Holy bejeezus!
What a Weekend!
So the show was rip-snorting success - thank you to all the wonderful and supportive people who came out to see us. We mean every word at the end of the show - it's your interest in independent theatre and creative communities that keeps us running.
An for the those of you who didn't make it, it was a shame not to see you there, but there's no hard feelings about it really. You might just get playfully mugged, or something.
The show itself went off almost without a hitch - i certainly consider it a success when no peformer or audience or crew member has been physically injured. Trust me, it happens more often than you think, and it ain't pretty. There were a few bungled bump-outs, quite a bit of drinking, but most spectacularly on Friday night a member of the audience interrupted the show to give her perspective on what is permissible in humour, and things that it isn't ok to laugh about.
She was talking about a routine which reads something like this:
1. “Ladies out there – have you lost someone in War? I understand that this is a sensitive topic, so lets get straight into it. Perhaps it was your boyfriend, your husband, your father, your son or even a girlfriend (I’m into that). There are many ways that they could have died in service of their country. Perhaps they were killed by a bullet, or perhaps it was a knife, or falling out of a truck, or from a roadside bomb, or in a covert action, or from friendly fire, or in a helicopter crash, or a plane crash, or a suicide bomber, or from depleted uranium, or terminal depression or…. Whatever. I have just the thing for you. When you are falling into sweet slumber (what is slumber? Whats that mean? My mate works in the slumber industry and if you hippie fucks mess with him I will be mad! They have families damnit! Oh.. Slumber as in sleep”) you must notice that there is a jagged empty hole of darkness in the bed next to you. Well suffer no longer, with my patented Hot-Water-Bottle-With-A-Heart-Beat. Drift off to sleep just as though your loved one has returned. Available now for only 25.99. Thank You."
Light fades as he finishes, and returns to Clown.
jjjj (yes that's right we had a script for this show!)
The above monolouge is delivered as though the slightly stupid salesman is reading from cue cards in the audience and recieving prompts and reprimands from a manager via an earpiece.
N
Now when we developed this piece the unspoken idea was to mock those who make a profit from warfare. A moronic sleazy popular culture type (as played brilliantly by Wazzadeeno Wharton-Thomas) fallen on hard times, finds himself selling an equally inane product. The references to warfare and the pain and distress it causes to the families of people who have died "in the service of their country" - a phrase that should send shudders down the spine of any audience member, were included because it exposes the reality of the ugliness and disaster that underpins such consumer culture. The hot water bottle is a symbol for the things that we are offered to make it all go away. A ridiculous effort because nothing can take away from the pain of losing someone or being injured in a stupid game of political violence.
However the lady on Friday night who chose to speak up in possibly the most awkward moment of the entire show, didn't appreciate that irony, parody or sarcasm can be just as effective as political tools as any enraged and righteous ranting speech. In fact when i went down stairs to speak with her and her friends after the show they said as much. One of them tried to suggest that when we used the word parody, that we could replace it with "laugh at" and then stated that any sentence with this substitution just goes to show how mean and horrible our humour really was. To me this really seemed to demonstrate how seriously misunderstood the tools of irony, mockery, parody and satire are to any political movement. I think that perhaps that their thoughts on this had been colored by themselves and their opinions being made fun of. A thicker skin and a quicker repartee might be in order. Another made an impassioned plea for me to understand that humour and laughter actually serves to disperse energy which could be better used elsewhere.
I was quite stunned by this last point. Although it has some merit, to adopt the idea that laughing about things makes the world a worse place is pretty foreign to me. Her point, i think, was that it breaks that tension which builds up in a person over the concern for emotionally intense issues. I agree, but i think that the release of that tension is generative, not wasteful. To make someone laugh about a political or emotional issue should be to break the frost over the fertile soil which will produce action and thought. In doing so you seed in them a feeling that change is possible - the opposite of what you are thought to think. And in my experience, any comparison between political humour and a political speech will show you that humour contains so much more potential to reach out across intellectual boundaries, and interest a greater number of people. Funnily enough (pardon the pun) during the activist's speech at our show she was heckled by the crowd who told her to "shut up" and "get off".
In a world of over-consumption and apathy, the careful examination of one's role as an entertainer/performer should lead to an inspiring realisation that we hold the keys to people's energy. Nobody that doesn't already agree with you wants to listen to a moralistic, hell-fire speech about what's right and what's wrong in the world. More to the point, this approach seriously lacks respect for people's diversity of opinions in our culture, and in doing so it becomes a dangerously fundamentalist way of thinking about radical politics. Honestly, everytime i hear someone describe a complex issue as being "fucked" i want to scream! To qoute from a political nemesis, Andrew Bolt, perhaps it's time that these people moved out of their "black-clad Brunswick ghetto's of hate". It's a prison baby.
...
B But that incident is only part of the weekend, and i'm glad i got to speak with the above mentioned women, because it was a stimulating conversation, and after all isn't that what Art is designed to produce?
Well that, and nudity.
And speaking of nudity...! Flap! played on Sunday night after our final show. For many years Jess has proclaimed that her ultimate ambition is to get the audience nude. In one of her songs, she quite explicitly demands that "I need your help/I know that you'll oblige/come here and take off my dress".
On sunday we did just that. It started when I got invited to the stage to sing my favourite song "Poor Man" with them, dressed in a gigantic gold sequined star costume that we use in our show. And then somehow after that (we believe that it was a combination of pre-rehearsed strip tease, Theodore slapping Wazza, and some form of pheromonal chemical mist which descended over Bar Open) Wazza and I both appeared to be nude... Strange.
But it certainly wasn't to be just us having all the fun. One after the other men and women began frantically losing their clothes, flinging them overhead with delight. I even saw my old housemate Jeremy, who might be described as what one would call a "Dandy", shirtless with a mad grin from ear to ear. Penises, bushes, breasts, sweaty skinny chicken legs a-flying we DANCED like maniacs, knowing that this was a night like no other.
B But who says we should have all the fun. Wazza and I decided to give the sheepish, wholly entertained, but slightly bemused Band a little help, who were still fully clothed. We started with Eamon to little protestation. The drummer made the count, dropped the sticks, upped from his stool and downed his pants. Drummers never wear shirts for very long anyway so he was fine. The double bassist Marky Mark was a little trickier - it's a big unweildy instrument to negotiate a pair of pants and buttoned shirt around. Wazza and I, naked as the day we were born did our best to get him nude though, not realising that Mark's elderly parents who farm sheep near Shepperton had made the trip down for the show and were politely sitting at the back watching the whole proceedings. One can only imagine their comments after the show. "Yes dear, very good - does that happen every night?" and "when can you play in Shepparton next?"
And then it was Jess' turn. I'm not exaggerating about her proclaimed love of nudity. But she did seem a little embarrassed, and that's fine. But when she started singing "Dress", there was little that we could do to resist her impassioned urges to "take off my dress". So we did!
I can just see the headlines:
A Nude Flap! ends Good Clean Fun! with a Fleshy Bang!
H Hooray! Thanks again to everyone who came to the show. Thanks to Elise and Greg who did our lights and sound respectively. Thanks to Bek, our OHnS (Oh Hell No! Shit!) officer, Stage manager, resident Wine Drinker and friend. And thanks to Luke, the booker at Bar Open, who somehow i managed to talk into this crazy thing in the first place. Cat and Wazza sucked his nipples in reward i believe, so he got his.
Fucking Rock n Roll you crazy lovers,
mad love from the future!
Captain Ruin
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T)
