🌀 04: A Time for Remembrance and Repetition

On Sunday I visited one of my favourite events in Melbourne, A Plus Market, where I saw old friends, picked up some cute as fuck outfits, and revelled in a community filled with love and good fat vibes. All in all, it’s been a great week. Let’s get into it.

Kendrick Lamar‘s Super Bowl performance!! How fucking good!!! And here I was thinking Rihanna’s couldn’t be beat—how wrong I was. I loved this contextualising writeup from David Dennis Jr on the stakes, symbolism, and dissonance in Lamar’s performance:

Lamar performed between the end zones where the slogan “End Racism” used to be. A few days before the Super Bowl, the NFL made the decision to remove the slogan, coinciding with a nationwide rebuke of DEI, where Black folks’ accomplishments are questioned as much as ever before. To perform at a halftime show for an organization like the NFL implies a tacit complicity in that type of empire, even in the face of raised Black fists at the 20-yard line.

I also adored this article from WIRED, detailing the work of staging the half time show. It’s full of set diagrams(!) and an insight into how they achieved the clown car effect (literally buying a car and ripping it apart lol). Plus:

There was one other restriction: the stadium entrances. Unlike some arenas, the Superdome has only one main tunnel that organizers could use to bring everything onto the field for Sunday’s show—and it dumps out right into a field goalpost. Eastland had less than 10 feet [3 metres] of clearance to get everything through.

I’m not much of a club patron these days, I’d much rather the dim murmurations of a bar like Caretaker’s Cottage to a doof doof—BUT, that didn’t stop me from enjoying this essay about rave-nationalism, and the ways that Israel turns clubbing cultures into a soft power which ‘glitter-washes’ the atrocities of Zionist occupation.

Reading that led me to another essay from the author; a two part discussion about queer temporalities in the club which poses the question:

What if the queer time that Edelman describes, and that which we find in commercial clubs, is not actually a subversive experience, but instead is the result of gaps in our histories, the loss of our stories, and the emptiness of our archives? 

While alluding to queer futurity, Dreamscroll (for the life of me I cannot find their name) explains:

With no knowledge of the past, I didn’t dare to dream of a future. Perhaps if we can extend our time horizons, we can challenge the short-termism that infects almost everything we do. We can begin to learn how to dance and move in a way that bears the responsibilities of both past and future generations.  

A fascinating read which has left me hankering for a little boogie with friends.

And on the topic of remembering our pasts, I really enjoyed this essay from Oscar Schwartz about the new St Kilda Pier and how it fits into the unchanging face of one of my favourite suburbs.

Visitors from beach-rich Sydney or Perth will no doubt come to the pier and snicker, just as gentlemen from Hyde Park might’ve at the St Kilda promenaders and their mongrel dogs way back when. But they’ll be missing the point. Promenading in St Kilda has never been about a view out towards the beautiful. It’s about gawking at each other, the unruly and sun-burnt masses.

Six whole shows this week, three of which were re-watches. Coincidentally, I read this contemplative review of The Years from a critic who enjoyed the show's West End transfer less the original. Seeing it with more baggage, more context, and the weight of memory held the experience back. But as they point out:

My second viewing garnering a different reaction doesn’t mean what I saw that first time – and my memory – was wrong. ... Both experiences hold equal weight, and one memory does not invalidate the other

So with that in mind, I watched 37 at MTC again. Last year 37 was one of my favourite shows but I'm not sure if what I experienced the other day in the Sumner would top this year’s list (for one, it's too early to tell). It felt like the magic or the sheen had worn off? Last time I didn't really know much about Adam Goodes or AFL, and this time I had done my research; I remembered being on the verge of tears when the protagonist Jayma walks away from his football career, but none of that came. I enjoyed it—no doubt (Isaac Drandic's direction is still phenomenal), but there was something missing. Ahh well.

The next day I caught The Butcher, The Baker which was a bamboozling cabaret about (bear with me) a woman obsessed with a man to the point that she kills and impersonates a butcher to get close to him only to realise that the man was actually a woman impersonating a man to get closer to her. Not my cup of tea.

And for Valentine's Day I got to enjoy three different shows with my #1 theatre-going accomplice. Georgie and I saw Flashover at VCA which was a multimedia installation exploring the 2020 bushfires and the visceral experience of it on firefighters. Really cool technology (wow big OLED screen go brr) with gorgeous animation.

Then, a cute picnic in Kensington where we watched every angel in the city descend on Laneway before getting rudely mistaken for a straight couple celebrating Valentine's Day. We were in Kensington to catch One of These Things First from Hot Lunch, right before they head off to Adelaide Fringe. This show was also one of my top ten last year, an accolade it thankfully lived up to. One of These Things is a theatrical attempt at fulfilling every dream job the trio of theatre makers had as kids, in just 60 minutes. It's riveting, heartbreaking (Rebekah Carton’s monologue about wanting to be a mother is one of the rawest things I’ve seen in the past year), and deliriously fun. Hot Lunch's work has been exciting me so much—I can't wait to see what they serve next.

From Kensington Town Hall we swung over to The Motley Bauhaus for Ryan Stewart's Kinder, a theatricalised hour of drag storytelling with shades of Hedwig & and the Angry Inch. Kinder is about Goody Prostate, a queen stuck in the midst of the culture wars, hired to read at a drag story time. Stewart's adaption of the show from a traverse staging at Melbourne Fringe last year to a small front-on venue loses some of the magic that I enjoyed in it last year, but Goody's care, anger, and showmanship still shines. Super fun.

A day after that I saw POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive by Selina Fillinger at fortyfivedownstairs. It's a fun albeit muddy farce about a White House administration falling apart at the seems which as Keith Gow noted, 'would have played differently six months ago.' Interestingly, it turns out it was the Australian premiere following Queensland Theatre's mess of a cancelled season last year.

Oh, and I've also started watching the much-hyped Invisible Boys which is about four queer boys growing up in regional WA during the plebiscite. I'm about halfway through the season and am slowly losing steam. What started out feeling like a gritty contemporary story is softening into a facile Aussie Heartstopper. Here's hoping the second half of the season turns it around. 🤞

Finished reading There Must Be Happy Endings, an altogether brilliant book of essays on theatre. Too many good bits to mention, so please enjoy this riveting quote from the final essay:

Maybe, then, the happy ending is not what creates hope, or defines hopeful art. It is in each moment of potential encounter along the path, and how available we are willing to be, again and again, to the idea that something might be generated there. It is the cold little girl and the hungry dirty dog locking eyes. It is the journey of the ring from one hand to the next, the cross of the horizontal axis with the vertical, the moment where the dream of the night touches the night itself.

Well worth a read if you're at all interested in making art of joy and utopia.

I spent all of Saturday plotting out Pigeon Pigeon's 2025 with Georgie. We’re planning two fringe shows, a couple of developments, and an immersive digital work (What would a show told through your Insta DMs over the course of a week look like? I simply cannot wait to find out).

And finally, I had just begun exploring the comedy fest program when I came across this show. The short pitch is that every night a different AI-written script gets performed sight unseen by a new set of actors. It’s disappointing to see artists make 'work' with a technology which atrophies minds and disseminates propaganda. But what else could you expect from a theatre company with a website built on a Zionist website builder and no credits anywhere? If you're going to gleefully make money off of a stolen pastiche of real art, you better be brave enough to front up about it.

The week ahead looks pretty quiet for me, so I’ll just be enjoying Melbourne’s turn towards colder weather (may it last as long as possible). That’s all for this week—see you soon.