Griffin Theatre – Cultural Omnivore Blog

What a treat it is as an audience member to see the first ever outing of a show in development. It’s a special kind of exciting, really. You go in with no specific expectations about what you might see, but with high hopes that you’ll enjoy it.

It also feels like a special kind of privilege sometimes. We’re let in when the work is still a “rough draft” and when the artists/creators are at what I imagine might be their most vulnerable and courageous. And it’s exciting knowing that you (and all the other members of the audience around you) will have an impact on the work as it continues on its journey of development.

Whether you laughed, sighed, fidgeted, focused, gasped, groaned, walked out swiftly or clapped loud and long at the end all matters. The work is being tested on you. How you receive it and respond to it will play a part in shaping how it evolves into the future.

Almost a year ago I saw Aanisa Vylet’s The Girl/The Woman at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta. Before that, months before, I had seen two development showings of the work – one at Bankstown Arts Centre and the other at Belvoir. At Bankstown we were treated to a tiny teaser of the work. At Belvoir, months later, were we given the more extreme, edgier bits, as the point at which a collective audience laugh can turn into a collective audience discomfort was tested on us. The final show was just brilliant by the way. I wrote about it here.

Aanisa’s latest work, Sauvage (Wild), got its first outing last night at Griffin’s Batch Festival. It’s early in development and totally worth seeing. Not only for the privilege and excitement of being a part of the development journey of new contemporary Australian theatre, but because even at this early stage there is lots to love.

Like the way it centres the female experience in it’s retelling of the dutiful daughter/disobedient daughter narratives, at the same time over-laying and playing with contemporary cultural nuances. (The King character, for example, is your average Wog Dad. He certainly has a lot in common with mine, just a slightly different accent).

And Aanisa’s charm, warmth and natural, easy physicality in storytelling is of course the highlight, especially in the moments when she invites the audience into the work. These bits worked really well in the intimacy of the Stables Theatre. Some of my favourite moments in the show were carried by the genie/wild womyn/sage/seer character moving in and out of Arabic and English fluidly, punctuating text with non-worded vocalisations and utterances. This was for me really quite captivating and a bit of an aural treat in quite a sparse soundscape.

I look forward to seeing where Sauvage (Wild) will be taken from here.

If you love being a part of the journey of new work; if you love really fresh new, hyper-local theatre; if you love theatre about and by women; if you love myth and storytelling and play; and especially if you love theatre that centres diverse stories, characters and languages from this melting pot of a city we live in… then I think you’ll like Sauvage (Wild). It’s on daily at 8:30pm until and including Sat 11th May at Griffin Theatre. Tickets are selling fast.

The word poet, derives from the Greek, poiētēs, meaning he who makes, fashions, creates.

It’s a fitting description for Omar Musa, who uses as his materials – verse, music, story and us, the audience – to ‘make’ Since Ali Died, on stage before us, with us.

His tools are many. He’s a disarming and sometimes self-deprecating humour, essential when you need to take the temperature of the room quickly and react to it even quicker. He’s a true talent as a lyricist, hip hop artist, performer, raconteur and poet (the ‘writer of verses’ kind). He is also possessed of an easy going kind of ‘relatability’.

In Since Ali Died, Musa weaves together songs from the album of the same name, poetry from his collection, Millefiore, along with new material and playful exchanges with the audience. As cliché as it sounds, he takes us on a journey … kind of literally.

Picture a boat with Musa and his hero, boxing icon Muhammad Ali, travelling down a “restless, brown river” (Musa’s words) through memories of Musa’s boyhood in his hometown of Queanbeyan. He draws us into a hazy imagery of beautiful, sometimes painful, often really funny, always believable, stories and raps of his father, mother, troubled friends, and of a deep, unrequited love.

The river, of course, is an allegory of Musa himself, of his own struggles and his own path in life as the artist he is, one that has seen him branded “un-Australian” and placed him at the receiving end of the worst kind of vitriol for daring to call out racism and other injustices he has seen and lived. True to the essence of the hip-hop and spoken word genres it straddles, Since Ali Died, is as personal as it is political. And it’s very, very current. I took my teenage daughter along and she loved it just as much as I did.

She loved the beats the most, and that it was “personal and emotional”. My inner muso (or maybe it’s my inner ‘Westie’) loved the bass vibrating up through the bench seats of the Stables Theatre and Musa in rapper mode, most of all.

As a musician, he’s even better live than on recording, bringing a bigger energy to the songs, intense but still contained, through his movements as much as through his voice. (He has this one move – a pivot or a kind of pop – that he does when the beat drops or at a break … and it’s really, really, good).

And Sarah Corry? Love. Love. Love. She joined Musa for two songs and was just gorgeous. Smooth, rich but sweet, sweet vocals. She also brought a real counter-balance to the masculine energy in the room.

Since Ali Died is at Parramatta Riverside Theatres from 22-25 Jan and I’m tempted to see it again there in the knowing that the audience might be more of a ‘home-crowd’. It’s the sort of show that needs a certain type of energy from the audience to feed it, and Musa is the sort of performer that goes from really, really, good to pretty fricken brilliant with that.

First published on Audrey Journal