Tag Archives: Clockfire Theatre

Ruins أطلال

5 Oct

A woman travels to Lebanon. It was trip she was meant to make with her father, a man who’d expressed great attachment to the country of his origin.

Written by Emily Ayoub, Madeline Baghurst & Mine Cerci, and conceived and co-directed by Ayoub & Baghurst, Ruins explores connections with family and with place.

Though having an engaging text – much of which is delivered with a wonderfully rich, wistful regret by Tony Poli as the father – it’s at heart a piece of choreographed movement.

As such, it’s a stunningly beautiful work of visual metaphor. A door dances about the stage, a potent symbol both of entrances to new worlds and barriers to those lost.  A tray becomes a mirror and, looking at herself, the woman sees the past to which she is intrinsically linked. Ayoub’s performance powerfully expresses the complex joys and pains of love and loss. There’s projection: the woman and her father watch together films by Jean Cocteau, and discover his motif of mirrors, doors to the underworld, to the past. Does every mirror in the world lead here?

But perhaps the most salient image is the ruins of the temple of Baalbek. The woman is told she should visit the ruins for two reasons. One is that they teach ephemerality (also taught by this show’s 45 min running time). The other reason is to find a bond with the past.

The temple is to Baal. Baal is an ancient god, worshipped possibly before Yahweh, and certainly before the father of Jesus of Nazareth or Allah (if these sort of temporal differentiations make any sense in relation to the divine.) And Baal is a jealous god. He extracts a toll on everyone who leaves the homeland over which He rules: a piece of their heart. It’s a poignant image of the pain of displacement.

The focus on Baal avoids contemporary tensions in the Middle East, but it also harks back to a pre-Axial Age world view. Baal is ancient, and perhaps old fashioned. By old fashioned, I don’t mean irrelevant; I mean in conflict with challenging modern realities. In a world where so many people are adrift, so many people have migrated, so many people live on lands different from their ancestors, so many people must share their ancestral homes with the displaced, any intense bond to a particular place inevitably means heartache.

It all had me thinking about Simone Weil’s observation that What is taken from us does us harm, while what we give up does us good.

This splendid meditation on connection and loss is both evocative and provocative.

Paul Gilchrist  

Ruins أطلال by Emily Ayoub, Madeline Baghurst & Mine Cerci

Presented by Clockfire Theatre Company

at Belvoir as part of 25a, until 20 Oct

belvoir.com.au

Image by Geoff Magee

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Plenty of Fish in the Sea

23 Sep

Firstly, this is top-class physical theatre.

Created and directed by Emily Ayoub and Madeline Baghurst, and performed by these two artists and Christopher Carroll, Plenty of Fish in the Sea is a visual wonder.

The choreographed movement is extraordinary, and the individual clowning a treat – replete with hilarious visual gags and moments of playful poignancy.

Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s design is both beautiful and inventive and, mounted all on wheels, it dances with the performers. The soundscape with composition by Daniel Herten is enchanting and fun, and the performers’ interaction with it is superb. Victor Kalka’s lighting design is a gorgeous game of light and shadow, creating a magical aura that invites us into the play’s fabulous world.

Which brings me to Secondly: What is it all about?

On the surface, a French speaking nun (Je ne pourrais pas) and her silent novitiate go fishing and catch – with a hook – a man. They then want to teach him to fish. He learns. They catch a huge amount of fish. He says too many. And I’ll leave it there.

Except for the sex. I really should mention the sex.

Fables don’t usually have sex (which is probably why they’re of little interest to most people.) I guess the piece is a fable about excess, in particular sexual excess; a sort of allegorical presentation of the endless opportunities offered in our society for hooking up, and the way that can lead to hyper-sexualisation (which may, or may not, be a good thing.)

You can probably sense a little doubt. I’m uncertain about the meaning of the piece for two reasons. One reason is the work’s potential for sensory overload, which (for me, at least) results in semantic overload. In addition to the extraordinary visuals and soundscape, there’s also spoken word. A recorded voice over reads from a book the women have given the man. The book appears to be some treasured text about fishing, but it’s salted with symbolism and mischievous hints of higher meaning (or perhaps lower meaning; see earlier comments about sex.) I found the VO difficult to follow; I’m not sure if that was because of a technical thing or an accent thing. There’s also a lot of talk from the French speaking nun which, va sans dire que, I didn’t understand. The only spoken word accessible to me was the dialogue of the male character, and I felt positioned a little like him – bewildered, charmed, and ultimately fucked over (in the nicest possible way.)

The second reason I’m uncertain about the meaning is that I’m not sure the piece really does operate as a fable or an allegory.

Perhaps, instead, it does what abstract art can do: that is, present a mood that resists or escapes linguistic statement. (Picasso, or somebody, said something about not wanting to paint what trees look like, but rather how they make you feel.)  

Or, perhaps, the piece functions as a sort of Zen koan; a teasingly deliberate denial of certainty; a cheeky refusal to flatten into a dull, explicit meaning; a type of tricksy epistemological illusion that offers intimations of spiritual liberation.

Whatever the case, seek depth, if you want – but know for sure this work delivers true delight.

Paul Gilchrist

Plenty of Fish in the Sea by Emily Ayoub and Madeline Baghurst

Played at New Theatre, as part of the Sydney Fringe,

17 -21 September

Image by Geoff Magee

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