Sunday Arts Magazine

26 Jun 2016

End of World, Parallel Futures, 4.48 Psychosis, Dust-A Case Study

Arts, Books, Education Technology, Music, Performing Arts, Technology, TV & Film, Visual Arts

Brendan jumps straight into film review.  First up is Mustang which is B’s favourite film so far this year. It is a Turkish/French film (controversial in Turkey) set in a beautiful rural area, about 5 rambunctious girls. They live in a conservative family, and to control their spiritedness, the relatives decide to marry them off. B was ‘blown-away’ especially by the youngest sibling– 4.5 to 5 stars.  Next is the sequel to animated film Finding Nemo (2003) called Finding Dory— with Ellen DeGeneres’ blue fish as the main character and an all-star cast voicing the others. It has broken box-office records for an animated film. A strong 4 stars from Brendan.

Special guests this week are:

13:09 to 30:30 mins—Writer and actor Patrick Moffatt is here to talk about Come with me to the End of the World on at the Malthouse Theatre from 5 to 24 July. Patrick started acting and directing other kids in send-ups of ads at primary school. At Curtin Uni in Perth he did a degree majoring in Theatre Arts and then got into VCA in Melbourne with an unusual audition. After VCA he produced a play and then was invited to join the Ranters Theatre Company by founders Raimondo and Adriano Cortese–23 years ago. It started off text-based but morphed into more group-devised pieces. They have established a network of producers and have toured all over the world. They just returned from New York with a show called Song and were actually there when Bowie died. Ranters’ latest production is a group-devised piece that developed out of a lot of improvisation which, at the end, started to reveal the actors’ interior lives which was very moving to witness. They thought the show could be about change and desire and ‘the collapsed dream’ meaning– things that you think would not finish such as a relationship or parent never dying and your quality of life reflecting how you negotiate these ‘collapses’.  The show is ‘a gentle meditation’ on these things and your own mortality. The show feels improvised but is actually scripted. Patrick explains the title and also the role of fantasy and dreams. They do want to create a space where people’s lives can enter into the piece. He gives an example of one such happening.

31:00 to 55:32 mins–Artist, sculptor and photographer Sonia Payes to talk about her career and her new solo exhibition- Parallel Futures– at McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park-a free event  from 3 July to 6 November.  She knew she was artistically oriented when she won a landscape competition, in Grade 3. She became a primary teacher, which she enjoyed, and got an ‘art release’ when she taught art and made backdrops and costumes for musicals. Once she had kids she started using a camera and studied photography at 2 colleges learning darkroom skills and producing beautiful B&W prints.  She loves documenting family and street life, photojournalism and experimenting/playing with photos and in the darkroom. Sonia is also a sculptor and is computer savvy but needs her technical experts which she works with to be able to get her envisioned sculptures out there. She talks about digital installations and animations she’d done called Insomnia I & II plus other solo exhibitions including Re:Generation (see her website) involving 5 metre tall, four-faced fibreglass heads installed in the park at McLelland. She got the McClelland Achievement Prize for this. Parallel Futures- is an indoor event, comprised of over 50 works and has both old and new works in all her disciplines but is all one story–about humanity, the environment and global warming.  She gives examples of how the works depict this and also the inspirations for some of the works. At the exhibition there will be a book about Sonia written by Ashley Crawford. Apart from her website, Sonia also has Instagram.

56:38 to 1:15:44mins–Director and performer Kendall Jane Rundle is here to talk about her theatre company’s (Bare Naked Theatre) new production 4.48 Psychosis on from 29 June to 2 July at Metanoia Theatre at the Mechanics Institute in Brunswick. Kendall started learning drama from childhood and got the bug. She and her family moved here from South Africa and Kendall decided to study Anthropology at uni. She went travelling, met a guy and went to Montreal where she got involved in the exciting theatre scene– and stayed for 13 years. Bare Naked Theatre to her means raw, open storytelling where the audience feel they’ve been part of an experience.  4.48 Psychosis, by British playwright Sarah Kane, is emotionally violent and brutal. The premise of the play is you’re experiencing a psychotic breakdown; a woman’s deepest darkest moment before she decides to kills herself at 4.48am. The text has no characters or scenes. There are 24 vignettes with a clue that now there’s a different speaker. Kendall and cast interviewed people with psychosis to get the feeling of the experience. The consistent thing they found was an exhaustion & tiredness with life, and emptiness. Kendall has tried to direct with this theme and remain true to the experiences of the people she interviewed. There are 4 people in the cast including Kendall and they all worked together to get an interpretation that’s true for all 4 of them.  Also on 30 July, a speaker from SANE Australia and Kendall will have a Q&A panel after the show.

1:15:58 to 1:30:51 mins–Donna Jackson is here to talk about her book Art and Social Change, Dust: A Case Study. As a child and teenager Donna did youth theatre & ballet classes, then studied drama & English at a tertiary level. She worked at a women’s refuge, played in girl bands and worked at Footscray Community Arts Centre where she set up The Women’s Circus and did large-scale shows.  The dust in her book is asbestos and the book is about the large-scale theatre show ‘Dust’.  Donna did the show for 7 years and 7 seasons in a lot of places including Williamstown, regional Victoria, Adelaide and Brisbane. The show talks about people making compo claims against James Hardie because they’d been exposed to asbestos and gotten sick. After a long battle they won. Songs for the show were written by Mark Seymour.  There were actors, technicians and a choir in the show.  Donna also worked with 70 people in each place getting them to tell their story of asbestos exposure. She wrote the book to ‘wrap-up’ the show talking about the origins, creation & impact and providing resources such as the script, the songs, sheet music, an ABC doco about making Dust, an evaluation model and lesson plans for schools. Donna talks about how the idea for the show snuck up on her via a building worker, when she was doing another show. Also how she collaborated with people to get photos, film vox pops, evaluate the show, help edit the book and design it so it had energy and colour. The book is available at Sun Bookshop in Yarraville or online via Paperback Books and Donna’s website.

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