This joyful, aching work redefines the meaning of ‘ability’
By George Palathingal, James Jennings, Peter McCallum, Katie Lawrence and Harriet Cunningham
DANCE
Glass Child
Seymour Centre, April 9
Until April 16
Reviewed by KATIE LAWRENCE
★★★★
The Australian primary school bubbler is a rite of passage. I met one of my first best friends there. We share a birthday. Until mid-primary school, I thought all best friends did. Like Maitreyah Guenther – one of the two protagonists of Glass Child – I was too short to reach the bubbler, and needed a boost.
It’s a fitting entry point into a poignant exploration of what it means to grow up in the shadow – and light – of difference.
Glass Child explores the bond between Maitreyah Guenther and her older brother Kayah.Credit: Kate Holmes
The set is beautifully minimalist – just five chairs. Maitreyah sits in one, telling stories. One involves her younger self, too short for the bubbler, cold water splashing her face, noticing a group of children running from someone, and realising that someone is her brother, Kayah. Isn’t that like someone running from a part of you?
Glass Child, presented by the Seymour Centre and contemporary dance company The Farm, is a joyful, aching, vibrant portrayal of those who are both invisible and too seen. Combining dance, theatre, and storytelling, it explores the sibling bond between Maitreyah and her older brother, Kayah, who lives with Down Syndrome.
The title refers to the sibling of someone with special needs who is often “looked through”. Yet it’s hard to imagine looking through either of them, given the colour and tenderness they bring to the stage.
Glass Child features a playful, pop-laced soundtrack.Credit: Kate Holmes
There’s a playful, pop-laced rhythm to the show – Enrique Iglesias and MJ both get a whirl – but it’s punctuated by brutal realism. “Retard on the second level,” shouts someone in the mall. Maitreyah learns to drown it out, until the night she hears her 10-year-old brother, at bedtime, say “I want to die because nobody likes me”.
We cut to a scene where Maitreyah “translates” for Kayah. He says something incomprehensible to the general audience. Maitreyah, equal parts sheepish and confident, translates: “Emma Watson is a dirty girl with a nice bum.”
The Latin root of translate means to “carry over”. She carries him into a world that doesn’t always know how to receive him. Then they dance, and no translation is needed.
Glass Child is raw and unpolished, and that’s part of the point. It’s a powerful redefinition of what “ability” looks like, if it were measured not in squat reps or bank balances, but the size of a heart. It reminds us that love, in its truest form, is the act of carrying someone over, into the light.
MUSIC
THE LIBERTINES
Enmore Theatre, April 12
Reviewed by PENRY BUCKLEY
★★★½
For a band so notorious for conflict every show can feel like a reunion. But those still pinching themselves about their 2010 return (they got back together for good in 2014) might be relieved to hear the sourness has gone between frontmen Pete Doherty and Carl Barat.
There’s no denying they come alive most during their old hits – the sound gets louder and Gary Powell’s bass drum bigger on early singles What a Waster and Up the Bracket. But their post-reunion material, including last year’s All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, also has swagger, even if it doesn’t stray far from the original formula.
The Libertines come alive when they play their old hits.
Shiver, with its chiming, Johnny Marr-ish guitars, could have passed for an old standard at any early 2000s indie disco, as would the big beats and Barat’s Happy Mondays-esque rapping on Mustangs.
Merry Old England (“Crisp packets and puddles on the ground/Welcome to Merry Old England”) rehashes themes Doherty has explored throughout his career, even if this effort is not as strong as Babyshambles’ (his other band) soaring Albion. But bassist John Hassall holds it together, skanking on one side of the stage.
The new Libertines album, their first in almost 10 years, reveals a band that still enjoys playing together. Doherty and Barat play the same guitars and dress as they did in their early 20s, with the addition of wide-brimmed hats, making them look like bushrangers, or jolly swagmen (an impromptu Waltzing Matilda sing-along breaks out during The Good Old Days). They still approach each other to duel guitars, or share the mic, tantalisingly so on set closer Can’t Stand Me Now, about their tumultuous relationship.
But if there’s no longer any animosity, or unpredictability, from the long-sober Doherty, there is something else: a directness and sharpness in the playing that speaks of their early promise, then never quite fulfilled, and an enduring professionalism.
As the band closes the encore with two of their best-known songs, Time for Heroes and Don’t Look Back into the Sun, the crowd reaches an ecstatic crescendo and it feels like once again, after years of strife, the boys in the band are back on track.
MUSIC
Bach, Stravinsky & Spohr
Sydney Symphony Fellows in Concert
Sydney Opera House, April 11
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★½
This concert by the Sydney Symphony Fellows and their mentors began with a supreme masterpiece of the 18th-century concerto grosso genre, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G. It continued with the same genre just over 200 years later, as seen through the 20th-century’s neo-classical distorting lens in Stravinsky’s Concerto in E flat, Dumbarton Oaks.
In the outer movements of the Bach, confidently led by violinist Natalie Mavridis (with SSO associate concertmaster Alexandre Osborne and harpsichordist Thomas Wilson), the nine concertante string players (three each of violins, violas and cellos) exchanged motifs with buoyant momentum, switching between solo, trio and accompaniment roles as Bach continuously regroups the players in a joyous variety of combinations.
By the time Stravinsky revisited this style, its characteristic ideas had stiffened into convention and recycling them unadjusted was no longer an option. Although the opening theme of Dumbarton Oaks (led by Liam Pilgrim) has passing similarity to ideas in Bach’s first movement, Stravinsky clips the rhythm unpredictably and makes the harmonies collide as though cut up and rearranged in a cubist painting.
The Fellows’ performance, under conductor Tim Constable (percussionist for the SSO) was generally tight in the unpredictable metres of the outer movements, and persuasive in the second where Stravinsky specifies intricately specific articulation (some motives could have been chiselled more insistently).
In the arrangements for brass quintet of four pieces from Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals which followed, the challenge was to rediscover the natural melodic shape of lines written for the voice with modern brass instruments. Using flugelhorns for the upper parts in the slow languorous madrigals and trumpets for the march-like faster ones, the brass quintet (with SSO player Brent Grapes as mentor), produced smooth euphony and warm balance, spiced with strings of dissonant suspensions.
The final work, Louis Spohr’s Grand Nonet in F major, Opus 31 (1813) uses one each of the four string instruments, and one each of the woodwind plus horn, and is full of amiable ideas, conceived more for salon than concert hall. The string sound was less strongly projected than the woodwind, but the Fellows maintained musical geniality through close listening and carefully matched nuance.
MUSIC
Lumen Machine
Ensemble Offspring
The Nielson, ACO on the Pier. April 12
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
The first concert of Ensemble Offspring’s 30th anniversary year foregrounded digital technology as a tool of musical extension, creation and transformation. Digital technology pervades much of today’s musical world (even when you don’t want it to), and is not the new frontier it was in the 1980s when works such as Pierre Boulez’s Repons opened a new world of live performance possibilities.
Ensemble Offspring’s Claire Edwardes.
This program was notable for its energy and variety as much as for its neat new devices. The first work, Weight and Load #2, by German composer Brigitta Muntendorf, was of interest as much for what it wasn’t as for what it was. Eschewing conventional concepts of musical grace and beauty in both classical and popular spheres, it began with a bludgeoning beat across all instruments including a “virtual piano” played in the air by pianist Zubin Kanga in which sensors translated hand gestures to sounds.
When melodic motifs appeared, they were mechanical and emotionally empty, with an expression of denial reminiscent of Lucky’s dance in Waiting for Godot. Kanga’s own work From the Machine (after Eastman) drew on the work of singer and composer Julius Eastman (notable for his recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King).
Kanga blended scales and timbres at the synthesiser, waving a Genki Wave ring on his finger to change echo and resonance, somewhat like the distortions of a “wobble board”. Amanda Cole’s Dream Garden introduced the fresh intervals and chords of just intonation, based on the natural harmonic series rather than the compromises usually made in modern scales and keys.
Instrumental players adjusted the pitch of notes to those played by Kanga on a Lumatone keyboard (slightly over-dominant in the sound mix) to produce serene and tranquil textures over four movements, Unfurling, Insects, Rain, and Rainbows.
Anna Meredith’s Bumps Per Minute celebrated the crass hyperactivity of popular digital styles unashamedly. Its four movements were an arrangement for electronics, keyboard (Kanga) and vibraphone (Ensemble Offspring director Claire Edwardes) by Jessica Wells of short pieces Meredith originally wrote for an art installation in which the collisions of dodgem cars triggered outbursts of digitised music.
Tristan Coelho’s Hot Take offered a comment on the crassness and superficiality of modern discourse and resonated with Muntendorf’s piece in both sound and idea. It began with brash musical gestures thrown out wave upon wave by the players, with barking repetitions from bass clarinet and cello, arpeggios on the piano and emphatic thuds from vibraphone and bass drum.
The resonance hovered around the ensemble and was again controlled by Kanga with the Genki Wave ring so that it redoubled and turned in on itself. Melodic ideas fitfully tried to break through and eventually established a quieter phase on solo violin (Veronique Serret) suggesting more authentic musical reflection. The bass clarinet tried to revive the earlier raucousness but its energy was spent.
MUSIC
Cyndi Lauper
Qudos Bank Arena, April 8
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★★
Cyndi Lauper’s life has been more colourful life than most, a fact underlined by an MTV-style montage that kicks off the Sydney leg of her farewell tour. It’s all there: the bold ’80s fashions and multicoloured hair, the global hits, the vibrant music videos, the campaigning for LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.
They’re all crucial elements of Lauper’s enduring appeal, but her distinct, four-octave vocal range and ability to belt out a song like every cell in her body is vibrating has always impressed the most. It’s a thrill to hear it in action on ’80s classics like The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough and She Bop, which deliver a potent nostalgia hit for the crowd, many of whom are decked out in fluoro wigs and fishnet stockings.
Cyndi Lauper performs as if every cell in her body is vibrating.Credit: Martin Philbey
After the sugar rush opening, Lauper takes the first of many breaks to talk to the audience. By the time the gig is done, there will be about as much chatting as tunes. While that might be a major strike for most artists, it’s a positive for Lauper, who is equal parts charming and funny, regaling us with engaging tales about her life in her distinct Noo Yawk accent.
There’s a roughly chronological run of songs from throughout Lauper’s career, including some choice covers that show off her range and ability to traverse genres: a Mardi Gras in New Orleans-invoking Iko Iko; Wanda Jackson’s country-rock classic Funnel of Love; and Frankie Laine’s I’m Gonna Be Strong.
While there are a few occasions when Lauper, understandably, doesn’t quite hit the high notes like she used to, there are still plenty of moments where she does, like on a thrilling version of Money Changes Everything and chill-inducing Time After Time, which may be the best song of the night.
Yes, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is saved for last and it’s still a blast to hear 42 years later, but True Colours best encapsulates Lauper’s spirit. In a show full of striking set design, the image of Lauper singing what has become a gay anthem, with a fan-blown rainbow scarf dancing above her, is both iconic and poignant, and a perfect example of an artist who’s always poured her heart into her art.
If it really is the final time Lauper plays live in Sydney, it’s a wonderful way to go out.
THEATRE
BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY
Belvoir St Theatre, April 9
Until April 27
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½
I’m sure Megan Wilding doesn’t mean to steal scenes, but her physical acting, timing and control of her vocal pitch are so complete she’s a magnet for the eyes and ears. Even with very fine actors, you sometimes see the craft underpinning their art. With Wilding, you just see the character she plays, and laugh at every jot of comedy this character conveys.
In Dalara Williams’ Big Girls Don’t Cry, here having its world premiere directed by Ian Michael, Wilding plays Queenie, the most rambunctious of three young black women living in Redfern in the mid-1960s. Her friends are Cheryl (played by Williams, herself) and Lulu (an amusing Stephanie Somerville), and their camaraderie is a bulwark against the racism that pervades their daily lives.
Megan Wilding (left) with Stephanie Somerville.Credit: Stephen Wilson Barker
Williams draws on stories she was told by women who lived through this era, and references the 1964 establishment of the Foundation of Aboriginal Affairs, the 1965 Freedom Ride confronting racism in New South Wales towns, and the run-up to the 1967 referendum that saw Aboriginal people finally included in the population. Vietnam is there, with Cheryl’s boyfriend, Michael (Mathew Cooper) writing to her from the war, and 60s-style pop music (by Brendan Boney) sprays the air, hence the titular reference to The Four Seasons’ 1962 hit.
Yet, despite the bigotry experienced by the women and Cheryl’s brother Ernie (Guy Simon), notably at the hands of a local cop (Bryn Chapman Parish), the play spends most of its time riding on a rare lightness of humour. Williams shoots for neither raucous laughs nor laboured satire, but a gentle comedy of manners, interwoven with conflicting love stories, primarily with Cheryl falling for Ernie’s friend Milo (Nic English) while Michael’s away.
Ernie, who bears the physical brunt of the racism, is proudly defiant, gleefully explaining to Milo that Australia’s whites are bizarrely loyal to the same crown that kicked their own ancestors out of Great Britain. When he’s arrested for little more than breathing, and Queenie’s fired for being late for work, the play darkens.
Here, however, Williams becomes less assured. “I’ve lost my job, but I’m not ready to lose my dignity,” Queenie declares, and even Wilding can’t save the line. Chapman Parish (who later is highly amusing as Lulu’s deferential date) has only a shrill white supremacist to work with as the cop, and the increased drama somehow doesn’t equate to increased tension. The problem is compounded when the second half of the three-hour play begins with Cheryl enunciating the debilitating effects of racism, as if Williams has shrugged off her character, and is addressing us as the playwright. The information was already implicit.
After this lapse, she steers her play back to the earlier deftness of tone, notably in a scene between Ernie and Queenie on a park bench, with Simon perfectly catching Ernie’s awkwardness, while succeeding emotions play across Wilding’s face.
Mozart & Bruckner
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House, April 9
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
The opening work, Kate Moore’s Blue Light Sphere, began suddenly with an energised texture of plucked notes and pulsating repetitions on percussion, all embellishing a single chord. That chord ended up being sustained for the entire eight-minute piece, and the combination of intense micro-activity within harmonic stasis conveyed a sense of swirling movement within a context of equilibrium.
Denying herself the resource of harmonic movement, Moore relied on modal inflection, shifts in orchestration and texture, and irregular rhythmic impulses. Sometimes a line would momentarily be highlighted with iridescence before receding into the surrounding motion like a rotating object in space catching a distant light.
The strategy of building a piece on a single harmony with varied orchestration is akin to that used by Schoenberg in his orchestral piece Farben, but the effect here was of a more vivid sense of presence within a state of transcendence.
To fill up the short first half, Lise de la Salle then played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459 with pert brilliance and vivacity. De la Salle maintained a strongly projected, marble-edged sound that favoured the piano, though sometimes at the expense of woodwind detail (for example, in the first movement). She drove the finale with insistence and brisk pianistic competence.
In Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in the second half, the music shifted gear, to ideas that unfolded over paragraphs rather than phrases. Conductor Lawrence Renes subdued the violins at the start to a hushed murmur while the cellos and horn unfolded the broad opening theme with carefully nuanced gradations, growing in grandeur and magnificence with repetition.
At the close of that movement, the horns recalled that moment with a sound of sun-drenched warmth. The transition from that moment to the darker, premonitory sound of the so-called “Wagner tubas” (sitting just behind the horns) who, with violas, play the first theme of the second movement, is like watching that sun-drenched object change mood as the sun becomes cloud-covered.
Bruckner said the theme came to his mind just as he realised that the ageing Wagner, whom he had just met in Bayreuth, might shortly die, and Renes allowed its structure to unfold at its own majestic pace without dragging to a point of climactic culmination. For the third movement, Renes and the orchestra established an effective tempo of incisive vigour enlivened by crisp articulation, and moved to the fourth movement without a break (thus heading off distracting applause).
Transparently balanced woodwind clarity, glowing strength from the brass and furious intensity from the strings all gave Bruckner’s expansive, sometimes surprising finale rewarding cogency and impact.
MUSIC
Sex Pistols
Hordern Pavilion, April 8
Reviewed by GEORGE PALATHINGAL
★★★★
We’ve just heard three of his heroes tear through a seething Pretty Vacant, with Frank Carter himself getting to live his dreams and gleefully sneer and snarl his way through it with both them and an ecstatic crowd - but the fill-in frontman is not happy.
Carter, a slight but ferocious cult hero of 21st-century Brit punk (former bands: Gallows, Pure Love, Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes), has on this tour been given the mammoth task of replacing John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon alongside original Pistols Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook.
He’s not quite as unhappy as the uninvited Lydon, but Carter nonetheless berates us for booing Jones’ talk of the crowds in Adelaide and Melbourne being better. So he takes matters into his own hands, wades into the crowd, gets a sizeable circle-pit going and howls Bodies from it.
This Sex Pistols tour is way more exciting than it has any right to be. Credit: Martin Philbey
It’s a magnificent moment in a gig that’s far more exciting than it has any right to be, but it’s not our fault there’s limited atmosphere for most of it. Curtains are hiding most of the chairs up the sides of the Hordern and the room is perhaps half-full at best.
So while the band, and those who turned up, do everything they can to tear off the roof, there simply isn’t enough energy to do so.
Still, these Pistols are firing. They play in full, but not in order, their only proper album, Never Mind the Bollocks, and while obviously not having the culture-shattering impact it had on its 1977 release, it still thrills relentlessly, largely thanks to Jones’ scorching riffs and Carter’s energy and vocals – the latter adding to a superlative approximation of these past glories rather than being a flat-out imitation of Rotten memories.
And on the subject of handy stage names, mercifully there’s little Vicious about this night’s take on My Way, as stupidly warbled by Sid in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, which Carter sings quite sweetly before it kicks off after its first chorus.
By the night’s end, Jones is clearly pandering when he says we were the best crowd after all, but we really could have been; a packed-to-the-rafters show or two at, say, the Metro, would have taken this gig to a level that’s still, perhaps unbelievably, within the Sex Pistols’ grasp.
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