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