The Mysteries of the Convent
Peepshow inc.
Abbotsford Convent, Abbotsford
Melbourne Fringe Festival 2008
Richard Murphett used to ask us during the animateuring class at VCA – “who is your audience?”. Some of us imagined that it was a question designed to tailor performances for a specific punter group. But I think he was asking are they voyeur? God? friends? What is the relationship? indeed as Jenny Kemp would say – “What is the transaction between performer and audience?”
Formalising this structure is one way of dealing with this. There have been a number of works recently that use modes of presentation that mirror performative styles. Ilbijerri’s Dirty Mile was a dramatised walking tour of Fitzroy, Version 1.0 has recently created Bougainville Photoplay which uses a university lecture as its structure and Spat and Loogie’s two Next Wave works (new!shop and Holiday) utilise retail and aviation modes to create performance around.
The ‘transaction’ with the audience is clear in all of these works, the audience understands what their role is and the performer can use or exploit the shared knowledge of this. And so I came to Mysteries of the Convent knowing little about the convent and hoping to learn. We are led around the buildings and grounds by a hapless tour guide who is played perfectly by Robyn McMicking. She manages to create an air of complete incompetence (in the spirit of free flowing hippy types you would expect to find connected to Lentil as Anything) yet at the same time be very charming and funny. And considering she is literally and metaphorically guiding us through he space, it is important we like her and also feel safe.
As we go along, we encounter ‘ghosts’ of the grounds both in human and puppet form. These vary in size from small puppets as big as ones hand to Mother Superior who towers over all the audience members.
Initially the sight of the convent was beautiful and hearing the stories were great but after a while I wanted some narrative to take over. The thin storyline of the little girl and Mother Superior didn’t grab me enough to care about it. There were moments of sweeping beauty, one sequence with a revealed overhead projection that used water to affect it was transformative. The space became something more than what it was, and this is what I needed from all the work, to take me to places that extended the boundaries of the given structure. Does this seem strange? that the tour was about the convent and I wanted them to take me out of the convent?
I think that the large scale projected moments or changes in scale took us out of the bricks and mortar reality of the real space and into an abstracted or endless time. Even the humans and human sized puppetry became part of this bricks and mortar reality.
The final sequence was some sort of coup de theatre, with the reveal of the scaled convent a real tear jerker. As my friend Sam says “If you can end a show well then they will forgive you the rest”.
