I didn't know then and I don't know now. I remember doing a quiz in a women's magazine in my teens.
It was a career-finding tool. You answered all the questions such as do you want to work with people, do you like travel, do you like using your mind, your hands, whole body?The quiz results worked in a table form and in the box corresponding to using both imagination and body there was an empty space. There was no option for this choice of mine.
Mum had sent me to Ballet classes and Piano classes and Jazz dance classes and Art classes - all the things she had never had herself. I could weep now when I think of it. The battles she must have fought with my father to make it all happen. I'd like to go back in time and throttle my nine year old self who gave up the classes. To make more time to play Barbies with a girl called Susan something. For heaven's sake. My mother must have been in despair. I didn't know what privilege was, but perhaps I was also lonely.
Mum had taken me to the old stucco studded theatres of Brisbane a lot. I remember the pleasure and privilege of sitting on the edge of the seat ( the old fashioned flip-down seats. Mum told me to leave mine up and sit on that so I could see over he heads of the grown ups.
A play about Elizabeth Browning with a live dog onstage.
Modern Dance. Ah that - I remember a female dancer making a contraction and I was spellbound....oh the emotion to seemed to contain, ah what was the title of the piece, I suddenly wanted to know....what is the story, what is this woman going through, how wonderful a piece of dance that is telling me something emotional...and what a wonderful emotion - at the core of her body, it was compelling. All that ran through my small brain in a bare moment, trammeled up in a flash by disappointment. Because the gesture was fleeting. Just a dynamic to spin her into the next group of steps in a new tangent. Years later when I saw photographs of Martha Graham, there it was, that curve of the backbone - and that hollow space in front of the abdomen, the shape of absence. The grief of something lost or perhaps never found. But I never saw that promise of shape and emotion combined onstage until many years later.
My French boyfriend was widening my horizons - he had me reading Genet and Vian. Seriously, Genet - I was 17 years old. He (Eric, not Genet) had a curmudgeonly critical side which I thought only belonged to the old school Aussie men. We went and saw a Pinter play. I am always ready to be moved and excited when I go to the Theatre. Sometimes my aesthetic tastes go out the window, so strong is my impulse to be excited and swept up in the watching of a show.
Eric thought the Pinter play was pretentious although he didn't use that word. He found the pauses empty. I loved the mystery of it all. The blank emptiness of the space, the sofa and the characters sitting on it.
I saw Kopit's Indians at La Boite - a wonderful dream-like play with a curious mix of humour and pathos, somewhere. Possibly in a wonderful little architect-designed theatre our English teacher had taken us to . Often architects get theatre design wrong or the building budget ruins their concept with compromise, but this was a little jewell. La Boite, meaning The Box, was 'theatre in the round', in well, a square. The actors were able to enter from each of the four corners and sometimes via a ladder and a trap door, on a level with the back row and then enter through the aisle steps, or even use the aisles as playing spaces. My mother knew of the Opera La Boheme but had never been permitted to study languages or even history ( her father said she had to do home economics) and she used to pronounce it La Boh-eet.
I've just remembered that one May or August break ( August is a short break in Australia and not summertime), I signed up to do a Jazz dance class. I've done classes before, I said to myself, so I'm not a beginner, therefore I must be Intermediate. I had no one to tell me otherwise. A week of pain and humiliation. Actually not a full week. I dropped out. I was staying at Eric's sister's house and working my way through their record collection - Charles Aznavour! Like Piaf, his songs were vivid little movies, and the orchestration so emotional.
While still with Eric I signed on for some workshops at La Boite. We made sculptures with our bodies by running into the circle and striking a pose. One person would start and when the second person entered, their gesture had to be in relationship to that pose, then the first person would change. Each new person that entered, we all would notice the new feeling and possibility in the choice they had made and CHANGE! so the entire picture changed. We were urged to be interesting from every angle - the essential discipline of working in the round.
I've just remembered an exercise the other female teacher at the workshop when I was 17 taught. Standing in a circle, someone had to jump in and become something that would give the opportunity to build an entire picture, hopefully with everyone in the group ending up in the centre. I remember the two women teachers and Salvatore demonstrating. 'Fire!' one yelled and jumped into the circle writhing like flame. 'A hose!' (that was a gently mind blowing moment - ah, not the fireman, the hose), 'Water!' now, 'A fireman!'. Someone became a dog pissing on the fire 'Is this allowed? I probably jumped in as a pointing 'passerby...' with classic adolescent timidity and lack of chutzpah.
There was an audition at La Boite and I got the part - nothing much, nothing much at all. A Yukio Mishima play - a husband and his lover, I think, and much talk of drowned hydrangeas. I played the hysterical, nervy wife, but didn't actually have to play any of that as she was in bed throughout the play. 'In bed' under a sheet on two wooden cubes (classic bare stage design staple). My main acting challenge was to stay awake for my cue and my show stopping ( not that it was great but I think it was at the end of the show, or before a blackout at least) moment to sit-up-and-scream. I think I wore a calico shift and my long lank blonde hair made me correctly wan.
At some point my french boyfriend ditched me. After much weeping and much wearing of his favourite shirt (out of some kind of rage of appropriation rather than sentiment), opportunity opened in a new way. Another audition at La Boite.
One day (years later) Eric told me this: he has been employed/volunteered into taking photographs of the UniQue (University of Queensland Theatre Company) 'Precious Moments' show. Where are those photographs now? He said that he watched me as I played (among other small roles) a bikini clad lion tamer (the way I recall it, my main focus in this segment was not to be too embarrassed) and that as he watched, he said to himself that he was never going to be able to put that look on my face. It astonished me that a/ he had been observing me so closely b/ that I had anything worth watching about me c/ that he couldn't see that I was just pushing out the performance so as not to fail d/ that he would expect to be able to get that reaction from me (he's a person, not an endeavour) or e/ that he would want it or need it. And I suppose I got a message that, buried under all that was, f/ something that I was enjoyed doing might well make me unviable as a love object.
Going back to a/ and b/. Most things in Brisbane happened with a stoic resignation. As a child disappointment was an old friend. My father's main aim for us children was for us to be invisible, silent and obedient. Timidity was pretty much my middle name. Yelling, railing, anxiety, bitterness and rancour were the unnamed principle actions and emotions for my dad. And my brother and I were encouraged to feel that we were the cause of all unhappiness or at least the salt in life's wound, which helped to prepare my jumpy disposition and an unhealthy self-consciousness in me.
Eric opened my world and also sometimes limited it. I'd say, 'let's go to that art exhibition', he would say 'yes', but not make a plan was given to understand that I would be somehow disloyal if I went on my own.
Somehow or other (My mum looking in the paper for a way to cheer up her rejected daughter?), I found out there was an audition at La Boite.
The foyer. Normally a place where people in nice clothes stood to drink coffee and eat the amazing La Boite fruit cake slices. Now people are sitting on the hairy carpet tiles, leaning up against the walls. An intriguing girl and a stunning boy. Wow, this is a brave new world. Drama School but an new level. We were to work with a director from Sydney or was it melbourne..he had worked at The Pram Factory, which was in Melbourne. Exciting name. Pram Factory. New possibilities started to be created in my head.
I have zero recall of the audition process. What did he ask me to do? Lindzee Smith. Long black hair. Strong but very present and with you. I'd never met anyone like him. The word sincere seems limp.
http://lindzeesmith.blogspot.com/ The next time the chosen cast came together, we sat (what privilege) scattered around in the seats of the La Boite auditiorium. Lindzee looked at each of using turn and called us by our names. Without reference to notes. He called us by our names. It was the first facilitation skill I learned. We were seen, we were present, we were going to do this thing together and he was our leader. So maybe the first good leader role model I'd ever seen, I now note.
Jack Hibberd's ensemble theatre style play, Captain Midnight, with music. We had two aboriginals who agreed to be in the cast. One of the two girls in the crochet blanket from the Drama School played one of the three aboriginal girls...they all work black leotards. Sounds naff, but it was done with as much care as possible. I remember a segment of the play she danced wildly in a spotlight, with her long bushy dark hair making trajectories in the space.
I had a solo song. A woman called Barbara - forgive me! time has erased her last name from my memory - was the MD. She taught me to sing 'Ah' instead of my first hard syllable 'I'. She and Lindzee told me 'hold your head up' and like a petulant moron I said, 'I am'. My posture was almost as poor as my confidence. That terrible way in which a 19 year old thinks they are a piece of shit and god's gift at exactly the same time. And that it's the director's job to get the performance out of them, not their own responsibility. Maybe not all 19 year olds, but certainly me.
I could probably sing you all the songs from the show. The ones I was in. I played the Premier's (?) wife the chauvinist white guy's wife. Again my long hair and ability to wear a long white cotton shift standing me in good stead.
'I mope around this house all day,
in search of something to do,
I feel just like a statue in clay,
or a wingless cockatoo.
I lounge all afternoon in bed,
and bathe until my body melts,
sometimes I wish, I wish I were dead...
there's one consolation though...the wealth!!'.
I played one of a pack of french prostitutes in one scene - rainbow wig, heightened, cartoonish, camp - and other group roles with quick costume changes. Sue, the intruiging girl, had a larger role and she was playing a guy. I was amazed my her confidence and 'differentness'. I later found out that she had already directed Endgame. Fearless and focused, I found her. Not surrounded by a bunch of limits like me.
I do remember thinking that if I hadn't lost my boyfriend, I would not be able to do this. This. Theatre. It was something.
