Volume 28#26 © 2013 Echo Publications Pty Ltd
P : 02 6684 1777 F : 02 6684 1719 adcopy@echo.net.au Editor : Mandy Nolan gigs@echo.net.au www.echo.net.au
A L L
DEC 3 – DEC 10
Y O U R
C O A S T A L
E N T E R T A I N M E N T
Byron’s House of Theatre . p23
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.... MUSIC
CULTURE .......... p25
STARS................ p28 GIG GUIDE ...... p31
CINEMA
S ......... p
31
GOOD TASTE ... p32
FALLS PASS CONNECT LIVE Win a double pass to an exclusive, invitation-only music industry event. Arts Northern Rivers are giving three lucky Echo readers the chance to rub shoulders with the music and media industry and be the first to preview the CONNECT artists ahead of their Falls Festival Byron Bay debut! Connect LIVE will take place Thursday 5 December at SCU, Lismore. The first three readers to email info@connect-muso.com.au will receive a double pass. This is a catered and licensed event, so you must be 18+ to enter. If you would like to receive this giveaway and a free subscription to Echonetdaily, email your name, phone number and postcode to gigscomp@echo.net.au.
THEATRE-LOVERS ARE IN FOR A TREAT WHEN NEW THEATRE GROUP THE THEATRE PROJECT, DIRECTED BY ROBERT OWENS, PRESENTS THEIR OWN ADAPTATION OF THE SPANISH PLAY THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA. SEVEN SPOKE WITH ROB OWENS ABOUT THE UPCOMING PRODUCTION. Tell me a little about the concept for the production. This play is described as a tragedy. The last thing I want to do, however, is fall into the obvious and let assumptions mandate a dark and heavy allegory on a dreadful time in Spanish history. I know life to be full of contradictions. Tragedy can be mundane, absurd, beautiful as much as it is horrible. The Greeks were wrong to separate Tragedy and Comedy! It seems to me that one defines the other and they are inseparable, so this production of Bernarda Alba is light as it is heavy, is funny as it is tragic… but it is always meaningful. As a director what were you looking for in performances? I started out using Lorca’s script a number of years ago to explore an actor-training methodology that I have been developing since I had a year in Melbourne doing postgrad study at VCA. The methodology demands intense focus and with this comes a quality, an aesthetic even. I am looking for dynamic and nuanced performances from the actors. If this is achieved, audiences are engaged; interested, and, if anyone in the audience is not, then we have failed… But we’ll ‘screw our courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail’! What have been the challenges directing a collaborative show (musicians/ actors etc)? Collaboration is an important process in creating theatre for many reasons. At a base level, the people involved in the project must know and own the production. No-one is paid anything in community theatre. This show will run at a loss. The reward is inclusion and the satisfaction of contributing to something artistically fulfilling and that audiences appreciate. Listening to people and coordinating everyone’s contribution is difficult, but I am working with people in The Theatre Project who have similar artistic values to mine, though not necessarily the same aesthetic. In this production we have four wonderful musicians and the complicity that must exist between them and the actors, and the lights, and the costumes and props and everything else that makes up the theatrical experience, must be palpable, must be meaningful. Collaboration is something that is be practised from the beginning of the process if it is to achieve a unity in the production. What is it about the medium of theatre that you are drawn to? Theatre for me is extraordinarily complex and beautiful. The eminent literary critic Harold Bloom speaks of Shakespeare’s writing as ‘the invention of the human’. How incredible is it that we can take those scribbles on paper and fashion the physical world they imply?… Wow, what a wonderful thing to do! But it is difficult. Great directors and playwrights are very few in the world… how many Shakespeares are there out there? Creating good theatre, I imagine, might be like playing a form of threedimensional chess: extraordinarily complicated but forever fascinating and joyous; something that demands you to tap into different types of intelligences. Is it a challenge to come up with theatre pieces that are going to resonate with contemporary ‘digital’ audiences who are used to receiving information and entertainment in very different ways? Digital ‘entertainment’ seems to me terribly remote, although it can be fun and grow neurons and solve certain problems if used in the right way. But I have an unwavering belief that people crave intimacy, people crave an encounter, and that it is through creative contact
that we truly find joy and meaning in our lives. Sure the ‘digital’ can appear to do so much ‘more’… give us fantastical worlds or feed us roles that we only dream about, and we love it for that, but I can’t see it going any further than that. It’s not the flesh, blood and bone moving in the space that theatre is. Theatre affirms our humanity and, in the middle of the night, this is what is important. How have you staged this piece? I have cut and reassembled the original Lorca script a great deal. I admit that purists may be a little miffed but I contend that to find a play’s ‘local habitation and a name’ as Theseus in A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream put it, one must adapt. It is the playing space, however, that dictates so much of what the play ‘looks like’. Byron Bay High School has been very generous in allowing The Theatre Project to use its Performing Arts Centre. The PAC is an open space with no curtains to hide behind. Audiences will see the actors, they will see the characters, they will see the musicians, they will see the lighting and who controls it, they will smell the coffee! This production of Alba is pure theatre… finessed? Most definitely so, but I’d like to think also that our Alba has an edge that is in the tradition of great storytelling. What impact are you hoping to have on the audience? Taking on this play, I wanted to examine whether it is indeed possible to create community theatre that is genuinely engaging; that is complex and difficult but intellectually and emotionally satisfying for both participants and audiences. The House of Bernarda Alba asks audiences to stretch beyond the comfortable and predictable and ‘the market’ mentality of Saturday night gig guides. It is a theatre of beauty and contradiction that makes comment on what it is to be an artist in the theatre and to be living in Byron. Thursday and Friday at 8pm at the Performing Arts Centre, Byron High School. Show is $15 and $20 and tickets are available at Santos in Mullum and Byron.
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