Flood of talent washes into RCC for 2020 Adelaide Fringe
An iconic US multimedia artist, a top international electronic band and a beatbox theatre version of a horror classic are among the drawcards at RCC for next year’s Adelaide Fringe.
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Trailblazing New York multimedia artist Laurie Anderson will lead the RCC program for next year’s Adelaide Fringe with a career-spanning retrospective performance.
Anderson, best known for her 1981 hit O Superman, is an electronic music pioneer who came to prominence in the 1970s with performance art projects which fused language with her own technological inventions and visual imagery.
Former Adelaide Festival and Unsound artistic director David Sefton has continued to program world class theatre and music acts for his second year with the RCC at its new home in the University of Adelaide.
Anderson, 72, last performed in Adelaide as part of Sefton’s 2013 Festival, after having first appeared in its 1986 program. Her work again featured as the score for Ex Machina’s show The Far Side of the Moon in 2018, when she also returned to Adelaide to address university students.
All The Things I Lost In The Flood, which is based on Anderson’s recent book of the same title, will be performed at Bonython Hall on the final weekend of the Fringe, March 14 and 15. The show includes previously unreleased music, electronics and visual images, accompanied by an intimate monologue in which the artist comments on some of her most iconic work.
“The world is made of stories and as stories escalate and get shorter and shorter until they’re 10-word tweets and as our sense of reality continues to shred, we see that this is not a political situation, it’s an existential one,” Anderson says.
US punk cabaret artist and 2020 Fringe ambassador Amanda Palmer will also perform her show, There Will Be No Intermission, at Bonython Hall on the event’s opening weekend of February 14 and 15.
“We’re bookending it with really powerful, important female performers,” Sefton says.
Also falling within that description is US singer, poet, writer and actor Lydia Lunch, who will perform with her current band Retrovirus as part of its final tour at LVL 5 (the former Uni Bar) on February 27.
Other attractions will include English-French electronic avant-pop band Stereolab, which has already announced interstate dates for its first Australian tour in more than a decade, at Bonython Hall on March 5.
Theatre works at the RCC will also have a strong musical emphasis, headed by this year’s hit Edinburgh production of Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster by Battersea Art Centre Beatbox Academy at The Attic (in Union House) from February 14 to March 15.
“It’s taking the idea, which is very prevalent at the moment, of gig theatre,” Sefton says.
“These young beatbox champions have taken the Frankenstein story and turned into a beatbox music theatre piece – it’s quite unlike anything else you’ve ever seen.”
All The Things I Lost In The Flood is based on a series of essays Anderson wrote about the archive of work which she lost when Hurricane Sandy flooded her and rock star husband Lou Reed’s New York City basement in 2012. Reed, who collaborated with Anderson on many recordings and projects, died the next year.
“This book is about language in live performances, the difference between spoken and written words; the influence of the audience,” she says.
Sefton has worked with Anderson since she was guest curator of the 1997 Meltdown festival at London’s Southbank Centre.
Anderson’s collaboration with Kronos Quartet at the 2013 Adelaide Festival, Landfall, was finally recorded and released as an album last year and won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.
“It’s deeply gratifying … it’s nice to give these things life, especially with something like Laurie and Kronos, that end up getting a Grammy,” Sefton says.
Also returning will be another of UK group Architects of Air’s inflatable “luminariums” which have previously been in Rymill Park and at Womadelaide, this one called Daedalum after the creator of the mythological Minotaur’s labyrinth.
The full RCC 2020 line-up will be released online Thursday as part of the Adelaide Fringe program launch. Tickets: thercc.com.au