Black Is The Colour - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

New theatre company Deafferent Theatre is just a little bit deafferent, in that they create new and engaging pieces of work for hearing and deaf audiences. For their first production, presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, they have chosen Daniel Keene's Black Is The Colour, which is performed entirely in Auslan.

The story revolves around two friends and their experiences with domestic violence. Catherine (Anna Seymour) is a victim of physical abuse from her husband, while her best friend Irene (Hilary Fisher) struggles to makes her understand the situation she is in. This production results in a unique exploration regarding loss of voice: in the text, the two characters have lost their voices and in reality, so too have the people of the Deaf community. There are some powerfully directed scenes by Jessica Moody where the characters express their rage and frustration by letting out a scream only to have the room remain empty with silence.

Onstage Dating - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

The dating game is a hard one to keep up with, let alone win. With online dating apps more or less becoming the most common way in meeting someone, going on a first date and getting to know someone from scratch by face-to-face is a distant memory. In her Melbourne Fringe Festival show, OnStage Dating, Bron Batten is determined to change things, by having a first date with a member of the audience on stage - and the results are priceless.

The show opens in a colourful and attention grabbing way and from then on, we are all putty in Batten’s hands as she recalls memories of bad dates and describes the science behind dating and human interactions. Eventually she pulls out the pre-filled questionnaires from all the participants willing to be her date, and I am surprised by how many there are.

Awesome Ocean Party - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

We’ve all been invited to a party - an ocean party for our half-human half-octopus friend. Created and performed by Giema Contini, Awesome Ocean Party is a 60-minute cabaret-comedy-performance piece that explores loneliness and acceptance through the eyes (and three hearts) of this hybrid creature. 

Contini has great physicality on stage and fully conveys the awkwardness of her character that later reveals to us that it is her birthday and the human side to her begins to surface. Her interactions with the audience are sweet and genuine and convey her longing to belong and be accepted.

How Can You Sleep At Night? - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

In How Can You Sleep At Night?, Christian Taylor delves into the world of climate change, death and insomnia. While I was initially uncertain on how one could cover these three topics in detail and with clarity in a 60 minute show, Taylor easily accomplishes this and much more with his debut solo performance for the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Taylor is having somewhat of an existential crisis about the world while also dealing with what happened to Andy. He can't sleep at night and the only one that he seems to be able to talk about this to is to a sentient jellyfish, voiced by a different actor every night. On the performance I attended, Hayden Burke had the honour and his sassy banter with Taylor was full of laughs and deep thoughts. If there were an award for best non-human performance in a Fringe show, it would go to the jellyfish.

Notorious Strumpet and Dangerous Girl - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

Greeted with offerings of tea and coffee, we are welcomed into our Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. We all have stories we want to share in this meeting (whether we know it or not), but before we begin, Jess Love has something she would like to share, and that is how performance piece Notorious Strumpet and Dangerous Girl begins.

Throughout this deeply personal show, Love explores her struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, and the effects it has had on her personal life and the disconnect she feels with her family. With a Christmas family photo projected on the screen - one that does not include Love - she informs us that while she is a queer carnie who drinks too much, the rest of her family are involved in the teaching profession and have also been Christian missionaries.

ménage - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

I recently spoke to Ryan Good about two shows he will be performing during the Melbourne Fringe Festival: COSMOnaut and Stupid and Contagious. Well Good is also presenting a third show called ménage, which is an intimate look at the world of sex workers. The show is performed for only two people at a time and was written based on dialogue from interviews he had with sex workers in Edinburgh, London and Australia.

"The idea came to me while I was performing in Edinburgh in 2013.  I was in two shows with a tight turnaround so I used to cut through a back alley to save time and in that alley was a little door and a sign that said 'Sauna No. 61'," Good recalls. "I thought it would be interesting to set a show there, so I returned a few months later to begin the project and discovered that business and a lot of other sex work locations had been shut down due to new enforcement of laws cracking down on brothels.  That drove me to read more on what was happening there and I discovered lots of concern about the safety of the people in the industry, many of whom were now working on the streets or alone in flats.  Getting their issue heard was the initial driving force of the show."

Not Another Indie Cabaret - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Do you even indie? That's the question cabaret and burlesque performer Jessamae St. James will be asking during her Melbourne Fringe Festival show, Not Another Indie Cabaret. The comedy cabaret takes a nostalgic look at the drunken purchases we make while on eBay.  

"The show is a brand new musical comedy that is part self deprecating reflection, part ode to questionable adult-ing skills and part love letter to making excellent life choices whilst drunk on eBay," St James explains. "It will also be featuring original songs, all written by me, and will be played on ridiculous instruments, including an omnichord."

Black Is The Colour - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Deafferrent Theatre is another emerging theatre company that is making their debut at the Melbourne Fringe Festival with Australian playwright Daniel Keene's Black Is The Colour. The difference here, and as the name might suggest, is that the performance is presented entirely in Auslan, and captioned in English. Deafferrent Theatre aims to create theatre that is accessible to hearing and deaf audiences and to attract new audiences to the world of theatre.

Usually, there are enough nerves from just performing a show, let alone performing your inaugural show during one of Melbourne's biggest festivals. "It's simultaneously thrilling and completely nerve-wracking!" says Ilana Charnelle Gelbart, one half of the team at Deafferent Theatre. "Jess and I have been planning this company for nearly two years so it's very exciting to finally see our theatre 'baby' taking its first steps out in to the world!"

Onstage Dating - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

First dates can be pretty nerve-wracking. Have you dressed appropriately, are you going to a suitable restaurant, do you smell good, is your hair okay, will they be a good kisser, am I a good kisser? The questions and self doubt are endless. So what better way to kill the nerves than by going on a first date in front of a room full of strangers? Well that's exactly what Bron Batten is doing with her show Onstage Dating, performed as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

The show features a different volunteer each night as they and Batten go through the awkward phases of small talk, flirtation and trying not embarrassing themselves. "I started 'research' for this show whilst on residence in Paris last year by going on dates with strangers. Over the course of the year I went on over 50 dates abroad and in Australia and was struck by the vulnerability and hope that accompanied each encounter," she explains. "Everyone I met was searching for some kind of intimacy, if only for an evening. And I began to realise there were some parallels to a night at the theatre, as an audience member I'm searching for that moment of connection to the art or the performers, just like the people I met 'in real life'. The audience witness the entire course of a relationship over an hour."

Awesome Ocean Party - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

One of the myriad of shows being performed at The Butterfly Club this Melbourne Fringe Festival, Awesome Ocean Party is one show you would be mad to miss. Created and performed by Giema Contini, it incorporates song, storytelling and an ocean themed birthday party that won over audiences at The Anywhere Theatre Festival in Brisbane last year. Now it's Melbourne turn to witness the magic and charm.

"The concept for Awesome Ocean Party was originally something completely different. In 2012 I had an idea for a solo show called: Broken Heart Syndrome. I was fascinated by the fact that Broken Heart Syndrome is an actual scientific condition where people can literally die from a broken heart," Contini explains. "I quickly discovered that the medical name for BHS is: takotsubo cardiomyopathy, which translates to: octopus-trap heart disease. The condition was first discovered by a Japanese cardiovascular specialist and it was called takostubo cardiomyopathy because there is a reflex in the heart that balloons out to the shape of an octopus trap when Broken Heart Syndrome occurs. This piece of information lead me down an amazing path involving octopuses (did you know they have three hearts??), Hawaiian creation myths, broken hearts and birthdays."

How Can You Sleep At Night? - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Write about what you know. That's exactly what Christian Taylor has been doing for the last seven years, even if he didn't know it at the time. In the premiere of his Melbourne Fringe festival solo show, How Can You Sleep at Night?, he opens up about his long experience with insomnia, as well as death and climate change.

"My insomnia isn't a case of having difficulty initially falling asleep, but instead I wake-up and fully regain consciousness anywhere between five and twenty times a night. This means I rarely hit REM sleep, and wake up feeling like I've been hit by a truck. There's usually a few months where I sleep okay, but then it comes back with a vengeance. Doctors deemed it wasn't physiological, but probably more psychological," Taylor explains.