The mods are all going ‘Downtown’

By Helen Musa

YOU’D have to be a killjoy not to appreciate what Queanbeyan Players are up to with their production of “Downtown: The Mod Musical”, coming to Belconnen Community Theatre.

As with “Keating the Musical” last year, it’s one of the Players’ ventures into smaller-scaled venues and is, director Anita Davenport tells me, more a “revuesical” than a musical.

It’s an all-girl show, I find when I turn up for rehearsal and it does actually have a plot.

On stage are five girls only known by colours – the yellow girl, green girl, red girl, blue and orange, variously representing five individual experiences.

The show follows the perspectives of the five girls – the one who married young, a good time girl, a naive girl who’s growing up fast, a dolly girl, and an American who’s come over to England because she’s obsessed with the Beatles.

They all pour their hearts out in their letters to the teen magazine, “Shout”, but it soon becomes obvious that the magazine’s gossip columnist Gwendoline is increasingly out of touch with the contemporary issues of the time – divorce, the advent of the Pill and the revolutionary strides made by women in the swinging ‘60s.

The focus is on the famous UK singers of the era and the singalong numbers will include Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”, Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me”, Lulu’s “To Sir With Love” and the title song, Petula Clark’s “Downtown”, which conjures up not so much New York’s downtown as Britain’s Carnaby Street. But the “revuesical” is called “Shout” overseas, where people are ignorant that such is the name of a much-loved, bio-musical about Johnny O’Keefe. In the UK and US, it was Lulu who covered that song.

Davenport is a seasoned director best known for having directed “Barnum” for Canberra Philharmonic, but here has the advantage of having listened to her father Ian Davenport’s ‘60s favourites in the family car while growing up.

“I heard that music in dad’s car during the ‘90s, and if you think about it, the ‘60s were only 30 years before that,” she says, explaining why she thinks the songs will resonate across the age groups. Her favourite is Cilla Black’s “You’re My World”.

“In the ‘60s, you had to buy vinyl and the songs had to hook you in and have good stories,” she says.

“It was so common for people to associate a song with their first love or driving for the first time.”

The show won’t be an historical reconstruction, and although designer Helen McIntyre has been working with vintage patterns, her costumes will be “a wonderful bit of whimsy, bright, short and lots of fun”.

It will be much the same with choreography by Laurenzy Chapman who, Davenport says, “has given a nod to the ‘60s without being a slave to historical accuracy in the dance moves”. There’ll be a band on stage, directed by Tara Davidson, who like Davenport, believes the songs need to be sung with a band just as they were written, not with an orchestra.

“Music transports us through space and time,” Davenport says. “I don’t feel you have to have grown up in the ‘60s to feel that connection.”

“Downtown: The Mod Musical”, Queanbeyan Players, Belconnen Community Theatre until March 4.

Arts In The City

Hatching a batch of naughty tunes

By Helen Musa

LOCAL comedy duo Sparrow Folk – Catherine Crowley and Juliet Moody – are hatching a batch of “deliciously naughty” tunes for their new show, “Nice Pair” at the Courtyard Studio, March 2-3. The pair will then appear in “Sparrow-Folk SuBIRDia” at the Novotel Hotel, 7pm, March 20-21, as part of Canberra Comedy Festival.

“THE Threshold” is a script by Canberra music legend Judith Clingan based on her interviews with Canberra women on ageing and the end of life. The performance will be rounded out with 14 short pieces of music for choir, strings, wind, piano, bells and singing bowls, all backed with visual images. At the Australian Centre for Christianity & Culture, Barton, 4pm and 8pm, March 4 and 11am, March 5.

THINGS are going musically wild in the first week of March in Queanbeyan, with Creedence Clearwater Collective on March 2 at The B, “Get Rhythm – The Johnny Cash and June Carter Show” at The Q on March 3, Arj Barker Power Hour at The B on March 3, Mark Vincent performs songs from The Three Tenors at The B on March 4 and “Good Morning Vietnam: Volume 2” at The B on March 4.

A NEW work from composer and former Musica Viva Australia artistic director Carl Vine will be performed by classical guitarist Karin Schaupp and the Flinders Quartet, at Llewellyn Hall, 7pm, March 9.

ART Song Canberra’s first concert for 2023, “Love and War”, will be given by the Tasman Soloists – tenor Kent McIntosh, Robert Johnson on horn, Sharolyn Kimmorley on piano, with Rob Wilton as speaker. Wesley Music Centre, Forrest, 3pm, February 26.

Walk the talk in a mother language

By Helen Musa

MEMBERS of Canberra’s International Mother Language Movement will make the 10th annual walk around Lake Burley Griffin on February 26.

Although for convenience, this year’s walk will take place on the Sunday, it is February 21 that was proclaimed as International Mother Language Day by UNESCO in recognition of the date when Bengali-speaking students, demonstrating for their language, were gunned down in Dhaka. From such tragic beginnings, the day has grown to become a worldwide movement supporting mother languages and cultural understanding.

In New York recently the UN launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

Starting at the international flags’ display near Questacon, language lovers bearing banners and dressed in traditional costumes will cross Kings Bridge and end at the police memorial near the carillon, where there will be performances and a picnic.

Worldwide estimates are that between 95 per cent of today’s spoken languages may be extinct or seriously endangered by 2100 and nowhere is this question so acute as in Australia.

A long-time friend of the walks is Ngunnawal elder Caroline Hughes, who has over the years provided the event’s Welcome to Country. Now she has a more personal tale to tell, for she is learning her mother language and brought the house down at the National Museum in December when she told those at the 2023 Australian of the Year exhibition launch how she had started dreaming in Ngunnawal.

I caught up with Hughes to find out how she was fitting it all in with a busy career. Now working at AIATSIS, she was formerly director of CIT’s Yurauna Centre and is now in demand as a speaker and Ngunnawal celebrant around Canberra.

“I grew up with a kind of creole language, but with English as the dominant language in society,” she says. “But it’s not just about communicating meaning, it’s also about experience and knowledge, about geography, family, philosophy, cultural spirit, even anatomy and health care.”

For instance, unlike English, where there is simply a common word for snow, in her language there are many words – “hard snow”, “cool snow”, “and snow at the end of winter”. It’s the same with trees.

Several years ago she attended the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education and heard about revitalising mother tongues even in cultures where there was little to hang on to.

“If they can do this, why can’t we?” she thought. Hughes contacted traditional custodians to ask for support from elders, also finding sympathetic ears in linguists Doug Marmion and Louise Baird.

Noting that unlike English, Ngunnawal doesn’t have “s” “k” or “c”, they set about creating a basic grammar and vocabulary.

One big advantage is that the languages of nearby Yuin, Ngarigo, Gundungurra and Dharawal people are interconnected linguistically.

She’s happy with her progress but says “realistically, it’s going to take at least 50 years for fluency… but as you start learning it’s a good sign if you start dreaming it and hearing it… children pick it up quickly”.

She looks back on an era of destruction of language, but praises the work of linguists, interested farmers and even missionaries who wrote things down.

“We’ve got from about 200 Ngunnawal words to 2500 and now some people are going off to train in linguistics to extend their language knowledge,” she says.

In the meantime, there’s the Winanggaay (“look listen learn”) Ngunnawal Language Aboriginal Corporation, where though the focus is on Ngunnawal people, all are welcome to have a go.

Mother Language Walk, at the international flag display, 10.30am, February 26. Free event, all languages welcome.