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RENOVATION CITY LIZA DEZFOULI GETS INTO HER LEAST FAVOURITE SUBJECT WITH VINCENT CROWLEY OF TORQUE SHOW ABOUT THEIR NEW WORK, MALMÖ. Home renovations. Wake me up when people change the subject. But a dance theatre performance about it? That I’d like to see, even if the subject might suggest more of a danse macabre than anything else. Vincent Crowley is one-third of the dance/ theatre trio The Torque Show whose new show Malmö is about this very thing. “We were working with fairy tales, Rapunzel and so on,” explains Crowley. “Then we got ideas from people’s aspirations, their dreams; anyway we’re much too old to be doing fairy tales!”
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For this theatre maker, engaging with the great middle class cliché is revealing: “It’s a statement about who you are. The notion of ‘lifestyle’, as in the style in which you live your life, that’s not about what you do – it’s about the look of it. That look of the ideal life, it’s about who we think we should be.” Crowley and wife Ingrid Weisfelt team up with director Ross Ganf to explore the whole idea of people reinventing themselves through their home renovations. “We’re not saying it’s wrong but it can be a self-inflicted
bucket of stress,” he says. “Couples in their late 30s or 40s can endure years and years of frustration and compromise, it can make or break a relationship.” It’s hard to imagine a show about renovations that’s not a conventionally comic presentation of middle class angst. “Without giving too much away,” Crowley elaborates, “the show is a bit like Dogville meets The Block. The whole space is the house we’re renovating and the audience are being shown through.” Crowley is struck by the absurdity of people going on what he calls ‘virtual tours’ of homes-to-be. And taking their friends along with them. “You’re walking around this empty block of land. It’s a bombsite. And you’re being ‘shown through the house’; ‘the TV goes here’, ‘the kids playroom is here’. It’s bizarre. Having no idea of whether they’re going to achieve any of it. Is it ever going to be finished? Renovations can go on forever. And as soon as you move in there are all those little bits that are never going to get done. The absurd nature of it all is part of that transaction. “Dance has many forms,” maintains Crowley. “Our intention in dance is to use physicality to make metaphors and images. To take it back into that surreal dream-like place.” This fits with the initial impetus of the work which Crowley reckons didn’t come from the intellect. “It wasn’t us sitting around saying we wanted to do a show about home renovations. We were exploring parallel lives, where dreams intersect with the prosaic. It evolved out of our explorations of dreams. People have these aspirations of beauty. They say ‘we can make this beautiful house, our own little world, configure my space’
FRAGMENTED
FISH
WITH BOB BAKER FISH You may know José Mojica Marins better via his signature, a black cape, top hat, excessively long fingernails (which measured three feet at one stage), or perhaps from his moniker Coffin Joe. He’s one of the most unique and provocative filmmakers Brazil has ever produced. In fact he’s responsible for Brazil’s first ever horror film, 1964’s At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul, in which Coffin Joe (Marins himself) searches for a women worthy to bear his child. It’s unbelievably excessive. It actually begins by warning the viewer to go home, then admonishes them for not, and warns them they will now suffer. As an undertaker, Joe openly flouts the religious beliefs of the day, eating meat on Holy Friday, and steals wine from grave sites. He also bullies and but it can become so generic, this expression of individuality. So many people turn to lifestyle magazines. French philosopher Alain de Botton says, ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness.’ We can try to configure our homes, our spaces, with some sense of style which can represent happiness but when aspirations and dreams meet reality, how do you deal with it? The world of aspirational style gurus is ripe for the picking.” I couldn’t agree more. WHAT: Malmö WHERE & WHEN: Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall until Sunday 17 April
torments townspeople who are all terrified of him. During the making of this film Marins apparently split the crew into two, working in 12-hour shifts, swallowed 20 amphetamine pills he bought over the counterm and worked for 96 hours straight. He eventually had a nervous breakdown, was hospitalised and reports that after this experience, “life became a little strange”. It’s all included in the four-disc Coffin Joe Collection (Umbrella), which also contains 1967’s even more excessive This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse. Again Joe is out to further his bloodline, which he does by kidnapping a bevy of beauties and putting them through sadistic tests to determine who is worthy. Whilst Joe cuts off people’s fingers, pokes them in the eyes, stabs them with Jesus’s crown of thorns and enacts all manner of antisocial behaviour, his treatment of his harem is something special. Waiting ’til they’re sleeping he sends an army of tarantulas and studies their reactions. Apparently the actresses weren’t particularly thrilled with the spiders crawling over their near naked flesh so Marins
got them drunk. It was at this point he began his infamous screen tests which usually involved spiders, snakes, scorpians, or being buried alive. He wanted his women brave, or at the very least not wanting to quit everytime he brought in a box of spiders or waved a gun around. 1969’s Awakening Of The Beast is truly something else, a tome to be whispered about in tones usually reserved for the likes of Arrabel or Jodorowsky. It’s very much a product of the ’60s focussing on the drug problems in Brazil, but it is incredibly surreal and highly sexual. It was banned in Brazil for 20 years. You can see why in the first three minutes. It’s amazing, self-indulgent and demented. Of course the Coffin Joe character would continue to appear in subsequent film and TV projects, as mentioned in the doco The Strange World Of Mojica Marins. Yet Marins never really capitalised on the phenomenon, living a frugal existence in Sao Paulo. In fact during the ’80s he was reduced to making porn, creating a sensation for some coital action with an actress and a German shepherd. Participants, including Marins, seem to view this experience with an almost whimsical nostalgia, but then that’s the world he exists in, defying and challenging social conventions, disturbing and unsettling his audience with gleeful abandon. And though he has something like 14 unfinished projects, in 2008, some 29 years after he had completed a previous film, he made Embodiment Of Evil, the official third part of the Coffin Joe trilogy. It’s not in this collection but the stills look, well, wrong.