Playground, a new world order
Panther (Maddy Hodge and Sarah Rodigari)
Saturday 15th August, 6.15pm
Meat Market, Arts House, North Melbourne
I find Panther elusive, their mode of performance is somehow mysterious. I can’t really find the words to describe this – it seems to sit somewhere between them being themselves and taking on a subtle persona. As I entered Playground and was met at the door by Sarah Rodigari I was slightly on edge, she was polite, yet strangely distant. I was ushered in and told to put on a sash which i thought was right for me, I chose a deep blue, although red was also on the menu (it is interesting how my favourite colour has been shifting throughout the years from blue to red). I felt like i was part of a team, but only a team that had one person on it, as all the colours were different.
After a short address to the crowd about beginnings, we entered a large indoor playground space, from this point on I entered a childlike mode, I became the ultra competitive kid that i have always been, jumping, running, evading and generally being dangerous and obnoxious. It was not until later that I realised this, and here is where the true power of this work is, through the psychogeographical mapping of the past, through play.
Panther interjected throughout the piece to gently nudge the piece into the next phase, marking the narrative point in the arc of the show – never overbearing but always guiding. One moment where the text came not from naked voice but through a microphone was beautifully realised and the shift didn’t jar at all. The world suddenly altered here from being live and in the moment, running around and interfacing with other humans to a poetic dreamlike space where i found myself still and taken away with the repeated text.
Paticipatory artworks live on in my body long after the actuality of the live experience. I am so much trying to grasp the totality of the experience in the moment that i can’t appreciate the nuance immediately. But on reflection i realise what has happened to me. In this way it is a two part journey. The first is to be alive in every moment of the work and the second is to reflect and understand what has happened to me. (I guess that is akin to what I do here in this blog). My friend Jasmine said to me once , ‘she doesn’t want art to be about the lived experience, she wants to be taken away from that’. In many ways I agree with her, in many ways Playground did both the job of being in the ‘now’ as well as providing the escapism.
I also think that Playground was a lesson in ‘learning while doing’, that the lessons learnt in the playground stay with us for so long, that who we are when we act out the cartoon or super heroes are the people we want to be, the people we hope we will be. (I was always Jason from Battle of the Planets, the second in command, a little bit reckless and possibly untrustworthy). We can also learn to live more greatly in our imaginations, and that is something that the work pushed as well, that we can dream a new space for ourselves, create a new world, a new world order.
Overall I really loved this work, it was never about Panther, it was about the work, very much about the audience and giving them a playspace in which to be.
If anything I felt like the work (which was 20 mins long) could be longer and go further. It felt like as an audience we only really got to play one game and then they were wrapping it up. With more time, Panther also could drill down into some of the deeper ideas which were sitting so tantalisingly on the surface of the work.
