martyn coutts

Civil
Pacitti Company
North Melbourne Town Hall – Arts House
Monday 18th August 2008

My interest had been peaked by Pacitti after I found out that they shared company members with the UK’s Blast Theory who I have admired greatly from afar. Then when I found out that pvi collective, Arts House and Performance Space were supporting a tour (including a bunch of workshops that happened in Sydney and Perth, but mysteriously not in Melbourne.), I was excited to see Civil.

Admittedly I didn’t read the program extensively before I went in, which according to my colleague Sam was a beneficial thing to do. The content of the work was based around one of the most influential gay rights activists in New York, Quentin Crisp. The work was created in 1996, 3 years before the death of Crisp.

The work was a solo, played out against a backdrop of a massive projection screen which alternately created a perfect clean white reverential crucible and then became filled with enormous slide and film projections which reached the roof. Apart from these elements there were very minimal set pieces which were used sparingly throughout and the soundtrack consisted of music of the time period <including a rather jarring use of a very well known Jeff Buckley song>.

The performer Richard Eton was so calm and so unaffected in his delivery of the text and of the tasks he was carrying out. This was especially the case when he was naked (which was for over half of the piece).

SO what happened? Well nothing really.

It ended up being a series of images that were connected with gay male rights which was over a decade old and a man who while interesting (and historically relevant) was not revealed to me in a new or interesting way.

Some of the images were provocative and striking, especially one sequence where the performer inserted a knife into his ‘how’s your father’, but on the whole I struggled with the work.

The one thing it did raise for me was the responsibility to works that are older and are still being toured. Did Pacitti consider that this was to be a work that would still be relevant now? Or was it a monetary decision, because there was only one performer? There didn’t appear to be any attempt to bring make the work relevant to now, so therefore the only way I could view it was as a historical piece of theatre.

Perhaps the only thing that resonated with me now that wouldn’t have done in 1996 was the vision of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers, standing tall in the New York skyline. Somehow the film of those buildings managed to bring home a more visceral response than the entire rest of the show. His struggle for civil rights somehow diminished beneath the symbolic behemoth that was 9/11.