Crop Circles
By Urban Theatre Projects
The Performance Space, Sydney from July 24, then Newcastle Uni (Aug 8), Uni of Western Sydney, Nepean (Aug 14). Info 02 9601 8011.
Review by Brendan Doyle
At the Performance Space in Redfern, you're always sure to find the sort of show that mainstream theatres avoid like the plague. This venue has become a haven for artists wanting to experiment with fusions of different media.
Urban Theatre Projects (formerly Death Defying Theatre) is based at Casula in western Sydney, and aims to "explore Sydney's diverse cultures and communities", using whatever artistic forms seem appropriate to the current project.
With this combination, I was expecting something out of the ordinary if not off the wall. I wasn't disappointed.
After hanging around (too long) in the freezing courtyard, I entered the theatre (also unheated — this show is not for wimps) to discover a vast cornfield-like landscape with rusted car hulks, twisted metal towers and oil drums. The lighting is subdued and fragmented, like moonlight.
This is the territory of dream and memory. The soundscape of this place, haunting and atonal, is beautifully realised by Liberty Kerr, on cello, various percussion and synthesised sounds.
Nothing is fixed or certain in the hour or so of performance that follows. A woman (Teresa Casu) tells what happened 25 years ago near Narromine in western NSW, where a series of circles appeared in cornfields within a seven-mile radius of the town.
The nation was perplexed. Practical joke? Alien forces? And a girl mysteriously appeared in one of the circles. Real X-Files stuff, it seems.
Two stargazers watch and wait. One struggles to remember her stolen history, the other (Ian Callen) to forget a past that is all too present, inked indelibly in tattoos on his black skin.
Enter a stranger (Rolando Ramos), in pilot gear, fascinated by the landscape and its occupants. Another woman remembers the family pilgrimage to see the crop circles, driving west, listening to the landscape as it flashes past. On a screen at the back of the space, flickering, beautiful video images seem to double the live action, adding to the dreamlike atmosphere.
There is no dramatic interaction, no plot, no characters in conflict. This is theatre of poetry and suggestion, where the eye and the ear receive images that open up the imagination. It all happens like a dream.
Crop Circles doesn't have a universal meaning, nor is it intended to. Each audience member will take away a different experience and interpretation.
The project came into being when three writers, Catriona McKenzie, Ross Gibson and Susie Lingham, were invited "to write performance texts about memory — personal, family and cultural — beginning with the crop circles and spiralling out".
Without characters and dramatic tension, this sort of performance relies totally on the visual and auditory space to carry all the impact and meaning. I found that my attention wandered at times because the potential of the visual space was not fully realised. The sequence where two actors hover around on skyhooks, for example, went on far too long. And the dialogue was not always clearly audible.
I felt there was something missing too in the overall concept of the piece, and it's to do with a lack of connection with a specific cultural context.
The new coordinator of Urban Theatre Projects, John Baylis, writes: "Working with a community provides a meaningful and responsible context for creation". I wondered which community influenced this production, and how it was involved. I could find no indication of this in the show or in the program notes.
This reservation aside, Crop Circles brings together an impressive group of creative people from diverse backgrounds in many media to create a dreamscape that is light years away from the drably conformist imitations of television that all too often pass for theatre these days.