Cosmic dancer: Belvoir’s Blue Wizard

This review was originally written for artsHub.

Billed as “the gayest one-man show ever!”, Nick Coyle’s Blue Wizard is like nothing you’ve seen before. Presented by Belvoir as part of the Mardi Gras festival, it’s the story of a cosmic wizard who crashes to earth in a comet, and sings and dances in an effort to return home. First presented by PACT centre for emerging artists in 2013, Blue Wizard is a show that doesn’t apologise for being itself. Playing in Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre, Coyle’s wizard cavorts and dances, shimmies struts and frets amongst piles of junk and detritus set atop a mirrored floor. Lasers flash and strobe, smoke creeps along the floor, and the blue wizard must care for an egg which hatches uncharacteristically early.

An almost perfect score: Sydney Festival’s Kiss & Cry

It begins like a fairytale – two people meet, there’s the heady giddy exhilaration of falling in love; there’s joy, heartbreak, sadness; a tiny glimmer of something else. Except there’s a twist: the two people – figures – are not human, but rather two dexterous hands. In Jaco Van Dormael and Michèle Anne De Mey’s Kiss & Cry, playing at Carriageworks for the last days of the Sydney Festival, a romance is played out on a miniature scale whilst simultaneously being filmed and screened above the action itself.

Follow your dreaming: Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Page 8

First staged in 2004, Belvoir’s production of Page 8 – the autobiographical one-person show by David Page – toured the country and internationally for the next five years. Presented here by Bangarra Dance Theatre on its tenth anniversary, as part of Corroboree Sydney, the show is a collection of stories from the Page family’s rich goldseam of experiences, peppered with fragments of home videos, direct audience address, re-enactment, and song-and-dance numbers.

Round dance: Enigma’s La Ronde

Written around 1900 and not performed publicly until 1920, Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde (or Der Reigen in the original German) is based around a simple theatrical conceit, whereby ten characters (five men, five women) come together in a series of sexually-charged scenes, with one person leaving the scene at the end and replaced by the next character, in the pattern AB, BC, CD… JA. Its title, literally translating to ‘the round’ recalls the musical pattern of a round where interlocking melodies are staggered over the top of each other at intervals. Presented here by independent company Enigma, La Ronde is a seductive and beguiling play which, under Steven Hopley’s direction, shines and crackles with a very real sexual frisson.

Hopley’s staging here amplifies Schnitzler’s structural conceit; by staging La Ronde ‘in the round’ on a raised circular dias (designed by Rachel Scane), Hopley creates an intimacy which could easily have been lost in a larger, more conventional theatre space. Sparsely furnished, Hopley’s cast furnish their scenes with a vitality and a believability which is perfectly suited to Schnitzler’s timeless text. Some references have been understandably updated, but the play remains largely intact and (surprisingly) relevant and applicable to a twenty-first century audience.

Putuwá: Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Patyegarang

I have written about the story of Patyegarang and William Dawes on this blog before. It’s a beautiful story about language, friendship, trust, heart, and sacrifice; it’s a story about building bridges, whether you realise it or not; how different things might be now had the understanding not been rudely interrupted in 1791. When Bangarra announced their major production for 2014, their twenty-fifth year, was to be based on this story, I added it to my list of must-see productions and eagerly held my breath. And here we are, nine months later; the same amount of time it took those eleven ships to sail from London to Sydney Cove, two-hundred and twenty-seven years ago.

Bangarra’s Patyegarang takes the notebooks William Dawes made of the Sydney language, and turns them into a haunting, elegant and powerfully fluid seventy minutes of dance theatre. If you’re familiar with Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, then you’re already thinking along the right track of this piece. Except there is a difference: where Grenville’s book is about the friendship from Dawes’ point of view, Bangarra’s Patyegarang is about the young woman, her culture, her land, her language, and her relationship with the white man to whom she taught her language. It is Patyegarang’s story; it is her show.