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/
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/
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