Notes on LA, Mother Courage and politics
Your peripatetic crrrritic is back from LA, which was a gas. I read poems
and talked about myself to people who were polite enough to be interested,
and checked out a little of what is a very interesting music scene.
I got a bit of everything: I saw the NY New Music Ensemble at the LA arts
museum, LACMA; the Canadian band Broken Social Scene at the Henry Fonda
Theatre in Hollywood Boulevard; jazz at the Catalina Club , which is like
stepping straight into a black and white 60s movie; the extraordinary
trumpeter, composer and improviser Wadada Leo Smith at the Frank
Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall (the closest I got to Disneyland) as
part of the Redcat program produced by Calarts Theatre; and finally, again
at LACMA, a mind blowing performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations , by the
Russian pianist Sergey Schepkin . Oh, and lots of art - a Kiki Smith
exhibition and a wonderful William Kentridge piece at the MOMA in San
Francisco (where I also went to the City Lights bookshop and hung out at a
beat bar) and Pisarro and Cezanne at LACMA.
It's fair to say that I had a most interesting time.
And yes, Virginia, there is theatre in LA. I managed to get to one play - a
production of David Hare's translation of Mother Courage put on in a
gorgeous new theatre space, the Boston Court , in Pasadena.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Billy Maloney by Bill Garner and Sue Gore, directed by Denis Moore, designed
by Shaun Gurton, lighting by Nick Merrylees. With Don Bridges, Jim Daly and
Ruth Schoenheimer. At North Melbourne Town Hall until December 10.
Billy Maloney left me cogitating about the connection between art and
politics. This is a much more difficult question than it might appear to be
in this play, which overtly sets out to celebrate the life of a fascinating
early Melbourne radical and to rouse the audience to emulate his exemplary
idealism. But in assuming that art can be unproblematically political, in
the way that, say, a political rally is, I fear that Bill Garner and Sue
Gore may have missed the point.
The play itself is a biopic of Dr William Maloney, a part of Australia's
history that John Howard's government would prefer remained forgotten. MLA
for West Melbourne from 1889 -1903, he was a dyed-in-the-wool progressive:
an indefatigable campaigner for free speech and social justice, who
introduced one of the first bills for female suffrage in the British Empire
and organised the first May Day march. He was a medical reformer who founded
the Medical Institute, which gave free health care to Melbourne's poor, and
championed issues to do with women's health.
As an obstetrician, he was able to see first hand the consequences of women
being unable to control their reproductive lives, and was a vocal supporter
of Bessie Smyth, founder of the Australian Women's Suffrage Association and
an early campaigner for women's health and contraception. The illegitimate
son of a wealthy and unconventional woman, Jane Maloney, he also changed the
legal definition of children born out of wedlock from "illegitimate" to
"ex-nuptial".
But Maloney was much more than an earnest social campaigner. He was a
colourful figure, a 19th century Melbourne Bohemian, who dressed like a
Baudelairian flaneur . When he was in Paris, he attended Victor Hugo's
funeral, and he corresponded with the 19th century Christian philosopher,
art critic, artist, social critic and teacher John Ruskin.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Best to all
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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