Material Mouth, performed and devised by Carolyn Connors. Directed by
Margaret Cameron, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist. La Mama Theatre
until October 9.
Material Mouth, says the press release, is a "theatrical concert for solo
voice", which seems as good a description as any. Created and performed by
the remarkable Carolyn Connors, it's as hard to classify as it is to
adequately describe - a work of performance art that encompasses sound
poetry, compositions for voice and wine glass, cabaret and satire.
In Material Mouth, music, poetry (in its least semantic form) and theatre
collide in the female body. As much as anything, this work is a very
conscious performance of femininities, a subtly devastating parody of how
the politeness of the feminine is laid, like a constricting costume, over
the impolitic female body. The gap between the proper and the improper
emerges as a disturbance, in expressions of hysterical extremity clothed in
a parade of apology, which assault the audience with a discomfort that is
very close to embarrassment. The response, certainly on the night I saw it,
is a lot of laughter.
This is not to say that Connors isn't funny; she is often very funny indeed.
But there was an interestingly nervous edge to the laughter of the audience
the night I saw it; Material Mouth was as clear a demonstration of the
mechanism of laughter as a release for anxiety as any I have seen.
Carolyn Connors has been called one of the "most experimental mouths" in
Australia. A composer, keyboardist and vocalist, she has collaborated with
the sound poets Amanda Stewart and Chris Mann, and most recently she was the
"Psychokinetic Pianist" in Gotharama with Moira Finacune, star of the "new
burlesque". Here she is directed by Margaret Cameron, one of the most
innovative and distinctive theatrical talents in Australia.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/
Forumitis
On the train home from today's (Sunday's) forum, I opened Giorgio Agamben's
book of essays, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, to this serendipitous
passage:
'Primo Levi has shown... that there is today a "shame of being human", a
shame that in some way or another has tainted every human being. This was -
and still is - the shame of the camps, the shame of the fact that what
should not have happened did happen. And it is shame of this type, as has
been rightly pointed out, that we feel today when faced with too great a
vulgarity of thought, when watching certain tv shows, when confronted with
the faces of their hosts and with the self-assured smiles of those "experts"
who jovially lend their qualifications to the political game of the media.
Those who have felt this silent shame of being human have also severed
within themselves any link with the political power in which they live.
Such a shame feeds their thoughts and constitutes the beginning of a
revolution and of an exodus of which it is barely possible to see the end.'
It was almost startling, since it articulated something of the complexity of
what I was feeling at the time. There I was, being an "expert", in a
context in which my position behind the microphone and the attendance of an
audience made a constituency of authority. And within that constituency,
with the authority, however spurious or legitimate, conferred on us as
panellists, we spoke about the act of theatre criticism.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/
All the best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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