Quito
Newtown Theatre, August 6
Review by Rebecca Conroy
Quito is a music drama concerned with schizophrenia and the plight of the East Timorese. Composed by Martin Wesley-Smith with lyrics by his brother Peter, it is a moving exploration of the parallels between mental illness and the common suffering of the East Timorese under Indonesian occupation.
The story is based on the life and death of Francisco Baptista Pires (nicknamed Quito), who at age 26 was found hanging from his pyjama cord in Royal Darwin Hospital in 1990.
Quito was shot in the throat in 1989 by a police officer attending a domestic disturbance at his Darwin home. Despite being diagnosed with schizophrenia, Quito was later charged with the attempted murder of a police officer at the scene.
Stress, brought on largely by the charge against him, overwhelmingly contributed to his eventual death.
The main narrative deals with Quito's mental condition and the similarities it bears to the overall situation in East Timor: voices in the head, delusions, shattered logic, mental distress and invasion by alien forces.
Through Quito, we see his struggle and suffering reflected in the entire psychology of the East Timorese landscape. His life is used as a powerful metaphor, vividly brought forward by the fusion of the two parallel narratives.
Various sources were used to identify Quito's state of mind, including recordings of his own songs, a poem he wrote just after he was shot and recordings of his sister Fatima Gusmao. These were paralleled by documentary material on the screen and voice-overs related to the situation in East Timor.
Stark contrasts are made between fast tempo songs, dissonant chord patterns and disturbing images of torture victims, gradually distorted by video technology. Quito's voice cuts through songs narrating his own suffering before moving on to eyewitness accounts of the Dili massacre in 1991.
The story is in this way composed of interconnected moments, which the audience is left to link together. Identifiable noises establish location before the audience is whisked off again to experience another parallel dimension of the story.
The final song left an indelible mark with the audience, a tragic image of the continuing suffering of the Timorese held static on the screen fading into a distorted outline, accompanied by dirge-like music.
The six singers from the Song Company, who presented Quito as part of the Modern Art Series, performed the piece in Newtown Theatre with just a piano offstage and a screen for projected images.
Overall, it was an effective exercise in linking a documentary narrative with the personal tragedy of an individual. Executed brilliantly, it left the audience very much affected by both its stark imagery and its accurate portrayal of a country that, like Quito, has suffered, resisted, loved, despaired and hoped.
As the saying goes in East Timor, "Only those with open eyes can see". But as they say in Quito, "The dumb can hear the thunder, the deaf can see the rain, the blind can speak and understand, and all can know the pain of a body torn asunder, of a devastated land".