Upcoming at the Tap Gallery in Darlinghurst is a production attractively and enigmatically entitled The Intimacies Of Women. Produced by the Living Room Theatre group, it has been a collaborative effort between the actors and artistic director / actor Michelle St. Anne, who tells us about Intimacies and how she got into theatre.
Tell us about The Intimacies Of Women. How was it created?
Intimacies is a beautiful work set in a displaced restaurant with a group of women trying to find comfort and resolution in a surreal and coded world. They travel through their dreams constantly being dragged back by the domestic world, trying to find resolution. Women dream, compartmentalise, and document their lives and world and it is this that I attempt to capture. It was created through a group of experiments dealing with my obsessions.
The Living Room theatre website says the company aims to present the dichotomy of beauty and suffering. What do beauty and suffering mean to you and how do they interact with each other?
Wow, I guess I’m interested in the beauty in suffering and the suffering in beauty and that pivotal point. Beauty to me is Film Noir, is Prague in winter, is a cat sleeping on a doona in the spring sun. Suffering is the film going haywire, is a dining table in Prague that is empty with children all around it, is the memory of the cat which was killed last week. I guess suffering for me gives a certain comfort or reality check whereas beauty can lift us out of the domestic and into the epic. Into the fabulous world of dreams.
How did the Living Room theatre group get started?
I come from an acting background with a passion for the classics. Unfortunately most directors and producers found it difficult to cast me as a Juliet or Irina or even a Miss Julie [because] I’m a short Indian person! I soon started collaborating for small works and found I had a great passion for it.
Sick of doing ethnic specific work and inspired [by] the work of companies like Sydney Front and Entr’act - I saw my first penis in their production of Ostraka - I realised this [the theatre] is where I wanted to be – not necessarily naked!
I was waiting for the bus outside the Strand Arcade and all of a sudden I thought of how much I missed my sleep. How much I enjoyed it. So it was here where the first seed [to start the Living Room Theatre] started to germinate. I formed a small ensemble and we worked together for 9 months before we opened in March 2001. The work was well received because it was “different”…
Was there a moment when you realised you were really into the theatre?
The moment came in Mrs Spalding’s dance routine to Fame where I felt a lot taller than the four foot fuck-all ten that I was. Years later, after performing at the Asian Open House at Belvoir St., people came to me and asked if I was the girl in the show “cause you looked a whole lot bigger on stage”. So maybe it’s just that theatre gives me height. Although I am itching to make a film. Sometimes I think what I want to create in theatre is better served by film or maybe I just need to bit of funding so I can afford my clever dreams!
No comments:
Post a Comment