Cageling - Sydney Morning Herald review

CRUEL, challenging, eerily beautiful, Cageling is derived from Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, the story of a widowed mother's imposition of an eight-year period of mourning on her five sheltered daughters - a rule that attains the level of tyranny.

Lorca's original play is present in fragments only, part of a text made up of passages from Ovid's telling of the Philomena and Procne story, a ringing score by composer Matt Davis, excerpts from the poems of Ana Rossetti, and a physical language that runs the gamut from the balletic to the palsied.

The action is in a sealed room, sparsely furnished, painted white, lit by stuttering fluorescent tubes. We observe them through a window that mother and daughters occasionally peer through. Perhaps they see us, perhaps not.

The opening passage is related in a series of wordless tableaux, with Alba as a kind of monstrous choreographer chivvying her daughters into correct postures and acceptable attitudes. All wear closely fitted black dresses and ballet pumps. Veils are drooped over their faces. A microphone is present though none feels willing or able to use it for 20 minutes or so.

Performance troupe The Rabble play a dangerous game here. There's no doubt the opening gambit builds a level of need in their audience - a need for release echoing the stymied desires on display - but it also sets up a barrier that is never truly broached, even when the repressive culture that Alba enforces explodes into mania and bestial savagery. Though Cageling is fascinating to observe, its remoteness might be off-putting for some.

The shaven headed, somewhat priestly Daniel Schlusser is Alba and he gifts her with the monomaniac - almost comic - intensity of a James Bond villain. Dana Miltins, Jayne Tuttle, Mary Helen Sassman and Pier Carthew are the daughters and all maintain a seething stillness until, one by one, they rebel.

Like their convulsive take on Oscar Wilde's Salome in 2008, Cageling is difficult work. It is also rewarding and likely to haunt the memory.

by Jason Blake

SMH link

Cageling - Bicycle User Goes Out review

Go bring the rabble, / O’er whom I give thee power, here to this place - Prospero (to Ariel), The Tempest, Act IV, scene one

The Rabble have been brought to CarriageWorks to present Cageling. Cageling is a physical exploration of the repression of grief and desire, set in an enclosed box with a perspex wall facing the audience, two seamless white walls on the sides, and a wall with a high window at the rear. When you enter the space, you are met with a cast of five. They are all in the box, wearing floor-length, black, Victorian, gothic dresses and black ballet slippers. They are lit with fluorescent lights, and arranged in an unsettling tableau. They are there as if waiting for the audience, but very little happens for the first fifteen minutes. Cageling is designed to leave you outside, distanced from the action inside this home, and it takes effort on the part of the audience to find a way into this private world. This is almost in complete contrast to the the last thing I saw in Bay 20, Matt Prest and Claire Britton’s Hole in the Wall in which you are literally invited inside the home. But, although you are left outside Cageling’s cage, if you are actively willing to find a way inside, you’ll be rewarded.

THE RABBLE are not controlled by Prospero, or Shakespeare for that matter, but they are controlled by another formidable magician, Fredericio Garcia Lorca. Cageling’s urtext is Lorca’s play The House of Bernada Alba, a drama about a recently widowed mother, who controls her grief by dominating her children. This play is “smashed open” by THE RABBLE, and rearranged through the use of ballet, contemporary dance and hymn, and enhanced by stories from Ovid, thereby exposing the unconscious, affective underbelly of the Lorca’s text. But, we keep the mother and daughters and Dan Schlusser is terrifyingly good as Mother Alba.

Mother’s rules are no weeping and no secrets. A tension is established at the outset of the work between desire and action; if you do not act, you do not desire, and you do not grieve, if you do not cry. The flawed theory, of course, is that grief and desire will disappear if they can’t find expression, therefore as long as order is kept, tears are avoided, hierarchies are respected and instructions are followed everything will be OK. But, everything is clearly not OK. Within this world the only actions Mother allows are carefully choreographed: the poised movements of ballet and the perfectly harmonised hymn. Cageling dramatises the Daughters/sons’ attempts to break free from these rules, and the Mother/father’s attempt to reinstate them. And, I use the word “dramatises” with all its conventional import in spite of the lack of the dramatic text. And I say Daughter/son, Mother/father because gender difference necessarily unclear because the work is about women without men, but who have internalised the patriarchal structure. (Actually, Women without Men by Shirin Neshat that played in the recent Sydney Film Festival, has some interesting affinities with Cageling)

There are so many dimensions to this performance, and this is because THE RABBLE put to use all the tools available to the performing artist–speech, song, silence, movement, tableau, dance, costume, gesture, vocal tone, makeup, properties, set,  lighting, sound–THE RABBLE treat each aspect of the artform with equivalent importance, no element dominates, each device in turn contributing to Cageling’s emotional and physical assault.

Cageling is extraordinary, it deserves much more time that I can give it here to unfold the dark matter that is explored in the white box. Cageling requires your active attention, I think the audience are given many ways in; the sound design, dance lighting and speech all had a refrain. If you miss those clues or willingly resist the offers, you might be literally left out in the cold. But, I love difficult theatre, I like being made to work to find meaning, I love work where meaning keeps emerging for days later and there are too many threads to possibly consolidate in one short review. For example, I didn’t even get mention the headstand and the upside down penis, so, perhaps the upside down penis can be your reward if you are willing to involve yourself in Cageling.

by Jennifer Hamilton

http://bicycleuser.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/upside-down-penis/

Cageling - ABC Arts review

The Rabble's Cageling, a reinvention of Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, is a sometimes puzzling curiosity which requires diligence to unravel, writes Jenny Blain.

 







‘To be born a woman is the worst punishment’ was the cri-de-coeur uttered by two of the five daughters in Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, first performed in 1945. It is also the catchcry which informs every heartbeat of The Rabble’s stylised reinvention of Lorca’s work called Cageling. As the name suggests, this production cleverly reifies entrapment applied to the female gender by its use of a sealed and claustrophobic cube to contain its message of cruel repression and seething passions. We must watch through a glass frontage at one remove, rather like peering at exotic creatures trapped in amber. 

The inanimate analogy is close to apt for the opening 15 minutes of Cageling. The brightly lit white cube presents us with a tableau of five figures clad in floor-length black and ballet shoes seemingly frozen save for the agitated fluttering of a Spanish fan. The occasion is the solemn observance of a funeral, that of the second husband of the mother Bernarda Alba. The figures – actually Bernarda Alba and her four daughters – could be mistaken for cloistered monks, an idea reinforced by the drawn-out, ringing refrain of temple bells. Two daughters create a sense of mystery as they sit immobilised in a corner, their heads covered with large white kerchiefs like escapees from a Magritte painting (I have discovered that white veils were worn for mourning in the 15th century by the Queens of France). The effect is gothic, meditative, hallucinatory and double-edged: the prolonged stillness and persistent bells create both calm and a tension of expectancy. The intense black and white imagery pits notions of death and oppression against those of freedom and the life-force; it also neatly references Lorca, who saw his play as a photographic documentary. Its graphic starkness signals impending drama, and indeed any illusions of a ‘normal’ grieving process are destined to give way to cruelty and calamity.

As the players begin to move into a choreography of ‘right’ attitudes and postures demanded by a matriarch wielding a cane it becomes abundantly clear that being a daughter in the house of Alba – now an outback Australian property where the burnt body of a fifth daughter Martirio, victim of a terrible bushfire, is on display in a jar – is indeed the worst imaginable punishment. Five trapped souls subjected to a family tradition where mourning is de rigueur for eight years and where, according to Alba’s terms, no grief must be shown – no tears or passion of any kind – is not only the height of absurdity but a perfect recipe for disaster. The tyranny of Alba looms large. Driven by rage and loathing to persecute her offspring, she is a slave to tradition, conformity, class prejudice and a belief that a woman’s place is in the home. Possession of money makes her an impossible snob: to her, money confers social superiority, a convenient excuse for her conviction that no-one measures up as a suitor for her daughters.

Her daughters have other ideas. In The Rabble’s version the unseen suitor Pepe el Romano, despite his betrothal to Angustias, the ugly but rich elder sister – who has inherited her wealth from her father, Alba’s first husband – has allegedly rogered all the daughters behind the chicken shed. The daughters are without exception mildly deranged, in their turn undone by jealousy, resentment, rage and pent-up sexual desire. The sickly Angustias (Mary Helen Sassman) has grown a beard, apparently in protest. Amelia (Jayne Tuttle) is restless, frustrated; she becomes violent when beaten by Alba, grabbing the whip and beating the surfaces of the set. The behaviour of her twin Magdalena (Dana Miltins) suggests repressed sexuality: during a dance routine she appears to commit suicide by wrapping a braid of hair around her throat. The youngest Adela (Pier Carthew) is a rebel who finally breaks her mother’s cane and who is punished for being in love with Pepe el Romano: when Alba contrives to shoot her lover, Adela, believing he is dead, hangs herself.

I think it is at this point that Alba, her authority gone with the broken cane, reasserts it by showing us that she does, after all, have balls. Her character as played by Daniel Schlusser makes this plain with a prolonged headstand to demonstrate what Jennifer Hamilton has dubbed the ‘upside-down penis’. It’s a confronting scene but it does drive home the idea of the controlling woman as having internalised a form of patriarchal power. Recalling Angustias’ manful beard and Adela played as a sweet youth, the bald and frocked Schlusser as Alba is the most spectacular of The Rabble’s playful gender inversions.

Macabre as Cageling may be, and despite a subtext of ghosts and werewolves and dark fairytales, nothing quite prepares us for the final scene, a diabolical homage to Ovid’s tale of Philomela – she whose tongue was sliced off by the sword of Tereus, her sister Procne’s husband. Here it is Alba who, in an act of terrible revenge towards her daughter Angustias – it can only be because she has a ticket to freedom – bites her tongue out. The shock caused by this hideous act finally smashes – in a metaphorical sense – the glass wall of separation. In a strange way it also acts to dissolve much of the nightmarish unreality of the many instances of violence we have already witnessed. Curtain call – in all its seemingly authentic blood and gore – managed to find a sympathetic audience.

The Rabble’s directors Emma Valente and Kate Davis have made of Lorca’s prototype an artwork, a sometimes puzzling curiosity (a Rubik’s cube?) which requires not only diligence to unravel, but some prior familiarity with Lorca’s original. There is much inspired panache invested in this work, a brave revisiting whose novelty, while retaining elements of the visceral and morbid, adds an overlay of challenging surrealism. My only criticism is a set that makes for a certain lack of immediacy. That said, Cageling, like its predecessor, reminds us forcibly of the destructive nature of power in the wrong hands, male or female.

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s2947020.htm

Cageling - Curtain Call review

Cageling is one of those productions that blurs the lines. Where does performance art begin? End? When does it cease to be a visual art installation? At what point does theatre take over? Let’s not go there. It doesn’t really matter. It is what it is. Which is something very arresting. It comes with the guiding catchphrase, ‘to be born a woman is the worst punishment’, and is veritably bursting with the most powerful imagery along those lines. It’s about oppression of women; by men, of course, but also other women, such as mothers. It is, according to The Rabble, its producers, a ‘reimagining’ of Federico Garcia Lorca’s, The House Of Bernarda Alba; albeit, for mine, a rather abstracted and liberally poetically licenced one, that comes reasonably hot on the heels of the success of ‘Salome: In Cogito Volume III’; not to mention ‘Corvus’.

To be frank, pretensions of reference to classic works, while typically, I suspect, a gambit to legitimise new and adventurous work, are too often tedious and can prevent it standing on its own merits, which might well be preferable. Here endeth the editorial. Or maybe not.

Suffice to say Cageling is a reimagining in the way the bible is a reimagining of the word of God: it might be inspired, divinely or otherwise, by Lorca’s text, but that’s around about it, I’d suggest. In any case, as with any debate about what constitutes theatre, it’s of dubious consequence. Whether Lorca is an ‘undercurrent’, or his text has been ’smashed’ is of no relevance to the novice viewer. There are those, probably, who’ll walk in and out of this production without ever knowing about the Lorca references, or even who Lorca is, when he’s at home, in or around Granada. (Or was: he died pre-WW2, aged only 38.) Few will recognise Rosetti’s poem, or Ovid’s tale. We’re also told the piece is informed by Lorca’s essay on duende. Duende being a quintessentially Spanish concept, perhaps best embodied in, say, flamenco. It is, as best I can describe it, the proverbial dark night of the soul, embodied in music, whether this ‘music’ be sung, spoken, or otherwise impressed. The Cageling certainly exemplifies this sensibility, by dint, perhaps of the directors’ self-confessed obsession with gothica.

But, again, it’s not necessary we know, which is the folly of this background contextualisation. It’s a bit, or a lot, like curatorial notes, at an exhibition: one can have the purity, if you will, of one’s interpretation prejudiced or dictated by such; or eschew them, in deference to one’s own intellectual and aesthetic capacities. Where I do give credit to The Rabble and Cageling, in this respect, is is serving to open an old debate. Perhaps wound is a better word.

We walk into the capacious Bay 20 of CarriageWorks. Towards the back of the space is a box, a room, constructed of blonde timber, with a glass front. Inside are five performers, dressed in funereal robes; faces obscured by veils. (Is there an intentional, or accidental, allusion to oppression via the hijab, or burqa?!) They move very little, if at all. We hear a clanging cacophony of cymbal, chime and bell-like sounds. It’s slightly unnerving. This soundscape, by composer Matt Davis (who prefers to be known, Bond-like, as M, apparently) is one of the most engrossing and cohesives aspects of the work.

Not a lot happens, for quite a while. But it soon launches into a “surreal nightmare”. “Four daughters trapped by their mother’s rage; at once grotesque and sublime; a piece of visual theatre that explores repression, monsters, sexuality and the feminine.” That’s how it describes itself, and it’s about all you need to know and as near as you’re going to get to articulating this haunting, tormenting, dark, abstracted work. It has to be seen, to be believed and appreciated. But there are things you’re not likely to see, even given abnormally heightened acuity in your mind’s eye.

It is, for example, supposedly set on an outback property that has been ravaged by fire, where Alba rules the charred roost. Yet there’s no way of discerning this and it seems immaterial. Why apply a narrative idea that isn’t clearly present in the work itself? It’s just annoying. And there are many other ostensibly invisible, undetectable narrative assertions. Please, cease and desist and just us show us the work.

Yet some things are clear. Crystal. Alba (Daniel Schlusser) isn’t just a mother, she’s a motherfucker. Consequently, her daughters (Amelia, played by Jayne Tuttle; Magadalena, by Dana Miltins; Angustias, by Mary Helen Sassman and Adela, by Pier Carthew) are subject to arbitrary beatings and other cruel abuses, are seriously, and variously, fucked-up. Angustias wears her rebelliousness and individuality on her sleeve; well, chin (a beard). Adela has lapsed into some sort of pseudo-poetic psychosis. Magdalena seems to have developed rather canine and incestuous sexual impulses, finding release in friction with her sisters’ bodies. Whatever turns you on, I s’pose.

But all jokes aside (don’t get the idea it’s humourless, though), there are any number of compelling elements in this production. You’ll likely squirm. It should probably come with some kind of warning, besides the one about strobe, of graphic violence. Though if you can handle that throwback from the Third Reich on SBS, with his sliced-and-diced cadavers, there’s probably nothing you can’t handle herein.

Alba, arguably, represents more than maternal authority. She (I use the gender assignation advisedly, as it’s ambiguous, despite the priestly frock) is authority-in-general: political; military; religious. The horsewhip s/he wields is a constant menace; a symbol that can turn, in a flash, to implement; a sadomasochistic motif; a sexual fantasy. In similar fashion to the the manner in which Cageling blurs the lines of theatre, it bends gender: what is feminine; what is female? When one eats one’s veil, is one swallowing the oppression one has long suffered; merely internalising it? Or is one finally coming out? Showing oneself to the world, in an heroic gesture of defiance? There’s plenty to feed on: emotionally, intellectually; even spiritually (even if it brings to mind REM’s Losing My Reigion). It’s not vegetarian theatre, but brontosaurus stick-to-your-ribs fare. Rare. The fatted, golden calf just slain-and-served.

All the performers are brilliant, with requisite intensity. Schlusser & Sassman, particularly, have great charisma (and Sassman, incidentally, a belting blues singer).

The Rabble was formed a few years ago, by Syd Brisbane, Kate Davis and Emma Valente and is “an ongoing conversation about theatrical aesthetic, process and thematics”, between its artistic directors, Kate Davis and Emma Valente. Here we go again. Yada yada. Yawn. Spare me! A leaf out of Bugs Bunny’s book: on with the show. The very real, ever-present danger with this kind of claptrap is one runs the risk of believing one’s own publicity. And what’s most frustrating is this work is so vivid, so verdant, so Jungian, surreal, sexy, brash and beautiful, it doesn’t need the ‘context’, rationale, directors’ notes, or anything else. As colleagues and rivals have noted enthusiastically & rightly (if not in so many words), The Rabble stands on the edge of a theatrical precipice, ready to take the plunge. And plunge they do, into the realm of dreams and nightmares. Look ma, no bungee! It’s a thrilling, chilling, unfinished symphony. More like a still evolving, very cohesive, real-time, whistle-while-you-workshop, before an audience. It doesn’t get much riskier. Or courageous. The importance of those qualities and ambitions alone, can’t be overestimated. The fact they’re unfunded makes it all the more incredible. I mean, it’d be a whole lot easier and more profitable to give it up and do highschool Shakespeare. That’s what damnable integrity will do for you.

Cageling is at the cutting-edge of theatre. I think it’s theatre. Anyway, I’m sure it’s at the cutting-edge of something. Magical, mutinous, unorthodox and epic (and let’s not forget viciously political), it incises below the superficial level of mere consciousness. It’s dark music for the eyes. It will tap your soul on the shoulder and say, menacingly, ‘I know you’re in there’. The Rabble is rousing. If only they’d skip the taqriz and leave it up to us, to skip their dark light fantastic.

By Lloyd Bradford Syke

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/curtaincall/2010/07/05/review-cageling-carriageworks-sydney/

Cageling - Theatre Notes review

Through April and May I wrote and recorded a score for The Rabble’s production of ‘Cageling’. It ran at Fourty-five Downstairs in Melbourne in May and Carriageworks in Sydney in June/July and starred our very own Jayne Tuttle. Here’s a review from the wonderful Alison Croggon at Theatre Notes (http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/), more to follow -

Few poets write of desire with such passionate delicacy as Federico García Lorca. Lyric, erotic and savage, his poems celebrate the anguish of absence, the bittersweet longing for what cannot be possessed. When he writes of his home city Granada, he imagines an ideal beauty, the "spiritual colour" which Andalusia woke within him. This beauty exists within and beyond the "poor cowardly city", the "miser's paradise" that contains "the worst bourgeoisie in all Spain", of which he wrote bitterly only months before he was shot dead near Granada by Fascists. He saw the real as clearly as the possible.

In Lorca's poetry, repression squeezes desire into a defiant brilliance. Lorca was gay - some claim that is the reason that he was murdered - and so, in a world of absolute divisions, he existed on the penumbra between both sexes, a fluid creature of the twilight, weaving his poems out of the blinding contrasts between night and day. He made of them paeans to life in which beauty is a measure of mortality: "Like all ideal things," as he says in a poem about fountains, "they are moving / on the very edge / of death."

His theatre articulates these tensions in different ways. Lorca's plays attacked the bourgeois theatre of his time both stylistically and thematically, uniting a burning passion for social justice with a take on tragic poetry that incorporated influences from Shakespeare to Surrealism. He is most famous for his "rural trilogy", Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, the last of which he completed two months before his assassination. In all of them, but especially in The House of Bernarda Alba (which is subtitled "A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain"), Lorca presents a critique of the place of women in Spanish society.
The House of Bernarda Alba is the story of the newly widowed Bernarda and her five daughters. Bernarda turns the frustrated rage of her marriage into an uncompromising tyranny over her children, insisting that she is the only authority in the house. As one daughter - enriched by her step-father's death - is courted, the others are riven by jealousy and desire. The youngest and most beautiful daughter becomes the mistress of her sister's fiance, with tragic results. It's a bitterly savage portrayal of the internalisation by women of the chains of patriarchy.

This is the world that The Rabble, one of the most interesting young companies around town, explores in Cageling, a work of physical and visual theatre that springs from Lorca's final play. Created, co-directed and designed by Kate Davis and Emma Valente, it is most certainly not, except in the most abstract sense, a performance of the play: aside from a few fragments Lorca's text scarcely exists, except in how images from the text have been amplified and embodied. In fact, often it seems more like an attempt at physicalising the qualities of Lorca's poetry, which is, along with a little Ovid, interpolated into the minimal text. [Correction: the poem, Grandmother's warnings to Carlota and Ana, is actually by Ana Rosetti. Though I would have sworn it was Lorca]. While Lorca (with, I think, a certain irony) said his play was intended as a "photographic documentary", this is a theatre of dream and nightmare, seeking to tap the unconscious in parallel ways to Lorca's surreal lyrics.

I had an interesting time watching this show: my responses shifted wildly through its duration, from irritated impatience to straight-out impressed. The design is stunning: the set is a wooden box placed in the middle of the space, with paned windows facing out to the audience, who sit a couple of metres away. The inside of the box is painted white, and the costumes and various props are black, reflecting the austerely beautiful world Lorca describes in his play. Near the window is a microphone.

When the audience enters, the actors are already inside, trapped in this box from which they cannot escape. There are five of them - Daniel Schlusser, Dana Miltins, Mary Helen Sassman, Jayne Tuttle and Pier Carthew. Both men and women are sexually ambiguous: they wear the constricting dress of formal mourning but are sometimes bearded, sometimes male, and they all wear ballet shoes.

For 20 minutes, nothing happens: the performers shuffle from one side of the stage to the other in tiny ballet steps, rehearsing the mundane domestic routine. At one point, Schlusser moves across to the microphone and taps it, before retreating without saying anything. Expectation is drawn out to such a pitch that for me the thread broke: I wasn't wound into the action, as can happen with this kind of uncompromising refusal, but rather thrown aggressively outside it. The windowpanes already forbid direct relationship, and the actors face the centre of the stage, in a wholly contained, alienated world. I really thought I might scream.

And yet - and yet - gradually, backed by Matt Davis's nuanced sound design, the show winds up, almost imperceptibly, into an extraordinary expression of repressed desire that explodes volcanically into violence. I missed The Rabble's two earlier shows, Corvus and Salome, which were both produced in Sydney, but I can see why this work has prompted some people to draw comparisons with Romeo Castellucci. Although The Rabble is doing quite different things, the ambition - and often, the potency - of the theatrical images this company creates are in the same universe. When these images work, they are sheerly strange, poetic, erotic, disturbing. Their sense is the language of dream.

Aside from its oneiric choreography, Cageling's power comes from the courage of the performances, which are rigidly disciplined, and yet reach into extremity. Schlusser, playing Bernarda Alba, is compelling: he is both male and female, as Alba herself takes on the role of patriarchal tyranny, or like a priest, whose spiritual authority is signalled by feminine dress. His is the voice which insists, as Pier Carthew attempts to recite a poem into the microphone, on the emotional truth of its language: this is real, what is this reality, what is it?

The minute exactness of the performances and movement play against what feels like a fuzziness in the broader direction and structure of the piece. This kind of theatre, like a poem, depends crucially on rhythm: the pulse of contrast, the shaping of transition. These are aspects Castellucci judges to a micron. Thinking it over afterwards, I thought it was here that I felt most problems with the show: its structural rhythmic uncertainty means that the relationships between stillness and movement often fail to be kinetic, each investing each with potential energy. Sometimes the inhibition it seeks to express seems instead an aesthetic inhibition.

In short, it's fascinating, frustrating, beautiful. And also clearly in evolution. I'm sure later shows - I saw it on opening night - have developed from what I saw, and I'd be very curious to see it again. Sydneysiders get a chance to see it for themselves when it opens at Carriageworks on June 24.

Cageling, devised from The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca. Co-created, designed and directed, by Emma Valente & Kate Davis, sound design by Matt Davis, dramaturgy by Dan Spielman. With Daniel Schlusser, Pier Carthew, Dana Miltins, Mary Helen Sassman and Jayne Tuttle. Fortyfive Downstairs unti tomorrow night (booked out). Carriageworks, Sydney, June 24 to July 3.

Films / New Record - 4/8/09

On Sunday night we went to the premiere of Alkinos Tsimilidos' new film Blind Company, to which I and my Paris-based vibraphonist- extraordinaire-friend and 11th arrondissement cohort Micheal Emenau penned the score.  It screened to a full house as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival and included an introduction by Alkinos and Colin Friels (who plays the lead Geoff Brewster).  It goes to Montreal next.

Here's the poster:

 

 




















In other film news Sarah Watts' new film My Year Without Sex is in the theatres here and getting lots of attention and good reviews etc.  Apart from terrific performances across the entire cast it features four Bombazine Black songs, three from Here Their Dreams and one little specifically-written piece that I called 'Give A Little Beat'.
 
Session times and soundtrack info can be found at the official site here and here's a look at the poster:

 




















Apart from gallivanting 'round town watching movies we have also been putting the final touches to the follow up to Here Their Dreams. The basic tracking was done between Sunset Studios in LA, Headgap Studios in Thornbury and Michael Emenau's bunker in Cité Joly in Paris with a band that includes Danny Tulen and Daryl Bradie from Gersey, Miles Browne from Art of Fighting, Taylor Holland from Texan rockers Monroe Mustang and actress/writer/musician Jayne Tuttle.

It will now be mixed by Tim Whitten who some of you will know from such Gersey records as Hope Springs, Storms Dressed As Stars and No Satellites.  So far I'm very very happy with how it sounds, can't wait for you all to hear it.  More news on release dates and all that soon.  
In the meantime here's a photo of Headgap engineer Sloth and I deep in contemplation mode..
 
Best,
M

Here Their Dreams Australian launch shows - 9/3/09

Back in Oz to launch Here Their Dreams here and I'm very pleased to say it's in the shops as I write this.  And the album launch shows are in Melbourne and Sydney this week. The band includes Danny Tulen and Daryl Bradie from Gersey/Tall Buildings, Miles Browne from Art of Fighting and actress/writer/musician extraordinaire Jayne Tuttle on Mellotrons, organs and percussion.  Hope you can all make it!

Thursday 12 March, Melbourne
The Toff in Town
Curtin House
252 Swanston Street
Melbourne
Phone: 03 9639 8770

With special guest Mick Turner.
Mick on at 8.45pm, Bombazine Black on at 10pm.
Tickets $12 pre-sale or $15 on the door.
Pre-sales available from Polyester (City) or from Moshtix, 1300 438849 or http://www.moshtix.com.au/event.aspx?id=25206

Friday 13 March, Sydney
The Hopetoun Hotel
416 Bourke Street
Surry Hills
Phone: 02 9361 5257
 
With The Sun Blindness, Richard In Your Mind and The Laurels.
Doors open at 8pm, Bombazine Black on at 10:30pm.
Tickets $12 on the door.

 

Here Their Dreams Paris launch show - 3/12/08

This Sunday night we launch the record in France and bid farewell to Paris for the time being. Jayne and I are off to Australia for a bit. Expect news about Australian shows in the near future but in the meantime we hope to see you on Sunday night..

Galerie Impaire show - 20/11/08

Saturday night we had the great pleasure of playing at Galerie Impaire to celebrate the opening of J. Otto Seibold's show 'Dream Homes & One Song Guitars' with the one and only Spiral Stairs.

Michael Emenau dazzled with his vibraphone chiming and Miss Jayne wowed them with her unmistakeable organ, glockenspiel and tambo playing. I managed to remember most of my parts. I then got up and played a few songs with Scott and memories of Gersey tours we have done together came a'flooding, good times.

All Things Considered - 23/10/08

Can't believe we've been home for over a month. We are settling back into Paris, making new music, working l'hippodrome, and saying goodbye to a summer we hardly got to know and are sorry to see the back of. That said, the autumn leaves in the Butte Chaumont are beautiful and there is vin chaud at the brasserie on the Isle de St Louis again. I love the island.

The US tour was a blast and worthy of more than a few paragraphs as is my usual undertaking, and I pledge to give it the time it deserves, but in the meantime I am pleased to report that "The Sun Will Set" is featured in this week's fine radio broadcast/podcast by NPR, All Songs Considered, alongside Paul McCartney, Oasis and Lambchop.

Here's the link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95907285

The introduction to the song comes on at 13:09 in the broadcast.

And the album is on iTunes.

More soon. Be well all.
M

US Tour / La Set de la Butte photos - 20/08/08

Steaming it up in Austin. Eating lots of Mexican, drinking plenty of margaritas and also managing to play some music as we get ready for our two shows here this weekend and the NY and LA shows next week.

The record is out on Tuesday 26 August, more news about how to buy them shortly.

For now here are some more photos from the La Set de la Butte show, with thanks to Phil Moore..   

Amalia

MNO

M and Stevo

Amalia

 

 

  

Here Their Dreams release - 26/7/08

Back in Paris. C'est une belle ville.

Very pleased to advise that the record is set for worldwide release on Youthful Chaos on Tuesday August 26, 2008. There will be limited edition hand-numbered digipaks to buy and as many digital downloads as you can handle. It's called Here Their Dreams. The artwork is by the ridiculously talented Richard Dinnis. More details on the Records page.

Jayne's show was terrific, check out a review from the Sydney Morning Herald here.

We're on Facebook (here).

And the best show, of all time: Tom Waits at La Grand Rex, Paris, Friday July 25, 2008. Still can't believe we got in.

More soon,
M

Australia / US dates - 25/7/08

Huge thanks to everyone that came to the La Set de la Butte show and a special thanks of course to the new recruits Amalia and MNO, it was an absolute pleasure to be on stage with them and it was terrific to hear the songs with vibes and cello, it got me thinkin'.

After a frantic dash to Mad Loc the next morning to drop off the amp I jumped the RER to Charles de Gualle and caught a plane to Sydney. I've come to see Jayne perform in Dan Spielman's 'Manna' at the Sydney Theatre Company. Apart from being a terrific keyboard, glockenspiel and tambourine player she is - for those not in the know - an actress of international repute and I can't wait to see her do her thing. Tickets available here.

The record is 95% finished, there's only a few small mastering and artwork bits to attend to and she'll be all done. Tracklisting and release details to be announced shortly.

One thing I can announce is that in August we are embarking on a showcase tour of the USA. Full details on the shows page but here are the dates:

Saturday August 23
Mowhawk
Austin TX

Sunday August 24
Red Scoot Inn
Austin TX

Tuesday August 26
The Living Room
New York

Thursday August 28
The Knitting Factory
Los Angeles

I'm bloody rapt to advise that in addition to Jayne and I the band will include Daryl Bradie and Danny Tulen of the mighty Gersey on guitar and drums respectively, and the irrespressible jack-of-all-trades Taylor Holland on bass. It's going to kill.

M

La Fléche d'Or - 30/5/08

La Flèche d'Or is a cracking place to play. Apart from the very friendly staff, terrific in-house mixer, two stage hands, good backline, great room, good sound, amazing rider (I had the fish), it is absolutely free to get in. It was great to play to people who had no idea who we were. With any luck we'll be back there in April or May..

 

Spring - 19/5/08

Spring has finally hit. After the longest winter in this Antipodean's memory it has been so good to get out amongst the city and out to the track and to play le basket with my brothers on the canal with the sun shining and a sweat raising (that's just le basket, not too much sweating at the track, well not normally). 

I have also been doing a lot of work on the release of the record and am pleased to announce it will be out toward the end of the northern summer, exact details to follow shortly. One thing for certain is that it will be a limited edition digipak release featuring artwork by the extraordinary Richard Dinnis and a special appearance by the late Richard Burton.

Jayne and I also hope to do a few little duo shows over the summer while Taylor and Stevo are away and we have one booked for June 19 at La Set de la Butte, flyer below..

Enjoy the sun.
M

 

La Scéne Bastille - 31/1/08

Thanks to everyone that came down to the show at La Scène. We had a blast. Highlights include Miss Jayne's hip tambourine action on Springheel and, of course, Taylor Holland's mid-song rendezvous with a smoke machine fit for a Tool show at Rod Laver Arena that had somehow made it into the gig (and the 21st century).

Next up, perhaps some recording, perhaps another show. Maybe we'll go to England.
M

The Embassy - 28/1/08

On Friday night we were the "entertainment" at the Australia Day party at the Australian Embassy.  Now, it's within the realms of possiblity that we would be entertaining to some, but we are not, I would have to say, "hey-mate-do-you-know-any-chisel-songs" party material.  In any case, we played, we practically cleared the room, and we got to drink Coopers Pale for the first time in 7 months. C'etait bonne.

We are at La Scène Bastille tomorrow night. Tickets are selling out, if you haven't got one and want to come you can buy them here.

First Paris show - 9/1/08

We are very pleased to announce that our first show in Paris will be at La Scène Bastille on the 29th of January. Support on the night comes from the excellent Kwoon and Dirge. Tickets are 12 bucks via the La Scène website (here) or 10 if you happen upon one us on the street, or at the track, or perhaps at Chez Jeanette..

Full details on the shows page or at myspace (here).