OzAsia Festival 2022 reviews: When, Gudirr Gudirr, The Special Comedy Comedy Special
Our latest reviews from this year’s OzAsia Festival, including When, Gudirr Gudirr, and The Special Comedy Comedy Special.
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When
Nexus Arts
November 4
One of the functions of art is to help us process and understand difficult and painful events in our lives.
The Covid pandemic is such an event, and artists are finding ways to respond to it. Mindy Wang is a Chinese Australian who has taken up the challenge in her affecting work When.
The personal impact on her was considerable, unable to visit her mother in China, and caught in the lockdowns of her adopted home in Melbourne.
The show combines video and music, featuring Mindy Wang on the traditional Chinese guzheng, Anita Quayle playing electric cello and Daniel Jenatsch using a laptop and Push controller.
Mindy Wang’s imaginative use of the guzheng takes the instrument a long way from its traditional roots, but still retaining a connection to its cultural origins.
The opening video focuses on Wang’s mother and her sense of isolation. The music here had a Central Asian quality as we saw repeated images of the Xiguan mosque in her hometown of Lanzhou in Western China.
The music took a darker turn when the video moved to the epicentre on the pandemic in Wuhan.
Startling aerial shots of this huge city were powerfully evocative, but most moving of all was the footage made by a Chinese filmmaker whose wife, a nurse in a Wuhan hospital, fell seriously ill with the virus.
This grounded the effect of the pandemic in individual human experience in a very moving way – beyond politics, prejudice and opinion that have coloured debate about it.
It will probably take decades for artists to work through the experience of the pandemic. Mindy Wang’s When is an important starting point.
– Stephen Whittington
Gudirr Gudirr
Space Theatre
November 3-6
Dalisa Pigram is a Yawuru/Bardi woman from Broome, and has been at the forefront of devising and performing intercultural dance for many years now.
One of the very best examples of her work is her award-winning 2013 solo Gudirr Gudirr.
It’s gripping from start to finish. Pigram has tremendous presence. As the lights come up at the beginning, a horrible message from the days of “Aboriginal protection” scrolls down and she stalks forward, rightly alert to danger.
“Yor Yor!” she cries, imitating the guwayi bird’s warning, “Look out!” or you will miss the turning tide.
What follows is an often harrowing glimpse at the lie of protection, and the cruelty of segregation, abduction and assimilation.
This is at times inferred, by a hesitant step, a glance over the shoulder, or a fearful retreat. At other times, it is powerfully overt, as violence spills onto the streets in some brutal video footage.
Her fury at this disgrace and dishonour bubbles over, wrenched from her heart, with angry, angular movement, and screams of protest.
The movement is fascinating, drawing on indigenous motifs as well as structured, formal steps alluding to martial arts.
There is also a broad contemporary palette, no doubt the fruits of the co-creation of the work with the Belgian choreographer Koen Augustijnen.
The sparse, simple design gives prominence to a fishing net suspended from the heights. Pigram uses this very imaginatively, at times trapped, like a fish, at other times in a kind of ecstatic reverie, using it like an aerial silk, climbs, wraps and drops included. Beautiful.
We see this extraordinary piece in a week when the tragic death in Perth of 15-year-old Noongar Yamatji boy Cassius Turvey has sparked protests around the nation. It is a stark reminder that the warning call of Gudirr Gudirr is yet to be fully heard.
– Peter Burdon
The Special Comedy Comedy Special
Her Majesty’s Theatre
October 29
The OzAsia Festival’s Special Comedy Comedy Special returns in 2022 with another generous mix of Asian Australian comedians from hardy perennials to fast-rising stars.
Among the familiar faces, there were stellar and side-splitting sets from the likes of Suraj Kolarkar, Lizzy Hoo and Michael Hing (of Letters and Numbers fame), and relative newcomers like local duo The Coconuts (Leela Varghese and Shanaba Azeez) whose apple-pie sweetness belies a couple of astoundingly acid tongues.
(They dropped a plug for their first solo show in next year’s Fringe – be there!)
Fans of local legend Jason Chong – 20 years in the business and counting – were out in force and were rocking in their seats at his witty Am I Not Asian Enough (a song about “depression and self-loathing” with an affectionate nod to Kasey Chambers).
Arguably the star of the night was Patrick Golamco, whose underplayed delivery of comic body-blows is almost as good as his timing, which is amazing.
A number about a well-intentioned instructor giving a bilingual safety talk – the English replete with bogan f-bombs – to a group of Chinese-Australians, none of whom understood a word of Mandarin, was priceless.
It’s a delight to have events like this where race is not racist, and the performers can debunk stereotypes and myths with the snorts of laughter they deserve. It makes the world look on.
Deftly emceed by pun-mistress extraordinaire Jennifer Wong, and with the constant musical presence of the excellent Trio Sepia (Gareth Chin, Mick Durant and Mike Jenkins), the Special Comedy Comedy Special once again hit quite a lot of the right spots.
– Peter Burdon
The Rat Catcher of Angkor Wat
Festival Plaza/Lucking Dumpling Stage
October 28-30
Giant mutant rats, their faces fused with trashed technology and torsos bulging with fur-covered muscle, bare their threatening teeth as they scurry across Festival Plaza.
They proceed to pinch purses and prams while tickling adult onlookers and simultaneously terrifying and delighting their children.
A truck pulls up, from which a futuristic spaceman arrives with a boombox, blaring music which appears to frighten the rats, until they turn on it – and on him.
Mad Max-like garbage men are dispatched to catch the rats, a huge durian fruit opens to reveal a part-alien, part-goddess, part catlike creature with a laser rifle, and the truck unfolds to reveal the Cambodian Space Project band, performing its funky fusion of western and eastern grooves.
Then they all begin to dance together, encouraging the crowd to join in.
Is this making any sense yet? Don’t expect it to: just relax, have a boogie and try not to get freaked out if a truly monstrous rodent suddenly sneaks up on you from behind.
On this occasion, First Nations rapper Prodigal Worm joined in to get people jumping, while Khmer vocalist Rachana Tanner blended her more traditional Cambodian singing with the funk backing.
The band explained that this was all set 200 years in the dystopian future and invited us to enjoy “finding harmony in chaos”, which pretty much summed up the rather loose, random nature of this street theatre performance.
As quickly as it arrived, the truck was off again, heading for the troupe’s next spaced-out free performance in the Lucky Dumpling Market.
– Patrick McDonald
Action Star
Space Theatre
October 27-29
From this show’s opening, 1980s-style, direct-to-video title credits, the audience can see who Vietnamese-Australian martial artist and actor Maria Tran wants to be: an Action Star in the mould of her heroes like Cynthia Rothrock and Michelle Yeoh.
But much of Tran’s fight has taken place off-screen – from being the only, cruelly nicknamed Asian kid in Ipswich (where her parents ran a fish shop in competition with Pauline Hanson’s) to the almost inevitable #MeToo moment that threatens to derail her career.
Tran blends different schools of martial arts with modern hip-hop dance to create mesmerising movement sequences which are interspersed with her story.
She also calls upon her two technicians and stage hands to block out the moves for various fight scenes, which are then re-enacted at full speed and with deadly accuracy for the camera on stage.
Much of the dialogue is also delivered straight to camera and screened almost simultaneously on the white backdrop, but on opening night a significant delay had the lip movements even more out-of-synch than an old dubbed kung fu film, and proved distracting.
However, her magnificently over-the-top fight faces proved hilarious in close-up.
A professional encounter with Hong Kong and Hollywood star Jackie Chan almost leads to her dreams coming true, but Tran remains determined to make it on her own terms.
Even in the Australian film industry, she has to battle Asian stereotypes – acting out and then screening clips of how she had to play the exact same part in two different productions.
Tran has hit on a winning blend of movement and monologue for this show, which could benefit from the dialogue being punched up a notch to match the fights.
The final action scene is brilliant but too brief, and begged for a more prolonged, high-kicking martial arts display – perhaps something that blends together all of the previous blocking into one continuous sequence, like the film montage that follows.
– Patrick McDonald
Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep
Dunstan Playhouse
October 28-29
The first woman to graduate with a doctorate from Juliard, Margaret Leng Tan is better known as the “queen of the toy pianos”. That said, she only brought along one toy piano to the Playhouse.
No issue. Singapore-born New York-based Tan filled the intimate space she created with other curios – including what appeared to be a toy smart phone and its rotary counterpart; both of which she toyed with, while playing her toy piano, to pump out a postmodern pop song.
There was also a cymbal, on to which Tan sprinkled what looked like rice to make what she describes as “delicious icicles of sound” music; numerous hand-cranked music boxes, simultaneously manoeuvred to play a symphony of sorts; and a grand piano, to which she pointedly added three screws, also pulling on its strings to stretch the definition of piano playing.
Two ghosts – Tan’s late mentor, US avant-garde composer John Cage, and her mother, who died in 2019 – also added to the haunting performance, thanks to projected film footage and photographs, and Tan conjuring them up by sharing her memories.
Tan also talked through her personal philosophy. In relation to her own willingness to enter Cage’s world, she explained “nothing happens by accident”, but when you are ready to receive it.
Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep presents as an out-there stream of consciousness. But it’s also quirkily calculated. One of its overt themes is Tan’s almost lifelong compulsive obsession with counting. There’s a sense that everything in her performance is meticulously timed, but the sensory show is also about going with the flow. And, as Tan noted, being ready and willing to take from – and make of – the experience whatever you will.
– Anna Vlach
Bridge of Dreams
Her Majesty’s Theatre
October 27
Jazz and Indian music, two of the world’s greatest improvisatory musical traditions, have a long history together.
Back in the 1960s one of the most influential jazz musicians, John Coltrane, was profoundly influenced by Indian music. But it’s fair to say that the influence has been largely one way.
So it was fascinating to hear Indian vocalist Shubha Mudgal acknowledge that the Indian musicians involved in this cross-cultural musical project have learnt a lot from working with their Australian jazz colleagues.
The excellent Sirens Big Band, a rare example of an all-female jazz ensemble, led by Jessica Dunn on bass, with Sandy Evans on saxophone, worked with Shubha Mudgal, harmonium player Sudhir Nayak, and tabla players Aneesh Pradhan and Bobby Singh in this rewarding and impressive cultural fusion.
The music, composed for the Bridge of Dreams project by Evans, Pradhan and Mudgal, was at its best powerful and full of energy.
Subha Mudgal’s splendid singing and the dazzling tabla playing of Aneesh Pradhan, ably assisted by Bobby Singh, were a constant source of musical delight.
Sandy Evans’ arrangements for the band, and her own playing, perfectly complemented these distinguished traditional artists.
Cross-cultural ventures of this kind sometimes involve compromises, but that was not the case here. The musicians were quite obviously engaged with the music throughout, attentively listening to each other’s contributions with pleasure and admiration.
The cumulative effect of all of this was exhilarating.
– Stephen Whittington
The Long Walk
Space Theatre
October 23
In the 1850s, the Victorian gold rushes attracted tens of thousands of hopeful migrants to Australia. Many were Chinese: so many, in fact, that the Victorian government placed a tax of £10 on every migrant arriving in Victoria.
The workaround was to land at Robe, in South Australia, and trek to the goldfields. More than 16,000 arrived in just two years.
Choreographer and filmmaker Sue Healey’s The Long Walk is a kind of moved meditation on this extraordinary episode in Australia’s history. Set on the beaches and bluffs at Robe, she’s created this piece with dancers of Chinese ancestry, filmed with a combination of handheld cameras and drones – the masterly work of Ken Butti – streamed in real-time online, with a prerecorded and improvised score.
The result is extraordinary. In the first scene, Kimball Wong – one of Australia’s finest dancers any day of the week – cavorts on the beach, captured up close by nearby cameras, and from far above by drones, describing gorgeous patterns in the wet sand, revelling in the arrival on land, clambering up the rocks, determined to move on.
We then see the other dancers exploring the new land, and then moving to a path that might take them on towards their hopeful reward.
If only it had it been the promised live steam. Alas, the weather put paid to that, but fortunately the company had the foresight to record their rehearsals. So what we saw was not live, but recorded.
This was not disclosed until after the performance – though the eagle-eyed could tell – owing apparently to the needs of the online audience. Poor form, that. Mind you, even an attempt at a brief live cross to Robe failed on the day, so perhaps it was all for the best.
The in-theatre session also included a showing of Healey’s 2018 short film Weerewa, a rapturous reflection on the relationship between nature and humankind. Created in partnership with Elizabeth Cameron Dalman’s Mirramu, it’s a ravishing piece.
In the new piece, a dancer holds a shard of porcelain, found on the beach at Robe in the course of creating the work. It has been identified as Chinese, from the mid 19th century, perhaps a cast-off from one of those arriving ships. A poignant reminder of a significant part of our culture and history.
– Peter Burdon
New Sounds of China
Elder Hall
October 23
While international acts often receive the most attention during arts festivals, these events also showcase the immense talent that we are lucky to have here in Adelaide.
With highly-accomplished performers from the School of Chinese Music and Art and Elder Conservatorium of Music, New Sounds of China was an engaging mix of Chinese classical music, folk-song arrangements, experimental sounds and pop-influenced tracks.
The Adelaide-based Chinese huqin (two-string fiddle) ensemble Silk Strings performed the first four items of the concert. George Gao’s third erhu capriccio truly earns its title Dazzlement. The piece’s dramatic opening, played with great virtuosity in this performance, leads into catchy, pop-influenced dance music.
The arrangement of movements from Stephen Whittington’s … From A Thatched Hut string quartet perfectly suited the timbre of the huqin instruments. There was sensitive phrasing and excellent balance from all four players – Lester Wong, David Dai and Felix Wang on erhu and zhonghu, and cellist Joseph Freer.
Soprano Xinyi Fan’s beautifully clear tone and precise ornamentation were highlighted in Shi Guangnan’s The Younger Girl’s Heart. Chou Wen-Chung’s atmospheric piano work The Willows Are New makes excellent use of the sonorities of that instrument.
The highlight of the program for me was 100,000 Subtle Kinds of Music, an improvisatory work devised by Whittington with an electronic track created by Georgia Oatley.
With performers spread across Elder Hall from the organ loft to the back of the audience, there were beautiful nuances from all players and effective contrasts between lyrical melodic lines on the Chinese string instruments, the tinkling tone of the celesta and Oatley’s electronic sounds.
– Melanie Walters
SNAP
Her Majesty’s Theatre
October 20-22
South Korea’s GrueJarm Productions presents the Australian premiere of SNAP, a colourful mixture of illusion, mime, and more than a little technological trickery.
The show is introduced by the Tricksters, three blundering clown-like characters who react to each jolly jape with astonishment writ-large, much to the delight of the youngest members of the audience.
They also serve as the links between set pieces from characters named the Oddball, the Florist, the Alchemist and the Dreamer.
Of these set pieces, the latter two were by far the best. The Alchemist is a delightful episode in which the performer seemingly creates solid objects from handfuls of sand, only to have them turn to dust (and very sparkly it was) at the tap of a finger, while the Dreamer was an outstanding demonstration of the lighting designer’s art.
That said, SNAP fell generally flat. The Tricksters ought to provide a link between the character acts. Instead, they allowed the applause — polite, at best — to end before making a silent entrance to deliver yet another lame ruse. Fake fingers holding a box out of which the real hand protrudes might cut the mustard with tots, but for an older audience, drawn by the promise of “a mind-boggling extravaganza of illusion, mime, and comedy”, it failed to resonate.
SNAP looks terrific, but the lacklustre stagecraft makes it hard to engender any real atmosphere. The Saturday performance is pitched at children, and that’s the audience they want.
– Peter Burdon
The Demon
Dunstan Playhouse
October 20-22
An 1861 goldfield massacre turns into a modern-day, paranormal murder mystery in The Demon, which is like a jigsaw where all the pieces come from different puzzles.
Forced together, they create imagery which is often as unique and impressive as it is confronting and jarring.
Martial arts meet contemporary dance in high-flying fight displays – complete with wire work – while lengthy physical theatre, shadow and mime sequences also do battle with foul-mouthed and racist dialogue scenes.
Scaffolding sets are reconfigured by shadowy ninjas, tables on trolleys transform into cars, an actor turns tricks on a treadmill, and there’s even a dash of karaoke.
The cultural and ethnic influences are equally diverse in this collaboration by novelist Michael Mohammed Ahmad, theatre director Rachael Swain and surrealist choreographer Gavin Webber.
It opens briefly at the Lambing Flat anti-Chinese riots on the NSW goldfields, where a young woman is killed for a nugget which is cursed with the blood which has been spilt.
Along with her corpse, the audience is dragged behind the curtain and forward 150 years to a contemporary setting.
Two unreliable witnesses – who also happen to be police officers – deconstruct an exhilarating fight sequence which results in some thrilling stunts and another Chinese death.
Both police are Islamic, one of Lebanese descent and the other an Aboriginal convert from the Burrangong region, site of the earlier massacre.
But it is another murder from the past – that of the Lebanese officer’s younger brother – which connects many of the threads.
Meanwhile, the Demon won’t be appeased until the golden rock is returned to the earth from which it came.
The moral? Possession – be it demonic or of stolen nuggets – is nine-tenths of the law. But this play invites you to put the pieces together any way you choose.
– Patrick McDonald
Lost in Shanghai
Space Theatre
October 20-22
A born storyteller – both her parents were journalists – Jane Hutcheon made a name for herself as a foreign correspondent, whom many would also recognise as the interviewer on ABC TV’s One Plus One.
Lost in Shanghai is a love letter to her late mother Beatrice – who died earlier this year at 99 after living an extraordinary life as a trailblazing Eurasian woman born in Shanghai – but so much more.
It’s a fascinating look at history: As Hutcheon explores her mum Bea’s story, she places it in its historical context – from the decline of British influence in the region to the rise of China.
Thanks to its projected backdrop, it is also an intriguing display of archival photographs and happy snaps curated by photographer William Yang.
But – as with all family slide nights – the commentary makes or breaks the show.
Hutcheon does not disappoint.
It’s no easy feat to narrate – without an autocue – and engage an audience for more than an hour, but Hutcheon does just that.
Her heartfelt storytelling – she often puts her hand to her heart – is brilliantly complemented by percussion music, composed and performed by Dr Terumi Narushima.
Lost in Shanghai is also a dramatic performance.
At 15, while living in her birthplace, Hong Kong, Hutcheon won a major drama award and had aspirations of being an actor.
She taps into that talent, channelling everyone from Bea’s besties to Queen Elizabeth and even her teenage self.
Hutcheon is making it her mission to find out as much as she can about her family who “lost its way in Shanghai” and “claim a space for my Eurasian family”.
While the former may be a work in progress, she’s already achieved the latter.
Lost in Shanghai has something for everyone, whether you’re fascinated by history, love a family drama or are a fan of its superb storyteller.
– Anna Vlach
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