Scanning the foyer of the North Melbourne Art House after watching a performance of Holiday there are scores of audience members looking as if they had taken a trip themselves.
In an era that is distinguished by busy agendas it was a real treat to see so many visitors chatting over a drink, reflecting on a couple of successful performances and generally sharing a few idle moments together.
Hoilday is a charming piece of theatre. Produced by the Ranter Theatre co-op it is a contemporary baroque musical about relaxation that brings up some interesting questions for a society that is unable to take its foot off the accelerator.
It seems that down time is a complicated subject for people these days. In an economic culture of success, of making things happen 24-7, of keeping a diary full of appointments, seeking leisure for itself is not an easy goal out there.
The idea of leisure as a topic for the stage is what writer Raimondo Cortese so wonderfully realises in this meaningful look at the lives of two blokes taking time out.
Cortese is a wonderful writer and the level of success of this project was proven by the size and responsivness of the theatre goers who took a deep refreshing breath at the atmosphere of the absurd established by actors Paul Lum and Partick Moffatt. When taken by the mood they did the odd baroque sing song.
A remarkable set designed by director brother Adriano Cortese put on centre stage a wading pool that pulled the eye towards it as real pools pull people towards them for fun.
A pool is the traditional status symbol for middle class relaxation; of earned leisure.
It's the middle class of any society who are most awkward in persuit of real leisure as they are always desperate to make their lives meaningful by toil rather than putting their feet up.
For Cortese, the middle class context is a grand setting of drifing and dreaming for his characters.
The pool of water is a reference for lazy days as the actors take their time gazing into the mid distance, reclining on a chaise lounge and languidly slipping into the depths of their own thoughts that makes for a string of ephemeral reflections that as you might guess are often profound.
In such depths of themselves we see that there is an extreme of ideas, of experiences, of awareness, and these themes take the place of action on stage.
The light heartedness of a trip away, of doing nothing and expressing ideas freely took a sudden turn when truth entered the stream of Lum and Moffatt's relationship.
Are you awake or dreaming? Is what one actor insighfully inquires after a particularly laissez faire exchange of words. Of course the question is not posed to be answered and the dialog drifts along as a ship sails across the back of the set, birds fade in and out of the elegant soundscape and the actors coast on until the light dims on this carefree flight from the daily grind.
Holiday closed at the North Melbourne Art House on August 22.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Homelands in exile
When Frederic Brenner went to work almost 30 years ago it was one photograph he took, then another and before long there were the thousands of images that make up this remarkable body of work.
Diaspora: homelands in exile, gathers a selection of lyrical black and white images of the Jewish Diaspora as it does in an accompanying book of the same name. The photographic exhibit is now on at the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne.
On his lengthy search of authentic Jewishness Brenner went to more than 40 countries aiming his lens at the keepers
of remnant cultures who often kept their traditions out of sight of prying eyes.
For three months this series of photographs of Israel, Italy, the United States, Russia, Spain, South Africa and Poland will be celebrated by Victorians as it was by guests of the United Nations gallery and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City in previous years.
Brenner was born in 1959 in Paris. At 19 he had gone off to Israel with his camera. In the streets of Jerusalem, in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish district of Mea Shearim he caught a thoughful first series of photos that he imagined were archetypal Jews preserving an ‘authentic’ Jewish culture.
Besides these earlier images is written the question that drove the photographer for 25 years of research, What is authentic Jewishness?
Brenner went moving slowly along from ethnographic documentation of his subjects to elegant, posed individual and family portraits. He brushed on the epic cycles of Jew history, of departures and return, but found an answer to satisfy his calling in the presence of cultural mingling.
In Rome of 1992 the inexorable influence of Italian life can be traced on the faces of Jewish men as they pose with motorbike helmets under their arms at the most iconic of Roman landmarks, the Colosseum. At the Arch of Titus, the old Roman port of the Jewish ghetto, women stand in a small group beckoning us to ask if they are the one family, the one race?
The melding of Jewish culture with the cultures of other lands is a theme that skips from frame to frame as one wonders this exhibition.
Idiosyncratic and sometimes outlandish images of the United States are Brenner’s most interesting as they directly challenge the stereotype of Jewishness.
What about the protesters of an anti-Semitic act in Montana of 1994. Each person; black, white and native American is alone, defiantly alone, tens of them as they march toward the camera each raising a Hanukkah.
How wonderful is the express conversion on a beach in Miami, Florida of 1994. We read that the people arrive in the morning for breakfast, they have three hours of lessons on Judaism and Kabbalah. They are then brought to the sea for a ritual immersion and given their Hebrew names. Lunch is offered, and they are Jews.
Of the years on the Iberian peninsula of inquisition and conquest we get a Diaspora within a Diaspora. After 1492 the Jews of Spain were forced to flee their homeland for the safety of neighbouring countries. In Morocco we first see a North African, or is it a Spaniard? Again we meet a Jewish character who is unique in the world.
A beautiful photo of the Marrano's of Portugal is a rare glimpse of people who vanished for centuries only to be rediscovered in 1917, and by the lens of Brenner.
Diaspora: homelands in exile is Jewishness as Brenner observed it. The shifting soul of the photographer who traipsed to five continents to achieve this fascinating collection eventually went back to Israel where he encountered some of the subjects he had snapped years earlier in other places. Again the obsessive chronicler took his camera out to capture these new exiles, at home.
Diaspora: homelands in exile is at the Jewish Museum of Australia in St Kilda until October 28.
Diaspora: homelands in exile, gathers a selection of lyrical black and white images of the Jewish Diaspora as it does in an accompanying book of the same name. The photographic exhibit is now on at the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne.
On his lengthy search of authentic Jewishness Brenner went to more than 40 countries aiming his lens at the keepers
of remnant cultures who often kept their traditions out of sight of prying eyes.
For three months this series of photographs of Israel, Italy, the United States, Russia, Spain, South Africa and Poland will be celebrated by Victorians as it was by guests of the United Nations gallery and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City in previous years.
Brenner was born in 1959 in Paris. At 19 he had gone off to Israel with his camera. In the streets of Jerusalem, in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish district of Mea Shearim he caught a thoughful first series of photos that he imagined were archetypal Jews preserving an ‘authentic’ Jewish culture.
Besides these earlier images is written the question that drove the photographer for 25 years of research, What is authentic Jewishness?
Brenner went moving slowly along from ethnographic documentation of his subjects to elegant, posed individual and family portraits. He brushed on the epic cycles of Jew history, of departures and return, but found an answer to satisfy his calling in the presence of cultural mingling.
In Rome of 1992 the inexorable influence of Italian life can be traced on the faces of Jewish men as they pose with motorbike helmets under their arms at the most iconic of Roman landmarks, the Colosseum. At the Arch of Titus, the old Roman port of the Jewish ghetto, women stand in a small group beckoning us to ask if they are the one family, the one race?
The melding of Jewish culture with the cultures of other lands is a theme that skips from frame to frame as one wonders this exhibition.
Idiosyncratic and sometimes outlandish images of the United States are Brenner’s most interesting as they directly challenge the stereotype of Jewishness.
What about the protesters of an anti-Semitic act in Montana of 1994. Each person; black, white and native American is alone, defiantly alone, tens of them as they march toward the camera each raising a Hanukkah.
How wonderful is the express conversion on a beach in Miami, Florida of 1994. We read that the people arrive in the morning for breakfast, they have three hours of lessons on Judaism and Kabbalah. They are then brought to the sea for a ritual immersion and given their Hebrew names. Lunch is offered, and they are Jews.
Of the years on the Iberian peninsula of inquisition and conquest we get a Diaspora within a Diaspora. After 1492 the Jews of Spain were forced to flee their homeland for the safety of neighbouring countries. In Morocco we first see a North African, or is it a Spaniard? Again we meet a Jewish character who is unique in the world.
A beautiful photo of the Marrano's of Portugal is a rare glimpse of people who vanished for centuries only to be rediscovered in 1917, and by the lens of Brenner.
Diaspora: homelands in exile is Jewishness as Brenner observed it. The shifting soul of the photographer who traipsed to five continents to achieve this fascinating collection eventually went back to Israel where he encountered some of the subjects he had snapped years earlier in other places. Again the obsessive chronicler took his camera out to capture these new exiles, at home.
Diaspora: homelands in exile is at the Jewish Museum of Australia in St Kilda until October 28.
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