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It seems an age since Canberra first saw the likes of Boho Interactive. This July, almost ten years after their first forays into the theatre, they bring their latest show, True Logic of the Future, to the Belconnen Theatre stage before a season installed at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. It seems appropriate, in order to understand Boho’s Future, to take a trip into their past.
Way back at the dawn of the millennium Mick Bailey, David Finnigan, Nick Johnson and Jack Lloyd, precocious youngsters fresh from the upper-middle-class high school gauntlet, launched themselves on the scene as Bohemian Productions. Touting themselves as “Canberra’s least professional theatre company”, Bohemian brought to the stage a mix of classics (Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) and new work by local playwrights, most often Finnigan himself. Their shows were branded with the raffish, backalley humour that fuelled their dual aims:
1. Make Plays. 2. Don’t Go Broke.
Fast forward several years, skirting around degrees, jobs, funding grants and curated performance seasons, and the company has reformed with new interests and new ideas.
“In 2006, when Mick and Jack and I and Muttley [David Shaw] ‘reformed’ as an ensemble after a long time working on separate projects, we each brought an element we wanted to focus on,” Finnigan relates. “I wanted us to use science as a focus, Mick wanted to produce live music, Mutt wanted to include hi/lo-fi media devices, and Jack was interested in pursuing interactivity.”
Supported by the 2007 Multicultural Fringe, Boho produced the first of their interactive science-theatre performances, A Prisoner’s Dilemma. Combining interactive theatre, lo-fi electronics and live music performance from trombonist Bailey, the play – based around Game Theory and the show’s eponymous thought experiment – was impressive, compelling, engrossing.
And though interactivity can be a thorny (and irritating) element in theatre, Boho seem to have made it work for them, partly because of their shared understanding of it. “We all had a very clear shared aesthetic about how interactivity onstage should work - what is and is not cool,” says Finnigan.
Since A Prisoner’s Dilemma, the group has performed their cross-artform work at festivals, theatres, science conferences and schools around the country, from local theatres to bigger forums including the Brisbane Under The Radar Festival, the Asia-Pacific Complex Systems Conference, and the Adelaide Fringe. The nose-thumbing sensibility of the original Bohemian seems to have been absorbed into a more responsible approach to the job of theatre making (which makes the company sound like douches wearing lab coats – most definitely not the case).
In 2009 they held a residency at Manning Clark House, producing the interactive installation performance Food for the Great Hungers, which used “techniques from Complex Systems science to create a simulated re-imagining of Australian history since 1901 under the audience’s control.” The show was hauntingly compelling, once again proving what can be achieved with great brains, thoughtful use of space, a healthy enjoyment of the absurd, and a clear-eyed sense of humans in the world.
This year, the group - now minus Shaw – has taken that understanding of the mutability of human history explored in Food for the Great Hungers and the variety of human reactions prompted in A Prisoner’s Dilemma and, as part of National Science Week, dressed it in “nineteenth century period costume” in True Logic of the Future.
The show, developed in partnership with the Powerhouse Museum and in collaboration with director barb barnett, designer Gillian Schwab, and performer Cathy Petocz, takes on the interdisciplinary ideas of nineteenth century scientist-economist-musician-logician William Stanley Jevons “without ever actually mentioning him” in order to create a political thriller that integrates science theory, strong narrative, and meaningful audience interaction, explains Bailey.
Drawing upon Jevons’s experiences in Sydney, the play is set, says Bailey, in a “pseudo-Australian city state” in a not-too-distant, steampunk future. Beset by the several catastrophes of climate change and population increase – flood, drought, famine, and housing crisis – the city is, says Finnigan, “starting to give way”. Humanity has reached the point of a “last-ditch attempt” to stop the world from “going completely off the rails.”
Enter three unlikely characters: ethically questionable journalist Jen Howe (Petocz), statistician Alex Moore (Lloyd) and assayer at the mint, Will Sands (Finnigan). Within the confines of a computer simulation, Sands, Howe, and Moore “must activate an array of bizarre artifacts” in order to “determine the future of their society”.
These bizarre artifacts include interactive replicas of Jevons’s inventions – such as the cloud chamber and the logic piano – constructed by the Powerhouse and controlled, in the show, by the audience.
“The city [in the play] is facing runaway problems […] that aren’t wildly different from the problems facing the whole world”. Informed by “modeling of global change and economic flows”, Finngian explains, the show explores the possibilities of what those problems are going to look like when they hit our shores.
Like the dystopic sci-fi classics the play is inspired by – Blade Runner, Cube (and a little bit of the humour of Red Dwarf) True Logic of the Future asks difficult questions of the human world in the twenty-first century: how much would you sacrifice for the greater good? What is expendable? And, when faced with the possible collapse of the planet, are the things that Western society holds dear – personal freedom, individual rights – as important as we suppose?
It seems a long journey from Bohemian’s skuzzy beginnings to the lofty themes of True Logic of the Future, but the group have, in one definitive sense, fulfilled their aims: they’ve made some splendid plays. And not, apparently, gone broke.
True Logic of the Future plays at Belconnen Arts Centre from Tuesday 13 – Saturday 17 July at 8pm & Sunday 18 July at 6pm before moving to the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Tickets $25 / $18, bookings and enquiries 6173 3300.
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With the number of local comedians quadrupling over the past two years, three monthly comedy rooms now running, and a barrage of performers coming from interstate, Canberra's comedy scene is finally being taken seriously.
National Green Faces winner and stalwart of Canberra comedy, Jay Sullivan, says the scene is feeding of its own success as it becomes interconnected nationally.
“More of our comedians are travelling to cities like Melbourne and Sydney, and our reputation is changing as a result - more comedians are coming here,” Sullivan says.
Sullivan has worked hard in building the scene and runs two four-week comedy courses a year.
One star pupil is Greg Kimball, who has performed regularly around town since he first stepped under the hot light last year.
“The course identifies what is a joke and how to put it together, and actually gets people up on a stage with a mic, under a hot light, and talking,” Kimball explains.
As a result, there’s been a stack of fresh comedians come out of the woodwork in the last year alone, performing to regular strong crowds at Civic Pub, the Front Gallery and Café, and more recently, the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
“It’s a huge rush and we all have a great time performing,” Kimball says. “The crowds that come get involved and they love it too.”
Local comedian Dayne Rathbone performed for the first time in May last year at the Front, and says the laid back atmosphere was welcoming to a first timer.
Rathbone performs as a “strange and very different” character which he finds hard to explain.
“I’m still trying to figure [my act] out myself,” he says. “I guess you do the things that make people laugh, and over time my material has gotten weirder and weirder.”
The comedian made a hugely successful appearance at Melbourne International Comedy Festival earlier this year, and, as he steps out on the national scene, he attributes some of his success to the teeth-cutting he received at home.
All three men have stories of what it was like starting out, whether it is Kimball performing to a 12-strong crowd - six of them drunk hecklers - or Rathbone freaking out that his material was rubbish and rewriting his whole show the night before a gig.
But all three have lived to tell the tale, thanks in part, says Rathbone, to the local atmosphere.
“Canberra’s a great place to start out,” he says. “The venues are cosy, with everyone packed in close together, which is good because laughter creates more laughter.”
Monthly comedy nights are held at the Front in Lyneham, Civic Pub in Braddon, and the Tuggeranong Arts Centre. Check venues for details. To take part in one of Jay Sullivan’s comedy courses, contact the Tuggeranong Art Centre.
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The Samurai of the Drum: Tai(Ko) Hard
Perhaps the friendly Taro Harasaki has been told that BMA has a young, hip readership, or perhaps it’s my young, hip phone voice, or perhaps Taro’s been burned by Japanese-drumming purists in the past. Whatever the cause, Taro goes to great lengths to tell me that Drum Tao is very modern and not at all like the traditional stuff.
“How can I say it? The numbers we are playing on stage are made by ourselves and the choreography. The numbers are modern rhythm. Our show is very entertained and innovate. And the costume is totally different to traditional ones. She (Maki Morifuji, the group’s designer) blends Asian style of clothes with modern pattern of clothes.”
Taro is one of the thirteen drummers in the Drum Tao group, which is touring Australia in June with a new show, The Samurai of the Drum. The group, first established in 1993 by founder and director Ikuo Fujitaka, blend Taiko drumming with high-end choreography and production values. From what I can gather, the show is to traditional Japanese culture what Lord of the Dance was to traditional Irish culture. It’s more sexy and less boring than what you’d find in a village.
“We dance, and we play drums, and bamboo flute, and Japanese flute, and trumpet from New Zealand,” say Taro. And they do it with sass and bare torsos. Or to borrow words from their press release, they “summon the spirit of the Samurai as they beat with precision, vehemence and persistency on their huge Wadaiko-Drums”.
These drums are quite different from those that Westerners bang. “The sound is very natural. It doesn’t hum.” They’re also larger.
“The biggest one is diameter two meters and the weight is over 400 kilograms. It’s so huge, actually. It makes a very, very loud sound. The people say the sound that this – we call it Big Mama drum – people say the sound of Big Mama drum is just like the mother’s heartbeat. We often see the babies sitting in the first row sleeping while we are drumming.”
What else do you need to know about Drum Tao? I suppose you should know that one member, Natsuko Kuroyanagi, has the “vigour and force” of a “tigress”. And you should also know that drummer Ryohei Taki has “more shining muscles than should be allowed for one human being”.
“He’s a hunk,” says Taro of Taki. “He’s one of the guys who has the most beautiful muscles in Tao.”
Drum Tao bring their show The Samurai of the Drum to the Canberra Theatre Centre on Tuesday July 13
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