Writings belong of David Finnigan

dirty poppet picture show and the crack theatre festival

Things are restless jiving here. As of very recently, I am performing this Thursday 25 as part of the Dirty Poppet Picture Show, an evening of cabaret in Glebe (Sydney) put on by Jane Grimley and squad of the DeConverters.

do not google the words ‘dirty poppet picture show’

The DeConverters are presenting their show Witness in the Wall as part of the Crack Theatre Festival (which I am co-directing) at This Is Not Art, which will be radical. In the meantime, do as the frog above suggests and come to Glebe this Thursday night.

On a different but similarly splendid note, I have been summoned in to do some performing for Anino Shadowplay and Paschal and Valerie Berry’s Within and Without, which is currently in development at Performance Space in Carriageworks. I don’t know if I can really get this across without sounding like a maniac, but THEY HAVE BUILT MANILA. This morning I got to sing kareoke on Remedios Circle.

Katoomba Winter Magic Festival

Performance last night at Katoomba Winter Magic Festival in the Blue Mountains. First off, many thanks and much respect to Sarah Mae for organising the gig and for assembling a troupe of poets from Canberra, Sydney and the mountains. So Winter Magic: WIZARDS EVERYWHERE. I HAVE NEVER SEEN SO MANY WIZARDS IN MY LIFE.

Wizard-related-terror aside, the gig was awesome. Seung Baek laid out beautiful fluid streams of words and meaning, images and thoughts, rolling forward in that incomparable way of his, featuring one of my favourite poems by him (’What are those flashes of silver above those dark and wrinkled hills? What are those dark and wrinkled hills?’)

Sarah Mae’s pieces were agile in a way I find it hard to describe - like the Plaid of the spoken-word - leaping from image to shredded nursery rhyme to late night streetlight insight - and all on a half-heard half-imagined beat.

Peter Hines was brilliantly woozy and stumbling on a strange stomping rhythm with words and songs drawn out of daylight following wasted evenings, and it rolled and veered madly from tight on-the-spot turns of phrase to easy looping lines like Ginsberg at one of Ken Kesey’s parties. Then Miles Bruny appeared out of NOWHERE wearing a TEAPOT HAT and told a story about a trip he’d made by kayak to a little-visited island in Vanuatu and BLEW MY TINY MIND.

I had fun - time to play out All the pieces that weren’t up to standard, the new Dogmatron piece and the Hottest 100 1996 piece, which (I think) went well but which is still missing something to really tighten it up. Anyway, then we went out to see the Katoomba Dub Collective at the Hotel Guerin. The riot police showed but there wasn’t a sufficiently violent riot, so they left. At some point in the evening they changed their mind, and we left just as riot squad pt 2 was commencing. Wizards & goblins vs police with tasers: Katoomba is rock and roll.

pre-Nighttime checkin

I’m onstage in 2.5 hours for Nighttime at Performance Space, at Carriageworks in Sydney. Sitting in a dressing room in what used to be Sydney’s stables, and I appear to be the most technically simple of all the performances here tonight (with the exception of soda_jerk, who are showing a video and therefore don’t even need to be at the dress rehearsal). I don’t know much about Carriageworks, except they’re also supporting the creative development of Paschal & Valerie Berry’s new work with Anino Shadowplay, for which I give them points.

soda_jerk I dig you

I want dinner, I want to see the other performers tonight (particularly the Sensitive New Age Gang queer B-Boy all-girl dance battle troupe), but more than any of that I want a really good haircut. As a kind of sonic haircut, I’m playing a Sevenen (aka Reuben Ingall) EP and mapping out my set for the Katoomba Winter Festival tomorrow.

will S.N.A.G. be as good live as they are in this photo? I figure so.

June 4 update

While I’m scratching out a basic not-quite-living in Sydney, things have been growing (festering) quietly on the sidelines, creeping gradually closer. Some of they are these:

Hate Restaurants is going on in Manila at the end of this month as part of the Virgin Labfest, directed by J Victor Villareal. Virgin Labfest is a festival of new theatre-writing which takes place at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and Hate Restaurants is going up in a set of plays under the heading of Life is a Trap (3 plays in search of an escape).

I’m heading to the Youth Earth Symposium (link is a .pdf article) at the Gold Coast on June 18 to present a workshop on Performance and Social Change, as well as perform a gig (under the DOGMATRON guise).

I’ll be performing in Sydney on June 19 at Performance Space in Carriageworks, as part of the Nighttime series, alongside such luminaries as soda_jerk, S.N.A.G. (Sensitive New Age Gang) and a raft of other Sydney-based performance cats, doing all the pieces that weren’t up to standard.

Then there’s the Winter Magic Festival on June 20 at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, where DOGMATRON will be doing battle with the largest assembly of Wolfmother copyright lawyers outside of Wolfmother’s mother’s bedroom.*

And in the background, seeping ever closer, the Crack Theatre Festival and This Is Not Art swell up on the horizon… October 1-5 in Newcastle, for all you people who want to do a thing ever.

*what

Extraordinary! DOGMATRON East Coast Tour.

I sound like I’m kidding. I should by rights be kidding. In fact I’m not kidding. My Wolfmother tribute band DOGMATRON will be playing a series of gigs on the East Coast of Australia in June: The Gold Coast (June 18), Sydney (June 19) and Katoomba in the Blue Mountains (June 20).

We were thinking of naming this tour THE WALLS OF JERICHO tour because of the famous battle of Jericho, the first victory in the Israelite’s conquest of Canaan. Then we did some research. From the Bible:

They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys. Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the LORD’s house.

Thanks to research we are now calling this DOGMATRON‘S DESTROY WITH THE SWORD EVERY LIVING THING tour. Contact me if you want to make a booking for DOGMATRON to come to your city, festival or party and destroy with the sword every living thing in it, before taking your silver, gold and articles of bronze and iron and burning your whole city.

DOGMATRON

Who remembers 2006? Was anyone here alive in 2006?

2006. The air was sweeter. The youth were younger. Life seemed just around the corner. Promise sang in the bloodstreams, in the lung cavities; but nowhere did promise sing louder than in the amplifiers of WOLFMOTHER, one of the hardest bands to ever rock the planet with rock.

I wasn’t there. I’m too young to remember what it was like, how it must have felt to hear the voice of whatever Wolfmother’s singer was called blasting through the radio speakers for the first time. But I live on planet Earth, and like everyone else on planet Earth, I live in the reverberations of that colossal rock mastodon. Wolfmother. Where did you went? Why did you go?

Some people tell me that Wolfmother are back - some even say that they were only away for a couple of months tops - but those of us who’ve felt the power of the Wolf know the difference. The new Wolfmother - or ‘Wolf-failure’ as some have dubbed them - are sleek, over-produced and overhyped record company shills. Anyone who remembers Wolfmother’s storming Lollapalooza performance - the gig which led the legendary Mike Patton to pronounce that ‘Wolfmother suck’ - know that the real Wolfmother can never be tamed - never be owned - by anyone.

That’s why myself and two close colleagues formed our Wolfmother cover band: DOGMATRON.  To give you the real Wolfmother experience - uncut, uncensored and untamed.

DOGMATRON: playing at the Youth Earth Symposium on the Gold Coast in June 2009. After that, available for gigs in YOUR city. Bring the power of Wolfmother to your home town, in the form of Dogmatron, today! Contact David Finig with your performance needs to book a slot today!

hate restaurants: it’s a command.

World, world, world. Either you don’t understand, or I don’t understand. Cause I mean I love my scripts - I love them more than you love children, or food - but some I love more than others. Before the elephants reach the beach I love as an actual example of good writing that I can genuinely say I wrote. Chosei: Frozen Shape is genuinely a play that no-one but me and Nickamc and Muttley would ever have come up with.

Hate Restaurants - Hate Restaurants I love in the way you love the thing that you did in between when you should have fallen asleep and when you had to get up to go to your 5.30am breakfast shift at a shitty pancake parlour. I mean I love it, yeah, but I don’t respect it. (Though it does contain one of the best worded lines of dialogue I’ve ever written. ‘As the ancient Sumerians based their diet on barley, so we base our diet, as the ancient Sumerians, on barley.‘)

Maybe I’m wrong, though, because it’s just been picked up for two productions this year: as part of the Virgin Labfest in Manila this June, and as part of an ANU Theatre Society (NUTS) triple-bill of mine and Hadley’s work in October. So, uh… fuck yeah.

fuck YEAH.

from the Canberra Youth Theatre 2005 production

crack theatre festival

Alright, a little news for anyone out there still drifting past this blog. The fact of the matter is that on March 30th, I relocated from the Cancers to Sydney (to follow a girl) and I’ve spent the last month trying to get my head around this city. At present, I’m employed by several organisations (including National Science Week) and focusing all my remaining energy on one project: the Crack Theatre Festival.

Crack is a national theatre and performance festival taking place in Newcastle from October 1-5 as part of This Is Not Art, Australia’s largest media arts festival. This Is Not Art is an umbrella event which includes five different festivals: the National Young Writers Festival, Electrofringe (electronic and new media arts), Sound Summit (independent music), Critical Animals (creative research symposium) and the Crack Theatre Festival. TINA takes place annually in Newcastle over the October long weekend.

Over 2007-8, the National Young Writers Festival featured theatre and circus performers in its growing ‘Crack’ program. Following the 2008 festival, the Crack showcase emerged from the NYWF to form the Crack Theatre Festival, an independent performing arts festival within This Is Not Art. Myself and Gillian Schwab were appointed as inaugural directors for the new festival, which takes place for the first time in October 2009.

The 2009 program includes a performance showcase featuring works and artists from around Australia, a series of critical forums, panels and workshops, and Playground, a massive DIY collaborative performance event open to all comers. Featured performers include physical theatre and puppetry artist Fleur Elise Noble, Black Lung hermaphrodite Thomas Henning and lego-gypsy ensemble Mr Fibby. Dig on the Crack website for more info.

 
Fleur Elise Noble, Thomas Henning and Mr Fibby

brief april update

hola! so the truth is that I haven’t updated this blog in over two weeks, and the reason is not that nothing has been going on, but that TOO MANY THINGS have been happening. More specifically, I’ve moved to Sydney for a few months and I’ve been having all the attendant joys that go with a city-move: job & house hunting, being poor and fighting lizards.

I can almost promise that that’s almost at an end. There is much loveliness re: Boho, Oceans, Thucy and even my own miserable music-ness that I wish to report on and in a few days or so I will. In the meantime, thank you for coming by. You are fine people. Especially the person who entered the term “where does diplodocus sleeps” into google and thereby found this page.

delightful new vocals

More exciting than having new vocals or lyrics is having a new process for generating them. Jeff Noon did the world a greater service by sharing the Cobralingus and Mappalujo writing techniques than with any of his actual works, love them though I do. I have never done the world a service and am not likely to any time soon. I have, however, recorded some new vocals:

blind - praise you.mp3 (thanks to Fatboy Slim and Camille) (and by thanks I mean I used the words which Fatboy Slim sampled in his track Praise You - I’m not really thanking anyone for real)

blind - it doesn’t matter 2.mp3
blind - it doesn’t matter 3.mp3

If you can guess how these were made then you get a prize. A prize!