early years

Kindy. There’s going to be a concert and they want me to dress up in a boy’s trousers. Holding them out for me to step into. I don’t like the idea at all. I hope they won’t put him in my dress. No memory of this performance. Either it didn’t happen or I blanked it out.

Sunday School. A competition. Mum sends me for lessons with a man who plays piano. I have chosen to sing ‘On the good ship Lollypop’. I love Shirley Temple.

I don’t get the whole concept of rehearsal. I’m quite young. I guess I think learning the words is as prepared as you can expect to get. I think he was telling me to sing loud. We were always told to be quiet at home. The concert day comes and I sing the song. A redhaired girl called Rosemary sings an old fashioned song called Beautiful Dreamer. I watch her pursed lips and am uncharitably reminded of a goldfish. It seems to me that the whole song is composed of ‘oo’ sounds. She wins. I hadn't visualized winning but I somehow feel shock. I get a chocolate frog as a consolation prize. I strip off the foil slowly and carefully and I bite its head off.

Mum sends me to ‘Misses Joy and Nell’s School of Ballet’ in a wooden hall (the Camp Hill School of Arts) in a dusty, glare-y suburb of Brisbane. The ‘barre’ is the back of church-pew-like benches arranged along the edge of the hall. No mirrors. No dance floor. In the breaks we pick matchsticks out of the dust-filled cracks between the wooden flooring. 
We wear white tunics with nude pink elastic belts. And the shoes with the impossibly slim soles.

First show. I am surprised that I shall be dressed in brown bib and brace trousers to be a gardener. I see other girls are in tutus! At least I am a gardener who has curled hair and a light smear of mum’s lipstick, although that doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense to me. Similarly perplexed by the lack of water in my watering can. We perform in the cavernous Festival Hall (think empty warehouse with a stage and folding chairs) in Elizabeth Street. My father says ‘That’s my daughter, the only one in step.’ Perhaps because my father rarely acknowledged me, I thought this might be praise. I failed to understand this was a joke until decades later.

Later years saw me in a blue sky-fairy tutu (with an unsatisfyingly small amount of sequins) and the following year in green satin bodice and pink tulle skirt as an apple blossom fairy. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought.

All these performances passed in a glare of nerves, spatial disorientation and lighting as bright as the Australian sun.

Primary School. I once staged a kind of sketch. It involved various people entering a shop. Happily untutored in Drama at this stage I was not aware enough to know or worry, but as I remember it, I now know that every aspect of it failed.

A few years later, in a different school even deeper into suburbia, we were asked to turn a short story into a puppet play. We were shown how to use a folded-over paperbag as a puppet. I think the story was Brer Rabbit. I enjoyed and was fatigued by the typing out of the parts eliminating the ‘said’ bits and the quotation marks. I formed a small group and ours was the only one performed in front of the class. Not because it was the best, but because I was the only person who thought we had been required to see it through to the logical conclusion. I am sure the result was underwhelming indifferent. Inert paperbags with poor drawings on them over hands and heads down on the carbon copies my mother had tirelessly typed.

This must have whet my appetite, though, and with two friends we prepared and performed a dance piece before the class. It was about a fairy coronation with the blue sky fairy tutu being recycled, a tiara belonging to my Grandma being brought in on an appliqued pillow and, I think, music by Tchaikovsky. I made a prolonged exit because we had set the props in the sports store room next to the classroom. The other poor girls were left in bras bas for ages. I had further failed to prepare by leaving the tiara in my school bag for safety and so the coronation finally happened in mime. A real pillow holding an invisible crown. Also, we had changed a bit of ‘choreography’ at the last moment. One girl still put her arms up and in the heat of the moment I grabbed her nearest arm and levered it down. A moment when I learnt key lessons concerning rehearsal, performance, setting props and self-control.

Bit later. I now had friends in the flower of puberty (I was still stick thin and shaped like a Skipper doll) and the next performance was to their choice of pop song. A Charleston-inspired tune (costumes to match) called ‘No Trespassing’. No comment.

vaudeville

My father eventually told me that he used his job as a singer sewing machine repairman and salesman as licence to drive about town most of the day. My dad always had jobs that didn’t require him to be sat at a desk.

He used to drive all over the sprawling hicktown that Brisbane was then. Usually by the least appealing roads, dusty, glare-y roads that avoided traffic but also avoided the river views, the nicer parks and beautiful trees. Sometimes he drove through the city and somehow or another he used to end up at the stage door of the Theatre Royal.

Maybe he came across a clutch of chorus girls having an outdoor fag break or some such. It could be said that my Dad was an idler. I can vouch for his powers as a monologist. Some found him boring and insensitive, others found him charming.

At some point he would take my mother to the actual shows. It became an institution, the mid-week night (I think it was a Tuesday or Wednesday show). My brother and I were either babysat or left with Grandma, that’s my father’s mother. Mum always described her as a woman dreaded for her violent temper, megalomania, and melodramatics, but ‘good to you kids’. And she was.

So there’s mum and dad at the Theatre Royal and then all the ‘kids’ (not us, the dancing girls in the chorus) would come round to our little wooden house for beer. Perhaps that was only once. I have a memory of this happy rowdy group in our kitchen and me being given a lemonade and a ginger biscuit and sitting outside on the long flight of gappy wooden steps that led down to the long thin back yard.

Late we got taken along as well. My memories of the Theatre Royal include some skit where a woman had put ping pong balls down her black tights – eerie.

I remember watching a man in a green light – Brian somebody, a good looking chap, playing the Bad Wolf in a Panto of Red Riding Hood. Probably a surge of scary music. Apparently I cried. Funny how the scary and the fun combine.

I remember watching the ‘Nudie Cuties’ or at least this is what my mother called them, in an Egyptian Tableau (unless my memory has fudged this with other imagery I’ve seen since). I remember spangles, possibly feathers, a curtain rising and a silence that struck me as respectful. The semi-naked girls had to stand stock-still so that it wasn’t salacious, but artistic.

I remember more clearly watching a woman called Sabrina singing a song, covered in glittery bracelets and flinging them off into the crowd. My brother, aged 8, caught one. I was jealous and confused that he had the sparkly thing - a girl’s thing. Once I was allowed to hold it in my hands it was suddenly a dull thing, perhaps because it came with no beaming congratulation on a parental face. I was never old or bright enough to figure these things out, often feeling left in the dark.

I remember the Horrie Dargie Quintet. Double bass, drum kit, and harmonica. Harmonicas. Of various sizes. And witty, razzed-up comic songs. One of them about ‘a little girl with blonde hair. Her name was Goldilocks, and on the door she knocked (bang bang bang bang bang  (harmonies) But no one was there….(cue walking bass) So she walked right in and had herself a time, ‘cos she didn’t care….’ Then they’d do the instrumental ‘Ritual Firedance’ with bigger and bigger harmonicas and one so big it hit the next man on the side of the head. Slapstick.

We saw them and had their record. I listened to this until I memorized the whole record –  I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, The Autumn Leaves, The Three Bears, Jukebox Saturday Night, Big Noise Flew in From Winetka and Walking my Baby Back Home.

disappearing act

Something about me and video cameras. If I was able to record a show , it was on a duff night. If it was a sellout evening, the person who promised to bring the camera forgot.
Recording any theatre show on a single camera is a disappointment anyway. The lighting is poor and the recorded sound only as loud as the camera operator's cough.
The human eye has an ability to zoom in on a single detail and dance around the full stage picture in a moment. This experience can only be captured with multiple cameras, gifted cameramen, skillful editing, re-lighting, re-location (out of the theatre and into a studio) and re-scripting. Most of my shows now only exist on VHS. The earliest recording, of a show performed in a hall in Edinburgh in 1980, was degrading into a black and white snowstorm the last time I looked. 

This year I remounted a show that I created in 2001. The show, MIDRIFF, is about a number of things including the 'now you see it now you don't-ness' of places, people, life and theatre. 

I thought of using the title 'disappearing act' as the url name for this blog but it was gone already (almost some kind of joke there). The idea was to make a record of all the the shows I've made. And maybe some I've performed in. 

I was thinking that the only problem with this idea was getting started on it. Now that I have started, I can see several reasons why this could be a really bad idea. There's exposing my indifferent ability to write and punctuate for starters. And then, I now realize, there's no way round the fact that this is a transparent bid to leave some kind of mark (oops, looks like we can expect a number of visible/invisible transient/permanent metaphors and such). But heigh-ho, here goes. It's going to happen slowly...that's if I don't give up completely...