Maria Fernanda Cardoso on the hunt for spiders; NIRIN: Biennale of Sydney; opera hits a hay note; new light on ‘poet of Sydney Harbour’ plus more arts news
An interview with Sydney artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso, and her quest to photograph spiders, leads our rolling March arts coverage. (See @Ozartwriter on Twitter for updates on what’s open and what’s closed due to coronavirus.)
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ARTS NEWS
Maria Fernanda Cardoso is awarded $50,000 fellowship
FEW people would call any kind of creepy crawly “completely charming”. But Maria Fernanda Cardoso does. And the celebrated Sydney artist will use a $50,000 fellowship to photograph Maratus spiders in the midst of their most risky sexual gambits.
Whether they make you shudder or not, Maratus spiders are unarguably spectacular. Incredibly tiny at just 5mm long, they boast iridescent, vibrantly-patterned abdomens that they display like peacocks.
The Maratus’s mating ritual is a high-stakes performance in which the male stands to be abruptly eaten by the female, whether she allows him to become her lover or not.
Cardoso refers to the male spiders as “the first performance artists”. If so, the females certainly make them suffer for their art.
Using her new fellowship, Cardoso will capture the spiders twice. First she will commission citizen scientists around Australia to corral live specimens.
Second, she will capture the spiders with a camera — Australia’s only Visionary Digital BK Plus Lab system, located at the Queensland Museum. The camera represents the latest technology and enables even the tiniest creatures to be photographed in almost molecular detail.
The resulting series will go on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, which is Create NSW’s partner in awarding Cardoso the second annual New Dimensions fellowship. The inaugural winner last year was Denis Beaubois.
Cardoso is a celebrated artist who has worked with objects from nature ever since her arrival in Australia from Colombia in the late 1990s. Emu feathers, starfish, earthworms, seahorses and taxidermied frogs have all appeared in her aesthetically beautiful, painstakingly-crafted work.
In 2003 the MCA honoured Cardoso’s work with the solo exhibition, Zootopia. In the same year, her art was shown in the Colombian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Cardoso was born in the Colombian city of Bogota, where her parents — Alfonso Cardoso and Eugenia Mantilla de Cardoso — were distinguished architects. On weekends the young Maria Fernanda would go with her father and sister into the bush, where they studied nature through magnifying glasses.
“We’d be looking at fungi and mini orchids and snails. (My father) was really in tune with the natural world,” Cardoso says.
But life in Bogota was far from idyllic. Cardoso recalls the bombings, murders and assassinations during the drug cartels’ reign of terror in the 1980s.
“It was like, every day. It was like, it will affect you one way or another. There was this time they blew up a shopping mall and my father was on his way there,” Cardoso says. Hearing of the explosion, Alfonso Cardoso turned back and survived. But the trauma was all around.
“When I grew up you will see dead people from time to time by assassinations. You will see dumped bodies and things like that,” Cardoso says.
The artist used taxidermied animals in much of her earlier Australian work, saying this was her way of confronting death. But now, firmly settled in Sydney with her husband, children and the bountiful garden she has taken years to create, Cardoso is ready to photograph life.
“My work can be freer because I’m much happier. Living here is amazing, it’s so peaceful,” she says.
As for those Maratus spiders, she will photograph as many species as she can find. She has already captured some of the spiders in her 2016 photographic series, On The Origins Of Art I-II. In 2018 the series was purchased jointly by the MCA and London’s Tate gallery.
“They (Maratus spiders) are the first performance artists,” Cardoso says.
BIENNALE OF SYDNEY
Nirin: The Biennale of Sydney, until June 8, various sites, biennaleofsydney.art
Water swabbed from recent Sydney murder sites quickly vaporises when spilt, drip by slow drip, on to heated metal plates on the floor of the National Art School Gallery in Darlinghurst. Fibrous red clumps, resembling viscera, hang from a towering metal scaffold inside the Art Gallery of NSW. Wooden cut-outs of weird human figures swing eerily from the ceiling, or are trapped in wire cages, in the abandoned power generation room on Cockatoo Island.
Welcome to NIRIN: The Biennale of Sydney, where the public can explore all these works, and about 700 others, across six sites that went live on Saturday (March 14).
On view until June 8, admission free, and offering 600 events over 87 days — as well as presenting the artworks themselves — the Biennale is Sydney’s biggest global contemporary art extravaganza. Since it started in 1973, it has showcased the work of 1800 artists from 100 countries including Australia.
Apart from the NAS Gallery, the AGNSW and Cockatoo Island, the other sites of the Biennale this year are ArtSpace in Woolloomooloo, Campbelltown Arts Centre and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
And, while not an official Biennale site, the 1940s wooden ferry, Radar, has been refitted and decorated all over with Pasifika tattoo designs especially for her Biennale task of bringing visitors from the Sydney Olympic Park ferry wharf to Cockatoo Island and back again.
Brook Andrew, a prominent Sydney artist of Wiradjuri and Celtic descent, is the first indigenous Australian to lead the Biennale as artistic director. Andrew titled it NIRIN: The Biennale of Sydney, after the Wiradjuri word for “edge”.
NIRIN is intrinsically different from previous Biennales. There’s an emphasis on First Nations artists, artistic collaborations, community, and intersections with the public.
NIRIN’s celebrity-artist wow factor is more low key than usual. There’s no Ai Weiwei with his hulking black lifeboat (Biennale 2018), no Cai Guo-Qiang with real cars hanging from the ceiling (Biennale 2010).
Having said that, many of NIRIN’s artists are renowned. And if they are not household names, they come with fascinating stories. Teresa Margolles, who did the murder-site swabs for her work at NAS Gallery, is an international figure. Her work is represented by one of the New York City’s top galleries (James Cohan, whose other artists include Yinka Shonibare and Bill Viola).
A former mortician who examined bodies and compiled reports for the coroner, Margolles believes that violent death — and the resulting state of the body — can reveal essential truths about life. “She’s very famous internationally. She’s one of the busiest artists I know,” Andrew said.
Margolles’ NIRIN work is titled Approximation to the Scene of the Facts. To create it, Margolles, her English-speaking sister Margarita and some volunteers visited 20 sites in and around Sydney where women had been murdered.
Using forensic-style techniques, they swabbed the sites with water in a symbolic gesture to collect the “essence” of each victim at time of death.
“She (Teresa) does everything very precisely, like an autopsy,” Margarita said. While creating a similar work for Echo Park in Los Angeles in 2016, Teresa and Margarita were approached by a woman who asked why they were carefully swabbing the pavement. When they told her, the woman revealed she was the sister of the young victim who had been killed during gang violence on that exact spot.
“We all started crying,” Margarita said. “She said, ‘no one remembers his name’.” That all changed thanks to Margolles’ work, which deliberately included the names of the victims.
Margolles used that water — and the water from other sites of violent death in LA — to make a temporary cement sculpture called The Shade. Several months later, when the sculpture was demolished as scheduled, the young man’s sister was among many people who took home a chunk of cement to honour the victims. Margarita said Teresa’s artworks usually include the victims’ names and details of how they were killed, and in Mexico this is appreciated by grieving families as part of honouring their loved ones’ memories. In Australia, however, the Margolles sisters were told the naming of victims would not be thought appropriate.
The late Josep Grau-Garriga, who created the fibre-based work that evokes a butcher’s coldroom at the AGNSW, was a prominent Spanish artist. The work is called Altarpiece of the Hanged People, 1972-76. Grau-Garriga’s daughter Esther Grau Quintana said the work has not been hung in public since 1989.
“It is a tribute to unknown people who suffer from (oppression),” Grau Quintana said.
The central figure in the work, called Martyr, is actually a separate piece that usually hangs in the tiny church of Sant Josep Oriol in Santa Coloma de Gramenet near Barcelona.
Anna Boghiguian, who did the strange wooden figures at Cockatoo Island, was born in Cairo in 1946 and is now partially itinerant. Tate St Ives, a satellite gallery of London’s famed Tate museum, mounted a retrospective of Boghiguian’s work last year.
Boghiguian said her NIRIN artwork is about “being uprooted and exiled. It’s about being dominated and submissive and sexuality and death”.
As for the pigeons that have made their home on Cockatoo Island’s abandoned industrial buildings, Boghiguian is philosophical. “The bird shit can attack the work, but it’s OK,” she said.
The less well-known artists in NIRIN include the members of Tennant Creek Brio, an indigenous artist collective that started four years ago, according to member Rupert Betheras. The men “ripped the mechanics” out of old poker machines in the Tennant Creek Hotel and turned the one-armed bandits into painted artworks that can be seen at ArtSpace and on Cockatoo Island.
There’s Mayunkiki, a member of the indigenous Ainu people of Japan, whose artwork at the Museum of Contemporary Art celebrates traditional lip tattoos. There’s Taqralik Partridge whose work at ArtSpace includes poetry as well as beaded objects that reference the “spirit helpers” of her Inuit people.
At the AGNSW you can see the fabulously ramshackle sculptures of Andre Eugene of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. Eugene is a leading figure in the artists’ collective known as Atis Rezistans, and a broader movement known as the Sculptors of Grand Rue. He’s the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale, which has been held in Port-au-Prince since 2009.
“Eugene’s work appropriates and repurposes 21st century consumer detritus, often dumped on Haiti, into fetish effigies with an apocalyptic MTV futuristic vision,” the Biennale website says.
It’s unusual to see a scientific body like Adrift Lab listed as a Biennale artist. But Andrew has deliberately opened up the definition of who or what can be considered an artist. Adrift Lab is collaborating with Australian artist Lucienne Rickard whose work, Extinction Studies, is an ongoing performance at the NAS Gallery. In this project, Rickard is in a constant cycle of drawing extinct or endangered creatures, rubbing them out, then drawing the next one over the top. Extinction Studies changed Rickard’s way of thinking about animals that aren’t necessarily cute.
“All the creatures I started drawing and thought they were hideous, they became my favourite ones,” Rickard said. “The process of looking at how it’s constructed really builds a relationship.”
On Cockatoo Island, visitors can visit Adrift Lab’s presentation of its work on Lord Howe Island with birds that ingest plastic, mistaking it for food. Sad video footage of autopsies reveal birds’ stomachs packed with deadly seaborne detritus.
Andrew has always said his Biennale would be First Nations led, and he is true to his word. There are works by indigenous people from many countries. At the AGNSW the work of the late Kunmanara Mumu Mike Williams (1952-2019) is on display. Sally Scales, a relative of Mr Williams’ widow Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin, said Mr Williams believed he was leaving an artistic legacy that would inspire indigenous people to continue protecting their lands.
“His message for the kids was, ‘your country is a strong country. There’s significant law here, that you have to look after’,” Scales said.
Mr Williams was a founding member of the Mimili Maku Arts Centre in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands, in the remote northwest of South Australia. His inspirational words are painted on large canvases at the AGNSW, where visitors can download the Artivive visualisation app to translate them into English.
For Brook Andrew, this kind of link between artist and viewer exemplifies his vision for NIRIN. “As an artist, I know what it’s like to be in a Biennale and I wanted to do it differently,” Andrew said.
OPERA REVIEW
Attila, Opera Australia, Sydney Opera House until March 28 (now cancelled due to coronavirus)
Review by Sue Williams
This is the moment so many of us have been waiting for – and boy, what a crackling, sparkling, absolutely thrilling moment it is.
The Australian premiere of Verdi’s Attila, Opera Australia’s first-ever co-production with one of the world’s greatest opera houses, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, kicks off to a spine-tingling start, and keeps up the rip-roaring pace all the way through.
There’s barely time to draw breath as the action unfolds from the very first scene, with a legion of black leather-clad Fascists marching in to take over Italy in the mid-20th century, shooting the locals at point-blank range and acclaiming their leader astride a glossy black horse (yes, a real horse) on stage.
As everyone amassed stops in freeze-frame at various pivotal points, even the horse seems to appreciate the demands of its role, and remains stock still.
From that splendid start, it’s all on for young and old in this devilishly good adaptation of the classic opera about Attila the King of the Huns’ assault on Italy back in the 5th Century as part of the Mongol invasion.
In Verdi’s hands, it became a political call to arms for Italy’s independence from Austria. Now, in this version from Italian director Davide Livermore, it’s the story of the Fascists’ takeover of the country, and can perhaps also be seen as a rallying call against the right-wing forces currently making steady inroads into Europe.
Roman columns and walls thundering down from on high and a bridge that separates to show the gulf between peace negotiators, all complemented by some exquisitely artful digital projections.
These show the destruction of Europe at the hands of the Fascists, people fleeing for their lives, gathering storm clouds and the slayings that inspired the rebellion against the invaders.
Then there are those scenes of debauchery and dissolution that Opera Australia always do so well throughout their productions, as well as another favourite, when a second horse, this time a rather less well-behaved white one, walks onto the stage with a Pope on its back.
Attila, played by Ukrainian bass Taras Berezhansky, is a commanding presence as the murderous vanquisher, marching on to Rome after conquering the rest of Europe.
He meets his match, however, in the warrior woman Odabella who captures his heart with her display of courage and beauty – but who’s secretly plotting her revenge for his slaying of her father and, she believes, her lover Foresto.
She’s played by Armenian-Australian soprano Natalie Aroyan whose voice trickles, like golden honey, up and down the profoundly sticky register of difficult vocal tricks Verdi has given her character, until we all swoon before her.
Happily, Foresto escaped Attila’s barbarous onslaught, and the couple are reunited, although he accuses her of treachery before she can persuade him she’s only with Attila in order to slay him with his own knife.
Mexican-Australian tenor Diego Torre is Foresto, who almost ruins the plot against Attila with his trust issues, ranging from heartbreak to a lust for revenge, and back to heartbreak. Italian baritone Simone Piazzola makes his Australian debut as the Roman General Ezio, who keeps Foresto in line.
Of course, the music is magnificent but the action on stage is enthralling. When the production premiered in Milan, it enjoyed a 14-minute standing ovation. Here, it deserves nothing less.
OPERA
Attila: Opera Australia, from tonight (March 12) until March 28 (cancelled due to coronavirus), Sydney Opera House, $48–$335, opera.org.au
SOPRANO Natalie Aroyan will have two stunning co-stars in Opera Australia’s ambitious new production, Attila, when it opens at the Sydney Opera House tonight.
Yes, Ukrainian-born bass Taras Berezhansky and Russian-born bass Gennadi Dubinsky are good-looking men. But the true scene-stealers will be Zulu and Sinatra — handsome equine hunks that will carry Berezhansky and Dubinsky on stage during the opera about the legendary Attila the Hun and his marauding fifth-century forces.
Sinatra (known at home as Frank) is a sturdy, grey Quarter Horse who earned his name because he has blue eyes. His stablemate Zulu is a muscular, black Friesian who spends his weekends competing — very successfully — in the equestrian sport of dressage with his rider Nirrelle Somerville.
The horses, both of which are geldings, weigh about 550kg (Sinatra) and 700kg (Zulu). With their commanding presence, they’ll be suitably impressive as the steeds ridden by Berezhansky as the marauding Attila and Dubinsky as Pope Leo I.
Aroyan, who sings the leading female role of Odabella, is disappointed she doesn’t get to ride her equine co-stars. “I’m very jealous. I wanted to have riding lessons too,” the soprano says.
Aroyan has no doubt the horses will win the biggest applause at every performance. “They’re the stars of the show, you know,” Aroyan said. “They’re such beautiful creatures.”
For several weeks, before each rehearsal, the horses have been brought to the Opera House dock and loaded one by one into a cavernous goods lift designed to take bulky scenery and props up and down to the stage. Once on stage, the horses have been exposed to loud music, spotlights and the singers’ dramatic movements.
From tonight, the same routine will be followed prior to every performance. The big difference will be the presence of an audience. Horses can be flighty and nervous animals. But Zulu and Sinatra will handle all these new experiences like champions, says Steve Cox, a senior horse trainer from the Victorian talent agency, Paws On Film.
Cox has been working with both horses to “desensitise” them in preparation for their operatic roles. Certainly, the animals stood like rocks as workers trundled past them with trolleys during our photo shoot. And they’ll be fitted with special non-slip boots to keep them secure on all the different surfaces they’ll encounter.
Although she won’t be in the saddle, Aroyan did have her own fun while preparing for the show — she trained with fight and movement specialist Troy Honeysett. Without giving away the plot, Aroyan’s character of Odabella is anything but a shrinking violet when it comes to weaponry.
“The whole opera is about men and their own self interest and war, but it’s the woman who’s the hero,” Aroyan says.
Hero status should probably be also reserved for Berezhansky and Dubinsky. Singing in an opera is daunting at the best of times. Doing it on a horse must be next level terrifying.
Luckily, Zulu and Sinatra will be led on stage by Cox, who will be costumed appropriately. Cox has also given Berezhansky and Dubinsky some basic lessons in horsemanship at the Sydney stables where the animals are staying during the show. The two singers loved the novel experience.
“They were a bit hesitant at first, but they had a really good time,” Aroyan says.
EXHIBITION
First Light: Peter Kingston, March 28 to May 3, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Observatory Hill, The Rocks, $12/$10 concessions/$4 National Trust members/children under 12 free, shervingallery.com.au
Visiting artist Peter Kingston in his Lavender Bay home is a Sydney experience to be cherished.
You totter down a steep public path towards the harbour until you see Ginger Meggs whizzing downhill in a billycart. It’s an old toy nailed to Kingston’s fencetop, and is the first sign that a magical world awaits.
You enter the house where a 50-year accretion of art materials, artworks and general bric a brac makes for a visual feast that rivals the Sydney Harbour views.
For now, the most important object in the house is a huge painting on an easel. At 2.6m wide and titled First Light, it has lent its name to a major new exhibition of Kingston’s work that opens on March 27 (open to the public from March 28) at the National Trust’s S.H. Ervin Gallery in The Rocks.
The exhibition will be a revelation to people who know only Kingston’s earlier work on nostalgic childhood themes, and his love of Sydney’s heritage, says curator Barry Pearce, who is emeritus curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Those earlier artworks include the Luna Park chess sets that Kingston made, featuring laughing clowns and dodgem cars for playing pieces. And they include a model toast-rack tram with historical Sydney characters like Bea Miles and Rosaleen Norton, “the witch of Kings Cross”, on board.
(Just don’t ask Kingston about Sydney’s new trams. “They’re like great grubs — so crass and ugly,” he says.)
Stuart Purves of Australian Galleries calls Peter Kingston “the town crier of Sydney” because he has brought attention to so many environmental and cultural icons when they were first under threat from development.
Kingston fought for (and created artworks about) the Walsh Bay wharves before their redevelopment. His love for the wooden ferries, that have now disappeared from Sydney Harbour, inspired a huge number of his paintings and drawings.
Stuart Purves has come to know and greatly admire the man behind those artworks, and is familiar with Kingston’s dauntless pursuit of cultural and historic causes.
“(Kingston) is the only person I know who will take on a cause that he knows in his heart that he’s going to lose,” Purves says.
While Kingston’s life and art are part of the fabric and texture of Sydney, he has been known to embrace more distantly located causes such as the endangered dugongs of Hinchinbrook Island, between Cairns and Townsville on the Queensland north coast.
Across the last two decades, the 76-year-old Kingston has developed his art along different lines. His newer paintings are like spirituals in praise of the harbour, Barry Pearce says. He believes these pictures will eventually see Kingston hailed as “the great singer of the harbour”.
“Peter has a humble kind of poetry in his response to the world, and it’s going to take a long time for people to push away the joker,” Pearce says.
“This is the only hurdle that remains to seeing how great I think he is.”
Kingston himself admits he is “very pleased” with his new pictures.
“It’s much slower and quieter work,” Kingston says.
Kingston has abundant determination when he’s fighting what he believes is a heritage wrong. But he’s a gentle soul who dislikes the limelight, Pearce says.
“I used to go to his exhibitions at Australian Galleries and I remember (his) big paintings there,” Pearce said. “But he’d almost steer you towards the funny stuff as though he was almost embarrassed to put the big paintings up for scrutiny.
“(Artist) Margaret Olley used to say, ‘oh that Peter, he’s got such wonderful talent for serious painting, but he keeps shoving the other stuff in front of you’.”
A turning point came in 2016 when Mosman Art Gallery curator Katrina Cashman showcased Kingston’s new paintings in her exhibition, Destination Sydney. She wanted to show Sydney Harbour not as a tourist haven but as “the pulsating heart of the city”, as it is seen in Kingston’s work. Kingston badly wanted Pearce to see Destination Sydney. But Pearce had just shattered his leg in a fall and told his old friend he was immobile.
One day, Kingston simply arrived at Pearce’s place, loaded the curator and his wheelchair into his ute and drove him to Mosman Art Gallery. And that’s where Pearce had his epiphany.
“I tell you what, I so loved his paintings, which I’d never seen like that before. It was a revelation,” Pearce said.
Right now, Kingston is undergoing cancer treatment. His sister Fairlie Kingston — who is also an artist — is staying with him in Lavender Bay. But Kingston is tired of talking about ill health, and is desperate to return to his muse. He is excited by the new direction of his paintings, and can’t wait to take up his brushes and keep exploring the harbour in all its moods. His little fishing boat, the MV Anytime, is waiting for him in the sheltered waters of Lavender Bay below his windows. He often paints and draws from his boat, just as the French Impressionist Claude Monet once did from his.
Barry Pearce understands Kingston’s impatience to continue mining his deep well of ideas, and he believes it will help the artist to heal.
“His creative genius will pull him through more than anything,” Pearce said.
And so will Fairlie. A calming presence in the house, she makes the meals, does the shopping and keeps the world at bay when her brother needs his rest. Pearce jokes that Fairlie has banned him from emailing Kingston about the show.
It was probably like this when the Kingstons were growing up as siblings in Parsley Bay, on the opposite side of Sydney Harbour. It’s a harbour that has never lost its fascination for Kingston, and which is all the more magical for his presence on its shores.
BALLET
David Hallberg appointed to The Australian Ballet’s top role
David Hallberg, currently performing as principal artist with American Ballet Theatre, The Bolshoi Ballet and The Royal Ballet, will take up the role of artistic director with The Australian Ballet from January 2021, it was announced today.
Hallberg, who has a long history of association with The Australian Ballet and is its resident guest artist, will replace the popular Australian David McAllister who has led the company for 20 years following a stellar career as principal dancer within its ranks.
McAllister said Hallberg, with his pedigree as a great dancer and his knowledge of “how to get the best out of dancers”, will bring a great deal of attention to The Australian Ballet — including internationally.
McAllister said he will still attend opening nights and will be the company’s “number two fan, after David [Hallberg]”.
Hallberg said that after many years on the road as a touring dancer, he looks forward to living in a Melbourne terrace house with a dog and a car. (The company is Melbourne based.)
He said increasing the company’s “outreach” will be a priority for him.
“We put on exciting and relevant performance, but there’s a community rife with interest and curiosity that we have a responsibility to reach out to,” Hallberg said.
“Dance is such a universal method of communication — babies dance without even knowing it.”
Company chair Craig Dunn said Hallberg’s appointment “heralds an exciting new era for both The Australian Ballet and for dance in Australia and we look forward to welcoming him as our artistic director in January 2021”. He said Hallberg would bring a unique artistic lens and global view to his new role at the company.
“David is very well known to our dancers, the company and our Australian audiences through his regular visits, including a 14 month-long ‘residency’ during injury rehabilitation (in 2014),” Dunn said.
Hallberg, who was born in South Dakota and trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School, made history in 2011 when he became the first American to join The Bolshoi Ballet as premier dancer.
“It is a great honour to join this iconic cultural institution as its next artistic director,” Hallberg said of his new appointment to The Australian Ballet. “We have had a long history, first as an invited dancer, then seeking the expertise of its world-renowned medical team, and finally as its resident guest artist. During this time I have fallen in love with Australia, its people and this wonderful ballet company. I am thrilled for the future of this company, a company that inspires me with its level of excellence and global standard. I look forward to using the experience I’ve garnered over my 20-year career around the world and funnelling it into the culture of The Australian Ballet. The future looks very bright for this world-class company.”
David McAllister said Hallberg was “the ideal choice” for next artistic director. “David knows us well, understands our culture and our style of dance,” McAllister said.
MUSICAL THEATRE
The Secret Garden, from August 2, Sydney Lyric Theatre, from $79.90, secretgardenmusical.com.au
AS Anthony Warlow contemplates the role of the heartbroken widower in The Secret Garden, the music theatre legend can’t help thinking how different his life was 25 years ago when he first sang the same part.
Warlow’s daughter Phoebe had just been born, and he was receiving chemotherapy for cancer.
Finishing up in another show and then starring in The Secret Garden would prove to be a marathon effort. No one would have blamed this gracious singer and actor had he simply declined the role of Archibald Craven, owner of Misselthwaite Manor on the remote Yorkshire moors.
So why didn’t Warlow do just that? The singer, sitting in the semi-dark of the Sydney Lyric Theatre during the media announcement of The Secret Garden casting this week, looks baffled by the question.
“I wanted to do it, though, you see,” Warlow says. “I wanted to do it. It’s a beautiful role.”
This artistic drive enabled Warlow to face up to his unpleasant treatments, as well as the exhausting round of performances. But he brushes it off. “We do things, don’t we. You don’t know how strong you are until you’re pushed to the point, really,” he says.
For Warlow, memories of that time are coloured more by happiness than pain. “In 1995 I was given two beautiful gifts. The first and foremost was my daughter was born, and in that time I was offered The Secret Garden as well,” he says. “During that time I was still on my chemotherapy. I had just finished my intravenous. And then I was on oral chemotherapy while we were doing the show. And it kept me tired, it kept me slow. But I kicked on for the performances.”
Another concurrent “gift” was when Warlow met Lucy Simon, sister of songwriting legend Carly Simon. Lucy Simon wrote the score for The Secret Garden, and the pair remain friends.
“She’s almost like a spiritual sister for me,” Warlow says. “Knowing the way this show is and what it’s about — about spiritual healing — that’s Lucy. She’s a wonderful woman.”
The Secret Garden is a musical based on the evergreen 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett set in Misselthwaite Manor where Archibald Craven abandons his bedridden young son, Colin, to the care of starchy housekeeper Mrs Medlock.
The arrival of Colin’s orphaned cousin Mary, and the discovery of a walled garden overgrown with weeds, changes everything at Misselthwaite Manor where — in this Opera Australia and John Frost co-production — Rowena Wallace will rule as Mrs Medlock. Georgina Hopson will take the role of Lily, Colin’s late mother. Rob McDougall will be Archibald’s brother Dr Neville Craven, and Alinta Chidzey will be Mary’s friend and maidservant Martha. Nigel Huckle will be Dickon, the local moors boy who befriends Colin and Mary. Rodney Dobson will play the gruff gardener Bean Weatherstaff. The child roles of Mary and Colin will be announced later.
Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini says The Secret Garden is a “classical musical” with gorgeous music. And Warlow can’t wait to sing it again. “Vocally, it’s still going to be a challenge for me, but excitingly so,” he says. “What I bring now is 25 years’ life experience.”
ART
Portrait of Julian Assange on view at Casula Powerhouse from August, casulapowerhouse.com
A portrait of Julian Assange done at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London can finally be seen by the Sydney public after being roundly rejected by parts of the art world because, its creator claims, the subject is too controversial.
Prominent Australian artist and filmmaker George Gittoes did the WikiLeaks founder’s portrait at the embassy in 2017. Gittoes told arts editor Elizabeth Fortescue that the work has had outsider status because of the international heat surrounding Assange.
That controversy peaks this week, with Assange’s extradition hearings being heard.
Gittoes said many people were shocked that the painting was rejected from the Archibald Prize, especially after it featured prominently in a Foxtel documentary about the famous competition.
He said the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia declined to buy it when offered. The MCA told arts editor Elizabeth Fortescue that Gittoes was not on the museum’s current list of possible artists to acquire.
Gittoes said the work was also rejected by the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and the National Portrait Gallery. But today it will be proudly unveiled by the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, where it will go on view to the public from August.
Casula Powerhouse director Craig Donarski said the painting was purchased and then donated by businessman and long-time Gittoes supporter Mike Betar.
Gittoes said Donarski might get some “flak”, but Donarski is staunch.
“We are really delighted to have this painting come into the collection because it’s not just a painting on the wall, it’s a painting that tells a million different stories about fame and the media and press freedom and the individual against the state,” Donarski said.
Gittoes said his views do not always align with Assange’s, but he painted him because he was an important whistleblower. “We argue vehemently,” Gittoes said.
The Art Gallery of NSW, which runs the Archibald, said it was “not privy to the decision-making processes of the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW as judges of the Archibald Prize”.
THEATRE ON A BUS
Passenger, until March 8, free, artandabout.com.au
YOU don’t even notice the two strangers getting on your bus at Pyrmont and taking a seat together. They look like everyone else at the end of a busy day in the city. He’s suited in grey and looks tired and irritated. She’s in jeans and a cotton top and is minding her own business. For now.
As the bus begins to wind around the streets of Pyrmont and into the city, the man and woman talk tentatively about normal, everyday things. The rest of us fall silent, because we can hear every word the man and woman say to each other. They’re wearing tiny mics linked to an on-board sound system. Every so often the man and woman stop talking, and everyone else’s conversations start up again.
So far so good. But as the bus rounds the corner of Bridge and George streets, things start to feel weird. The conversation between the man and the woman is no longer in the realms of conventional chitchat. It’s gone somewhere else entirely.
Then the bus makes a quick stop and a hooded female gets off. We’ll soon realise we haven’t seen the last of her. An hour after we all got on board, the bus has deviated wildly from what you might expect to be a normal route around central Sydney. You’ve ended up somewhere you truly didn’t expect to be. It’s getting dark, it feels foreboding, and — without giving away the plot — the man and woman passengers who seemed so invisible are very much the centre of attention of everyone else on the full bus.
Welcome to Sydney’s newest and most novel theatrical experience — the latest project in the City of Sydney’s 2020 Art and About series which aims to bring art into unusual places.
The piece is called Passenger, and that’s exactly what each audience member is. A passenger, a spectator, an accidental eavesdropper, a witness and a participant in the inexorable progress of an ordinary bus and an extraordinary story that unfolds within it.
Written by Nicola Gunn with a score by Tom Fitzgerald, Passenger is co-directed by Melbourne’s Jessica Wilson and Ian Pidd. The two main actors for Wednesday night’s performance were Beth Buchanan and Jim Russell, both doing a great job as seemingly unremarkable commuters.
Central to the successful execution of the logistics was Ian Allt of Busways, who kept the bus’s progress in perfect synchronisation with the twists and turns of the script. Luckily there was a happy ending when the bus disgorged everyone at the Terminus Hotel in Pyrmont for a post-show drink. Until then, the show definitely had this passenger on the edge of her bus seat.
OPERA
La Traviata: Handa Opera On Sydney Harbour, March 27-April 26, (update: now cancelled due to the coronavirus) opera.org.au
THE rags-to-riches life and tragic end of the real-life Marie Duplessis will come to life this month when La Traviata is staged as this year’s Handa Opera On Sydney Harbour.
And if the show about the famed Parisian courtesan vibrates with historical authenticity, you can probably thank director Constantine Costi for the hours he spent in the State Library of NSW.
Giuseppe Verdi’s classic work is Costi’s first big directing credit following his internship with Opera Australia and his work on other company productions. The honour of being appointed to the position saw him immerse himself in the life and times of the beautiful farm girl who, at 14, was snatched away from her violent father and taken to Paris. In that city of romance, Duplessis quickly became a sought-after courtesan before dying of tuberculosis just after her 23rd birthday.
The story captivated Costi, and he became obsessed with the details. Above all, he wanted to avoid a stilted staging where “the chorus are over here, the singers are in their own bubble, and the actors are in the background serving drinks and looking vaguely confused”.
The incessant partying that was central to the lives of the Paris demimonde is an important facet of the story of La Traviata, and Costi is working closely with choreographer Shannon Burns to get it right.
“Dance was a very important part of the flirtation and the party lifestyle of this world,” Costi says. “People would meet after the opera, parties would kick off at about 1am and go to sunrise. People would get drunk, exchange ideas, there would be the great artists of the time, politicians, judges, public figures. And they would all dance.”
The waltzing during the famous “brindisi”, the drinking scene in Act 1, was a deliberate statement by Verdi. “When the waltz was invented around this time it was a radical, daring, controversial dance because you had bodies so close together. People are writing pamphlets saying ‘how dare young people be so intimately intertwined?’,” Costi says.
Courtesans were attractive, knowledgeable about art and music and could speak different languages.
“But this was all with the currency of sex underneath,” Costi says. “A high-profile male would buy your apartment, your dresses and your jewels in exchange for sex. So sex is a really important part of this piece.”