Sydney. January 8-30, 2011. Music, theatre, dance, visual arts, ideas, free and family events including Festival First Night. It's big. This is our city in summer. http://sydneyfestival.org.au for all the info.
by joe accaria, drummer with the Smoke & Mirrors band, direct from the Edinburgh Fringe…
After a rollicking party to celebrate week one in the Famous Spiegeltent (and beyond), I’m emerging from a bit of a haze to report on the second week of performances of Smoke & Mirrors here at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The first week saw some very enticing reviews which were enthusiastically mirrored in box office interest with a succession of full houses.
Welcome to the first in a series of blogs from Joe Accaria, drummer with the Smoke & Mirrors band, direct from the Edinburgh Fringe…
After 30hrs of travel, initiating 2 new members of the cast, 7 days of rehearsal not withstanding delays in tent construction, tech runs, dress rehearsals, the odd pint and opening night parties, Smoke & Mirrors is set to debut @ The Famous Spiegeltent in George Square Gardens for the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe Festival tomorrow night.
The wonderful cast is assembling nervously but without trepidation for its opening night in The Famous Spiegeltent here in Edinburgh. After miraculously erecting the tent in a northern hemisphere day, David Bates and his extraordinary crew have transformed George Square Gardens into a bright green fantasy land which is beaconed by the main tent and anchored by the Deluxe Lounge Supper Club and Speakeasy.
The George Square is located to the west of Buccleuch Place in Edinburgh, running south towards the Meadows and University grounds. It features countless unique and versatile venues including the giant upside-down cow aptly titled Udderbelly! Our daily walks to the Spiegel site can take us through the expansive and lush Meadows or through the heart of Edinburgh as it approaches the famous Edinburgh Castle currently housing performances of the Military Tattoo.
Above all we have witnessed a more than friendly welcome in a fervent and pulsating city with an amalgamation of performance options ranging from Operatic, Dance, Theatrical, Musical, Comedic and Literary. Now firmly entrenched in this seamlessly coherent mass of endless possibilities, the cast of Smoke & Mirrors prepares for its debut performance on one of the largest stages in the world.
The 64th annual Fringe, which continues until 30 August, involves an estimated 21,148 performers from around the world presenting 40,254 performances of a record-breaking 2,453 shows in 259 venues.
I am thrilled to be performing with this amazing cast directed by Craig Illot which includes: iOTA, Queenie Van De Zandt, Wayne Scott Kermond, Timothy Woon, James Brown, Casey Douglas, Christian Reid, Kali Rettallack and the band led by Tina Harris with Marty Hailey, Chris Ball and myself, Joe Accaria.
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What was your first job and what path did you take before working at Sydney Festival?
I worked at Ticketek for 6 years whilst at uni, and after a brief hiatus overseas, I joined their commercial department. There I worked closely with Sydney Festival and was snaffled over to the other side nearly two years ago.
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The past three weeks have been jam-packed full of Festival highlights. We opened with a bang on January 9 with Festival First Night, and saved some of the best til last with Leonard Bernstein's Candide at Mazda Opera in The Domain last Saturday night. We asked Sydney Festival staff for their favourite 'Festival moment' and here are some of the responses: Standing at the barrier as the first A.R. Rahman fans entered the mosh-pit. They included a 6 month old baby and an 80 year old woman in full sari! Being kissed by Dan Sultan at the Beck's Festival Bar. Every moment I spent in the Festival Garden. Hugs and kisses from the Revered Al Green on arrival at Sydney Airport! Hearing a collective gasp of appreciation in the final scene of Hamlet. Sitting in the Spiegeltent singing along with Patrick Watson while the rain bucketed down outside. Magic. The bliss that was Toumani Diabaté at the State Theatre. Being iOTA's object of obsession in Smoke and Mirrors (at least until he got closer!) The Arrival, well really, just The Arrival. Glorious. Peter Sellars standing in the middle of the Sydney Festival office yelling "I love you wonderful Festival people!" and the staff erupting in a spontaneous round of laughter and applause. Immersing myself in the glory of Oedipus Rex & Symphony of Psalms - feeling the music cleanse my weary body and soul. Seeing families playing cricket around Parramatta Park as they waited for A.R. Rahman to take to the stage. Leaping to my feet on the last note of The Manganiyar Seduction. Sarah Blasko wrapping thousands of people round her little finger when she performed a cappella in Rogue's Gallery. Watching Hamlet literally eat dirt. Looking back at the amazing sea of people at A.R. Rahman, getting emotional at the end of Jai Ho! Opening lines of The Slutcracker: "Slutcracker....bit of a misnomer really!" Tears in the eyes as a dancer in Happy as Larry displayed those little moments of secret joy, little bursts of uncontainable glee that we all feel (if we are lucky). Magic to see them on stage like this, so beautifully done. The yellow balloon photo competition - loved it and was thrilled to see people's images on the big screens. The Decemberists, especially the final three songs, complete with an audience singing "La-dee-dah-dee-di-di-dah" back and forth at each other, a cover version of a classic Go-Betweens song, and then 1200 people screaming as if being eaten by a giant whale in the 10 minute long Mariner's Revenge Song. Grandmaster Flash, where all the classics made an impressive appearance. "Don't push me 'cos I'm close to the edge, I am trying not to lose my head...". Hell yeah! Patrick Watson and his homemade speaker light backpack contraption! Watching the Beck's Festival Bar erupt with the call and response of Grandmaster Flashes' party starting tunes. Seeing a dinosaur 'escape' into Hyde Park from Erth's Petting Zoo on Festival First Night and be chased by dozens of kids. Having an exhausted Lars Eidinger sit in front of us in the final scene of Hamlet and mournfully chastise the giggling swarm of girls around him: "don't laugh at me! I'm about to DIE!" The Heliosphere gliding above heads in College Street on Festival First Night. Waiting for the last curtain to open at The Manganiyar Seduction and thinking how much they must be itching to bang their drums after being up there quietly for an hour and a half! The energy exuded from The Manganiyar Seduction and the audience in Hype Park on Festival First Night. Watching Hamlet with my two teenage boys and loving the fact that they were totally engaged and loved the performance. Late-night in the Spiegeltent, the band had long gone and the DJ was cranking it to a raucous audience dancing their hearts out, when out of nowhere appears a conga line snaking through the crowd and quickly picking up almost everyone on the dance-floor. Shamelessly silly fun, can't beat it! Unexpectedly going to Fink and taking the time out of the Festival to stop and listen to the soft voice and beautiful melodies. Watching a happy, peaceful sea of smiling faces enjoying A.R. Rahman's free concert in Parramatta Park. Immersion at Grizzly Bear - the soundscape of the band, the lighting and the acoustic of City Recital Hall all combined to create an unforgettable experience. Watching the crowd go crazy at Grandmaster Flash - hilarious, insane and so much fun. Watching Patrick Watson and his band performing their final song and weaving their way through a packed crowd at Beck's Festival Bar when they stepped in as the support act for Grizzly Bear. Sharon Shannon Band managing to turn a Belgian Beer Tent into an Irish pub with a truly stunning display of musicianship and craic. Giselle, for its crazy beauty as a Sam Sheppard-esque play blended with a Stephen King feel within some beautiful movement. Observing the anticipation of the crowds at Parramatta as the hours rolled closer to A. R. Rahman's concert. Driving a buggy for the first time. Watching the full dress rehearsal of A.R. Rahman with a really small crowd of people but also knowing that the next day the spot where I was sitting would become a moshpit of full thousands of screaming fans. Listening to Grizzly Bear's Two Weeks washing over the crowd at the City Recital Hall. Seeing The Sunchasers christening the Festival Garden bandstand and watching people jig on the lawn. The restorative and ethereal sounds of Toumani Diabaté at the State Theatre. Shuttling Patrick Watson between the Spiegeltent and the Beck's Festival Bar to play with Grizzly Bear. The Pure Passion cocktail at Go! cocktail bar in the Festival Garden. The all-star African jam finale at Summer Sounds in The Domain with Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra, Vieux Farka Touré and Afro Moses all on stage together and the whole Domain on their feet dancing. The production manager of The Manganiyar Seduction sent me a text from India to wish me a Happy Australia Day - I shot him right back a happy Indian Independence Day text! On the opening night of Giselle, sitting outside CarriageWorks with Michael Keegan-Dolan. With the show starting in 20 minutes we both agreed there was nothing we could do but enjoy the beautiful sunset over Redfern. A quiet, calm moment in a very hectic month... Lighting a cannon during the 1812 overture at Symphony in The Domain! Bouncing around in a semi-mosh pit to the hill-billy tunes of Juke Baritone on the late night in the Spiegeltent. The crowd was having so much fun the singer suddenly disappeared off stage only to reappear moments later next to me in the thick of the raucousness grabs my hand and starts crazy-jumping around with the rest of us. Awesome.Last night of the festival and we're gathered in the Festival Garden, beautiful summer's night, full moon, bubbly crowd, Smoke & Mirrors just performed their final show, the DJ is cranking tunes from the Rotunda - he plays Frankie Valli's "I Love You Baby" and the whole garden, as if cued, collectively assemble, dancing in sync and singing the lyrics out loud, a great finale number indeed!
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Image: Paul McDermott playing Pangloss in Candide, Mazda Opera in The Domain.
Check out Jamie Williams' pics of Festival Week 3 on his blog - he is one of our official photographers and we love his work!
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LINDY Hume's first Sydney Festival must surely put an end to tired old arguments about whether you're allowed to muck around with the classics. First, because the festival has included several superb productions that did just that; and second, because none of these productions, for all their innovation and for all the changes they made, and the new twists they introduced, have seemed in the least bit disrespectful.
It has been a festival in which interesting new versions of great works have been allowed to talk to each other and in which audiences have been encouraged to reflect on why and, more important, how some works can survive social and political change while others fail to do so.Ever since "classics" were invented, artists have reworked them. Sophocles rewrote Homer (already a classic in 5th century BC Athens) and was in his turn rewritten by Ovid, who was plundered by Shakespeare, who was performed for hundreds of years in rewritten versions.Nahum Tate's happy-ending adaptation of King Lear is the version that was played for most of the play's stage history.Pirandello's early modernist classic Six Characters in Search of an Author even nods to Hamlet in the story of the mysterious characters who take over the stage and challenge our understanding of what is real. In Britain's Headlong Theatre's version, one of the theatre highlights of the festival, it wasn't a stage they took over but a modern film studio.The reality that was being challenged was the now conventional dramatised documentary. This superficially radical alteration of the play enabled the adaptors, Rupert Gould and Ben Power, to reimagine for a contemporary audience a work that had lost a lot of its power.But let's go back to Sophocles, whose Oedipus is the classic text of a story that is so well known, 2500 years after Sophocles's version was written, that its title has an adjectival form.There were two adaptations in this festival: Ireland's Pan Pan Theatre's Oedipus Loves You, a version (in this case irreverent) that attempted (in this case unsuccessfully) to link comically the original myth with a pop interpretation of the modern Freudian version; and, much more excitingly, Peter Sellars's production of Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex.Sellars's fine production, having told the story in the first half using Cocteau's Latin text but with Antigone as the narrator doing chorus speeches from the Sophocles original, managed in the second half to pursue the blinded Oedipus to his death, as Sophocles did in Oedipus at Colonus.After the interval, Ismene and Antigone grieved over Oesipus's grave as the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, ranged around the orchestra and spread throughout the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, sang the beautiful music of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms.As in the Greek original it showed a chorus of ordinary citizens singing their baffled community response to the almost incomprehensible tragedy of the mythic protagonists. The effect was astonishing and moving.Then there's the greatest Oedipal play of all, Hamlet.At last Schaubuhne Berlin came to Sydney, in a production by Thomas Ostermeier, who has had an influence on some of the best Australian theatre directors. This was another example of an apparently radical version of a classic that was nevertheless deeply respectful of its source.Lars Eidinger's performance, as a shambles of a prince whose comic madness undermines not only the Danish court but the theatre we are in - with cheerful ad lib asides mocking the classic conventions of Shakespearean soliloquies - still gave us the troubled Hamlet of the tradition. It's just that he was also crazy and funny, a sort of South Park Hamlet, and therefore, for a contemporary audience, all the more tragic when everything comes unstuck.The only soliloquy that was left out of the Schaubuhne Hamlet, "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I", suddenly popped up in Six Characters, along with a number of references to the festival, including a scene in which director Rupert Gould complained that the Schaubuhne had received more funding than Headlong.This sort of playfulness is a feature of Hume's festival, which brings together a good number of absorbing shows and lets them interact. It has kept Fergus Linehan's grand celebratory First Night Party, taking over the city and opening its streets to large crowds of people who might not go to anything else, but keeping them alert and moving with a range of street performances between venues. It introduced, in Rogue's Gallery, a performance in the Opera House forecourt of sea songs and pirate ballads by performers such as Sarah Blasko, Marianne Faithful and Tim Robbins.I didn't see this but the negative response it had from many people seems to have stemmed, at least partly, from a feeling that it was disrespectful of the originals.And then there has been Christopher Alden's superbly brutal new Tosca for Opera Australia - not part of the festival, but another adaptation that has caused controversy. Perhaps opera audiences are particularly sensitive about their classics but as a theatregoer I couldn't see what the fuss was about. It is thrillingly urgent and immediate.Starkly political, set in Berlusconi's Italy, in a drab vestry lined with Forza Italia posters (and with the sacristan in his little glass office watching one of Berlusconi's TV channels), it brings Puccini's work into the 21st century with extraordinary power.It has a wonderful Tosca (Takesha Meshe Kizart, in January) so deluded that she only imagines her final meeting with her lover Cavaradossi, and so feisty that, rather than throwing herself romantically off a balcony, she has to be shot, like Carmen in Hume's controversial 1995 production of that other great tradition-bound opera.All the supposedly radical adaptations in the theatre this January have really just been reinvigorations of originals that were alive at the time they first appeared but have now died and become entombed in the sediment of theatrical and operatic convention. This might be a definition of a classic - a work that has become a fossil.Doing the classics in the way they were first done, or in the way in which subsequent staging traditions have fixed them, simply takes the fossils and places them carefully, perhaps lovingly, in a museum. Neither Hume's festival nor OA's new Tosca have been particularly subversive (come back, Barrie Kosky!) but at least they haven't given us museum pieces. What these respectful but reinvented productions of Oedipus, Hamlet, Six Characters and Tosca have done is to make old classics alive again, fit to walk the mean streets of the 21st century.
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We humans say some perplexing things to convey happiness, don't we? I'm on top of the world, happy as a clam, happy as Larry. Who is Larry anyway? There's no 'Larry' in this production. Who you might think is Larry as we walk into the theatre is a man is drawing on an oblong blackboard that dominates the stage. Silent he repeatedly etched a shape to create a pattern that resembled chalk knitting. By writing one word he silenced the audience and, as he faintly stroked the pattern on the blackboard, I felt a hand ran over my back as it dawned on me that the shapes on the blackboard were we, the audience. A cleverly illustrated series of cues on the blackboard followed, laughter created a feeling of effervesce in the room and the show begun. Happy as Larry's premise is to explore happiness with the Enneagram, a nine-pointed model of personality that includes the Optimist, the Seducer, the Boss, the Mediator, the Perfectionist, the Tragic Romantic, the Advocate, the Observer and the Devil's Advocate. Director Sean Parker has gathered a dolly mixture of dancers to explore these personality types, each of them distinct in terms of age, appearance and skill. One by one we meet them and, dressed in crayon coloured clothes they toy with us and play amongst themselves under a canopy of primary coloured balloons. Throughout, Parker conflates ideas and values associated with certain personality types and the dancers play them out. Between them they create a harmonious and delightful blend of ballet, break dancing, aerobics and gymnastics, flip flops, roller-skating and drawing. As they perform independently or as a troupe they drop sugar smiles, fizz and cackle and you want to join in their playfulness. The fun was punctuated by moments of sublime beauty and tenderness, each a joy to experience. There wasn't a layer of intellectual gauze about this production to pick my way through, yet that's not to say it didn't make me think deeply about the issue it is addressing. Happiness is our most singular human pursuit and a question often asked is do we know how to be happy anymore as we clutter and muddle our lives with the things that don't really matter? It's absurd to think that we can happy all the time, without the lows how can you ever recognise the
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Recloose & Frank Booker and Mad Racket DJs at Beck's Festival Bar, as part of Sydney Festival, Saturday January 30, 2010.
Photos: Shane Talbot
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The Very Best, Radioclit & Ro Sham Bo DJs at Beck's Festival Bar, as part of the Sydney Festival, Thursday January 28, 2010.
Photos: Robbie Chan
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