Critics have always been rather fond of saying that art enriches the soul and enlivens the mind. We are especially fond of saying so when the art we love comes under attack: when the commentariat starts baying for the blood of a photographer, or when an expat wordsmith or theatremaker offends the underdeveloped sensibilities of some philistine opinion writer. With our enriched souls and enlivened minds, we critics would like to think that we are the living proof of our argument’s validity. We are not a modest lot.
Personally, though, I rather think the philistines often have a point. While even the most prosaic of artworks can enliven one’s mind (and in the case of certain critics, sharpen the nib of their pen), nowadays it seems a rare piece indeed that leaves one’s soul feeling that it has been in some way replenished. Of course, the critic’s common riposte to this is that the philistine’s argument is disingenuous: there is more to art than entertainment and reassurance, and the soul’s enrichment and its replenishment are hardly the same thing.
This, of course, is very true. Emotionally harrowing work, such as Damien Millar’s The Modern International Dead or Barrie Kosky’s The Women of Troy, might well be said to enrich the soul by giving it a bit of a kick in the ribs, but they can hardly be said to replenish it, to heal it in some way, once they’re done. (Actually, this is a bit disingenuous, too: the humour and delicacy of the former piece and the emotionally charged musical asides of the latter both serve as useful correctives to the overall grimness of their content. A better pair of examples might be The Season at Sarsaparilla and Simon Stone’s Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov, both of which were harrowing in the most unapologetic sense of the word. These works brutally bitch-slapped the soul and told it to take it and like it.)
There is, I would argue, a certain truth to the philistine’s argument, hidden somewhere behind the cries of mock outrage and the chilling calls for censorship: while is there is plenty about to enrich the soul, there is comparatively little to fill it up, to cause it to abound. Indeed, I can count on the fingers of one hand the art that has done so for me this year: Jacques Demy’s Les Paraplues de Cherbourg, which I saw for the first time in March; Daniel Kitson’s The Impotent Fury of the Priveledged, which restored one’s hope in people and opened one’s eyes to the wonders of the everyday; Alina Ibragimova’s account of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in August; and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman cycle, which I can’t believe I had overlooked for so long. (Runners-up include Tanya Gerstle’s Yes and Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father.) Now, most recently and strikingly of all, there is another: The Border Project’s Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster.
A meditation on rock music, memory and image-making, and a practical intersection of all three, Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster is probably the most soul-replenishing piece of physical performance I have experienced since Jerome Bel’s The show must go on at last year’s Melbourne International Arts Festival. Like that show, which, even though it was programmed as dance, shone like a beacon in the festival’s otherwise very dark theatrical component, this is the sort of piece one can’t help but smile at long after it has ended, the sort of piece you carry with you as you bounce along home. The next morning, when you wake up humming the riff from Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child of Mine’, which has been playing on a loop in your mind all night, it’s like a wonderful dream you’ve been lucky enough to remember.
Like The show must go on, Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster, which closed last weekend, is a show that generates positive energy, and the similarities do not end there. Both works are similarly rooted in a common experience of popular music (the soundtrack, as they say, to our lives) which is then expressed as movement (and in the latter case as song). Unlike The show must go on, however, which was danced—if that’s the right word—by amateurs, the cast of Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster is comparatively professional, comprising a number of well-practiced theatremakers, actors and rock musicians. (Its lead guitarist—who coincidentally once played me in a play—sometimes performs with The Audreys.) Similarly unlike The show must go on, which had at its core a single—and singularly effective—formal conceit (that the choreography for each song would be an almost dispassionately literal illustration of its lyrics), Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster is formally a much more complex creature. This, not merely in terms of its use of technology (what is commonly known as audiovisual or multimedia content, both unfortunately ugly terms), but also in terms of the sheer number of ideas it has chosen to explore.
Primary among them is the interplay of cultural and personal memory. The show is, at its core, a memory play: an interrogation of the way popular music and the images it generates not only trigger personal memories but in a sense colour and become them. It is a process that many who have come of age in the last half century would have some experience of, and one that people of my generation in particular have experienced rather intensely. There are scenes, for example, from my high school days, which, no matter how hard I try to do otherwise, I can only remember as montage sequences cut to Nickelback albums and other similarly tragic music. (Why does one of the nicest memories I have have to be scored to Train’s ‘Drops of Jupiter’? Why not Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ or something cool like that?) Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster begins with each of its eight performers choosing and talking about a popular song that reminds them of a personal memory. The songs are as varied as the memories they trigger: R.E.M. and Delirium rub shoulders with Guns N’ Roses and Jeff Buckley, reminding cast members of the high school teacher they once had a crush on or the night they took a pretty girl out for a drive in their mothers’ car. What ensues is a series of high-concept set pieces in which the songs and the personal memories collide.
While highly theatrical, the results nonetheless pay lip service to both the music video and the rock concert. Employing a variety of styles and simulating, through a clever use of video projection and various framing devices, the sense of watching a music video, the cast stage their memories as though each was a top ten single and the production an episode of Rage or Video Hits. The memory of a party gone wrong becomes an homage to Michel Gondry’s video for The White Stripes’ ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground’, with a silent video of the party projected over the body of one of the cast members as she stands on her own and remembers it sadly. The memory of the beautiful English teacher becomes a Matthew Bourne-like contemporary ballet.
Given all this, it is hard to fault those who have written that the show is a kind of by-product of the MTV years and the increasing ubiquity of the music video form in that time. They are correct, of course, but at the same time their claims seem to me at once both overly simplistic and a little bit too obvious, betraying a certain unfamiliarity with the music video form and what it is capable of. The way these writers have put their argument suggests to me that they believe the show amounts to little more than the abovementioned clever simulation, without thinking too much about what that meeting of these two forms makes possible. In doing so, they have sold the production short even as they have praised it. For in taking the music video as their model, the show’s creators have embarked upon a theatrical inquiry, however implicit or even unconscious, into questions about the nature of looking and the rules that govern that process.
Should I be right and that indeed be the case, there could be no better form to turn to for inspiration than the music video. Over the course of the past decade, the most perceptive and inventive interrogations into the nature of the image have taken place in the field of music video, and much of Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster seems to have been inspired by those filmmakers who have turned the form into a laboratory for experimental image-making. Far and away the most impressive of these madmen is aforementioned Frenchman Michel Gondry, whose formal experiments with the music video are among the most ingenious inquiries into the illusory power of the moving image this century, and which, as distant cousins of Georges Méliès’ flights of fancy, are often more innovative than the otherwise brilliant feature films he’s made since. In terms of their images and threadbare narratives, and more subtly in terms of their formal preoccupations, Gondry’s music videos seem to have been an touchstone for this production and an inspiration for much of what it is attempting to do.
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As suggested above, there are countless traces of specific Gondry videos in the show: in addition to the ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground’ homage, there are also references to his videos for the Foo Fighter’s ‘Everlong’ and, especially, The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Let Forever Be’. More interestingly, and on a less immediately explicit level, the show also shares with Gondry’s work a minor obsession with frames and frame lines, and the manner in which they direct the gaze, cut up reality, and turn it into an image. Like a parcel of land, the show’s long, shallow set is continually subdivided into smaller stage images, as cast and crew members roll rectangular frames of varying sizes and ratios across it. Resembling the skeletal timber wall frames of a half-finished house, these large metal quadrilaterals at once both define the space and guide the eye across it.
Gondry’s music video for Lucas Secon’s ‘Lucas with the Lid Off’ remains the most instructive example of this process at work. The video consists of a rapper, Secon, moving through a warehouse set followed closely by Gondry’s camera. The set is broken up into a number of what we might calls stations, where in front of each a small numbered frame sits waiting to be peered through. As the camera approaches each station, it comes to settle in behind the frame, through which it shoots an image that in some way advances the video’s narrative. Then, as Lucas jumps up to move on to the next station, the camera pulls away, breaking the frame’s illusion and moving along with its subject.
(It is a trope that appears again, albeit briefly, in Gondry’s recent Be Kind Rewind. In a brilliant twist on the obligatory montage sequence, Gondry documents the creation of some ten or so amateur remakes of famous movies in one unbroken take, with the actors running from one homemade set to the next while the camera taxis alongside them and occasionally settles in behind fixed frames. Making the whole thing that much more impressive, the movie the characters are remaking only becoming apparent when the camera reaches the ideal vantage point.)
At first glance, the frame line might seem like a rather odd preoccupation for a theatrical production to have: the tyranny of the frame, as Peter Greenaway likes to call it, strikes one as a problem facing filmmakers somewhat more than theatremakers. (Obviously, the proscenium arch is capable of its own oppressive machinations, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to the cinematic frame line. Outside that frame, there is not even death—there is only non-existence.) It is perhaps only in the theatre, however, that the authority of the frame can be properly exploded: try as often and hard as he might, in the end Gondry is always thwarted by his medium. For every time he draws attention to a frame line in his videos and films, he is simultaneously creating another, which subsequently flies under the radar. The frames Gondry makes explicit are necessarily framed within another: it is, after all, in the nature of the camera’s eye to create a new frame line wherever it looks, even when it is shooting the edge of the one that preceded it.
This is not the case in the theatre, where the machinations of the frame can be made explicit without the audience having to forget that they’re looking through another frame. In this way, Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster not only references music videos, but also takes one of their central projects—the experimental filmmaker’s investigation into modes of seeing—and pushes it into territory where, by the very nature of the music video, it has previously been unable to go. As so often happens when two forms meet of an evening, the strengths of one betray the weaknesses of the other, and new possibilities for each of them become visible in the breach.
This production’s use of frames becomes increasingly complex as the show progresses. In its earlier scenes, the steel frames are simply used to delineate a field of action, appearing front-on to the audience like frames on the wall of a gallery. In pushing these frames up against the back wall of the set, and the actors along with them, the team reduces the depth of the already shallow space even further and creates a series of flat, planometric images. This is at its most pronounced and successful in the scene where two of the performers, appearing with their backs against the wall in a series of illustrative friezes while a series of short sentences are projected above their heads, act out a children’s story as though the wall was the page of a picture book and the frame the edge of the page. However, this is also the scene in which the frame line begins to be transgressed: after a series of frozen images, the final tableau suddenly comes alive, with one of the characters crawling towards the front of the stage, pushing the frame before him and completely reconfiguring the space. It is the moment when both the contents of the frame and all that exist outside of it begin to exert their control over its function, and from this moment forward the frame will become increasingly fragile while its authority over what we should look at becomes increasingly less powerful.
These experiments with the frame line are at their most complex and exhilarating in the production’s final moments, when Cameron Goodall remembers his days as briefcase-carrying schoolboy trying to learn to play ‘Sweet Child Mine’. Unlike the other set pieces, which are set to original compositions, the production’s final number is the actual song being remembered, albeit with some lyrics changed. (“O-o-o-o-oh, briefcase of mine!”) Once Goodall has played through the opening riff a couple of times, standing in the middle of one of the wooden frames, something odd begins to happen: it begins to move. But not only that: it begins to move in the three-dimensional space of the stage, no longer fixed to a horizontal axis parallel to the set’s back wall, but turning any number of degrees in various directions. Its edges begin to intersect with those other frames, which are being pushed around the stage by other members of the cast. Goodall begins to move between them, like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon moving from one sheet of paper to another, or the painted beings in the Harry Potter novels walking behind the walls of Hogwarts from frame to gilded frame. As he plays and sings (and he’s brilliant at both), Goodall walks across a three-dimensional landscape of frame lines in an image at once both trippy and beautiful. Suddenly, the realisation dawns on you: the body is finally framing the frames, not the other way around. The way you are watching and listening has undergone a similarly extreme transformation.
Alas, the show ends, as this critique must end also. It occurs to me that I have done little here to do much to convince the reader of my initial assertion that the show replenishes the soul as much as it enriches it. Clearly, given the extent of my intellectual response, however unwieldy it has been, the piece does do much to enliven the mind. Perhaps the length of my response will be sufficient to convince the doubter that I feel passionately about the production. Perhaps another reference to Gondry would be helpful? For while Gondry’s shorts, as I have already mentioned, can on one hand be seen as experimental tracts on the nature of seeing and on the possibilities of cinema, they can just as easily be seen as three- or four-minute celebrations of music and images and the magic of their combination. Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster is something similar: an experimental tract on the nature of seeing and the possibilities of theatre, which is at one and the same time an hour-long celebration of rock music and its role in our lives. If they’re anything like me, the philistines should love it.
Esoteric Rabbit Blog, 4 October 2008
