What I should do is write about my experience in Switzerland, training and performing with Ozfrank Theatre, but for now I am still spinning that over in my mind. It may eventually make it to a blog, who knows. The training addresses so many aspects of the performers physical and spiritual psyche that it is no surprise that I have shied away from trying to write it down - Suzuki training sits within the "self" as an experience, like building blocks, each of which, on their own, are weak, but as a "structure", each block sits upon another block and together they make a strong tower of learning and understanding. To take this analogy to a logical conclusion, the feet, grounded as they are, must be the foundation.
For now though, I would like to talk about the experience I had in the Theater Marie, of Suhr, after watching a screening of Ozfrank's Doll 17, which was presented as part of a forum of work to complement our training.
Doll 17 , adapted from Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, (considered an icon of classic Australian theatre) charts the fortunes of two sugarcane cutters, Barney and Roo, who return to Melbourne for five months every year at the end of the cane season, and take up with a couple of city women for a period of friviolity, with money in their back pockets and nothing between them and a sunny party...bringing with them a Kewpie doll each season as a gift for their sweethearts...hence the name...Doll 17...for the seventeenth summer. Anyway, in the 17th summer, changes are afoot, characterised as they are by the changes in each of the characters relationships in the play. Being good theatre, this asks of the audience many questions, about life, the past...the future...change...
...and I was transported. I think this is the mark of good theatre. When a spectator can be taken from his chair, not as the viewer in an upholstered seat, watching a re-enactment of sorts, upon a stage, but to that special place, called Dreamland. In that theatre, in the dark, I went back to a time in my childhood, when everything was not, as I call it now, broken. That's to say, when the family was intact, mortally, and life really was long hazy days spent in corn fields, in golden summers, or so it seems. I spoke with John Nobbs, (Ozfrank) the next day about this, and he knew where I was coming from. "We all yearn for those days, mate", he said, in his Aussie drawl. "Like, we all remember those long lost summers which lasted forever. The thing is, we maybe experienced them once, maybe twice, for three weeks, when we were kids, and we think they lasted forever..."
In a way, he's right. But in my head - I was back there. Dad was alive, mum wasn't dying. Uncles, aunts. Still here.
In the transformed Kino, now the Theater Marie of Suhr, I shed a tear. It was dark.
No one saw.
Saturday 8 August 2009
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