MTC Scenes magazine - Spring 2014

MTC

scenes Spring 2014

Christian Leavesley Blowing bubbles Miriam Margolyes Making deals Simon Phillips Coming back Stephen Phillips Taking steps

Sharing the light Inside information

The biggest date on the MTC calendar by far is the launch of our mainstage season, which, as you know (since so many of you were there), was recently held at Hamer Hall. Our Artistic Director Brett Sheehy has once again created a great line-up for 2015, and I expect that many of you have already renewed your subscriptions.

If you haven’t, go to our website to re-subscribe or call for a brochure, because this is a season you wouldn’t want to miss.

Of course, while producing our mainstage season might be described as MTC’s core business, we also have wider responsibilities. As a major not-for-profit theatre company and an artistic flagship for our state, we are always looking for ways to reach beyond our dedicated subscriber audience to embrace as many Victorians as possible. Our ongoing Education productions and workshops, our NEON Festival of Independent Theatre, our MTC Connect Ambassadors and our Women Directors Program, and our co-productions with theatre companies with different audiences, such as Arena (Marlin) and Chunky Move (Complexity of Belonging), are all positive attempts to cast our net for a more diverse and therefore representative Victorian audience.

Yet we are aware, even as we develop these projects and see their positive results, that their scope is limited by how much we can spend on them – which is never enough. We just don’t have the budget.

So, it was thrilling for us recently to announce Sharing the Light, a major new five-year project in partnership with Crown Resorts Foundation to bring the transformative power of theatre to thousands more Victorian young people and their families. The Cover: Marlin Scenes is produced quarterly and is a publication of Melbourne Theatre Company. All information was correct at the time of printing. Melbourne Theatre Company reserves the right to make changes.

project is designed to overcome two main hurdles to attending theatre for many: cost and access. We know that theatre is too easily seen as an expensive luxury for those with limited income or who live outside inner Melbourne. Beginning in January, Sharing the Light will address these issues by providing disadvantaged youth and remote families subsidised tickets to live theatre; by helping to tour education productions to regional Victoria; and providing Indigenous scholarships for learning and career development.

shows. The third part, MTC Education on Tour, will help fund a regional tour of one of MTC Education’s productions. And finally, the MTC and VCA Indigenous Scholarship Program, in partnership with the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development at the Victorian College of the Arts, will help create career pathways in theatre for Indigenous students. Also, we will be working with the University of Melbourne to develop a longitudinal study to evaluate the program over its five-year course.

An outreach program such as this has been a dream for MTC for a long time, but it has only now been made possible by the extraordinary generosity of Crown Resorts Foundation to provide $2.5 million in funding over the next five years. We cannot forget that the Packer family contributed $18 million to the building of Southbank Theatre, so we are doubly pleased that their substantial bricks-and-mortar investment has been followed up by this, their first major arts program in Victoria.

Studies here and overseas clearly show that investing in the cultural learning of young people reaps wholesale benefits in later life – though I don’t suppose I need convince Subscribers to MTC about the transformative power of theatre.

If you are like me, you enjoyed your

Sharing the Light has four key components.

Firstly, the Crown Resorts Student Theatre Pass will provide up to 10,000 disadvantaged students each year with subsidised five-dollar tickets to MTC Mainstage and Education shows, with travel costs covered for those from outlying areas. The second part targets families, with the Crown Resorts Family Theatre Pass providing families and children in outer Melbourne suburban areas with five-dollar tickets to MTC’s family

Educational touring: Luke Ryan, Daniela Farinacci, and Naomi Rukavina in Yellow Moon

first theatre as a young person and you nurtured that first thrill into a life-long interest, perhaps even passion.

The real excitement of this new venture is that more young Australians and their families will have access to that transformative experience.

Virginia Lovett Executive Director

EDITOR Paul Galloway GRAPHIC DESIGN Helena Turinski COVER IMAGE Billiejeanisnotmylover MAIN PHOTOS Jeff Busby, Mandy Jones, Jolyon James, Benjamin Heally, James Henry, Heath Warwick

MTC Headquarters 252 Sturt St, Southbank Vic 3006 TELEPHONE 03 8688 0900 FACSIMILE 03 8688 0901 E-MAIL info@mtc.com.au WEBSITE mtc.com.au

Melbourne Theatre Company is a department of the University of Melbourne

Southbank Theatre 140 Southbank Blvd, Southbank Vic 3006 BOX OFFICE 03 8688 0800

Over land or sea or foam

Marlin is a show grandparents can share with their grandchildren, says director Christian Leavesley The instigating spark for the forthcoming family show Marlin was the curious behaviour of Christian Leavesley’s father. ‘It was interesting to see how my father responded to my first child,’ says Leavesley. ‘He was a very different person. I didn’t know my grandfathers, so I was seeing that relationship up close for the first time. And I felt that in some ways my daughter was closer to my father than she was to me. They had an understanding between them. So that’s where I began, with wanting to do a show about the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren.’

Leavesley became the Artistic Director of Arena Theatre Company eighteen months ago and has set out to continue the company’s fifty-year tradition of creating exciting and artistically innovative storytelling for young people. He began his association with the company as a freelance director more than a decade ago, continuing with a stint as the company’s Artistic Associate. He admits frankly that youth theatre was never in his original career plan, but he was drawn to the genre’s artistic innovation, and, at Arena, the long lead times that allow for full research and development of ideas.

‘You come to appreciate the flexibility that you have here at Arena,’ he says.

‘There are not structures constantly managing you. When you want to do a show, you have the time to develop it.’

The creation process for a show at Arena seems the opposite of how a mainstream theatre company such as MTC goes about it. At MTC, a playwright writes a play and a creative team work out how to best present it. At Arena, you begin with a kernel of an idea and explore themes and modes of presentation first. Only later is a writer brought in to write the script. With Marlin, the first co-production between Arena and MTC for twenty-five years, Leavesley’s early thoughts about grandfathers was followed by a

completely unrelated idea about foam, the possibility of setting a story amid mountains of soapy suds.

story and characters turned out very differently, but the shadow of the Hemmingway drifts about somewhere.’

‘I really like making shows that have a dynamic, transformative playing space,’ he says. ‘I like shows where the kids can see the world change before their eyes.

So at an outdoor party at the Myer Music Bowl one afternoon I saw a big foam-filled pit that the children were playing in. And I thought, that foam could be moulded into any number of things and places. So we began to experiment.’

By the time the writer Damien Millar came in on the project, the grandfather, the girl, the big fish, the Townsville setting and acres of foam were already in place. Leavesley had roughed out a storyboard and presented it to Millar with some source materials and a demonstration of how the foam might work. Then they went up to Townsville, spending time with game fishermen and exploring the town and its surrounds. So far three drafts have been written and with each of the previous drafts Leavesley held a two-week workshop, a process he is reluctant to call ‘luxurious’ but in the usually straitened theatre world certainly feels that way. ‘We are so lucky here to have the time we need to develop a show, rather than having to work out solutions on the run during rehearsals. This third draft now looks very ready.’ ▲

Once preliminary tests with an industrial blower, garden mesh and washing-up liquid showed that the idea had possibilities, Leavesley started thinking about likely stories. ‘It happens that my father was a master mariner and a ship’s captain and the foam suggested a tale of the sea, some nautical adventure.

So we began to look at the literature.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was a key early inspiration. The problem with it is that it’s about the Old Man. The relationship with the Boy is a minor part of it. But the powerful aspect of the story for me was that he doesn’t succeed in bringing the fish home. And I thought that for young people learning that a quest can end in failure is a really valuable thing to understand. So our

Marlin, by Damien Millar, runs at Southbank Theatre, The Lawler from 25 September to 11 October.

Christian Leavesley spoke to Paul Galloway

Director Christian Leavesley with Jacob Williams, Ashlea Pyke and Christopher Bunworth

A time for renewal Prompt corner

If you missed our 2015 Launch, you still have time to organise your MTC theatre year before the priority booking period for renewing 2014 Subscribers closes on Monday 6 October. The easiest way to re-subscribe is by visiting mtc.com. au/subscriptions, press Subscribe Now and follow the links. To receive priority, we require the e-mail address you used last year and your password (use our Forgotten Password function if there is a memory lapse). If you feel more comfortable subscribing ‘old school’, you can fill out a booking form and send it to MTC Subscriptions, P0 Box 918, South Melbourne, Victoria 3205.

You should have already received a 2015 Season brochure through the post, but if you can’t lay your hand on it, you can pick one up from Southbank Theatre Box Office, or get us to send you one on (03) 8688 0800.

Casting news

We end the 2014 season with two oneperson shows, which means casting was done and dusted before the Season Launch last year. In I’ll Eat You Last, Miriam Margolyes plays the feisty Hollywood agent Sue Mengers and Pennsylvania Avenue features Bernadette Robinson, who, as she did in Songs for Nobodies (2009), will combine her uncanny vocal impersonations of iconic singers with stories from their lives.

but at least a couple of the performers will be familiar. Eloise Mignon had the lead role in Return to Earth (2009) and played Anya last year in The Cherry Orchard. Stephen Phillips previously appeared in Realism (2009), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (2007) and Metamorphosis (2003). They will join Josh Price and Karen Sibbing, both well-known from their work with Daniel Schlusser Ensemble and other independent groups, making their MTC debuts.

In youth theatre, however, hybrid performance styles are practically standard, as evidenced in Marlin, our co-production with Arena Theatre Company, which includes puppetry and an ocean of soap bubbles. Puppeteer Jacob Williams will be the third performer in the coming-of-age story of a girl (played by Ashlea Pyke), her grandfather (Christopher Bunworth) and a fish.

The Tony Award-winning musical Once opens at the Princess Theatre on 1 October for a special five-week MTC season before continuing on a long commercial run. The cast includes Brent Hill and Greg Stone, who have already appeared this year in The Speechmaker (Hill) and Glengarry Glen Ross (Stone). The Guy and the Girl (we never learn their names) in this Irish

love-story will be played by Tom Parsons and Madeleine Jones, and the full cast list comprises Anton Berezin, Andrew Broadbent, Ben Brown, Gerard Carroll, Colin Dean, Keegan Joyce, Amy Lehpamer, Lachlan Neate, Jane Patterson, Susan-ann Walker, and Paul Watson.

Production Briefings

Enrich your theatre-going by attending our regular Production Briefings. Held on the Monday evening before first preview, each Production Briefing gives you the inside story about the play, the writer, the rehearsals and the production process straight from the mouth of the director, cast and creative teams. The next briefings are: Complexity of Belonging, The Sumner, Monday 29 September, 6pm I’ll Eat You Last, Fairfax Studio, Monday 27 October, 6pm Pennsylvania Avenue, The Sumner, Monday 3 November, 6pm Note: there will be no Production Briefing for Once.

On the net

MTC’s website is like having a friend backstage giving you all the goss.

View trailers and videos, listen to

The mix of dance, movement and spokenword in Complexity of Belonging may be startlingly new to many Subscribers,

Brent Hill in The Speechmaker; (inset, from left) Eloise Mignon, Ashlea Pyke, Christopher Bunworth, Greg Stone

podcasts, read interviews and have up-to-the minute information about shows. If you missed Barrie Kosky speaking at the recent NEON Festival, you can take it in online. Or listen to playwright Lucy Prebble (The Effect) in conversation with journalist Fiona Gruber and actor Sigrid Thornton. (mtc.com.au/mtctalks or download from iTunes). And if you want to know how your favourite theatre company faired in 2013, our Annual Report is available for perusal. Finally, you can view both our current season and our newly launched Season 2015 at your leisure. www.mtc.com.au ▲

Agent provocateur

One of Hollywood’s outrageous personalities is brought to the stage by Miriam Margolyes

John Leary, Miriam Margolyes and Paul Denny in Realism (2009)

On the subject of Hollywood, actor Miriam Margolyes is ambivalent.

She enjoyed her time there, yet doesn’t particularly want to return.

‘I think to operate well there you need to be in love with celebrity and I’m not in love with celebrity in any way,’ she says. ‘Sue Mengers was. She was transfixed by celebrity, as indeed, truthfully, most Americans are.’

Sue Mengers was the famous agent, who, for a decade or so from the midseventies, was quite the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Her client list included practically every bankable star of the day – Barbra Streisand, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway, Michael Caine, Steve McQueen, Joan Collins and Cher. She was extremely bankable herself, a force of nature with the Midas touch, armed with a personality so brash and outrageous that she seemed conspicuous even in Hollywood. At the peak of her power in 1975, Sixty Minutes in America did a profile on her, presenting her to the world as a small, funny, Jewish dynamo who loved being the centre of attention. She enjoyed her power, too – until it all fell away. Until people stopped taking her calls and her own phone fell silent.

In I’ll Eat You Last, John Logan’s intimate and hilarious one-person show, Margolyes gets to recreate Mengers in all her gaudy, loudmouthed allure.

Although she last performed in Melbourne in Dickens’ Women, her solo survey of the women in Charles Dickens’s life and fiction, she freely admits she doesn’t care for one-person shows as a rule. ‘I would only do one that was absolutely unputdownable,’ she confesses. ‘And there was no way I could refuse to do this particular play. It is a brilliant play. It’s terribly funny. It deals with a world with which I am familiar.

And it is a huge acting challenge. So all those points mean that I have to do it.’

Margolyes never met Mengers, but her own Hollywood agent Susan Smith, who died last year, was cut from similar cloth.

‘She was a hard-talking foul-mouthed broad – not to put a fine point on it. But also [had] enormous cultural knowledge.

She had been to New York University, so she knew her stuff. But she was caustic.

So I know that there are agents like Sue Mengers still out there.’

‘Mengers was wonderful because she was witty,’ she adds. ‘It was her saving grace. You can forgive people their sins if they’re witty. Most agents, unfortunately, are not witty. They are either good negotiators or they are good schmoozers or whatever, but to be witty as well makes all the difference.

I think she was someone who quite deliberately fashioned a character for herself. Then it became who she was.

It’s clear to me that people who liked her loved her. People who didn’t like her absolutely loathed her. She wasn’t lazy; she really worked her socks off. But she could be cruel and vicious.’

Margolyes has never been more in demand. Just in the past few months she went from playing Ana in Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch in Adelaide to a role in a British TV series, now into rehearsals for I’ll Eat You Last and after that on to another series of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, which is also shot in Melbourne. ‘I’ve never been so old; and I’ve never been so busy!’ she says with a laugh. ‘I have work until 2016. It’s funny because I can’t suddenly go somewhere, do something unexpected. I am the prisoner of my craft!’

I ask her whether a one person show isn’t a daunting prospect at her time of life, with the learning of lines and the energy required. ‘It’s harder to make the lines stick, but once they stick, they’re in,’ she says. ‘But it is harder. Everything is harder. I’m older. I don’t move so well.

I get tired quicker, but I’ve still got more energy than most people my age. What always gives you the passion and the strength is the audience. So it’s going to be quite a testing experience for me, but not an ordeal. It is a discovery.

A journey. An exploration. A pilgrimage.

It’s a piece of daring to throw at Melbourne and to see what they say.

Golly, I’m looking forward to it.’ ▲ I’ll Eat You Last, by John Logan, runs at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio from 31 October to 20 December.

Miriam Margolyes spoke to Paul Galloway

InterContinental Hotel; (below) the view from The Deck restaurant

Make a date with Melbourne A couple of months ago, MTC launched our Make a Date with Melbourne website and this was our thinking – Melbourne is Australia’s most popular domestic holiday destination, and Victoria is Australia’s most popular destination for culture, and MTC is a jewel in the state’s cultural tourism crown. So why not create a convenient space where visitors can organise their entire Melbourne stay, from booking their MTC tickets and their accommodation, to choosing where to have dinner, and onto organising their Melbourne sightseeing? In short, to create a sort of one-stop-shop for outof-towners to plan a theatrical escape?

The buzzword for it is ‘synergy’. But really it’s only common sense.

To create Make a Date with Melbourne we formed partnerships with Melbourne’s

premier hotels, restaurants and tourism providers. For your accommodation, the website links with InterContinental Melbourne, Crown Promenade, Hotel Lindrum Melbourne and Quay West Suites.

For pre-show dining or post-show supper, you have only to click your mouse to have a table at the The Deck, Script Bar and Bistro, Blondie, and Saké Restaurant and Bar. For sightseeing, the website accesses Public Transport Victoria’s Journey Planner and all the train, bus and tram timetables. And to maximise your leisure time in Melbourne, it links to a changing list of cultural attractions from Dreamworks Animation – The Exhibition at the Australian Centre

for the Moving Image to the latest blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Already, this handy tourism website is generating interest among theatrelovers planning to visit Melbourne and bookings are starting to flow. So if you are planning your theatrical escape to the city, then why not make a date with Melbourne? makeadatewithmelbourne.com.au ▲

Book by Enda Walsh Music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová 1 October to 9 November, Princess Theatre Special-price additional tickets for MTC Subscribers for our season of Once are still available through the MTC Box Office (03 3688 0800) and our website mtc.com.au

Seats after 9 November do not receive MTC Subscriber discount and can be bought online through ticketmaster.com.au

Bernadette Robinson in Songs For Nobodies (2010)

Return of the native Simon Phillips is back at MTC with a new show for lyrebird Bernadette Robinson Former MTC Artistic Director Simon Phillips has been back at the Company recently, preparing for Joanna MurraySmith’s new play Pennsylvania Avenue, and feeling very much like the former tenant returning to his old house – a little disassociated. So much is as he left it, yet so much has changed, and he’s been feeling self-conscious in his new status as guest. ‘Yes, surprising that it didn’t feel quite like coming home,’ he says. ‘Some of the old faces have stuck around, I note, which is a comfort, but there’s a lot of new ones.

It felt strange, but still, I’m very happy to be back’ It is three years since Phillips left MTC after his sell-out swansong production of The Importance of Being Earnest. He always planned to have a break from the Company, ‘to let the new regime get on with it and settle in.’ He also had more than enough to keep him busy. Since 2011, he directed A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with Geoffrey Rush, the Dame Edna and Barry Humphries’ Final Farewell Tour and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at STC. He has also been developing new shows for commercial managements, especially musicals. ‘They’ve hired me for the particular skillset I was forced to cultivate over the dozen years at MTC of being able to guide a particularly strong idea through the script and development stage, bringing all the elements together into a show.’

Pennsylvania Avenue is another show he is raising from concept to production. It is the follow-up to MTC’s 2010 hit Songs for Nobodies,

a showcase for the extraordinary vocal impressions of Bernadette Robinson.

The original show was made up of five chapters, each an encounter between an ordinary person and an extraordinary singer from the past – Billie Holliday, Patsy Cline, Maria Callas, Judy Garland and Edith Piaf.

In creating this latest show the last thing anyone wanted was to repeat the format, present a sort of More Songs for More Nobodies.

‘We had the classic problem of following a huge success, the problem of the sequel,’ says Phillips.

‘We were aware that no Hollywood film with ‘II’ at the end of the title was ever as good as the original.

Bernadette had been touring Nobodies to great acclaim absolutely everywhere, but was coming to the end of that particular cycle. So we had to come up fairly quickly with what the next show might be, a framing idea as strong as the first but obviously not the same.’

It was Joanna Murray-Smith who suggested setting the story in the White House over forty years. There’s a long tradition of concerts in the East Room of the White House and successive Presidents have hosted countless great singers. Murray-Smith was drawn to how the choice of invitees reflected the taste and politics of the incumbent, but also, strongly, the changing world outside.

‘We begin with Kennedy and go up to George W,’ says Phillips. ‘These were extraordinary times, so the historical aspect creates an arc. But the main change from the first show is that rather than five ‘nobodies’, the idea was to have just one, one staffer at the White House telling her life story with the singers coming in over the years.

Her story provides the show with an emotional spine.’

Before the writing got underway, Murray-Smith compiled a list of female White House singers and she, Phillips and Robinson picked out possibilities.

‘Bernadette was itching to do some that were not on the list, but we had to be fairly strict and not break the format too much. There were also singers that she had never thought of impersonating – didn’t know if she could impersonate – but which we thought would be good for the show.

So there was an element of me pushing her into uncomfortable areas to see what she could do. There’s not much value in a show that doesn’t stretch everyone.’ ▲ Pennsylvania Avenue by Joanna Murray-Smith runs at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner from 8 November to 20 December Simon Phillips spoke to Paul Galloway

Great expectations MTC Foundation • Adapting productions for people with disabilities • Supporting NEON, MTC’s Festival of Independent Theatre.

Southbank Theatre

• Maintaining Southbank Theatre and administrative buildings • Greening Southbank Theatre • Upgrading technical equipment and fit out • Refurbishing Theatre public spaces • Maintaining and updating infrastructure.

These areas are all vital to ensuring that MTC remains the world class theatre company Victoria deserves. However, much of our work in these areas is not covered by our income from box office or government grants. Therefore, we Emma J Hawkins and Patrick Graham in Big Bad Wolf; (above left) Glenn Maynard and LeRoy Parsons at Cybec Electric The Visitors; (left) Alison Croggon interviews Barrie Kosky at NEON Festival

MTC recently announced the establishment of the MTC Foundation to ensure that we can continue to create the finest theatre imaginable and provide transformative experiences on and off stage. The MTC Foundation has two main purposes: to build an endowment fund that will provide an ongoing, secure revenue stream for the Company; and to provide a mechanism to receive, consolidate and distribute donations to MTC. From 4 September 2014, all donations to MTC will flow through the MTC Foundation, which will focus on four key areas of MTC’s business:

Innovation

• Supporting creative activity by local artists • Commissioning and developing new plays • Supporting the Production, Wardrobe and Design Departments • Facilitating international co-productions and tours • Supporting the MTC’s Women Directors Program and emerging arts practitioners.

Education

• Inspiring students from disadvantaged backgrounds through the Youth Scholarship Program • Touring Education productions to regional schools • Resourcing VCE student workshops • Facilitating schools’ access and teaching resources • Supporting scholarships, mentorships, internships and residencies.

Community

• Funding free and discounted tickets for disadvantaged members of the community • Producing family productions with affordable ticket prices • Supporting MTC Connect to collaborate with Melbourne’s diverse theatre and community landscape

rely significantly on donations in order to continue our transformative work in these areas.

As a Subscriber, you are an incredibly important part of the MTC Family.

We ask and encourage you to help us establish the MTC Foundation with strength and vigour, to ensure a future for theatre that inspires and transforms Victorian lives.

To donate to the MTC Foundation, please visit www.mtc.com.au/donate For further enquiries about the MTC Foundation, please contact Tiffany Lucas, Development Director on (03) 8688 0950 or t.lucas@mtc.com.au

Corporate entertaining

Host an event with MTC At MTC we offer truly bespoke events – it’s your event, your way. Want to peek behind the scenes and see how productions are made? Interested in mingling with the stars or sharing an intimate drink with your favourite writer? What about holding an exquisite lunch or dinner on stage, or just having a cocktail with the director before a show? At MTC, we tailor our corporate events to your tastes by offering a range of unique entertaining opportunities.

For more information, please contact Ryan Nicolussi, Corporate Partnerships Coordinator on (03) 8688 0951 or r.nicolussi@mtc.com.au

Enjoy a wide variety of entertainment options; (above) actor Lucy Durack talking to a guest at an MTC function.

You never know who you might meet: (right) Glengarry Glen Ross director Alkinos Tsilimidos with Alex Dimitriades

Special Offer

Need a ride? Try Uber! Book a ride with a private driver at the push of a button, on demand.

USE PROMO CODE

MTC FOR A FREE UberBLACK RIDE (UP TO $25)

3 SIMPLE STEPS TO TAKE YOUR FIRST RIDE

1

DOWNLOAD THE APP

2

ENTER THE PROMO CODE

SIGN UP NOW: UBER.COM/GO/MTC FOR NEW USERS ONLY. VALID 2014.

3

REQUEST YOUR RIDE

Garry McDonald and Stephen Phillips in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2007)

On his toes

For Complexity of Belonging, actor Stephen Phillips learnt a new way of working

MTC’s co-production with Chunky Move, Complexity of Belonging is a hybrid text and choreographic piece devised by choreographer Anouk van Dijk and writer/director Falk Richter, who have worked together many times before.

For actor Stephen Phillips, working for a dance company for the first time, it was a strange, exhilarating new world.

How did you audition for the show?

The audition process ended up being a sort of workshop. It was a three-day process, like for a commercial musical.

As in A Chorus Line, where you start up with a hundred hopefuls and you get weeded out.

That’s right. You go in and do your audition in front of Anouk [van Dijk] and Falk [Richter]. There was a crazy amount of stuff to prepare and bring in: a song, one monologue, then another monologue. And I hadn’t done that kind of big audition for a while, so it was great to prepare and go in fully loaded.

And in the first audition you work with two dancers to see how you adapt to the choreography – which was exciting as a test. Then there was a call back in the afternoon, and the following day I repeated it all with some different actors and dancers. By the third day, we were down to a few actors and dancers, working on improvisations and suggestions, and it felt as if we were already starting to create the show.

They decided on four actors and five dancers and then what?

We all came back in February for five

weeks of development – five weeks! All improvised, text and movement. There really wasn’t an absolute dividing line between the actors and the dancers.

The actors sometimes worked in movement and the dancers sometimes speaking text. Sometimes Anouk would run the floor, sometimes Falk. All these improvisations were all documented, transcribed, to go towards the script.

So Anouk and Falk worked as a team, or was one of them in charge?

They say they’re both ‘makers of the work’. So, Falk might provoke some text with the actors and Anouk sees what’s happening and try something with the dancers, which Falk responds to with another idea. It’s a system they’ve developed over five or six shows, with the two layers working together all the time. As an actor, you just try to respond to what’s going on. For me, what’s great about it is being in something that feels so experimental but within a system that’s so tried and tested. You trust the process. Very cool.

But exhausting. After five weeks we’d scatter-gunned an enormous lot of improvisations on the theme of belonging.

Which is why the show’s called Complexity of Belonging?

Yeah, what it means for us to belong, the meaning of belonging for us as individuals. How we construct our identities by the groups we belong to, or the land, or particular people, or the place we work. So the show is built up from dozens of our improvisations.

A lot isn’t used. The process felt pretty exhaustive, but we still have three or four week rehearsal process ahead of us.

And at the end of the development Falk went away to write the script?

Which he’s done and we all have. It still seems open, like a rehearsal script, not a finished piece. So I guess there’s a lot of work still to do. We’ve been instructed to learn all our text before rehearsals start, to get it deeply within us – I think, to allow us to work with it physically from day one.

So what is Falk Richter’s writing like?

It is really raw and present, almost automatic writing. It comes straight from the gut, straight from experience down onto the page.

And how are you dealing with the choreographic elements of the show?

Anouk told us straight away, ‘Don’t try to be dancers. You all move well. Just respond as you would respond. Move how you move.’ And that’s interesting, watching a dancer’s body and an actor’s body trying to find a shared area. The show is Complexity of Belonging and there is a complexity in that interaction, the two trying to belong on stage. ▲ Complexity of Belonging, a project by Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk, runs at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner from 6 October to 1 November.

Stephen Phillips spoke to Paul Galloway.

MTC Members

We’re thrilled to launch our new MTC Members program as part of Season 2015 Why not add a membership to your subscription and enjoy benefits such as discounted parking at Arts Centre Melbourne and complimentary refreshments in the new Southbank Theatre members lounge, all year round.

Annual Membership Fee

It’s easy to join:

(January 2015 to December 2015) $250 individual $400 joint (two people in the same household)

Tick the box on your subscription form under Membership Join online when you subscribe at mtc.com.au/subscriptions

Membership Enquiries

Please contact: Mandy Jones Engagement and Events Manager members@mtc.com.au ▲

Members Lounge at Southbank Theatre

Relax pre-show and at interval with complimentary drinks and snacks while enjoying stunning views of the Melbourne city skyline from the comfort of the all-new, exclusive Members Lounge.

The Members Lounge operates one hour before all mainstage evening performances at the Sumner Theatre on Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, and during interval (where applicable).

Members Card Discounts

Save when you show your MTC Members card at any of the participating businesses on our comprehensive list of retail and dining partners, including discounts at Southbank Theatre bars, Script Bar & Bistro and within the Southgate restaurant and shopping precinct.

Save 20% on parking

MTC Members receive a 20% discount every time you park at Arts Centre Melbourne. You’ll receive a Stored Value Card which allows you to store credit, eliminating the need to queue each time you visit.

Communications

Stay up to date with MTC happenings, special offers and events through regular e-newsletters and quarterly Scenes Magazine.

Upcoming CentreStage Dress Rehearsals I’ll Eat You Last

by John Logan 2pm, Friday 31 October, Arts Centre Melbourne, The Fairfax

Pennsylvania Avenue

by Joanna Murray-Smith 2pm, Saturday 8pm November*, Southbank Theatre, The Sumner

*CentreStage Members Lounge will be in operation from 12.30pm in the VIP Rooms, Level 2, Southbank Theatre.

To book for Dress Rehearsals, please phone Stephanie Convery on 8688 0954 or email membership@mtc.com.au specifying the number of members and guests attending. Remember, bookings are essential and Dress Rehearsals are subject to change or cancellation.

2 CoUrSE PrE-ThEATrE MEnU & A gLASS of winE

$39.50

*

AvAiLAbLE dAiLy froM MiddAy & froM 5PM for dinnEr *conditions apply

Upper Level, Southgate Arts Complex, Southbank Minutes away from The Arts Centre & a short walk to Southbank Theatre Phone: 03 9699 9544 Email: info@thedeckrestaurant.com.au www.thedeckrestaurant.com.au

Proud MTC sponsor for 10 years

Special offers Spring 2014

Lavazza Italian Film Festival

Movie Preview

Theatre Offer

Movie Offer

I Can Quit Whenever I Want

16 September

One of the top picks of the 2014 Lavazza Italian Film Festival, I Can Quit Whenever I Want (Smetto quando voglio) is an exhilarating comedy in the style of Breaking Bad and Ocean’s Eleven, that has become a cult hit in Italy. It follows a group of unemployed neo-graduates who turn to producing and trafficking synthetic drugs.

Pietro is a researcher and a genius who has just been laid off. So in order to survive, he recruits the best of his colleagues: economists, chemists and anthropologists in order to form the A-team of drug dealing.

Success is immediate, but at what cost?

For your chance to win one of 100 double passes to a preview screening of I Can Quit Whenever I Want (Smetto quando voglio) on Tuesday 16 September, 6.30pm at Kino Cinemas, email your name and subscriber details to offers@mtc.com.au with ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL in the subject line by Friday 12 September 2014.

We Are The Best!

18 to 26 September

Celebrated Swedish Director, Lukas Moodysson (Together, Lilya-4-Ever, Show Me Love) returns with a charming tale of friendship set in early eighties Stockholm.

Packed with humour and bursting with energy, We Are The Best! follows Bobo and Klara who are best friends with a passion for punk music. Problem is, it’s 1982 and everyone says that punk is dead. Sweet and wonderfully energetic, We Are The Best! will inspire viewers to identify with this couple’s insecurities, embarrassing parents, alienation and unrequited love.

For your chance to win one of 100 double passes to We Are The Best! courtesy of NewVision Films, email your name and subscriber details to offers@mtc.com.au with BEST in the subject line, or call 8688 0900 by Monday 15 September 2014. We Are The Best! is in cinemas from 18 September, and prize passes are valid from Thursday 18 to Friday 26 September.

Bell Shakespeare’s The Dream

25 September

Bell Shakespeare’s reawakening of Shakespeare’s classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a breathless ninety-minute production that amplifies the magic, mirth and mayhem. As quick as a shadow, Peter Evans’ production is fast, funny and family-friendly. The Dream as you’ve never seen it before is playing at Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse from 18 September to 4 October 2014.

For your chance to win one of five double passes to the 7.30pm performance of Bell Shakespeare’s The Dream on 25 September, email your name and subscriber details to offers@mtc.com.au with DREAM in the subject line by Wednesday 17 September 2014.

Magic in the Moonlight

From 28 August

Set in the glamorous jazz age of the 1920s on the opulent French Riviera, Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight is an enchanting romantic comedy starring Colin Firth, Emma Stone and Jacki Weaver. A cynical and arrogant master illusionist with an aversion to phony spiritualists who claim they can perform real magic, travels to the Côte d’Azur to unmask a possible swindle involving an alluring young clairvoyant.

Entertainment One is offering MTC Subscribers a two-for-one ticket deal for Magic in the Moonlight. Simply present this coupon at any participating cinema to receive two tickets for the price of one full-priced adult ticket. Valid from 28 August until the end of the film’s theatrical season at all participating cinemas, excluding public holidays, discount days and after 5pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Not valid at HOYTS La Premiere, Village Cinemas Gold Class, Nova Deluxe or Special Event Screenings.