One more show to see…and I can’t really believe it. It’s been quite an experience.
And the fact that my last show will be David Zambrano’s Soul Project sort of feels…right. Fitting. Apt. Because the chance to witness so many performances, to enjoy so many productions into which people have poured body, inspiration and heart…it brings home to you how the arts aren’t just another industry. Sure, artists and companies may talk about developing a marketable product or how best to brand ourselves and market our events. Some days we even find ourselves unconsciously parroting the squawks of some captain of industry we overheard on radio. But I bet most of us can’t put any real feeling into those lines.
Because in our hearts, we know that what we do…it’s not really the stuff of indices. Or earnings reports. Or economic summaries. Because we know – from experience – that the measure of a work’s worth is not the aggregate mean take from some notional demographic. No.
It’s the jagged silence that falls in a theatre house on the edge. It’s a movement phrase that catches you off guard and steals your breath away. It’s the scene that leaves you feeling both damned and redeemed. And it’s the instant between blackout and lights-up, when you have to come back just to get to your feet.
See, that’s what this festival has been. A series of soul projects.
That soulful quality was palpable with José Navas’ Miniatures, a work that drew the spectator’s gaze past the apparent, privileging us with a glimpse of the desires, compulsion, abandon and nostalgia that make up his past. It was a beautiful intimate presentation – one that could so easily have veered into the mawkish, camp or sentimental at various junctures, yet didn’t thanks to Navas’ choreographic integrity and intense commitment to his craft as performer. Perfectly judged and a festival highlight for me.
Similarly – though an utterly different kind of work in derivation and delivery – Ioanna Mona Popovici’s Work in Regress reflected the artist’s intensity in its conception and realisation. Even if I don’t tend to agree with her starting definition of authority, the piece that resulted from that definition perfectly captured the absurd lengths to which a power centre, stripped of its habitual (or any) periphery, might go in seeking to re-establish its purpose for being. All that…and it made me laugh too.
And then there’s Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness, a work that artfully led us to grasp the reality that, in Melbourne in 1970, a dreadful thing happened. Guerin’s composition raised its structures and paced its momentum with such sensitivity to pendle and weight, balance and link that it made the suddenness of the radio report a truly breaking kind of news. And yet, as art has a unique power to do, it inevitably swayed us to an understanding that all this…passes. However sad it may be. That though all may falter and fail, all may yet rise again – indeed will rise, inexorably, no matter how terrible and great the tragedy.
And that’s why work like this, work like this festival has made it possible for us to see, well…you can’t denominate the worth of such a thing; can’t price it, tag it, stack it or stock it. Because, recession or boomtime, numbers can’t count its true worth.
But we can.
Final soul project tonight. One last time.
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