TILT 2022, WAAPA 3rd Year Performance Making Students ·
Blue Room Theatre, 8 September 2022 ·

The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts’ decision, a decade ago, to launch a dedicated three-year degree course in the hybrid, DIY art form they called Performance Making has paid an important dividend.

While the result may not be as spectacular as WAAPA’s Music Theatre course, whose graduates dominate their field in Australia and have made their mark internationally, the Performance Making alumni are a force in independent and alternative theatre, the Spiegeltents and black boxes of fringe festivals that are an increasingly vital part of the popular arts landscape in these straitened times.

Put simply, performance makers express their talent and display their craft across the whole range of arts endeavour. They hold microphones in their hands, but hammers and drills too; they read scores and write scripts, they sing, dance and play. They devise, design and direct, and perform the result.

The annual showcase of the WAAPA course’s graduating class, “TILT”, is presented, appropriately, at The Blue Room, the little theatre that may become a hole-away-from-home for them in the next part of their career.

With a dozen or do self-devised pieces spread over two programs each September, it’s a great opportunity not just to get a first glimpse at the talent we’ll be seeing in future years but also the issues that preoccupy them and compel them to speak out about.

In The HMS Wilson-Smith a family is adrift on a vast – one suspects endless – ocean, trying with increasing desperation to maintain their middle-class ceremonies in a submerged world. The mother (Isabella Mclean) conducts the rituals, her daughters (Saskia Glass and Ashley Elliott) ignore or rebel, just as they would back when the world was dry.

The writer and designer Abi Russell and director Mazey O’Reilly make The HMS Wilson-Smith grim, stylised and stylish, and Samuel Beckett would have approved.

And Roger Vadim would, I’m sure, have approved of Extraterrestrial Sex God, a very Sixties, very sexy little sci-fi romp, complete with impossible miniskirts and alien critters with irresistible, priapistic tentacles.

There’s also some neat stand-up about the inevitable pitfalls of modern sex life to go on with.

Isobel Pitt, who wrote designed and performed ESG, is a convincingly minxie neo-Barbarella, and Donita Cruz directs, and designs its sound, with gleeful skill.

RepresentAsian takes an acerbic swipe at profiling and exploitation in the show business, and businesses beyond the show, as Jennifer “EFA” Mackenzie is stereotyped as a Dragon Lady, a Pop Girl or an over-studious science tech because of her Filipina ethnicity.

Mackenzie devised, co-choreographed (with director Reese Horne) and wrote the songs for her performance, accompanied by pianist Angelo Ravina, and Mazey O’Reilly takes a crafty turn as the show’s cynical impresario.

While McKenzie’s case is more convincing than the cabaret it is couched in, its point is well made, and needs making.

The spirit of Charlie Chaplin and the silent movies move through the tableaux that make up At Least this is Not a Show, a precisely choreographed and craftily constructed piece of physical theatre electrified by the brimful talent of Saskia Glass, who is ably partnered by her co-deviser Sarah Milde.

The visuals of Isobel Pitt and music of Renee Bottern give further lustre to a sophisticated and beautifully realised piece; more please!

Blair Duthie paints a forlorn, touching picture of an all-at-sea father foundering under the pressures of a family life he has no aptitude or preparation for in What Nappies Do We Need?.

Duthie conveys the quiet desperation of a man for whom responsibility comes as a thief in the night in a measured soliloquy (written and directed by Isabella Mclean) with the ring of common truth about it.

There’s plenty of desperation, but nothing measured, about the outrage in No Autonomy Under Anatomy, the agitprop-inspired pièce de résistance that closes the first programme of “TILT”.

A full-throated howl against sexual exploitation, patriarchal control and the perils of gynaecology, No Autonomy Under Anatomy is sometimes chaotic, often uncomfortable, but always passionate and compelling.

The director Holland Brooks and deviser/performers Abi Russell, Rhi Bryan and Reese Horne throw everything at the wall here, and an awful amount of it sticks.

Stay tuned, we’ll be posting David Zampatti’s reflections on the second program below.

Week Two’s TILT program was anchored on physical theatre and dance, and showcased some of the most impressive pieces and performances in the concept’s eight-year history.

Blair Duthie and James Ford’s No One Won the War reads like Ibsen and plays out like Vonnegut; two men cling to each other and bicker over chess, the rain, and the hows and whys of leaving. The sandbags on the floor are never referred to, but are a clue to where they’ve been, where they are, and why.

Ford has great presence as an actor, and shows he has writing chops too in With You, With Me, the story of the arc of a love affair waiting to be restored told in dance by Rudi Palmela and Ashley Elliott. It’s a sweet, sad story, beautifully realised by the two dancers, their director Alexandra Veleva and movement director Caroline Sengkey.

Anyone familiar with the work of Perth alternative theatre’s legendary provocateur Joe Lui will feel right at home in Bricks. The gymnastic Jack Martin and unforgettable Leisl Lucerne-Knight play out a wild parable of masculinity and its (literal) deconstruction as Mazey O’Reilly, the Man Of Brick, succumbs to the wiggle and jiggle.

Has Mrs Marcos got her dues? Surely she’s as deserving of the Lloyd Webber/Rice treatment as her Argentinian counterpart? Donita Cruz aims to right that wrong in Imelda, much aided by a strikingly convincing impersonation of the Mother of the Nation from Jennifer “EFA” Mackenzie, some delicious footage of the scurrilous First Couple and a gobsmacking song about a bridge of love that might be called “Don’t Cry for Me, Filipina”.

From “Open” to “Closed”, the day in the life of a restaurant gets an all singing all dancing “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” treatment from a wonderfully well-drilled (Jack Martin directs) ensemble cast of Sarah Milde, Mara Kremmidiotis, Caroline Sengkey, Renee Bottern and – here he is again – Rudi Palmela. I’ve no doubt Service, with a Smile would be a smash hit on any stage; it crams a terrific little story, some fantastic characters and some brilliant sight gags into its fifteen minutes.

Does it have enough in it to go for an hour? Absolutely!

Holland Brooks has a nasty streak, and she gives it full reign in Monkey Machine, a journey through all the fun things – rape, pillage and plunder – that give anthropology its kicker.

Leisl Lucerne-Knight directs this gruesome free-for-all with what I suspect is their customary relish, Marli Haddeill and Rhi Bryan writhe their way through the history of personkind with appropriate primate-ive physical and vocal gestures, and the piece leaves us in no doubt why it had to close the program…

The entrails would take forever to clear away.

The first program of TILT runs until September 10, the second program runs from September 14-17, at The Blue Room Theatre.

Pictured top: The cast of ‘The HMS Wilson-Smith’. Photo: Stephen Heath Photography