Finucane & Smith's Glory Box

From Left, clockwise. Cast of Glory Box - Holly Durant, Anna Lumb
Moira Finucane and Maude Davey.

Theatre making duo Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith developed The Burlesque Hour years ago and now it's almost a yearly event in Melbourne with month long seasons at fortyfivedownstairs. Recently it's been touring regionally in the form of the Caravan Burlesque.

Finucane has performed her unique brand of gothic/gender-bending/sexy/food-infused acts for well over a decade, way before the burlesque resurgence that has gripped Melbourne of late. She's more trend-setter than trendy and has a wide and varied fan base (especially here in her hometown.) It's not surprising that The Burlesque Hour, even with two shows a night, packs out it houses. 

Burlesque, as a genre, is so pervasive now that it can really mean anything and the market, so to speak, is flooded with mediocre and not particularly smart work. Finucane & Smith, with the help of their collaborating artists, transcend the average by far. They create performances that have all the sexiness and verve of high-quality burlesque and then take them to the next level theatrically. 

They're successful for many reasons including their maturity and experience as practitioners, their inclusion of intriguing and multi-dimensional artists into their fold and the trained directorial eye of Smith. Finucane often works with text or collaborates with writers (in this current show Christos Tsiolkas) and is interested in fully integrated dramatic pieces, which will not always totally successful, are appealing for their high camp costuming, eerie physicality and wacky twists. 

This new Burlesque Hour incarnation is called Glory Box, which is described as Burlesque Hour meets Pandora's Box, opening the way to play with ideas of original sin, temptation, human vulnerability and desire. The themes thread the new acts and give cohesion to the whole show. 

Finucane opens with Apple. She wears a white PVC bikini with sparkly green leaves over her female bits and thrashes manically while displaying a crisp green apple. The music stops every so often so she can tell us why she should eat the apple rather than share it with the audience and at each interlude she chomps and desicates the fruit further until it's just a bit of spit-out pulp on the floor. In the context of the show, it's a fitting opening - temptation, lust, greed....and it was an apple after all that set Adam and Eve on their journey out of innocence. 

Not all the acts work so closely with the theme, but of the ones that do, the most powerful is Maude Dauvey's rendition of the PortisHead song Glory Box in which she's nude but for antler ears, her skin painted a dusty white. She's vulnerable, yet sexy, soft but fighting. Davey's is a normal female body - not young, not old, not surgically enhanced. It is what it is and its out there in all its beauty and flaws. 

The most ambitious act is written by Tsiolkas and involves all five of the regular artists, which makes a good visual break from the  solo format. In long black dresses with plunging neck lines, holding apples in black-gloved hands, it starts as a rendition of Madonna's Like a Prayer and turns into an erotic dialogue between Finucane and Davey while the other three keep time as swaying back up singers. It's experimenting with a lot ideas at once and being text heavy, hard to absorb in one go.  

Ursula Martinez in Hanky Panky. Photo by
Prudence Upton. 

For me, the highlight acts came from Ursula Martinez and Anna Lumb. Martinez has performed in Melbourne before. I first saw her in the inaugural Melbourne season of La Clique doing one of the same acts, Hanky Panky, that she does here and it still feels totally fresh and surprising.  She's one of those flawless performers, so good at what she does - everything is tight and clean without a wasted or over-done moment. I won't say more as that would ruin the fun.

Anna " Pocket Rocket" Lumb is a NICA grad who has built a stellar career in a short time. She's made two full length shows for herself and seems to be performing everywhere. Both her acts are spot on. A hula-hooping routine, set to the Beach Boy's I Get Around cleverly slows down and speeds up in both music and hooping tempo. Fantastic! Her blue-suited trapeze act to David Bowie's Rock 'n' Roll Suicide works on a conceptual level while still being a sharp aerial display (in stilettos in a tight space, very close to audience heads, none the less...)

Holly Durant in Salome. Photo by Paul Dunn.

Harriet Ritchie and Holly Durant are both VCA School of Dance graduates. Ritchie is an in-demand contemporary dancer who works frequently with Lucy Guerin and Chunky Move, among others. As a duo act they have been with the Finucane & Smith brigade for a while, developing funky, poppy dance routines. Here they venture into solos. Durant's veiled Salome routine to Donna Summer's I Feel Love has developed from last year. Just like the music, it builds and sustains a heightened sensuality. Visually, Durant's slow body undulations and gradual journey down the catwalk match the extensive green billows of sheer fabric that envelope her. Ritchie's new routine, Wolf, to Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady is performed in a back-exposing fur outfit. It's all thrashy head and body rolls and quick darts through the space. It needs a bit of tweaking dynamically to balance the thrash with some other textures. 

Along with Martinez, global cabaret diva Meow Meow is the other guest artist. She channels German cabaret with a twist, abusive to her audience and self-deluded about her own beauty. She's such a good performer, with such a great voice (accompanied by John Thorn on piano), that, like Martinez, she can pull anything off. Again, don't want to spoil, but she has a great take on the Glory Box theme. 

The overall mix here is stronger than what we have seen in recent years. The whole thing feels fresh and dynamic. Each act is distinct, while still managing to thematically cohese as a show and the addition of some older, tried and true acts works a treat. 

As usual, not for the faint-hearted or those who aren't into confronting female nudity. But if you like burlesque out of the box, get ye to the fantastic Glory Box.

Click here for my review of Glory Box in the Herald Sun on 11 June 2012. 

Finucane & Smith's Glory Box

fortyfivedownstairs

09 June - 01 July 2012

Carnival of Mysteries

Image by The Sisters Hayes. Photo by Jodie Hutchinson.

Is this not the best image for a show that you have seen in a long time?

Totally intriguing. Really makes you wonder who are all these people are and why are they together. 

Carnival of Mysteries was  chaotic, entertaining, uplifting and deeply macabre all at once. Creators Finucane & Smith took their burlesque visions to new levels of audience participation. Participants didn't just sit around a catwalk partaking in sensually dark acts up-close and personally like they did in The Burlesque Hour. They walked through the space, negotiated crowds, tents, sideshow rooms and made conscious choices about how to spend their carnival cash (although in many cases the pushy spruikers were pretty persistent and made the choices for them.) There were so many acts to see - both serious and tawdry - that every person would have had a different experience. If you tried too hard to see everything, you would have been disappointed. Better to just take what came your way. Take the shonky with the uplifting; the just plain kooky with the sexy.  My experience included an erotic reading in the Victorian library, letter-writer Miss Lee penning me a beautiful postcard to give my husband, a fortune-telling by clairvoyant Ann Povey, a nonsensical melodrama between three Russian sisters and a monotonous monologue about various ways to die. 

Interesting aside: The "special" acts (they costed $10,000 a pop) happened in the Tent of Miracles. This tent is a mini big-top circus tent that seats about 30 people. Finucane  & Smith had been planning its realisation for some time and commissioned eight different visual artists to each design and paint a panel of the tent. The tent looked amazing - full of variety and vibrancy, with each panel having a distinctly different look. In the crowded environment of Fortyfive Downstairs it was hard to take it all in, but when this Tent of Miracles hits the touring circuit (especially if used in outdoor spaces), it will be a very impressive mini venue. 

Below is my review as published in the Herald Sun, Monday 11 October.

Carnival of Mysteries must be the only show in town that credits a carnival ephemerist in its program. This theatrical event invites its guests to wander through an intricately designed traveling circus of yore - packed with grotesque characters, snake-oily sprukiers and circus freaks. In Side Show Alley and the Tent of Miracles the acts range from the titillating and ridiculous to the macabre. Nobody knows what they are getting until they’ve paid their illegal tender and entered the booth. 

But what is certain is that in the capable and eccentric hands of creators Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, experienced merchants in all that is burlesque and carnivalesque, the mayhem and chaos is tightly organized and fabulously detailed. With a slew of visual artists and costume designer Doyle Barrow, they have constructed an evening that is unabashedly sensual, grungy and and fully interactive with the audience. There’s no choice but to be swept up in the seedy fervour, especially since there’s nowhere to hide - even the bar is the site for acts both refined and lewd. 

When it all wraps up with a feel-good, utterly anachronistic 80s inspired finale, it feels way too soon. Just when the revelry hits a frenzy, this motley crew of carnie folk have to head back to their tents to do it all again. Fans can’t get enough of Finucane & Smith’s odd-ball delights. The only way to score a ticket now probably involves a dangerous back street transaction.

Carnival of Mysteries

Melbourne International Arts Festival

Fortyfive Downstairs

7 - 30 October 2010