Brisbane Festival shows world premieres and international artists
Brisbane artists and producers are no longer content to be passive consumers of shows from the southern states or anywhere else.
Southerners who have not been north of the border since the Covid lockdowns may be in for a surprise the next time they visit Brisbane. The city is booming. The Queensland Ballet, under Li Cunxin’s direction for the past decade, has opened its impressively expanded Thomas Dixon Centre, with a full-size rehearsal stage and other studios. It is a boon for dance and for other performing arts companies in the city.
Recently, I was taken on a hard-hat tour of the new, as yet unnamed, 1500-seat theatre under construction at Queensland Performing Arts Centre. The building, clad with glass like a curtain, has been designed with regard to the needs of modern producers and audiences. It promises adaptable staging, a large orchestra pit, great sightlines and ample foyer space and toilet facilities.
And, while South Bank feels like a building site at the moment, the transformation of Victoria Bridge across the Brisbane River will be a pedestrian-friendly link between the city and the cultural precinct.
All of this is happening, of course, in the countdown to the Brisbane Olympics in 2032.
The city’s creative minds are also thinking big. The Brisbane Festival and QPAC, together and with other companies, are behind a flourishing of local performance that I’m tentatively calling the banana renaissance. These organisations are investing in new shows both serious and popular, with the intention that they can be exported interstate – after their Brisbane premieres, of course.
If you doubt the appeal of what may be coming out of Queensland, consider the runaway success last year of Boy Swallows Universe, the theatre adaptation of Trent Dalton’s bestseller. Produced by Queensland Theatre, Brisbane Festival and QPAC, it was the biggest-selling show ever presented by the festival. There’s talk of a possible tour and more to come from that corner.
Queenslander Leah Purcell’s utterly gripping play, The Drover’s Wife – having won many awards and been adapted as a novel and a feature film – is now being made into an opera with music by George Palmer, produced by QPAC. I saw an early presentation of some scenes a fortnight ago and was impressed by the vivid vocal writing for Purcell’s strongly drawn characters.
Another music-theatre work, also based on a First Nations story, Straight from the Strait, is being produced by Opera Queensland for next year’s festival. The musical, by composer Rubina Kimiia and librettist Norah Bagiri, is about labourers from the Torres Strait Islands who helped lay the tracks for Queensland’s vast rail network – their backbreaking work also breaking a world record for speed of construction.
Brisbane Festival director Louise Bezzina, delivering her fourth festival, has rolled out a program that shows evidence of her ambition to produce works of sophistication and scale. Along with crowd-pleasers such as the Riverfire pyrotechnics and the Lightscape installation in the Botanic Gardens, she has been gratified by the success of her performing arts program that includes some impressive world premieres and visiting productions from overseas. As the festival entered its final week, it had already met its $3.4m box-office target.
A piece such as Salamander is the kind of high-end performance you would expect to see at a major international festival, and it’s no wonder there has been interest from other presenters in showing it elsewhere.
The show, which finishes on Sunday, can accommodate only 200 patrons at a time and tickets are fully sold. Extra matinee performances were added to give more people the chance to see it.
The two-part piece is staged in a warehouse on the Brisbane River, with a set design by Es Devlin and choreography by Maxine Doyle. In the first part, a Perspex maze suggests a sci-fi greenhouse from which there is no escape. The audience stands around three sides of the square, on balconies or at ground level, as the action unfolds. The emergence of the dancers – bodies pulsing like amphibians from the deep – is thrillingly realised. And when the amplified soundtrack causes the tin roof overhead to vibrate, like the sound of unrelenting rain, the sense of an oppressive, waterlogged world is complete.
In part two the audience moves to a second, circular stage, on which is mounted a long red table, like the dial of an enormous clock face. The table revolves from a central point, on which the dancers ride and party, or are forced to leap over as the rotations increase to a dangerous speed. As a metaphor for the urgency of the climate crisis, it makes the point plain, but the table is also shown to be a place of family and community, where social and environmental values may be cultivated or neglected.
Bezzina’s other major commission this year is Bananaland, the musical that opened at QPAC on Wednesday. Bezzina had seen Muriel’s Wedding The Musical and wanted to take it to the Gold Coast – aka Porpoise Spit – when she was director of that city’s Bleach festival. Instead, she has reunited songwriters Keir Nuttall and Kate Miller-Heidke with director Simon Phillips to make a new musical about a punk band with an unlikely second life as a children’s musical group. The show follows the success in 2017 of another locally made musical, Ladies in Black, presented by Queensland Theatre, directed by Phillips and with music by Tim Finn.
The Making of Pinocchio, from British company Artsadmin, is not a telling of the children’s story suitable for young audiences but a radical reading about what it means to be a “real boy”.
The show’s creators and principal actors, Rosana Cade and Ivor Macaskill, are partners in art and in life. Macaskill is a transgender man, and in the show he describes the medical and surgical interventions that have transformed his body, including mastectomy and testosterone treatment. He has a light stubbly beard and a boyish haircut, and goes by the pronouns he/him and they/them.
The play at Brisbane Powerhouse is a kind of metatheatre, as Cade and Macaskill toy with theatre conventions and expose its illusions. Cade breaks the fourth wall to prepare the audience for our role of being a theatre “audience”. Will we be puppet-allies and publicly cheer and support them? Would we want puppets sharing public toilets or teaching at our children’s schools?
The stakes are raised considerably when Pinocchio, now a flesh-and-blood boy, is paraded as if in a freak show. Macaskill, as Pinocchio, performs an awkward strip tease before standing naked before us. As a theatrical ploy, it highlights a weird obsession with defining people by their body shape and characteristics. The Making of Pinocchio is presented here in an Australian premiere and deserves to be seen more widely for its humane if occasionally confronting exploration of this highly divisive social issue.
Circa already is one of Queensland’s great performing arts exports, the troupe led by Yaron Lifschitz having performed around the world and in collaboration with opera companies and orchestras. Lifschitz has a sensitive ear for music and the compositions he uses add considerably to the atmosphere and tone of the company’s work.
Eternity is staged in the gothic-revival architecture of St John’s Cathedral, the height and length of the nave being used most effectively by Circa’s acrobats and aerial artists.
The audience enters to the sound of the church organ and music by Arvo Part, the “holy minimalist” Estonian composer whose music evokes serenity and contemplation. Other music by Part is played throughout the performance in recordings by Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
A long stage like a catwalk runs down the nave with the audience seated on either side, and it is thrilling to see the Circa artists up close as they execute tumbles and backflips, feats of strength and human towers. One can find allusions to religious imagery if one chooses but there are no specific references in the hour-long piece. At one point, a lone acrobat performing on aerial silks is suspended high above the transept like a soaring angel or, if you prefer, the human spirit in flight.
Brisbane has long been an importer of musicals and big-budget performing arts – the cargo cult of Wagner’s Ring cycle, for example, will land on the city from Opera Australia in December. But it’s evident the city has more to offer, and producers and artists there are not content to be passive consumers of shows from the southern states or anywhere else. Don’t be surprised if there’s a shift in the cultural terms of trade towards the sunshine state.
The writer travelled to Brisbane as a guest of the Brisbane Festival.