of laughter. That is, unless you’re at The Listies show ROFL, where Rich and Matt are tackling bedtime with the verve of over-sugared toddlers.
Welcome to Trades Hall where a town meeting has been called to unmask the Mafia hitmen among us. We’re here to witness a game of strategy, accusations, and outright lies (don’t worry, no audience participation required).
“We recommend you enjoy this show with headphones and jammies” is advice I like to hear at the opening of any performance. All the better coming from the soothing voice of Telia Nevile, poet laureate and fellow sleep-seeker.
We all want to feel like we’ve seen something unmissable, never to be repeated. Stuart Daulman delivers just this in each night of A Day in the Life, a show he writes daily based on what happened to him since he woke up the very same morning.
Piper Scott’s satire goes beyond low-hanging fruit. In an acutely powerful monologue, she evokes compassion by exploring valid reasons JK fears men. Tackling this fraught territory simultaneously humanises her and lays bare her misguided logic. Arguments are followed to their logical conclusion and the destination is ugly.
In The Birth and Death of a Physical Artist, Roya the Destroya and Peter Sette aim to show why, despite all the challenges it entails, they pursue life as professional artists.
I’m pleased to be reviewing MICF shows for The Age this year. I first started reviewing MICF in the early 2000s for street press such as Beat magazine and in the years since have published literally hundreds of reviews in newspapers, online publications, zines, and radio programs. Comedy, with its mix of storytelling and/with humour (especially when through the prism of the personal being political), is my favourite live performance art form.
Jordan Gray is the hero Melbourne deserves and needs right now, bringing trans joy to the face of a city that has recently had to stare down transphobic Nazis.
Whether talking about office jobs she loathed or bringing Australian culture to Mongolia, Hoo is in the flow. There’s no dark to offset the light, no life lesson to take home, and not a single lull. It’s peppy, positive, and a damn good time.
Lara Ricote is presenting comedy as real as the truths you’re serving up in the all-women group chat of your most trusted friends. From flirty to filthy, it’s as wonderful as it is wicked.
Scout Boxall is what happens if you’re raised on a diet of educational media, including the nightly news, Oregon Trail, the history channel, and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing: an adult with a true crime and conspiracy theory obsession – one not killed off by working for five years as a court reporter.
As the show unfolds, unravels, tangles, untangles and turns back on itself, we are brought full circle and Davis’ skill at weaving a story you didn’t know you were being told is unveiled. It’s remarkable and gratifying in equal measure.
These deeply personal stories demonstrate a remarkable ability to draw the political from the personal in a way that avoids proselytising and endears him to the audience.
Huge Davies ends the night with deadpan delivery and a keyboard that he wields to deliver musical comedy and comedy about music, both of which have a delicious dark streak.
Dane Simpson named his show Always Was, Always Will Be…Funny on a whim, but it’s easy to imagine the funny kid he was when watching the cheeky, likeable performer he is now.
The latest tale from storyteller Stuart Bowden delivers a melancholic and bittersweet hour of entertainment.
Before us were our parents, and our collective human race. Before the lime green bulbous creation on stage before us were also her parents, her collective race, but they’re all dead now she tells us. This is the true story of her death, her extinction.
The latest of Stuart Bowden’s creations is this forest-dwelling creature living alone under a rock. In a mix of storytelling, dance and music, the tale of this creature, the last of her kind, on her last night alive, unfolds. Her loneliness is a melancholic offering to us. Her lamenting songs and soliloquies explore the loss of her family and friends and the emptiness of having her once adored perfect form now languishing with no-one who understands its beauty left to admire it.
While Bowden’s work is often discussed in terms like lo-fi, the truth is Before Us is deceptively simple. The lo-fi costume and lighting are an understated companion to the tightly woven, precisely executed story. The live looping Casio keyboard, banjo ukulele and sung soundtracks create an emotion-charged backing to the storytelling and dancing.
Where some use dance and physical theatre as an overblown dramatic technique, it is the darting precision of movement in the creature’s walk and the whole-body expression in her dancing that have the audience investing in her truth. There is no over-exaggerated, embarrassed stereotype of interpretive dance, but instead a measured expression of the emotion she is experiencing.
Taking the audience’s discomfort with the intimate performance and sometimes surreal material, Bowden commits entirely to his beautifully drawn character and her final hours. He uses suspense and repetition to deliberately provoke and disquiet the audience, keeping them as awkward and unsettled as she is laying her unfamiliar form bare before us. Her vulnerability makes for compelling viewing.
Bowden’s great talent is in taking the audience along with him, coaxing their participation in this surreal journey. Despite the usual resistance of being pulled further on stage and into the action that most audiences are comfortable with, when Bowden draws them into the tale they follow willingly. It is this talent that takes the surreal material from the unusual to the sublime.
In a tale that makes the audience confront death, loneliness, isolation and failed connection the humour here is a tender, wistful, perfectly bittersweet kind.
