The Company of Men: The Black Lung Theatre's I Feel Awful

As a part of the Studio Season for 2011 I Feel Awful is a completely new text commissioned by the Queensland Theatre Company at the behest of outgoing director Michael Gow; as they say: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="960" caption="The Black Lung Theatre 2011, Sean Young"][/caption]

The five members of The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm that have spent the last months developing I Feel Awful have some pretty strong feelings about theatre and theatre's communicative functions, and they want these feelings to be witnessed. In the Bille Brown studio, director and writer Thomas M Wright has found a forum to air his grievances about an industry he finds lacking (an industry that Gow, the QTC and ultimately The Black Lung themselves are ultimately immersed in). Soon after the coldest of cold opens, the young performers from Brisbane acting schools that join the production (called at times "the teens") demonstrate a gamut of rapid-fire dramatic skills, pre-empting the rollerskate tour of genres and intentions of theatre that Wright turns his critical eye to.

The 1992 film Stay Tuned, directed by Peter Hyams, featured the lazy Roy and under-appreciated Helen who are trapped by an undercover envoy from Hell. Their prison is an alternate "TV" reality - across the 90 or so minutes of the movie's duration the pair have to negotiate darkly satirical representations of popular shows (Fresh Prince of Darkness, Autopsies of the Rich and Famous). The overarching message is TV is dangerous - the Devil himself wants to welcome 'TV Junkies' into his fold in the most gruesome way possible.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="580" caption="Stay Tuned (1992)"][/caption]

Reflecting on Stay Tuned it now seems foolhardy to stage a critique of screen-based media on the screen - luckily I Feel Awful is more than just disgruntled. However cheesy, where Stay Tuned has the jump on Wright is the the ease at which scenes can transition - at the point of critical action, or more likely when the already laboured gags have stretched themselves too thin, someone clicks a remote and the scenery change. Changing scenes in front of a live audience is obviously a more physical affair, and it's an effort the audience are forced to observe more than once.

The second challenge of live-action theatre as multimodal as Wright has developed is establishing an evenness of the component elements. I Feel Awful at times appears shaky but never topples, although at times this writer questioned the necessity of the application of dance.

Costuming is of obvious importance to I Feel Awful. Clothing is judged, employed at the level of metaphor, soiled and discarded. By this writer's count at least five outfits appear for each of the fourteen performers on stage. The Black Lung wear variations on a a traditional staid business theme. This seems to be a trope all of its own: the professional thieves in Reservoir Dogs, Joaquin Phoenix in his efforts to establish himself as a hip hop artist, the live performances of Nick Cave - far from the office, the business suit seems to be the outfit of choice for violent, desperate work.



At times the Whalers appear outside of business suits: two such moments feature Gareth Davies in a WWE dressing gown and Liam Barton wearing a Wu-Tang jersey. In contrast to the timeless business suits these items are anachronistic - the dressing gown is obviously sized for a child, and due to a market flooded with bootleg copies and Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G, Wu Wear has substantially fallen out of popular favour. Anachronisms aside, combining World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. with The Clan in Da Front results in a very effective analogy for The Black Lung - rambunctious, charismatic, physical and very, very male.

If this analogy rings true, it is in no small part due to Thomas M Wright, director of The Black Lung, who is very much a hybrid of Vince McMahon and RZA - confident, calculating and perpetually promoting as he performs. From start to finish, Aaron Orzech's performance makes the most hay out of the business of theatre - it's often him with the bullhorn, the clipboard or the academic reference. While those around him careen out of control, he remains the most engaging on stage for this writer by staying true to small action. It is almost impossible to assess the performances of the younger cast - if they appear over-earnest, is it by design? - but it has to be said that Finn Gilfedder is a comic standout and Charlie Schache imprints himself on the production powerfully. Overall the supporting cast acquit themselves well under complex circumstances - if they seem to lack cohesion this writer would be inclined to think that the script has left very little room for it - this is a group that has had to be divided to be conquered.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="650" caption="Gareth Davies in I Feel Awful"][/caption]

While exceedingly engaging, there is a lingering concern for this writer - with so much focus on gender and sexual politics, it's hard to reconcile the fact that the narrative, which concerns itself with the ways the young women can be compromised on and off the stage, has been written, developed and presented by a group of men. Having Queensland's experience of theatre critiqued by a troupe from Melboure is also a bitter pill. Speaking to Marie-Christine Sourris at the Courier Mail[ref]http://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/play-it-once-more-with-feeling/story-fn6ck8la-1226123457398[/ref] Wright has indicated a move toward more personal content, and this writer anticipates this as a strong direction.

I Feel Awful lives up to expectations: Sex and Death are foregrounded as promised, but in an abstract, synthesised form. While the 'burn-down-the-academy' attitude to creative production isn't entirely for everybody, what The Black Lung have created for QTC is genuinely surprising, very funny and intellectually astute.

I Feel Awful: Bille Brown Studio, South Brisbane. September 2-10.

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Open Call for Manchurian Candidates: Gonkar Gyatso, Peter Roehr and Peter Alwast at IMA

Jimi Hendrix, famed for his innovation, has a chord named after him, the dominant 7♯9. The 'Jimi Hendrix' chord, also known as the 'Purple Haze' chord, has a unique dynamic, a raw, almost dissonant friction[ref]A good illustration of the chord's slightly more recent application is the opening of the Pixies' Here Comes Your Man.[/ref]. Gonkar Gyatso's Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, currently showing at IMA as a part of the exhibition Three Realms, can be said to not only appropriate the song's most quoted lyric, but the same angular, dissonant edge.

In a fat Futura Black, seven collages wrap the room in the work's title, embellished with stickers, cut out images and text. While Hendrix often defended the song Purple Haze as a love song, many of it's listeners interpret the lyrics as a treatise on the use of LSD. These woozy, psychedelic connotations are an uneasy location for Gyatso's explorations of Western media saturation and his own Tibetan background. As almost certainly a nod to Queensland as his host, Mister Fourex appears in the bottom right corner of the last work, like a punctuation mark (or possibly more accurately, a coda) to Jimi's polite request for pardon (this writer can confirm that on the day of installation, it was the last collage element applied to the work). It's a fitting addition - the mysterious 1924 mascot is totemic for many of the themes the artist seems to be concerned with - happiness, myth, commercial iconography - and suggests that Australia's most widely used recreational drug is a conductor for enlightenment; as if a tinnie of XXXX, rather than a tab of acid, is the pathway to meditative bliss, "the sky", or both.

In 1997 the Irish painter Stephen McKenna suggested that, "When Giorgio de Chirico wrote that the responsibility of the artist was to listen for and to understand the secret song of his time, he did not mean a catchy tune." In a lot of ways Gonkar Gyatso's work sits in opposition to this argument - his 108 Burning Questions are framed collages, each taking in to consideration news and debates very much of our time, and feature Eminem, Jay-Z, Wu Tang Clan and Amy Winehouse (who sadly found tragic new parallels with Jimi Hendrix only days before the exhibition's opening).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="452" caption="Panel from 108 Burning Questions (Equality)"][/caption]

Peter Roehr's Montage Films, showing in the Screening Room, also make use of the commercial images contemporary to the artist's time. Snippets of appropriated film repeat musical motifs or commercial copy, the consistent reiteration transforming them from media messages to mantras. Tragically passing in 1968 at the peak of his creative output, Roehr's works in the screening room are exclusively from 1965.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Peter Roehr, Harttrocknen x 13, 1965"][/caption]

A petrol station sign and a woman combing her hair are approached by Roehr with the same precise technique - seconds of footage lifted from commercials are repeated between ten and twenty times. Abstracted from context, to the contemporary audience the promotional devices are identifiably blunt - these could be splices of multiple prints from the cutting room floor of Sterling Cooper Draper Price. Several of the works are automotive in focus - the camera mounted on a car tracks its repeated motion toward tunnels and over bridges. One montage features a car plunging at speed off a cliff, cutting an arc toward the ground where it explodes. On first viewing the shot is exciting, by the third banal - further iterations drive home Roehr's stated goal that ‘the original function of the objects should be totally forgotten’.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="Peter Roehr, Brucke x13, 1965"][/caption]

Roehr explained his intentions in a “The story-line of my films is given in a simple sentence, e. g., ‘A Woman Dries Her Hair.’  Through repetition of this scene the initially perceived situation begins to dissolve and expand."[ref] Peter Roehr (Köln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1977) p. 80[/ref]

Like Roehr, Peter Alwast is deeply engaged with the technology of his time. The eight works that make up the exhibition Future Perfect present potential worlds, colonised at the floor of the uncanny valley. Often care has taken that these products of inorganic origin present themselves in the most organic form - soft shapes, slow movement. In some of the works a clinical environment is projected into the clinical environment, syntheses of the gallery within the gallery. In these pseudo-galleries animated loops challenge the laws of physics - pastel coffins fall from the sky, a phantom hand keeps a spinning top in endless upright motion.

Although this writer enjoys engaging with duration-based art, often it's hard to develop an exit strategy. While by no means crowded, the staging of multiple works in Gallery Three allows the viewer to channel-surf at will. The installation of Alwast's work in Gallery Four seems to take the most agency of the physical properties of the space - a flatscreen is adopted rather than a projector and two large-format prints create a lightly rippled tide on the ground. Both are reflected in a perspex form on the opposite wall. On first experience this reflective element creates a tangible event - we engage with the story of a man betrayed by a jealous colleague, outed as an enemy of Russia for an off-hand remark about the age of Stalin's young lover (the man is Alwast's great grandfather[ref]Revealed in a conversation with Grant Stevens: http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/peter-alwast218.php[/ref]). When we feel we have had enough, we turn to leave, but a ghost of what we have just witnessed appears. In the words of the educator Bergen Evans[ref]Quoted by Philip Baker Hall's Jimmy Gator in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia[/ref], we may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.



In the August 2009 issue of The Wire, David Keenan first coined the term 'hynagogic pop'. Used to describe artists like Pocahaunted and The Skaters, hypnagogic pop is distinguished by its reliance on exaggerated tape his, drone and delay. Listeners can expect calming tonal layering, repetition and nostalgic references. Similarly, the IMA's current group of shows use the traditions of pop formalism to gesture toward the infinite - these three artists draw attention to the barriers to epiphany while using the techniques of a hypnotherapist that make epiphany seem so achievable.