Mel Burn! It's hot! (actually it's pretty cold)

I know all you Bake Sale faithfuls are going to be wondering where the hell I (Meg) am this Saturday at Clubhouse. (I'm hoping my Mum will go to represent anyway, and so be one of the spare parents on offer. Yeah, I'm pimping my Mum. In a nice way. What?) I can't come because I'm in Melbourne for the Next Wave festival's Text Camp program.

For those of you in Melbourne, and also for my own benefit of noting/not forgetting, I want to mention some of the Next Wave emerging art things I've caught in the few days I've been here. The Last Tuesday Society's 'Comfort Zone' was almost worth going to just for a visit to Witches in Britches. It's a theatre restaurant. You go through a spooky foam, cobwebby, uv paint/black light tunnel to get in, I tell you, the excitement is just beginning! (I want to disclose my professional interest in theatre restaurants, as someone with a Bachelor of performance and a good deal of actor training under my belt, I was sizing this place up as a promising place of employment. Do we have any theatre restaurants in Sydney? Anyone?)

Maybe once this was a serious pub.

Comfort Zone was more than a variety night in a cool venue. The premise of asking artists to present short works far outside their 'specialty' made for some exciting, fingernail-gnawing, often-awkward, always interesting stuff. Making friendly with the Next Wave curatorial theme "no risk too great!" there was indeed a feeling that these performers could at any time fail at their attempts to do something different. Burlesque troop Caravan of Love's Eva Johansen did make a very convincing mime. Poet laureate Telia Nevile made a cute and very earnest hoola-hooper. I'm not sure what the Suitcase Royale were doing, but maybe their was a clue in them being announced as the "auteurs of Melbourne performance". They let the audience make the performance, so they didn't author it themselves. They also didn't talk and usually they talk a lot. Is that right? It is always more obvious when performers draw attention to what has gone wrong, and this could well have degenerated into self reflexive, apologetic embarrassment. But the performers were really trying. They were good at being bad , moving it from amateur to strangely artful. Whole new line up when they do it again next Tuesday.

Last night we went to Short Message Service. "An experiment" in which two performers (Mish Grigor and Jackson Castiglione) in a simple black box theatre take their instructions from text messages sent by the audience. A lot of these messages manifested in dialogue spoken by the performers, a short-coming I think, as one audience member texted "words words, enough of all these words". It was fun to see the two acting out your instructions, 'I am the puppet master!', perhaps some audience members were thinking. Interesting that immediately the performers were put in to a state of tension between sexual advances and insults. A reflection of the caliber of the audience? "It could have gone somewhere higher" one of my companions commented, intellectually I think she meant. "That would have been impossible", my other companion (her daughter) retorted. Indeed, the slow response time - in audience's texting speed and in filtering through to the performers, and the very minimal structure made it hard to build upon situations and ideas. So what if it was more structured? "It should have been set in a safari" suggests my companion, "that's lame mum", says Amy. At one point I was compelled to text, "Jackson, the audience is not happy with the gender politic in this show". Mish seemed a lot more passive, Jackson often the aggressor. Again, is this the audience, or the way their instructions were responded to? It worked best when the performers were forced to engage with each other, such as Jackson commentating on Mish 'as if she were a gazelle in the savanna and he were David Attenborough' (by the way, we got a glimpse of what the actual text messages where only at the end.) Every audience will of course have a different experience and it will be good to see where they take this experiment next. It's on til Saturday (22nd).


Oh! And! Controversy at Next Wave. An Age article condemns the Dachshund U.N. as cruelty to animals. The argument cites a violation of the RSPCA policy of "freedom to express normal behaviour" as grounds for this claim. I'm not sure what to think, as I haven't seen it yet. I was looking forward to how cute all the little doggies would be as stand in delegates for the countries who established the human rights commission in 1947. Aw, look at Belgium! He/she wants to eat its own tail. The article also refers to freedom from distress, but also says that owners were encouraged to only stay as long as they thought their dog was comfortable. I tend to think that keeping dogs as pets in the way we do isn't natural, nor is breeding shit out of them so the have tiny stumpy legs and long sausage bodies. It's all animal husbandry. Don't eat a cow. Don't buy a pedigree dog etc etc. There is also a chicken stampede later in the program at the end of which people are allowed to adopt a chicken in the name of self-sufficiency, and, I would add, not supporting the treatment of chickens in farms. Anyway, THIS is degenerating into a rant. Stay tuned for more Next Wave musings.