Lou Sanz claims she isn’t a natural performer, but no-one else seems to agree.

The Age, for example, named her “a voice that deserves our attention” and TimeOut gave her previous show four stars. While speaking to her, the reasons become obvious. Her modesty hides the fact that it is a focus on writing, rather than a lack of performance skills, which see her value one talent over the other. “I only do shows when I feel like I have a story to tell that might benefit from being performed. It’s a challenge for me.”

The latest in Sanz’s growing body of work is Neverending Storage inspired by the storage locker she has kept, interstate, for the past seven years. After a helpful jab from her producer and friend Jocelyn Brewer, she set to work to lose the literal baggage once and for all.

“I thought ‘Yeah, cool, that’ll just write itself!’ You know what? It doesn’t. It even got to a point one dark evening, I thought ‘I’m just going to Google stuff’. There is nothing. There’s a bulletin board for people who work in self storage; there’s a guy with images of self-storage from films. [The Internet has] cat porn, but nothing on storage units!”

So Lou found herself writing a different sort of memoir, tracking the sentiment behind everything she had kept, and the stories behind seven years of renting a Sydney storage locker, while living in Melbourne. “I actually tried to impress a boy with the storage unit.” She quips, guiltily. “So what do we have in common? He rents in Sydney, I rent in Sydney.”

Neverending Storage isn’t just anecdotal, punchline-filled, story time though. Those familiar with Lou’s work will know that she holds a Master’s degree in writing from Sydney’s AFTRS and has always approached performance as an external aspect to the creation process. Writing is her first love, a fact possibly cemented by her own title’s pun on ‘never-ending story.’

“I’ve never been good at writing for laughs; I would much rather play to truth. It may not get a laugh necessarily, but it’s part of the story. I think because people know me as a writer – when it comes to live stuff, the expectation is that you’re coming to more of a reading than a pithy one-liner show.”

Though she agrees that there is some risk to a show that doesn’t rely on the tried and true set-up/punchline formula, there is power in truth. “Cliches often work because they’re easy triggers. I don’t like that. I like to take time and construct something. If you’re constantly getting really simplistic views thrown at you for an hour, you become detached. For me, it’s very important that you get into the story and come along with me.”

This too comes from her writing background. While Lou calls herself a comedian, she thinks the definition of all comedians as stand-ups is problematic. Not only does it not allow for a range of skills, it is also a limitation on performers. Though she tells stories, she differentiates between the “anecdotes” of the stand-up circuit and “scenes” which usually occur in the theatre. “I might tell a lot of stories in an hour, but it’s all connected. [While building the show] I’ll go through and deconstruct it and rebuild it and do a lot of things that I don’t think you can do in a more anecdotal piece.”

She confesses she’ll probably always have storage somewhere (“aka baggage”), but there is hope that the show will bring a sense of catharsis. “As much as it’s a show about letting go, it’s also about realising that sometimes you can’t hide from your past, or change who you are, or learn to admit to yourself you’re a fundamentally flawed individual… and maybe finding someone to love that flaw.”

Neverending Storage runs at the Factory Theatre every night between the 25th and 29th of April. Show starts at 7pm and costs $15. Click here to book tickets.

A table is set amongst a wreckage of cultural motifs. Fellini might as well hover in the corner lest the lights dim, or the exit signs flicker over a framed picture of Hitler that hangs above a giant plastic soft serve ice cream. A full-scale discobolus lies on its side next to a goose. There is the squeal of a pig and sawdust strewn across the floor. A quiet automatic vacuum sucks in a wonky figure of eight. This is our cultural wasteland.

A likely place for Shakespeare, Mozart, Napoleon, Churchill, Caesar and a whole litany of historical characters, which are just that: personae kicked up with the sawdust, stirred with the wafting aroma of frittata soup. At the head of the table is the artist from whose imagination all these people emerged. From the pages of history, their stories are safely sealed behind so many centuries. But the actor’s story is forever in the present. It is subject to change and editing. And solipsistic destruction.

If we could see behind the curtain then we would know that the real Lady Churchill picks her nose, and that behind Caesar’s mask is a small businessman with a nervous twitch. The conversation at the table continues not as a conversation, but a monologue. Ceaseless, this artist is hysterical. A misogynistic, egotistical bully: he picks over each character with the full weight of his own.

Fellini had wanted to call his film The Comedy. Our dinner host fails to hear the storm rolling in over the cacophony of his own voice. He should have seen it coming, but so should have we: for we have come to momentarily have the lights turned away from ourselves.

The Histrionic Runs at The Malthouse Theatre from April 2 – May 5th, then travels to Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Theatre for the 20th June to the 28th of July

How else would I tell you about nerves which ebbed and flowed, like we were all being interviewed in that weird ‘just getting to know me’ way, never really comfortable. Or about the air in the room, how it made me take a moment to think about what I would say about some fantasy between two heroes that have never met. Would over ending powers become too much for both of them and weird situations where they were saving the same damsel in distress, become not so weird? Oh man, if I ever get myself into that kind of literary thinking, then please make sure you rocket launch me into the air and drop me full force into a cow paddock. I’ll roll around in that grass happy to be a simple man in all honesty. 

We observe these weird, stupid, crumpled ideas, more often than we think. Sometimes these ideas have been shitted on, or instead, their withered bodies were thrown into the air in celebration. But what never changes is the desperate manner in which these people aim to live out a fantasy, the bone-jarring thought that reminds me that these kinds of people exist but in many ways this weird, obsessive world is all the better for them anyway. Is it worth believing anything which anyone tells us because we crave it to happen?

I lied because they are better off undisturbed, because fiction trumps truth every time, because telling the truth might have set you askew.

FanFiction Comedy runs at the Melbourne Town Hall on Monday, Saturday and Sunday Nights from 31 March – 22 April

It’s that wonderful, thunderous idea of performing trouble and pain. I wonder if it hurts like acupuncture, like needles across various parts of the body with every word. In the concluding sense though, there is a wonderful smell of absurdity, or even insanity. Elaborate changes and scenes split characters from the person, wired to us through various nervous pulsating blood and emotions as if they are one and the same.

The moments, blended together, the dividing into various wonderful beautiful personalities, which have their flaws, but still you cheer and you sigh at it all. You have that kind of conventional ride on the golf buggy of life. Then the clouds clear. Time moves on and they close in again just as quickly. What can you do really? No-one really knows. You are left to an inescapable darkness while she waits. In your mind, there is a quiet scream knowing what she feels like. But you really don’t because the spiral is neverending.

This to and fro motion develops like a hypnotic video clip, pondering what it is all about in the end, and then progressing to endless questions. Should we bother dreaming? What is our existence for? Where to next in our lives? The rhythm of these queries move along in waves crashing down in a scattering of mindful noises giving advice everywhere.

We explore the depths of ourselves to make some sense of it, responding with discoveries so weird and wonderful that the entire audience may well become just sets of eyes blossoming out in that curious waythey do. There is so much to take in and the longer her routine continues, the more hope arrives, in calamity and relief. A peaceful shot in the arm and a cure.

Felicity Ward’s The Hedgehog Dilemma is playing at The Victoria Hotel, Little Collins Street Until April 22, 2012

A pulsating city laid open at the heart of India’s north, Lucknow is built on the arterial road that weaves beside the Ganges and its tributaries, or rather, the road was built through it. Having lived through countless empires, it is a city so layered with life that it is in a continual state of decay. From the dust and damp, Griffin wrote that he found comfort in the environment of such an ancient civilisation.

Far from my hometown, Canberra, my bus rolls heavily through Lucknow’s centre. The late afternoon sun flickers through the trees and buildings and when I close my eyes it glows red through my eyelids into the space inside my head – like the band of light that traverses a photocopier, but slowed down to the pace of a memory.

In the darkness, I am suddenly inside the means of reproduction. I know that the familiar box of the photocopier will soon be antiquated, perhaps a fate shared with archaeology – in 10,000 years from now, people will not dig in the earth to find out about the world as it was in 2012, we will have electronic documents and records: tablets filled with information.

But memory will persist. As we scan the surface of a piece of paper, memory illuminates one slice at a time: a word said, a gesture or catch of the eye. Reproduced. Degraded. These things build up like the carbon dust on paper fed through a photocopier too many times. It sticks to your fingers, clouds your vision.

If I rewind from Lucknow, back to Canberra, a city that is simultaneously the Griffins’ jewel and cause of their dissolution – a sparse, spiralling city built around a tiny inland sea peppered with black swans and occasional blue-green algae blooms – I’m suddenly driving into the Molonglo valley and before I can see the tip of Black Mountain tower beneath the clear alpine sky, I recognise a knot of willows crowded on the banks of a starved Murrumbidgee. This is the sign I need to trigger home.

Then I’m standing at the edge of another man-made lake and there are black swans out on the rough water. Black stains against grey. The compacted bank is held together with the roots of weeping willows and I think for a second that I’m back there, at the shore of Lake Burley Griffin – but for a palm in my peripheral vision – and I know that no, I am here, in Melbourne. But one spark, and a connection was made.

More than ten years after the Griffins’ severed their involvement with the Capitol Project, and after Marion Mahony had returned alone to their hometown Chicago, a headstone was finally made for Walter Burley Griffin’s grave. Cast in a mixture of clay, lime and sand that we call concrete, it has persisted in the monsoonal rains and heat in the face of winter frosts, and will do so for a few hundred years more before it once again becomes dirt on the Gangetic Plain.

Nicholas Mangan’s Some Kind of Duration ran at the Centre for Contemporary Photography from 10th February to April 1st, 2012.

And I wonder, as I hope you do too, if each time we spend in wonderment is just another fifteen in the ring, stalling before we inevitably knock each other out. We lead ourselves down paths of nothingness, of pop psychology and ideologies which only begin to touch the surface of a revolution, to one end: to spend our emotional currency until all we have left to give is our bodies, strewn across furniture we barely decided to buy.

Don’t you know we’re all whores? It’s not just me. We all like to play a bit of cards with fate. We all enjoy a dance here and again. We all fall about ourselves, sometimes, don’t we?

But this is it, isn’t it? This is all there is and I don’t even know who you are. I don’t even know who I am. I am God but he does not exist. I am love where there is none to spare. I still need to give it some space in my heart beyond that which it already took, because if this is everything, my life is complete, it is done and there is nothing worth living for. It’s not at all clear to me yet. It is all too much to contemplate.

The Great Lie of the Western World is produced by Jocelyn Brewer, starring Michael Booth, Jessica Donoghue, Alistair Powning and Kate Skinner. Wednesday to Saturday at 8pm, March 30 to April 21, The TAP Gallery.

]]> http://www.moodofmonk.com/2012/04/gloww-crt/feed/ 0 http://www.moodofmonk.com/2012/04/micf-simontaylor/ http://www.moodofmonk.com/2012/04/micf-simontaylor/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:30:15 +0000 Philippe Perez http://www.moodofmonk.com/?p=3107 The room was probably the smallest room I have ever dreamt anything in: the performance, akin to Rapid Eye Movement, exploring all sense of things in an inquisitive kind of way. Simon Taylor strutted a repertoire of performances ranging from poetic spouting to improvised creativity. Interspersed with disco balls and lights, my imagination flies into a lower budget version of a wry Space Odyssey vortex.

Perhaps more than a dream. Perhaps a reverie, the pews set in a cosy kind of way, a sermon from somewhere to incubate amongst the crowd. The definitive analysis from the platform became like a punch of newspaper smashed against the head of a long haired journalist. Everyone in the small room piped in laughter regularly, while the ghost of wit stood in the corner and watched pensively; nodding and posing like a distinguished British actor, rather than the slab of bogans he cleverly bestowed.

Intelligence from Taylor flowed and listening seemed like attending a lecture without having to concentrate and type notes. It was fascinating in many contexts, switching from a direct to playful style. What was said was direct and forthright and sunk in your brain long after we had all departed.

I left the dream for a thoughtful pose on the graffiti-laden train, the reverie stoned itself onto my skin. The evening, like a never endearing lyric, persuading you to return to yourself.

Simon Taylor’s 10 Things I Know About You runs 28 March – 22 April, Tuesday to Sunday at The Butterfly Club in South Melbourne. Click here for more information

Image courtesy of Carey Cuiro 

His serious side had not been alluded to with any great emphasis, hints scarce at best and strewn carefully throughout the evening. Tales of alter-ego antics, blissfully risqué blind-date behaviour and purple livestock had coloured the routine, each a red herring with a greater message in mind. Even the frivolous use of stage props and cued media served as mere distractions. His sizzling punchlines would preface an epiphany, one of personal rescue in the face of loss. Essentially, he had set the audience up to knock them down.

It had worked.

Then, as hearts became heavy, optimism began to surface. Relief was in sight, a sunnier disposition championed and coming to the fore. He had commanded sheer melancholy, springing it upon the Toff without notice, then returned them to a lighter psychology. Though a bumpy ride, Hamilton had deftly navigated his show, delivering a versatile and ultimately memorable experience. He proved the worth of not only satisfying comedy – dressed up in the usual slew of anecdotes and carefully executed quips – but the worth of its withdrawal, too. It was a brave manoeuvre, one commendable to seldom seen in the profession. To that end, The Goodbye Guy proved unique.

Laughter, this evening, came at a cost – referring to, least of all, the price of admission. His performance concealed a moral sting in its tale which, for better or worse, transcended the realm of stand-up. As punters filed out, caught in the sway of deep thought, it was clear that – despite a few familiar hallmarks gracing the routine – something truly unique had unfolded. He had used his platform to offer more than the norm: a message in the midst, to which few performers of the same cloth could ever aspire.

Justin Hamilton’s The Goodbye Guy runs 29 March – 21 April, Tuesday through Sunday, at the Victoria Hotel – Acacia Room. Click here for more info.

“I’ve never done any acting. I’ve got very few tools as a performer; I can’t do any accents and I can’t sing and…I can barely move really. So stand-up was the only option. [My stage character] is definitely still me, it’s just a slightly more competent version – I’m tempted to say a cooler version of me,  but not really cool.”

Though he may have a thin veneer, he cannot hide his approachable charm, talking about his work while his two-year old son plays in the background. And although this untainted humility is not unique, it is certainly rare among performers at his level. Even when describing his greatest comedic influences, he chooses Tim Key, a comedian he also considers his closest friend.

While discussing the efforts new performers make to emulate success, he agrees that British comedians tend to be a little more natural in their personae, but that there is a new generation in Britain which have started to emulate the big names. Nevertheless, British comedians haven’t inherited the pessimism which often permeates American comedy.

“There’s a raft of positive comedians from England. People like Russell Howard, Russell Kane… The Russells tend to be pretty upbeat… I don’t know why that is, considering we’re probably less cheery as a nation.” His stage show follows suit – no inflated ego, just his honest take on things.

Take his fascination with words, statistics and odd facts, for example. Such things might not be standard fare for comedians, but through his own utter fascination he manages to take people along on that journey.

“I quite like having facts to fall back on. I think it’s because I went to university and got a degree in Latin and I feel like I’ve got to use that at some point. It helps sometimes, to give you more authority on stage, if you know what you’re on about.”

It must be true. How else might he plug his show, Seven Years in the Bathroom, as “the ultimate stat-based, fun-packed thought-provoking experimental-and-sometimes-stupid hour-long comedy show” with such bravado?

In truth, when I presented him with his own show description, his humility returns once again: “That’s a good description. It does the job. I don’t know if it’s the ultimate though.” He thinks for a moment more. “It’s probably the third best one of those shows.”

“The penultimate stat-based comedy show?” I suggest.

“Yeah, that’s better.”

Seven Years in the Bathroom is part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and runs from 29 March to 22 April, Tuesdays to Thursdays, at Melbourne Town Hall’s Powder Room.

Idiots of Ants is a four man sketch comedy group you’re bound to have seen, even if you don’t know them by name. Apart from their hugely successful “Facebook in Real Life” video which went viral a few years ago, they have been featured on BBC TV, interviewed John Cleese and Jimmy Carr for the Montreal Comedy Festival, performed with John Cleese and made general fools of themselves for the sake of a laugh for over five years. Although they’re working hard these days, James Wrighton says their beginning was quite smooth.

“We were out and about on the comedy circuit. A few of us had done News Review, a long running news-based sketch show in England. We really liked our comedy and writing and decided to take our show to Edinburgh.” Their first meeting was almost entirely dedicated to coming up with the name: Idiots of Ants, a verbal pun on (Idiot Savants). “Then we went to Edinburgh.”

Some might equate sketch comedy with improvised theatre, but James says that’s not really their style. They like to operate as Monty Python did, creating a concept and writing it, with performance as the final step in the process.

“We don’t really do much improv. That’s not really our background. We come up with the ideas, they get written, we get into the rehearsal room and bash ‘em out and change them around. By the time we get onto stage, the framework is pretty much set. Now that we’ve been doing it for over five years is, during the show, things can happen and we’ll go off the script and then come back to it, but the framework is definitely there.”

In sketch comedy, even the influence of personal history is dropped for the character. Where an observational comic might find difficulty in the through line of an hour long show, a sketch team will not.

James describes Idiots of Ants as “kind of silly and lighthearted… basically four blokes, dicking around and having fun.”

While a stand-up comic might have time to elaborate and develop an idea before the pay off, and a sketch group is under much more pressure to deliver pretense, situation, set up and punch line in a very short period of time.

“We approach sketches in that we want to litter it with jokes. We get an idea and then we have three minutes where we get all the jokes in there. We aim for quite a high hit rake of gags, and then we move on, get on to something else. We have to get people into the sketch very quickly.” He laughs to himself “That also means that if you don’t like that sketch you only have to wait three minutes before you get another one.”

Of course, the stage show is only a part of Idiots of Ants success. Their video sketches, “Facebook in Real Life”, “Wii Breakfast” and “Wii Sword Fighter 3″ have collectively had over a million views on YouTube. I wonder if the video side of things might get in the way of their other plans, but James insists they like to spend their time equally.

“We love doing the live stuff, it’s great fun, but we also like transferring them onto the screen, giving them each their own filmic genre and aesthetic. We enjoy doing both, but there are a lot of sketches that we don’t do on stage that we like particularly for filming.”

I mention how effective the use of mise en scene is in the Sword Fighter clip, which simultaneously shows the boys inside controlling men outside.

“The Sword Fighter one was one that was in our show. You’ll see the stage version of that over here. It’s a challenge to get it onto the screen. How you can represent what’s actually going outside the window, for example, we were trying to figure out how to get that across successfully.”

And after this tour, where might their efforts lie?

“It’s always been our aim to just keep filming. We stopped doing it for a while because we were in talks with the BBC and so it was great to just get back and start filming stuff and putting it up there. We’ll definitely get back to that when we get back from touring.”

Idiots of Ants is at the Melbourne Town Hall Powder Room from 29 March to 22 April, Tuesday through Sunday. Click here for more information

Dixie Longate is sweet from the moment she answers the phone.

Although a mix-up caused me to call a little late, she forgives me like any courteous southern belle: “Oh, don’t worry about it. I understand. Sometimes people have to have sex and they’re like ‘I’ll call later when I’m done.”

I’m not terribly surprised since this affectionate showgirl has been plying her wares (Tupperware, that is) for 9 years now. Dixie describes it at length and with great speed: “I got out of prison about ten years ago and my parole officer, this adorable lesbian, she says to me, “you need a job in order to get your kids back” and I was like “I don’t want my kids back”"

She tells stories as if they only let her out once a month, her sentences running on in hilarious superfluity. “She said ‘You need a job which will be flexible around your different court orders and everything. How about Tupperware?’ and at first I thought ‘No, that’s for grandmamas, and then I went to my first party and I had so much fun! They gave me free booze and I said ‘This is work? I’m staying!”

Now that she’s on the straight and narrow, Dixie may have her kids to deal with, but certainly has no trouble with the men. Though you might think her audience is mostly women, she finds that men are turned around pretty quickly.

“Men come in and they say, ‘I don’t want to know about food storage, it’s boring’ and then they see me and their eyes pop out their heads. They say ‘look at those legs, I bet she could walk on over with them legs and wrap them around my head and we could do things that makes Jesus cry’ and you know, sometimes I do.”

Her life on stage is a far cry from her humble begins in Mobile, Alabama where “you can count the whole town’s teeth on one hand”, but she wouldn’t give it up for the world.

“To watch people sit down and just laugh and laugh and laugh. I’ll tell you, it does your heart good. I don’t care where you are in your life, if everybody’s sitting there laughing and having a good time with you, whether it’s on stage, in someone’s living room, at the dentist’s office or around the stripper pole – it makes your heart happy.”

Dixie’s Tupperware Party is at the Spiegeltent from March 29, 2012 to April 22, 2012 as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Click Here for More Information
 

“It’s a love story about a modern couple and why things aren’t working out for them, they’re so committed to making it work, but their work and lives get in the way,” says actor and writer Michael Booth. ”Then into the mix comes an old friend and he stays on their couch for a little while. He observes this couple he shakes things up. Things that need to be shaken up get shook up.”

“In a good way,” he says.

Booth studied acting in New York and Chicago, and is a graduate of the NIDA Playwrights’ Studio. He has acted, written and directed across stage and screen and was a co-founder of Cathode Ray Tube theatre company. The company has enjoyed sell-out Sydney shows with its previous productions, this show is their third in as many years. 

Booth co-wrote the script for The Great Lie of the Western World with fellow Cathode Ray Tube founding member Alistair Powning. Both Powning and Booth are also actors in the production. As a story of human connectedness and communication, the script writing process has been aided by the relationship between Booth and Powning.

“The last play we did we cowrote,” says Booth. “And I’ve directed a short film he did and he acted in a play I wrote before that… then we were flatmates for a few years, so we certainly know each other well. A lot of writing gets done at 3 o’clock in the morning, because we don’t have to make appointments to show up at the office. I don’t have that with anyone else, so I certainly can’t imagine cowriting with anyone else.”

The script draws on elements of their lives says Booth, “There is a lot of ourselves and our experiences in relationships in the story and its characters.” 

Working alongside Booth and Powning are Kate Skinner and Jessica Donoghue. Skinner is new to the Cathode Ray Tube company, she plays the role of Fiona, who is in a relationship with Simon, Powning’s character. Their story will be familiar to many, locked into a daily grind of work and other habitual distractions, their love takes a backseat. The four-piece cast is rounded out by Donoghue, who Booth says is being thrown in the deep end with this production.

“She’s just been in Los Angeles, pursuing the dream,” he said, “She’s playing a character that is quite different for her, so that’s quite exciting.” Donoghue is also the third original member of the company and has worked alongside Booth six times previously. Donoghue will play Paige, the “unlikely accomplice” to Booth’s character Emerson. 

Booth describes his character, Emerson, as ambiguous, and “kind of an angel”. Elaborating, Booth says that Emerson is the person who comes into your life at the right moment to have an impact. “He’s about as forthright as they come. He says what he thinks. He is not afraid to offend. But he means well and he’s got a big heart.”

Hinting at why Emerson is the character steering the unhappy couple toward greener pastures, Booth says, “He really doesn’t buy into the stress that the rest of them do. He enjoys himself as much as possible. He doesn’t have concerns, or he doesn’t have the same concerns as we do.”

“He’s also mysterious,” says Booth, “We don’t know where he’s from or what he’s up to. The audience will be trying to second guess who he is before they find out.”

The play ponders what is really important in life, Booth says, “It suggests that maybe in this culture we’ve got out priorities a little bit backwards.” 

Booth feels that this is a story that we will all be able to relate to, “The situation of feeling stressed trying to juggle money and rent, bills, all those boring things that get in the way of feeling like we’re free. These are the things getting in the way of this couples relationship and their love for one another. I think these issues are universal, in this culture.” But, he explains, this production is not a “serious lecture on how to behave yourself in life. It’s funny. I think it’s really believable. People will connect with the references.”

“Hopefully the audience will be moved to question what actually matters in their lives and not worry about the things that don’t,” he says. “Perhaps they will pay more attention to those they love.”

The Great Lie of the Western World: 28 – 29 March (Previews) , 30 March – 21 April (Weds to Sat only), The TAP Gallery – 278 Palmer St, Darlinghurst,  8pm (approx. 90 mins, no interval)

Tickets $25/$18 Previews: www.trybooking.com/BCZE

It’s highly recommended that you read this feature on Betty Grumble, before you read this article which is a follow-up on the ideas which created her.

The artist and her creation are often inseparable, one being the outpouring of another and thus cerebrally linked, but this is complicated for Emma Maye. You might know her best by the marionette, Betty Grumble, whose strings she pulls, but even if Emma Maye kept her voice the same, the difference is immediately obvious: Emma Maye knows exactly why she does things, while Betty just knows what to do…at least, that’s all she cares to know.

“The burlesque trope is that arc of the build-up, the tease, the reveal of your body. With Betty, I’m trying to find different ways to reveal different parts of my body, and the journey of how you get to that state. I’m working with the aesthetic to try to transcend what the female body can be on stage.” Emma Maye is no air-headed beauty queen despite the fame of her alter-ego. While it is startling how effortlessly she shifts into character to answer questions as Betty, it is refreshing to hear her explain her motives.

 ”I had an initial idea… what if we had bodies that assumed all the expectations of female beauty in the mainstream world, and then collided them something totally grotesque like bruises or vomit, distorted faces or spaces?” That first exploration came in the form of What Makes Men Blush, a performance collective formed by Emma Maye and Charlotte Farrell in 2008. Then came Betty.

“We all had stage names we were working with and Betty Grumble was mine but I had never really used it.” Betty Grumble revels in the unexpected: as the one alternative performer amongst a selection of neo-classical performers, the night turns from the art of striptease to a Frankenstein showcase of body image and the demands of echoing bodiless voices, her eyes light up and her teeth gleam and her body moves in ways that never seem quite right.

In truth, this is where Emma Maye’s stagecraft finds its convention. The strength of her work lies in examining exactly what it is that men want, what it is that supposedly drives the male gaze, and then giving too much of it. Salivation becomes drooling, nipple crosses are used six times to emulate a pig, the devouring female turns cannibal, the beauty pageant star becomes utterly helpless. It is the very definition of satire, but she says she still finds people are a bit wary. Despite the supposedly risqué billing, “it’s amazing how conservative people are. For me, in the 80s and 90s, stuff was really out there but as a society we’ve gone a bit more conservative. For feminism as well, female bodies ‘broke out’ in the 80s and then we kind of fell in on ourselves and we’ve gone backwards.” But surely a show which enacts a constant loop from costume to nudity can’t be too conservative. Not any more, says, Emma Maye.

“Original burlesque came out of the underground, it was rebellious. Flesh meant something different so just for a woman to get up on stage and show her leg was rebellious. Yes it was about sex, but sex that was exposing the underneath… That was dangerous, political, constantly shifting and expressed from the guts of the girls. Now, burlesque has had this resurgence as very clean – woman as a container for all of this stuff. That’s what I’m interested in, that container. Dita Von Teese is beautiful, that’s all very attractive but I just don’t think it’s progressive. I’m not interested in it. I’m interested in this container of Betty.”

It explains a lot. The first time I saw Betty perform, she defecated on stage. The next performance involved a pet dog’s untimely demise inside a violently rattled Christmas box. It’s certainly not anything Dita Von Teese would go near, and that’s why she does it. Emma Maye wasn’t trying to fetishise excrement, though she admits such fetish exists. “Things become unravelled and Betty’s body becomes a site where we can start to re-imagine the expectations around her. I vomit and I piss and shit out everything, and bleed, and then assemble something new, amongst all the chaos. The fact that people can come with me on that journey, whether it’s with laughter or outrage, can be really cathartic.” Betty, in all of her pageant training is confused into delirium, getting ‘sexy’ so wrong, that her insides spill out. “Then,” Emma Maye says, smiling. “she sells it back to the audience, rolled in glitter.”

And there it is, she’s found her way to the pet peeve of many of Burlesque’s detractors. If women supposedly empowered, surely selling tickets to a show where they strip defies the acts of  feminism. Conversely, if they lack the freedom to do so, is their liberty then also being limited? Surprisingly for a burlesque performer, Emma leans toward the former.

“Burlesque the word, is from Italian (burlesco). To ‘burlesque’ something is to parody it. It’s about pulling down hierarchies. The excess – the diamantes, the wealth, the celebration of bourgeois classism that goes on, the little top-hats they wear on the tops of their heads, the corsets, whatever – is just reaffirming this hierarchy that women are a part of in a way that we are a second sex.  How is that empowering? My research lies not in arguing that striptease is disempowering, but what’s at stake for the body that is doing it. It is also about context. “

And here enters Betty Grumble?

“Betty thinks she is Dita Von Teese, she’s utterly convinced of it, but all the pressure of having to be that way has her spilling out of that container so I’m interested in showing up the farce of it. It’s hard to speak to other performers who are interested in classicism about my true interrogation. It’s not to say that [classicism] can’t be performed with power, I just think it’s incredibly difficult because it’s a male gaze aesthetic that buys into the patriarchy which still exists and needs to be challenged. One of my mantras [when performing as Betty] is ‘is this what you want?’ which comes from a place of real violence, my experience of violence as perpetrated by men. I think that’s a very common experience, but perhaps more unmasking of how pervasive the sex gender system is will help the form evolve.”

Female empowerment can be a very complex debate, especially if we consider that denouncing a woman’s opinion may circumvent whatever empowerment already exists. Perhaps we need to focus on the right to have an opinion, while still debating the opinion itself. Surely, it’s possible. Emma Maye tends to find it problematic that burlesque operates under the pretence of class, while strip clubs are seen to be the realm of sexual deviance. Is there a difference between a burlesque performer who covers her nipples, and a stripper who doesn’t? Or is it the scenario which allows it, is the burlesque show free of the ever-pervasive male gaze while the strip club invites it? I ask Emma Maye if burlesque can operate as a veiled tool of the patriarchy, commodified and presented for the male gaze while claiming empowerment.

“I think a real issue is the re-affirming of hierarchy, operating from a space of ‘Burlesque it’s classy. Strippers are sleaze’ – comes from a phobia that ‘strippers are dirty, sex work is dirty’, but what’s the difference between a stripper and a Victoria’s Secret catwalk show? It’s just a way to keep people in boxes. I would argue that burlesque is a kind of sex work, but then we get into that line: “No, it’s not! No, it’s not! We never show our vaginas or our nipples. Because that, that’s what makes it erotic. If we are to truly burlesque something, should we pose ourselves this way? There is something fascinating about the self-censoring of those life-giving, intimate body parts in the form that begs for closer scrutiny.”

As our conversation draws to a close, the end of a fierce debate on female empowerment in which I play an unconvincing devil’s advocate, we consider Betty Grumble one more time. I tell her I’ll publish the feature on her alone, to let people engage with her fully before the explanation of the piece you’re reading now.

Emma Maye seems grateful, as if explaining her art might somewhat dilute it. As if whatever strength Betty Grumble has is erased by mentioning the word ‘feminism’. I cannot agree with her. The more I know of Betty’s method, the more I love her, the more I forgive her garish smile.

If these walls could talk they’d confirm that – invite you in, take your coat, offer you a cup of tea and tell you it was true. There was you and me, for a while, then there was me. They would start on a trajectory of ninety years of omniscient observations of entrances and exchanges and exits. They wouldn’t stop.

Would they start with the moment you stepped through the door, holding my waist and a bottle of wine – just enough to fuel the conversation through the midnight hours when we lay our dreams out face-up on the table, our fears face-down, and fell hand-in-hand asleep on the floor, leaving white noise and an empty bottle to fill the room?

Would they recall the day it started raining for a month? We left the window opened, sat under the sill, and invited the downpour in just to feel clean again – to have something natural pour over us in this unnatural place.

Did they realise that we borrowed each others foibles and swapped concessions? Where once were two people now stood the product of a hybrid experiment, made of dominant personality traits and idiosyncrasies, dangerously exaggerated.

Would they remember the tears?

Would they whisper of the day you leant on me heavy, pushed button after button until I broke the hybrid mould, remembering exactly how to be myself, without you? You took a bottle of wine from the shelf, laced your shoes, and exited the way you entered, in reverse.

Would our story be lost in the mêlée of all that came before us, and all still to come? A tale neither extraordinary nor significant compared to the wisdom of the stars, the life-sustaining properties of water, or the breadth of human experience -

but both extraordinary and significant to us
or at least
to me.

Where the beach was deserted, when she was truly alone, she stopped and looked back. Her delicate footprints had disappeared, coaxed away by each gentle, lapping wave as if she hadn’t walked here at all – her very presence the only thing suggesting otherwise.

Before her doubt and rationality caught up she unbuttoned her cardigan, moth-eaten and grey (just enough to keep mild Winter at bay), slipped off her heavy dress and let it lie.

Following her feet slowly to the water’s edge, she dove in. Despite the season and the gathering storm, she dove, and that sensation we all know of being spine-tinglingly cold swept over her, as if she had woken for the first time, aware and alive.

The chill subsided, as it does, and she floated in the calm between the regular sets of crashing waves, somewhere above whatever dark monsters lurk in the depths, and somewhere below the steel wool stretched-out sky.

The North wind whipped over her body, throwing iced sea-spray into her eyes, across her face, on  the rocks and into the caves. Swimming back to shore, head above the water, she heard a noise – no, not a noise, a melody. It could have been the wind, wailing like the saxophone for the broken-hearted. It could have been in her head, but it was resoundingly there – this  certain thing. The saddest song there was: perfect portions of beauty, loss, and melancholy.

Wrapped in grey wool, she followed the tune through crescendo and diminuendo, trying to keep time in her steps, but stumbling and sinking into syncopation in the sand. She followed to where it led – she was certain that that was where she needed to go.

Photos by Samuel Webster. All Rights Reserved.

My dear Figaro,

I often wondered why the rosy pink of your birthmark never held the power to stop you swinging the baseball bat. For a young lover, you sure had a lot of fight.

But I suppose fight is all that’s left when a man takes your wife, and double crosses at every turn. Perhaps I’ll double cross you too, as you stand mystified by falling confetti and the way the walls seem to expand when you’re not watching them. Isn’t that peculiar, isn’t that strange the way that we almost expect the world to change?

That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? The cake on the wall, the flowers dropped, the way we were never sure if the malfunction of our lives was truly happening, or a farce delivered by the voice of God. She certainly seemed nonplussed, didn’t she, from her tinny tower, as we failed in the dark. She certainly seemed not to care.

And now I wonder: is it best for us to give up to the repetition? Will they draw attention to us if we own up to our loop? Will they begin to see our value if we call it style and not banality?

It’s our wedding day my dear, and we’ve showered it with jealousy from the wings. We have made ourselves in the shadow of other men, and the only happiness here is in the innocence of these children. The only joy is in these awkward models who stand around and dance in appropriately. The only thing left to do is another show, another night, another chance for things to fall to their death.

To celebrate Joe Satriani’s SATCHURATED, the first live concert shot in 3D, we have TWO copies of “The Electric Joe Satriani: An Anthology” to give away. Read on!

“CinemaLive is proud to announce the Australian premiere of Satchurated: Live in Montreal- a concert film featuring the amazing talents of world- renowned guitar virtuoso, Joe Satriani in 3D with 7.1 Dolby Digital sound. The concert was filmed live in Montreal, Canada in December of 2010 during Satriani’s The Wormhole Tour, supporting his studio album Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards.

Captured expertly by GRAMMY and EMMY award-winning filmmakers Pierre and Francois Lamoureux, Satchurated captures Satriani at his searing best, with every chord documented by ten 2D and 3D high definition cameras. Fans will delight in the opportunity to catch this spectacular preview of the master at work ahead of his visit to Australia as the headliner and creator of the G3 concert series.”

 SATCHURATED is playing ONE NIGHT ONLY across Australia, this Wednesday March 7th. But before you check it out, you better enter the giveaway!

It’s simple. First, you must be a fan of our Facebook page, then leave us a comment below telling us the answer to the question: “What kind of Boogie does Satch prefer?” Be sure to include your e-mail address, winners will be notified by the end of the week so we can post them out to you ASAP.

 For now, check out SATCHURATED, live on Wednesday night at the cinemas below.

His stories darken the streetlamps.
They chase white clouds to black
and set the windchill on edge.

But we always knew where we were,
as he dragged us into his world,
we always felt the arctic chill, and
heard the gong of the orient.

His words were like dropped piano wire,
The reminder of a forgotten melody
we could no longer hear.

And all of his stories ended in death.
and all of his stories ended in death.
and all of his stories ended in death.
All, that is, but one.

Lazy lions Lounging in the Local Library.

“Bella, can you say lion (ˈlīən)?”

“Raaooooowwl.”

“Is that what a lion says?”

“Yep. Raaooooowwl.”

Two tigers taking the 10.20 train to Timbuktu.

“Can you say tiger (ˈtīgər)?”

“Raaoooowwl. Same.”

“Yes darling, they make the same sound.”
“Same same same.”

Zany Zebras zig-zagging in Zinc Zepellins.

“Can you say zebra (ˈzēbrə) darling?”

“Ot’s dat?”
“A zebra? You know what a zebra is. Remember Zoë on Peppa Pig?”

“Yep.”
“She’s a zebra.”

Her little eyelids grow heavier, and her mumbled sounds slip almost into reverie.

“Come on, upstairs for a siesta we go,” I whisper.

“Not me go a sleep,” she says, defiant, “stay here and a boo…”

We stay for another story, her sleepy fingers twirling on my hand, her precious head heavy on my belly. Her fingers stop twirling as she drifts to sleep. I close the book and sit still in the knowledge that if I move she’ll stir.

In this extended moment I build her dreams, and shape her consciousness. It’s an odd power, so I use it wisely, whispering verb conjugations and nonsense small-talk in French, reciting sparse poetry, singing sunny songs. Her dreams are strawberry coloured pieces held together with a golden thread, confused with words words words.

When she wakes, she won’t tell me of her dreams. She can’t. She’ll want some water and a tin of sardines (which she’ll call dink and deens) and afterwards, I’ll wipe her fishy face and hands. She’ll clomp her way to her pretend kitchen, put on her tiny pink apron, and fix dinner for her pretend children. She’ll phone her grandma on her pretend phone.

“Hullo. Yeah. Yeah…Yep. Yeah. K…Bye Nanny…Bye.”

She wakes, looks up at me, and whispers

Do do do doooo

in the vague tune of C#ABC#, and I smile.