MUSIC
Courtney Barnett
Metropolis Recital Corridor, January 20
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★★
When it comes to a musical about-face, Courtney Barnett – the Australian singer-songwriter recognized for wry, observational storytelling – releasing an album of improvised, instrumental guitar music isn’t fairly “Dylan goes electrical”. But it surely’s sufficient of a pivot to warrant curiosity about how her music fares minus the witty wordplay.
This night time’s present is cut up into two units, the primary that includes the aforementioned six-string noodling that was created for a 2021 documentary on Barnett known as Nameless Membership, which in flip grew to become final 12 months’s soundtrack album Finish of the Day.
Courtney Barnett’s music from the 2021 documentary on her, Nameless Membership, grew to become final 12 months’s album Finish of the Day.Credit score:
Set one kicks off with Barnett and multi-instrumentalist Stella Mozgawa (from American alt-rockers Warpaint) silently, stoically taking to the stage to reverently coax prolonged notes out of their devices in entrance of an enormous display screen that includes Barnett in a blue raincoat strolling by hilly countryside.
For those who assume tracks named Floating Down and Spring Ascends trace towards ambient meditation music, you’d be bang-on. For half-hour the sounds repeatedly construct, recede and conjure a dreamlike state through refined moments: Barnett taking part in her guitar with a bow, or standing to construct suggestions from a bluesy riff; Mozgawa’s synth taking part in backwards in encompass sound.
After a short interval a solo Barnett beatifically bounds again onto the stage for set two as if she’s simply switched locations with a serious-art twin who doesn’t do smiles. Courtney v.2 is chatty and charming: “Hi there, good to see you! Don’t be afraid to make noise!” she implores earlier than launching right into a choice of selection cuts from her again catalogue.
Even with simply guitar and voice Barnett is a compelling performer, one who is aware of tips on how to mix the suitable taking part in model, chord development and switch of phrase to make sure the entire is at all times larger than the sum of its components.
A grasp at making the mundane sound magical, Barnett places her distinctive storytelling abilities to make use of in Avant Gardener (“It’s a real story – besides the bit about getting a shot of adrenaline to the center. I stole that from Pulp Fiction,” she tells us), break-up dissection Want a Little Time and Depreston, a tune about shopping for a home that’s as gripping as any prestige-TV drama.
A half-hour of hypnotic guitar adopted by top-shelf indie rock peppered with humorous banter might sound like musical whiplash, but it surely’s to Barnett’s credit score that she pulls each off with aplomb, the standing ovation on the finale greater than deserved.
DANCE
Mutiara
Seymour Centre, January 20
Till January 21
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★
The stage is naked, however for a pile of discarded shells and a sq. column of thick ropes, hanging to the ground. A determine walks in, holding one thing. It may very well be a telephone, the best way its floor catches the sunshine, however no, it’s the milky iridescence of mother-of-pearl. He places it on the pile. And so begins Marrugeku’s new work Mutiara, a co-created collaboration that explores Broome’s pearling historical past by the lived expertise of Ahmat Bin Fadal, an ex-pearl diver.
Excerpts from Lustre (a Western Australian Museum 2021 exhibition) are displayed within the lobby, and the archival pictures and oral histories carry house the intercultural nature of the trade, which sucked Malays, Chinese language, Japanese, Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders into the harmful extractive trade that boomed from 1860. Mutiara embodies this interculturality, with the 4 performers expressing their individuality and their interdependence with gripping physicality.
Mutiara explores Broome’s pearling historical past by the lived expertise of Ahmat Bin Fadal, an ex-pearl diver.Credit score:
Element is every little thing: a tiny gesture tells, with fragments of Indigenous, conventional, martial arts and improvisation making a dense combination of formality and story-telling. There may be the Bomu, an amorphous harbinger of chaos. Then there’s a younger interracial couple, dancing the twist, having a ball. Then there are the divers, with lead boots and faceless globes for heads, dragging their ft within the dreamlike depths. Most affecting is the involvement of Bin Fadal, who strikes with solemn grace, his presence turning scratchy pictures and historic texts into dwelling reminiscence.
The staging (with set designed by sculptor and artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah) and lighting (Kelsey Lee) is very efficient: the rope column unfurls to turn out to be layers of ropes, curtains by which we see the pearl divers and on which we see archival footage of the pearl luggers at sea. In the meantime, an intermittent voice-over, the voice of White Australia, offers chilling context.
It takes time for Mutiara to surrender its tales. I’m eager about it, turning over the sleek physicality of Ahmat Bin Fadal, for a very long time after the lights go down. Historical past walks amongst us if we pause for lengthy sufficient to see it, hear it, and Mutiara asks us to pause, look, hear.
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