Macbeth at Sydney Theatre Company, 10 September 2014

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most iconic plays about the nature of evil and the destructive human thirst for power.

Kip Williams, the director, is not a big name (yet). He decides on a drastic re-working of the stage setting: We, the audience, sit on the stage, while the action plays around a bare table, mismatched chairs and very few other props in front of the auditorium emptily looming behind. The actors (all of them except Hugo Weaving playing more than one role) are sometimes sitting up in random seats, sometimes standing right in front of us. This is a thrilling and raw experience. I could reach out my hand and touch them, I  hear their breath and see their spittle and sweat flying.

Hugo Weavering plays Macbeth. No, he doesn't play him, he is Macbeth. He whispers, he cries, he shouts and sobs, and he takes you right along on his intense emotional journey. He is absolutely mesmerising and domineers the stage. Next to his towering performance some of the younger actors seem slightly pale in comparison. Only John Gaden can measure up, playing first Duncan and later Macduff's young child. He is formidable as both.

Above all I'm struck by the physicality and almost athletic nature of theatre. I quite forgot this after mainly watching movies recently, where every experience is edited and airbrushed. Sitting on this (very uncomfortable) chair for two hours straight, there is no distancing myself, no escaping. I'm sucked in, I'm there - in that Scottish castle and on that battlefield in a snow storm, and I'm watching Macbeth die right in front of me. It's chilling and it's beautiful, and I am hooked. Watch this space for more stories from the theatrical frontline.

TEDx Sydney 2014



Sometimes a day isn't enough. How can I summarise the amazing experience that is being in the audience for TEDx Sydney 2014?

Firstly, a few words about the event for the uninitiated: TED originally stood for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It started as a conference in California in 1984, a not-for profit enterprise asking the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes and share their 'Ideas Worth Spreading'.

TEDx developed from there all around the world in local, self-organised events, bringing people together to share a TED-like experience with speakers and performers. TEDx Sydney is a day of ideas, storytelling, creativity and innovation. It's a day to foster the community, for conversation and debate.

There is an atmosphere of kinship, of 'we're in this together'ness. You can palpably feel the energy and love of 2,300 people in the audience, around 200 in the sold-out event downstairs and about 50 satellite events. The hunger for ideas is breathtaking.

It gives me such hope for humanity to look at the faces around me and know that we are all here to listen to inspirational people who - in one way or the other - want to serve the community, improve the life of their fellow beings.

The day is divided into four sections:

PASSAGES
BLOOD
ENHANCE
RETHINK

There isn't really one single performance that stands out - I'm blown away by different speakers for different reason.

There is the very first speaker, Markus Zusak, author of the bestseller The Book Thief, who delivers a poignant speech about the benefits of failure as a writer and a human being. He is funny, humble and self-deprecating.

There is the dry and matter-of-fact former soldier and diplomat David Kilcullen who works with communities in conflict zones to help them take over control in a participatory approach, dealing with crime and poverty in rapidly growing, overstretched urban sprawls.

Judy and Tim Sharp, down-to-earth mother and 25 year-old autistic son have everyone in tears after their appearance on stage. Tim is a talented artist who has created Laser Beak Man, a colourful, funny and quirky super hero who likes to take things quite literally. Think Barbie Queue or picking up chicks...

Oliver Percovich is founder of Skateistan, a grassroots project that started in Kabul, which teaches skating and general education to thousands of boys and girls in Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa. He is very nervous, but incredibly passionate about his cause. His speech is a good example of what is so satisfying about TED: These are often not polished performers, but real people with a real passion to share a great idea.

And then there are the musical performances - the whimsical beauty of Linsey Pollack creating an orchestra out of a carrot, a garden hose and a feather duster. Or the breathtaking performance of Flamenco dancer Johnny Tedesco with the ensemble Bandaluzia that sizzles with his understated sexual energy and incredible stage presence. There is composer Nigel Westlake together with singer Lior who delivers the sublime and haunting Avinu Malkeinu out of their song cycle 'Compassion'. And finally Megan Washington, who gives a touching and vulnerable speech about her stutter, followed by her flawless and beautiful singing.

And finally the food. Oh, the glorious food. As Jill Dupleix says, "At TEDx Sydney we don't just do lunch". We sit down at long tables to nourishing, beautiful soups, curries, herbs, salads, hand churned butter and fresh bread with ingredients that are sourced from local refugee initiatives. The wine and beer is specially commissioned and locally produced for the day. The quality on such a large scale is astonishing and just so damn pleasurable. It seems like a fitting metaphor for the whole day - done with love, pride, passion and compassion.

What am I taking away from this day? Change is possible. Do something. Be open. I laughed out loud, I cried, I was speechless, excited, touched, inspired, and I can honestly say I enjoyed every moment. Bring on TEDx Sydney 2015.

The Maids at Sydney Theatre Company, 17 July 2013

I love theatre. I love the big gestures and big emotions - it's life amplified.

This performance has been anticipated as the highlight of the year for Sydney's theatre lovers: Cate Blanchett, French actress Isabelle Huppert and the young prodigy Elisabeth Debicki together on stage to play The Maids in an Australian adaptation of Jean Genet's classic written in 1947.

The play is loosely based on real events, where two maids and sisters murdered their employer. It is a sexually charged piece that explores the complex relationship of the three women. Solange (Huppert) and Claire (Blanchett) are subversive characters who have nothing. When their mistress (Debicki) is out, the two engage in an elaborate roleplay, one assuming the part of the mistress, the other one of the maid. They hate and depend on their mistress in equal measures, playing out sexual fantasies, but also a secret desire to kill the decandent oppressor.

Elisabeth Debicki is only 22 years old and working with two of her professional idols. She carries her role of the mistress with confidence and charisma. She is very tall, towering over the two other women, with the gangly, loose limbs of a dancer.

Blanchett's voice is remarkable (I've noticed this for the first time when she played Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings): sometimes booming and frightening, sometimes chilling and clipped, sometimes shrill, sometimes girlish. The same goes for her appearance: She can be plain and almost plump looking in one moment and of luminous, shimmering beauty in the next.

Huppert is like a naughty child - surprisingly small and slight, with the lithe body of a teenager. She is constantly moving, swinging from the clothes rack, frolicking in the big bed with her legs in the air, gesticulating and sticking her tongue out. She is hard to understand with her very strong French accent, but what courage of her to expose herself like that!

Part of the stage set-up are cameras taking details of the performance and projecting them on a big screen above the stage.

The cameras capture unexpected angles that are sometimes grotesque, sometimes painfully intimate, sometimes strangely random, like the shot of the yellow rubber gloves or one single shoe. At the same time this gives a sense of unease and building tension, the foreboding that a catastrophe could happen at any moment, from any corner.

The actresses are brave enough to let the audience see unflattering angles, sweat and faces that are no longer as taut as that of young Debicki. But they are still beautiful and at moments strangely innocent looking, yet so bitter, polluted and twisted in their murderous hate.

Huppert and Blanchett are incredibly courageous performers. They look exhausted and drained at the end, having hated, yelled, plotted and flirted for two hours straight.

I'm virtually on the edge of my seat for the whole time and find myself audibly exhaling at the end, being relieved for this emotional roller-coaster to end. And isn't this what art is all about? To suck you in, shake you up and spit you out at the end, dizzy from the experience.

Presence

Being present. Sounds simple, right? Well, I can tell you that it's not, at least not to me. This is one of the reasons why I love yoga and why it is sometimes so damn hard: It strips back all the layers and leaves you with the simple, unvarnished truth. This week's theme of the 40 day challenge is Presence (Come into your body).

To become fully aware of this moment without worrying about the future or reminiscing about the past is something children are really good at, but as adults we have all but lost the ability to just be. While I'm in the shower I remember that I need to buy toilet paper. While I'm cooking dinner I'm thinking that I really should organise the pantry, and why don't my kids eat more fish? While I'm reading my daughter a bedtime story I wonder if she's ever going to love reading as much as her brother does and if I should already get another couple of school uniforms for her, which reminds me that I need to tell my son to do his school project for next week, and I really should get my own website to get that freelance business going... And instead of savouring the delicious feeling of my lovely daughter's warm body next to me, I'm somewhere else, absorbed in things that aren't real.

So this week I'm trying presence. I'm meditating every morning, and while it's tempting to drift back into sleep, I have tiny glimpses into the calm, still centre of my mind. In the same instance I'm realising this, my "monkey mind", as the yogis call it, runs off and the stillness is gone. But that is also part of the process: to witness it without judging and to just bring my mind back to the breath and this moment.

On a more mundane note: I'm feeling pretty tired and not glowing at all this week. After fighting off my children's cold for weeks, it has finally caught up with me, and I have a sore throat and splitting headache. The last symptom could also be caffeine withdrawal. Not having any coffee is probably the hardest thing this week. I'm also a bit worried about my back, which pinches uncomfortably in the morning and after yoga practice. I've had surgery of my spinal disc last year, and going back to these months of unbearable pain is really the last thing I want.

I'm still glad I've started this journey, and I think I'm ready for next week's theme, Vitality...

40 day challenge - The beginning

Tomorrow is my first day of a 40 day challenge. Sounds exciting, doesn't it! For six weeks I will practice yoga six days a week in my local studio (www.powerliving.com.au) with one day of rest. I will meditate twice daily, say good-bye to coffee and alcohol and just generally take a long, hard look at what my body really needs and what it doesn't.

Why do I do it? I guess the main reason is that I'm just curious how it will affect me. The program is called 40 day challenge for a reason. Will I cope or buckle under the physical and mental pressure? I also believe that it will kick-start this year and somehow help me manifest the perfect job and the perfect balance of making my family and myself happy. A teensy bit far-fetched? Ridiculous? Maybe, but there you have it. Well, and then there is obviously the sheer vain pleasure in getting fit and looking great. I dare anyone participating in the challenge to contradict me in this point.

So for the next 40 days (or 960 hours or 57,600 minutes...) allow me the weekly self-indulgence of only talking about myself: my mind, my body, my fears and failings and ultimately (hopefully!) my triumphant success. Stay tuned.

Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

I feel like sharing a poem again; one that I love passionately and irrationally in equal measures, as it is - in my view - intensely beautiful, but quite long and not easily accessible, although it is very well known. It is a wonderful example of what I wrote about poetry earlier; that it is sometimes best just to let it wash over you and trust that the poem will carry you safely ashore.

John Keats had the extraordinary power to move his contemporaries as well as readers today. Surely part of his appeal is due to the tragic circumstances of his short life and his death of tuberculosis at the young age of only twenty-five years. He fell in love with his Hampstead neighbour Fanny Brawne, a romance that was beautifully captured in the movie "Bright Star". Keats wrote almost all of his major poetry in the short period between 1818 and his death in 1821.

I
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

II
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

III
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

IV
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

V
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

VI
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.

VII
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

VIII
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep? 

Books that changed me

I love to gaze emptily at my bookshelf and just skim the book titles. I've spent many a happy hour standing there, occasionally pulling one book out or the other, opening it at a random page, reading a few lines and smiling in that warm and secure knowledge of having rediscovered an old friend.

The Little Witch (Die kleine Hexe) by Otfried Preussler:
This is the first book I read when I was five years old. Here it was: The magic of words and the astounding miracle that a whole world is just waiting for you when you open a book. I was hooked.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse:
The knowledge of self was a recurring theme in Hesse's work. And isn't intense self-examination at the core of trying to become an adult? Hesse wrote about finding yourself, being true to who you really are and about claiming your individuality against the odds and against society. So when I discovered these books at the age of about fourteen, they very much suited the angsty, confused and quietly rebellious teenager that I was.

The Age of Reason (L’âge de raison) by Jean-Paul Sartre:
I shared an apartment in Munich with a bunch of crazy, noisy and partying art students. I had just returned from a year of backpacking through Australia and Asia, had broken up with my boyfriend and was at that delicious and heady stage of absolute freedom without any constraints. And - voilà - at this pivotal moment Sartre stepped into my life and talked about just this: You alone are responsible for your own fate, you choose your destiny. There is no helpless surrendering to a divine fate that makes the decisions for you. The purpose of life? You create your own meaning in life (or a lack thereof) yourself.

The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) by Thomas Mann:
With this book I come full circle: Here again is the vast, sheer endless landscape of knowledge that just waits to be discovered. The language is full of beauty, rhythm and musicality, and one can dreamily read whole passages without quite understanding what Mann is actually talking about. The characters in the book reflect on time, politics and sociological issues. Reading the novel just makes me feel so damn clever and eloquent; a state I have tried to capture and maintain ever since.

Vivid festival 2012

Vivid Sydney is a festival of light, music and ideas that's in town for the fourth time. Didn't I say that in this blog I want to share what recently got me excited and delighted? Well, the following definitely qualifies:



The Customs House in blue...


...and again multicoloured. Kiss!

Light pompoms that looked like exploding fireworks...

...the Museum of Contemporary Art...

...and the astounding projections on the Opera House. This photo is from the official website, because mine just didn't do justice to the amazing concept.

Oh, the excitement!

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

Poems aren't everyone's cup of tea. They are usually not straightforward. They can be enigmatic, cerebral and even convoluted. But if it is a good poem, you can just let it wash over you. Allow yourself to be sucked in. Try to unconsciously feel the words instead of intellectually grasping them. If you get lost in incomprehensible metaphors at any time, carry on and trust that you will find your way back again.

Once you're really familiar with the poem, once you wear it like a comfortable old jumper, feel free to do a background check. Look for references, research symbolic meanings, by all means count stanzas. It might lead to another level of appreciation and understanding, but in my opinion it is not the most vital part in getting a poem, in loving it like you love a song without neccessarily understanding the lyrics.

This is one of my favourites. It is about faith and doubt, and about love among the seas of change.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the Straits; - on the French coast, the light
Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the ebb meets the moon-blanch'd sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Flying Foxes by Robert Gray

The following poem has so many things I love about poetry: Its language is vivid and rhythmic, it ebbs and flows, you can smell the words and touch them. It also is a tad dark and melancholic, for which I seem to have a penchant, I am told... And it is Australian and contemporary and so a fitting first poem for this blog, I think:


In the night, the gorging begins / again, in the spring / night, in the branches / of the Moreton Bay figs, / that are fully-rigged / as windjammers, and make a flotilla / along the street. / And from the yard-arms / are strung clusters / of hanged sailors, / canvas-wrapped and tarred - / these are the bats, come / for the split fruit, and dangled, / overturned where they land. / It is the tobacco fibrils / in the fruit they seek, / and those berries, when gouged, / are spilt, through the squall / of the crowd, like / a patter of faeces / about the bitumen. This amidst / the cloudy shine / of the saline / streetlamps. In the ripe nights / the bats fumble and waste / what they wrest - / there's a damp paste / upon the road, / which dries to matted / sawdust, soon after the day's / steam has reared; it is scraped / up by the shovel-load. / The bats are uncorked / like musty vapour, at dusk, / or there is loosed a fractured / skein of smoke, across / the embossed lights / of the city. The moon is lost, / to an underhanded / flicked long brush-load of paint. / You think of the uncouth ride / of the Khan and his horde, / their dragon-backed shape / grinding the moon / beneath its feet. / And then, of an American / anthem, the helicopters / that arrive with their whomp whomp / whomp. I'm woken / by the bats still carrying on / in the early hours, / by the outraged screech, / the chittering / and thrashing about / where they clamber heavily, / as beetles do, on each other's backs. / They are Leonardo / contraptions. They extend / a prosthetic limb, / snarl, and knuckle-walk / like simians, step / each other under / and chest-beat, although / hampered with a cape. In sleep / I trample the bedsheet / off, and call out / 'Take that!' (I am told), / punching the pillow in the heat. / I see the fanged shriek, / and the drip / of their syringes, / those faces with the scowl / of a walnut kernel. / It's some other type of bat / I think of: these, in books, / where I looked them up, / have a face you can imagine / if you recall how you'd whittle / finely at a pencil / and moisten the lead / with the tongue-tip - / a little face that belies its greed, / like that of an infant. / All partly autonomous things / trample others down, / even what is their own, / and the whole earth throbs / and smoulders / with pain. No comfort for us that / in the nights I have seen / how the living pass / about the earth, / that is deep with the ashes / of the dead, and quickly, too, / vanish into dark, / like will o' the wisps / thrown out of the sun. / At three o'clock I gather / our existence / has been a mistake. I would like / to turn my back on / its endless strife; / but when I look out / at the night, I am offered / otherwise only / the chalk-white, chaste / and lacklustre moon.

Jack White Blunderbuss

Sometimes I listen to a new album and the magic happens: It is as if I would recognise the music as something I know already, as if a chord is struck and my mind goes "oh yeah, here it is again, I remember this".

I've loved the White Stripes for a long time - especially Jack White's voice that screeches and wails or purrs and seduces, and obviously his brilliant guitar riffs. When I read about his new album, Blunderbuss, I just downloaded it without previously listening to it. And here it was: quite a different sound from his older albums like Elephant in 2003, but I instantly recognised it and had the urge to play it over and over again - probably very much to the chagrin of my poor neighbours. The last album I had this feeling was Suck it and See by the Arctic Monkeys, who's excellent concert I saw this January in the Enmore Theatre.

Blunderbuss is quite organic and a bit retro with female background vocals going "ooh ooh" on I'm Shakin' and with distinctive nods to jazz and bluegrass, but not without surprising and fresh turns like Take Me With You When You Go, that starts out leisurely with a swinging waltz (I assure you there is such a thing) and transforms into an urgent, funky guitar-piece. There is blues and rock and a bit of country, which usually puts me right off any song, but works beautifully with White's voice that is anything but sugary sweet.

My top five of almost everything

I should have started this column a long time ago. Remember Nick Hornby's book "High Fidelity"? When I first read this book (only after watching the actually quite entertaining movie with John Cusack, although purists obviously would argue that you just can't take this essentially very British story to Chicago), I was delighted by his idea of creating a top five of... well, basically everything. The central theme of the book is his top five of girlfriends who broke his heart. But he also spends a lot of time thinking about his top five songs, films etc., with sub-categories like best side one tracks of all times (doesn't really work anymore these days, sadly), best Elvis Costello songs, best subtitled films and so on.

I got a bit obsessed with this for a little while and quite creative in inventing my own categories like the five most annoying things my children do, favourite words (this one I actually stole from the magnificent "Mary and Max"), best memories, most disagreeable noises... If you think about it, you can classify almost anything, which probably satisfies the secret nerd in me. But aren't you stunned like me when asked to name your three favourite books or the film that moved you most this year?

So, to cut a very long-winded story short, in this category (here it is again, the pleasing process of putting things into order) I will write down recent discoveries - be it a book, music, a clever quote or a beautiful poem.