Select Fringe Festival Reviews 2010

ENTER The Waiting Room and you immediately ask: where’s the stage?
The entire space is filled with rows of chairs. Sit where you will; from the outset, the audience is complicit in the show’s improvisation. When we think of that last word, we usually think comedy.
What makes this piece radically beautiful is that it interrogates and embodies the random processes intrinsic to human behaviour. Informed by physical theatre, social psychology and neuroscience, The Waiting Room is a living incarnation of fractal art.
Six performers (Penny Baron, Andrew Gray, Carolyn Hanna, Kate Hunter, Nick Papas and Tamara Saulwick) enter one by one.
They seem so distinctive, at first.
As a stage inevitably emerges, their individualities dissolve, mutate and re-form. Patterns emerge; haunting human geometries arrived at through minute iteration and recursion. Each performance will be quite different.
Michael Havir’s astonishing electronic soundscaping and Greg Dyson’s lighting are themselves randomised.
Yet, as with so much of Born in a Taxi’s art, this is improvised performance that appears anything but — not least because the equations from which it flows are so meticulously considered.
The Waiting Room is cutting-edge experimental theatre: a profound exploration of how we choreograph ourselves from chaos.
Another show at the Dog Theatre is Unpacking the Epic.
David Wells offers deeply personal vignettes about adolescence, respiratory disease, fatherhood and solitude.
Wells’s physical performance incorporates bacchanalian gyrations and clever impressions.
If the show doesn’t quite capture the magnificent intimacy of his previous work — Mantalk, say —
it remains moving, the sketches
of man and boy illuminated by
his son’s live music (piano accordion, chiefly) and ethereal presence.

Site-specific performance is providing our most haunting theatre. Maybe architecture always invites spectrality.
The last work I saw in this vein, I Thought a Musical Was Being Made, was set overlooking a busy Melbourne intersection. It turned an unwitting urban crowd into living ghosts.
This kind of presence as absence is reversed in Peepshow Inc’s The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum.
Inventive and spooky, humorous and poetic, it’s a theatrical tour through a section of the Abbotsford Convent previously closed to the public.
The convent served for more than a century as a refuge for penitents and postulates. The price of sanctuary was harsh. Women were given saints names, forbidden to speak of their past lives, their former identities lost. Work in the laundries was arduous and unpaid; discipline sometimes draconian.
Peepshow Inc engages with the history that stalks the abandoned, crumbling edifice of the Magdalen Laundries in imaginative and surprising ways. Our guide, Perpetua (Carole Patullo), reveals her story slowly, introducing us to a range of fellow revenants (Teresa Blake).
It’s a wonderfully researched work. I’m hesitant to give anything away. Surprise is crucial to the experience which — though it occasionally approaches historical re-enactment, a Gothic sideshow, even a funfair ghost train — will leave you with a sense of wonder.
The show unites disciplines, from puppetry and acrobatics to narrative theatre and lighting installation. That director Melinda Hetzel can merge such disparate talents speaks volumes for her creative intelligence. The final scene is utterly miraculous. Blake, an angel with clipped wings, delivers an elegy as she writhes up the limbs of the “Separation Tree” — the magnificent, sprawling oak planted in 1851 to commemorate the formal division of Victoria from New South Wales. It reminded me, incongruously but inevitably, of Ezra Pound’s famous poem In A Station At The Metro. See it while you can.