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1996 Adelaide Festival
Reviewed by Panos Couros
The challenge was to search for the substance behind the hype, a point where the heights are really hit through art, when you are totally suspended and moved. The program was very accessible, the well designed booking guide offering an extremely enticing and almost overwhelming array of acts from all over the world.
The exploration began with Pierre Henry, the creator of music concrete and a world innovator in electro acoustic composition, presenting his soundtrack to Walther Ruttmann's 1927 silent film Berlin: Symphony of a City. Henry has masterfully orchestrated a score which is rich in allusion. His commentary on a film made in 1927 provokes a freshness which dates the film in several eras. With the knowledge of hindsight, Henry is able to instil the various roles of Berlin history through the
score. Events of both WW2 are strongly, yet subtly alluded to, as well as the post war years up to now. As a survivor of the Paris occupation by the Nazis, this treatment of the film symbolically re-occupies Berlin by the French.
Henry reconstructs Ruttman's film ingeniously throughout the soundtrack, both commenting and anticipating the film's imagery through sound, often as complex atmospheres, and at other times as motifs. I couldn't help wondering whether Henry has lived through the occupation of Paris in WW2, and in some ways his soundtrack, which only contained snippets of French language was a re-occupation of Berlin, with the advantage of technology and history.
Next it was to the haunting heavy mystical vibes of the Whirling Dervishes and The Turkish Mystical Music State Ensemble. This is a serious religious ritual originating in the 13th century performed by Muslim priests who whirl themselves into a trance as they pray to Allah. During this ritual the soul is said to be released from the earthly ties and be able to commune with the divine. The heavy male choir of the Turkish Mystical Music State Ensemble (an orchestra made of traditional Turkish instruments) set a dark and solemn mood for this fascinating and entrancing ritual.
This festival had many themes running through it. Whilst much of the festival was very culturally and linguistically diverse, as well as being very much a younger people's festival - both in the acts presented and in the audience, there were also many works which were about men, sex and manipulation of power.
The highlight, and the saving grace, of the festival was DV8 Physical Theatre from England, in their humorous yet tragic expose of the heterosexual male world of pubs and boozing. Choreographer and Director Lloyd Newson, himself a gay man spent many months visiting straight pubs around England and collaborating with his performers to create this dynamic study of straight male behaviour. With the choreography taken from everyday body language, the dance has a life and fluidity which erupts into stylised and intensely complex imagery of the inadequacies and frustrations of men trying very hard to appear strong and sound. Rife with humour, the work threatens a darkness, and is not afraid to expose the underlying violence which emerges from such insecurity. Poofter-bashing, misogyny and murder are the final and desperate results of such oppression, leaving one in shock and thinking deeply about their own part of the games that men play with themselves and each other.
There was certainly a festival atmosphere well in swing when I arrived at the beginning of the second week, with shows being extremely well attended, and the central festival venue - Red Square, being packed out night after night. This temporary structure in the Parade Grounds opposite the Festival Centre in the heart of Adelaide was constructed from giant walls of shipping containers, in some places up to 7 containers high. Perceptively designed (with the exception of the badly lit entrance stairs making it a little precarious for the sight impaired), with a post industrial feel about it, with scaffolding and lighting rigging complementing the brick red container walls. Holding about 2500 people, the venue was usually nearly full to standing room only. The queues outside were often five wide and sometimes too long to bother waiting for. All programs after 11pm were free, and had caught the attention and participation of most of Adelaide, eclipsing the Fringe club as THE place to be during the Festival. Other than its awe inspiring aesthetics, the program was a feast of top class international acts mixed with Australian performers and highlights from the Fringe as well, often very successfully. A great place to meet and mingle with the who's who and who's not of the Australian and international arts scene.
Overall, this Adelaide festival, which on the surface glistened with excitement, missed its mark. Whilst in all other aspects it was a huge success, it lacked a consistency in the standard of the work presented which distinguishes a truly great festival from just a good festival.
Report by Panos
La Fura dels Baus, a performance group from Spain, shocked audiences with their visions of fascist Europe in M.T.M. , a production played out in a large dance party environment. The performance worked through the crowded standing audience, creating and dismantling large cardboard boxes into huge structures, whilst the large video screens showed live images of the performance and audience, occasionally cutting away seemlessly to show graphic violent scenes which appeared to be performed, but not fully revealed to the audience. This manipulation of the documentary nature of video is best use of video in a performance I have yet to see. Whilst the performance was extremely sensationalist, evoking violent and epic imagery to the loud pulse of a hardcore techno soundscape, I found it lacked the raw hard and compelling energy of the same group I saw in 1988 in Sydney performing Suz/O/Suz, and I was not as convinced as some of the people who saw them for the first time in Adelaide. This was more the glamour hi-tech version, and it fell a little short of truly terrifying me as they had done the first time I saw them perform.
Danish company Hotel Pro Forma in their contemporary opera Operation Orfeo, managed to capture the opposite extreme of emotion, presenting a stunningly visual, yet very minimal choral work of beautiful music. Set on a huge staircase, which disappears into infinity, and framed by a square proscenium, the visual illusions played with dimension and form, culminating in the simplest yet breathtaking laser effect near the end. An entire audience was unified in the spontaneous expression of awe in this rather difficult but highly evocative work.
Form and composition were also used to good effect by the Japanese group Molecular Theatre in their work The Facade Firm. This precise, timed piece (it took exactly 77.7 mins to perform, with a digital clock marking off every second) commented strongly on the hype and rigours of retail selling and the contemporary art world. Sharp formalist movement and imagery defined this work, a tedious yet fresh presentation of new theatre from Japan.
