Collide
ArtsLab Festival
Director: Natalie Rose
Projects 107, Redfern
March 14-24, 2024
Collide is Shopfront’s most recent ArtsLab program showcasing the work of emerging artists who are given not only the opportunity to develop their work but also the support of practising professional artists. The current festival of new work includes three completely original and, each in their unique way, inspiring theatrical performances.
Bonny and Read, the musical (Emily Whiting and Aiden Smith, mentored by Laura Murphy), takes its inspiration from two real-life early 18th-century women pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. While their queer story is a complex and layered one, the script is adept at filling out the bones of the narrative while engaging the audience’s emotions through song. Their hearts are surely won as the Irish Anne (Anka Kosanovic), who lived life as a woman as her attire conveys, sings movingly of her failure to feel satisfied with the life she has freely chosen with “Calico” Jack Rackam (Ben James). Before the song is beautifully reprised as she finds her true place, we meet revenge in the form of James Bonny (an intense Louis Chiu), Anne’s former husband, and jealous rage from her current lover, Jack.
Overall, Bonny and Read is very appealing. The story is most appropriate to our times, the pirate setting gives it colour and action and the songs are memorable. The actors are well cast – the more grounded Mary (Gabi Lanham) who lived as a man contrasts well with the moody Anne – while the more romantic Jack acted with panache by James is an effective contrast to the grim Bonny. The crew, Eli Reilly and Roya, are very able seamen and the ship was cleverly suggested by a simple canvas drop which later served as a screen for shadow play.
The second offering on the program, Fat Girl (Leah Herbert, mentored by Rachel Roberts), is very confronting. Leah’s hope in creating this disturbing monologue is “to expose the cycle of dieting and add to the conversation around fatness” and her approach – through the persona of “Fat Girl” and personal revelation – ensures the audience will leave with questions. One of Leah’s most powerful weapons as she describes her experiences in a society still promoting weight loss in a variety of ways, is her smile. It can convey a world of pain, it can accuse, it can mock and it can shatter carefully sustained illusions about personal attitudes to dieting usually advertised as producing a better version of oneself.
Herbert makes telling use of various props to take the audience through her struggle – an array of torturous-looking shaping garments she thrusts herself into – and to depict her compulsions – the slurping consumption of Nutella (does anyone really like this stuff?). A screen projection of various takes on the insensitively named “The Biggest Loser” is horribly funny and the audience probably cringe as they laugh. In this sharp way, Leah makes us understand how we have been acculturated to accept “overweight” as a concept that must be remedied. What is “over” when it comes to weight? Well, yes, Leah is convincing.
The final and intriguing offering, Art for the End Times by Highly Strung Puppets (aka Tom Hetherington-Welch and Oliver Durbidge, mentored by Solomon Thomas) is a very ambitious and worthy production. The story explores the question of what the future may hold for aspiring artists in a technologically avid time and while not providing a solution, this complicated puppet performance which depends on the collaboration and connection of the cast suggests a possible answer.
We are asked to imagine a time when the world as we know it has ended and a rather cadaverous bird called the Curator (voiced by Jack Curry) tries to pass on knowledge of art and its value to his young protégé Roderick of the bright green overalls. His lessons take the form of on-screen excerpts of various well-known children’s tales, highlighting their violence and absurdity and performed by an amazing array of puppets. Sensible Roderick is more interested in ginger ale until the Curator has learned his lesson. The puppeteers do well and while it could be said as a production it is bizarre, it is wonderful.
Thanks must go to Natalie Rose, Artistic Director of Shopfront, for her creative insight, joyful energy and loving faith in the young and their future in the arts.
