This isn’t the first Aboriginal/Maori theatre collaboration – that honour belongs to the moving, riotously funny romcom Black Ties, which premiered right before the pandemic hit and was a (fittingly brilliant) final stage outing for the irreplaceable Uncle Jack Charles.

But it does build upon that success, and if all First Nations children’s theatre is as entertaining and educational as Hide the Dog, there should be much more of it around.

It’s hard to think of a better way to open young minds to the enduring richness of First Nations spirituality, astronomy, mythology and culture.

Under Isaac Drandic’s direction, the show unfolds through an engaging blend of storytelling, vigorous comic performance and inventive design (including puppetry, flamboyant costume and spectacular visual projections). And believe me, holding a packed auditorium of primary school kids spellbound for an hour is no mean feat.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
The Dan Daw Show ★★★★
Meat Market, North Melbourne, until June 18

Dan Daw, a 39-year-old dancer and self-described queer crip, has a sex quandary: he likes to be dominated but he also likes to be in complete control of the situation.

He wants to be used, he tells us, but he has no interest in humiliation, punishment and abuse. Bring on the bondage, the discipline and even the masochism – but hold the sadism.

Because why would he need sadism when as a disabled person the world already heaps up cruelties and degradation for him? Dan Daw wants a different kind of pleasure from his bedroom role play.

And so, with the help of his trusted and very patient collaborator, Christopher Owen, the Australian-born Daw shows us just how he likes it in this intimate – but never graphic – theatrical confession.

Stripped to his underdacks, we see him held, choked, spun around, sat on, ordered about and shirtfronted by Owen: his slender, heavily tattooed body treated not aggressively but with force.

Owen and Daw often check in with each other in this tightly scripted performance, demonstrating a relationship of mutual concern and respect, with frequently given specific consent.

Daw is modelling a form of masochistic desire not rooted in pain or suffering or genuine domination but rather in a complex interplay of power dynamics and the creation of fictional roles.

This is, in other words, a theatre performance about sex as a theatre performance: a carefully choreographed routine that involves play and pleasure and agreed rules and rituals.

The audience is closely involved in this meticulous management of compliance. We are briefed at the beginning on what the show will be and how far the performers will go. And this is respected.

It’s all very slow and stagey – almost meditative – and anyone hoping for scandal or even spontaneity risks disappointment. But this all part of the experience.

Daw wants to hold his audience in the same confident embrace that he longs for himself. As he repeats throughout the performance: I’ve got ya. You’re in a safe place now.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSIC and DANCE
Buŋgul ★★★★
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Hamer Hall, finished June 15

Buŋgul is a tribute concert for Gurrumul Yunupingu, the late Yolngu musician whose haunting voice is sometimes described as the greatest ever recorded on this continent.

It takes the songs from Gurrumul’s chart-topping posthumously released album Djarimirri and adds live orchestral accompaniment, high-definition video projections and traditional buŋgul dances with an ensemble of 10 Yolngu songmen.

Djarimirri features vocal improvisations on traditional chants and songs and wraps them in busy symphonic textures composed by Erkki Veltheim. The result is what producer Michael Hohnen called a uniquely Australian amalgamation.

For this performance, recordings of Gurrumul’s shimmering vocals are played while Veltheim conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, members of the Yolngu ensemble – all of them close kin to Gurrumul – contribute yidaki and clap sticks.

The show opens with the atmospheric Baru, the song of the saltwater crocodile, which is Garrumul’s totem animal. Veltheim piles up the tension with drawn out chords and a repeated three-note motif for the horns that suggests the beginnings of a funeral march.

The dancers perform in a sand-covered circle at the front of the stage. Their movements don’t exactly complement the manikay but rather complete them, connecting the world of song with the embodied experiences of Galiwin’ku culture.

These dances are essentially imitative. When Nebbie Burarrwanga and Nelson Yunupingu perform Djilawurr they perform as scrub fowl – the darting head and the quick scratching of the feet – but with a sense mystery and refinement that binds the dance to ceremony.

Buŋgul is not without humour – there’s an air-guitar fantasy that’ll make you sit up and smile – but overall the mood is rather mournful, with the final two songs reintroducing the theme of sickness and death suggested at the outset.

And yet for all its sombre hues, Buŋgul is a fine celebration of the power of Gurrumul Yunupingu’s voice and its matchless capacity to move and inspire and unite.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE
THIS ★★
David Woods and collaborators, Former Richmond Power Station, until June 18

Stymied by lockdown in 2021, THIS is unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’s an avant-garde response to the theme of infuriation that’s calculated to anger audiences, and although the work cannot be dismissed – it boasts a large, talented, diverse team of theatre artists, and raises questions crucial to the state of contemporary performance-making – it also stands a good chance of being unlike anything you’ll want to see again.

Milling around in a foyer at the former Richmond Power Station, the audience is first drawn into a goofy and sometimes lacerating parody of major arts festivals themselves.

A white artistic director struggles with her mic, spouting pretentious and vague arts waffle. After covering politically correct bases in a hollow and self-congratulatory style, she introduces a queer person of colour who proceeds, with two backup dancers, to lip-synch and gyrate to adrenaline-charged pop in a performance that is deliberately and pointedly inane.

A white male minister for defence (and the arts) gives an ugly speech, claiming everyone’s an artist and paying respect to “all Australians past and present”. The stage can’t take it, swallowing him whole. A property developer presides over a tokenistic award ceremony which goes quickly awry. Angered, the (formerly working class) philanthropist busts headlong through a wall in a rage.

Clearly, we’re all complicit in this situation. The black comic spectacle of even progressive rhetoric and politics being co-opted to preserve the dominance of the professional-managerial class – that isn’t something you can simply enjoy without being part of the problem.

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The work’s aesthetic response to this cultural emergency spurns anything so shallow and conservative as “entertainment”. We’re corralled into a room by artists in full PPE. A performer living with disability vents her frustration at ableist prejudice in a monologue. We’re forced to line up for stickers in an extremely tedious sequence that may trigger memories of COVID vaccination queues.

And then, we descend into the dystopian underworld of the lumpenproletariat.

A diverse community shares music and dance, planning to protest public housing cuts from a distant loungeroom. That hovers like a heavenly mirage over the foreground – a muddy wasteland populated by rough sleepers and mentally ill prophets, ghoulish talking heads, a helpless schoolgirl savagely abused by her father, and a wild-eyed cannibal who kills and cans any “long pig” who falls into his path.

Originally conceived as immersive theatre, this part has been reimagined in a more passive theatrical form, though the style is thoroughly avant-garde, a new Theatre of Cruelty. Its savage and excruciating Hobbesian vision struggles to articulate voicelessness. It rubs our faces in the nightmare faced by those who are truly excluded, violated and oppressed.

Expanding the scope of our theatre when it comes to class is an important project. That doesn’t mean suffering through evident missteps and pointless longueurs.

The final echo of lower-class fury arrests for a moment, but as the audience files out you feel the experience isn’t enough to penetrate our shield of privilege.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Ethel Cain ★★★★★
Forum Theatre, June 9

The stage is bathed in a crimson red glow. “These crosses all over my body, remind me of who I used to be,” howls Ethel Cain. “Give myself up to him in offering, let him make a woman out of me.”

The American singer-songwriter Hayden Anhedönia is performing as her alter ego Ethel Cain, a woman who possessed her, as part of Melbourne’s Rising festival.

A tattoo across her throat reads “please”. The drunk guitar tones are sombre and the slow drumming suits her Southern drawl. As she tugs on the silver crucifix around her neck, black ink sprawled across her knuckles reveal the word “GOD”.

In Cain’s gothic techne, there’s a backbone of her Southern Baptist roots. Her father was a deacon and she sang in his choir from a young age. Now, she calls on her audience to be her choir. The sold-out crowd isn’t full of fans, it’s a congregation of idol worshippers: some had been waiting over 12 hours, possessed by the holy ghost of Ethel Cain.

In Corinthians, the apostle Paul says, “the body is a temple of the human spirit”. Cain rejects the Christian notion of the body as an instrument, with pop ballads that pull apart the malady of a soul’s crisis with real-world gravity.

In her performances, Cain sings about being touched until she vomits. She sings about shooting up, school shootings and baptisms. The mood is akin to a Sunday morning confessional while coming down from hard drugs.

She questions, “Jesus, if you’re there, why do I feel alone in this room with you?” Before accepting, “And I feel it there … But I’m still standing here.” The purity of Cain’s show recalls the numinous voice from blinding light.

Beside me, a young woman in a white lace gown wipes away her tears. We drink wine and drown in the ethereal frequency of Cain’s voice.

Cain sits on the edge of the stage, her eyes shut. “What I wouldn’t give to be in church this Sunday, listening to the choir, so heartfelt, all singing ‘God loves you’, but not enough to save you.”

For some, it’s baptism; for others, it’s communion. We’re all believers.
Reviewed by Mahmood Fazal

MUSIC
Thundercat ★★★
Forum Theatre, June 10

Come for the funk, stay for the … endless noodling and jazz freeform improvisations? That’s what Thundercat had on the menu for his sold-out show in Melbourne for Rising festival, which saw the 1500-capacity Forum filled to bursting, with patrons packed in shoulder-to-shoulder.

The American musician, real name Stephen Lee Bruner, is a creative and virtuosic player, with his unique signature six-string bass the axis around which his sonic world explodes.

He’s an in-demand studio bassist, having plucked the strings for the likes of Ariana Grande, Stevie Wonder and Kendrick Lamar. Most recently, he’s collaborated with Tame Impala and Gorillaz, and his 2017 single Them Changes has had a new shot at life as a viral TikTok song. In short: he’s a big deal.

In the live setting, two enormous speaker stacks backdrop the bassist – an indication of the huge sound to come.

He speaks occasionally, cracking jokes that continue in bizarre songs such as A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II), where he takes on the persona of a cat and meows for the crowd.

Tracks such as Overseas, an ode to joining the mile high club (he’s done it, by the way), show off Bruner’s silky falsetto, which stands in delicious contrast to his low, funky bass.

But for the most part, this show is about jamming: Bruner proves his chops alongside two band members on drums and keys.

There’s no denying that he is an impressive musician as his fingers move effortlessly, and it’s clear he and his band are having fun, punctuating songs with extended instrumental breaks that push the boundaries of their instruments.

It’s masterful stuff, but not exactly conducive to having a boogie, and after a while the impact dulls. A greater balance between this instrumental wizardry and more crowd-pleasing favourites may have made for a more well-rounded show.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

MUSIC
Weyes Blood ★★★★
The Forum, June 7

On the cover of And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (2022), the fifth album by Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, the singer-songwriter is shot like a deity, her wounded breast emitting holy light. Saintly and sacrilegious, this image inspires the theatrics of her world tour, with projections evoking her highly cinematic videos.

Dressed in a Grecian-style gown, which she gleefully twirls in across The Forum’s stage, a secret chamber conceals a chintzy glow stick that eventually shines through. This immaculate iconography is not just a marker of Mering’s musical ambition but also the self-declared nostalgic futurist’s distinctive sensibility, where wry self-awareness offsets an earnest belief in majestic pop songs as vehicles for communion.

Accompanied by a four-strong band, Mering begins with It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody, which opens her latest album and reveals it as pandemic diary: “Living in the wake of overwhelming changes / We’ve all become strangers / Even to ourselves”. While many artists are grappling with isolation’s aesthetics, Mering has a particular gift for merging personal and public feeling. Her lyrics link global catastrophe – rising tides, forest fires, fault lines – with mundane tragedies such as heartbreak, loneliness and uncertainty.

Mostly performing numbers from her latest record and her breakout Titanic Rising (2019) – which are the first two instalments in a trilogy – the set list moves seamlessly from, say, the interstellar grandiosity of Andromeda to the gentler grace of God Turn Me Into a Flower.

When the swooning orchestration falls away in slower numbers like Movies, Mering’s spellbinding voice finally takes the spotlight.

Describing her sound as “ethereal” – shorthand for lush instrumentation, wistful sentiment and choral splendour – belies its earthbound power. Her songs feel instantly familiar, conjuring a golden age of pop balladry where beauty and melancholy were comfortable bedfellows.

Even at the end of the world, Weyes Blood knows how to put on a show.
Reviewed by Rebecca Harkins-Cross

DANCE
Tanz ★★★★
Florentina Holzinger, Arts Centre Melbourne, June 8

There’s non-stop nudity, buckets of fake blood, scenes of gratuitous violence, lots of surreal horror, thought-provoking politics and the use of actual piercing equipment to rig a human body and hang it from the roof. Yes, it’s a long time since Melbourne hosted a live spectacle that was so gloriously confrontational. And how we’ve missed it.

Created by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger, Tanz is a bloody takedown of romantic ballets such as La Sylphide and Swan Lake. It begins with a barre class led by one-time prima ballerina Trixie Cordua, now in her 80s. Studied verisimilitude gives way to ludicrous voyeurism as the ecstatic dancing mistress strips her pupils and inspects their genitals.

What is satirised in this hilarious but troubling scene is the exposure of the ballerina’s crotch in the arabesque promenade. This exposure is a feature of both romantic and contemporary ballet which, as dance historian Susan Foster has pointed out, audiences and performers continue to accept as necessary for a true evaluation of the female dancer.

Meanwhile, a grinning witch leaps aboard a vacuum cleaner and gallops around the stage. She is our empowering contrast to all the sylphs and wilis and enchanted swans. We are given, in effect, two images of female flight: the ethereal ballerina who floats through dreamy mists, which is a patriarchal construct; and the self-delighting witch on her broom, which is freedom itself.

In the second half, the supernatural fantasies of storybook ballets are exaggerated into horror film scenarios. Holzinger’s aesthetic is instantly recognisable as that high-concept grotesquery particular to the European festival circuit. Think of such self-consciously trashy, gore-soaked spectacles as Jan Fabre’s I Am Blood and Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia, both of which toured here in the early 2000s.

Tanz also connects with feminist performance art, as well as incorporating circus and sideshow stunts. It’s pretty funny, too, with much slapstick and ironic self-parody. Really, however, the most daring and discomforting thing about Tanz is the absence of an interval. Where the interval should be – between the first and second act – we instead get 20 minutes of very awkward audience participation.

The sole purpose of this is to force audience members who have had enough to publicly declare themselves. You can’t just slink away in the break.

Holzinger might be a little late on the scene when it comes to questioning the gender politics of ballet, which is a stock theme of contemporary dance, but the theatrical potion she mixes is nonetheless a heady and stimulating brew and thoroughly recommended.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

DANCE
Tracker ★★★
ADT and Ilbijerri, Arts House, North Melbourne, until June 18

Tracker, created by choreographer Daniel Riley and director Rachael Maza, is a piece of dance theatre that tells the story of Alec Riley, the great-great-uncle of Daniel, who worked as a tracker for the NSW police force from 1911 until his retirement four decades later.

It’s a relatively slender production, but the subject is fascinating. Alec’s life is recounted by a great-great-niece (Ella Ferris), who is walking through bushland near where Alec lived. As she walks, she reads printed copies of old newspaper articles celebrating his prodigious talent for finding the lost and the fugitive.

The device is a little naff and this production lingers too long on these journalistic reports, making much of the more sensational details: Alec working the crime scene, hunting down clues that others missed, battling injustice, thinking through apparently insoluble mysteries.

Daniel Riley illustrates the story with busy but not always inspired choreography for a trio of dancers, creating elongated, flattened shapes suggestive of roots that clutch and entangle the niece, who is herself feeling lost and in need of a spiritual guide.

The show is thoughtfully presented in a circular space with attractive print curtains created by scenic artist Merindah Funnell and designer Jonathan Jones.

Ailsa Paterson’s motley blue denim costumes are brave but – like the sound design – don’t really serve the elucidation of Alec’s quiet resilience.

Alec is an interesting figure to celebrate because he was not a rebel or an activist, but a mild-mannered family man committed to his job.

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Indeed, he played a key role in locking up outlaws such as Roy Governor, the brother of Indigenous bushranger Jimmy Governor.

Instead, Alec embodies a different concept of resistance: family ties, connection to country and respect for the old ways. He was, in other words, a man of great constancy and resolve at a time of widespread prejudice.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

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