A show about people

As published in Arts Hub.
Friday, 5 October, 2007


Shaun Parker is the consummate collaborator. Despite being only a short time out from premiering his new work This Show Is About People at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, he is still writing the piece.

“What’s really good about doing interviews like this is that I can talk it out, and the things that will come up I will take back to the rehearsal,” he says as I sit down with him at a café in Sydney just before his departure.

This Show Is About People has been three years in the making so it’s no wonder that the Robert Helpmann Scholar has got used to constantly revising the piece and reacting to feedback from peers.

“When I came back to Australia from Europe, I had this piece in my head where I wanted to just do a show that was about people. A piece that looked at the human condition and the duality of life – light and dark, violence and peace, man and woman, freedom and confinement.”

For the Australian choreographer who has also worked as a singer, dancer and physical theatre performer for the last fifteen years, arriving at such a work has been a lifelong journey.

As a young boy, Parker was unable to speak until he was six years old due to a long series of speech impediments. “But strangely enough,” he says, “I could sing. My mother said she would walk in and find me singing all the songs on Playschool! I could sing the words of the songs, but I could not speak them.”

For Parker, this lifelong connection to song represents a starting point for his collaboration in creating This Show Is About People. “I wanted to create a soundtrack to people’s lives”, he says.

“You see, there is just so many dehumanised dance pieces and an overuse of multimedia”, he adds. “I want to start a rebellion by just using people and telling simple stories using performers who simply use their bodies.”

This Show Is About People, which will premiere at the Melbourne International Arts Festival and then tour north to the Sydney Festival in January is a close collaboration between Parker and musical directors Mara and Llew Kiek. Using five dancers and five singer/musicians, the creative team frame the action of the piece in a waiting room with the score intertwining the lives of the performers.

“When my mother was diagnosed with secondary cancer, just before I commenced the first stage development of this work, she was thrown into a period of grief and questioning,” he explains.

“I remember sitting with my mother in the waiting room of the Oncologist’s surgery, and when I looked around at the other families and patients who were also waiting, they too had their own questions – each as specific and potent as the next.”

This close-to-home experience directly impacted Parker’s initial creative processes so that by the time the origins of the piece where discovered the setting was drawing itself to the idea of a waiting room.

Asking Parker whether he had the opportunity to see Swiss director Cristoph Marthaler’s latest work Seemanslieder at the Sydney Festival earlier this year, a piece which is also set in a waiting room and where characters communicate in song, he shakes his head. “I am kicking myself that I never got to see that. So many people have told me how wonderful it was!”

I can indeed see similarities between the two creative’s. Parker, like Marthaler uses music as a core part of creating his vision for the piece. But even though the concepts of these two works are similar, Parker centres his process around the performer as dancer. As well as this, his choice of music, Bulgarian mountain music along with counter-tenor Early music, is far removed from the sea-shanty and 60’s pop music of Seemanslieder.

“The Bulgarian singing invokes for us a sense of community and belonging,” he explains. “One song, Neven Tsafti sung by Silvia Entcheva and Mara Kiek speaks of the Wild Marigold that is growing between the paving stones. It is a healing flower. It is waiting, ready to be found, but there is no-one there to pick it. Many of the Bulgarian songs speak of small tales of everyday life, yet their underlying meaning speaks many words.”

“The Early music is mostly a selection of medieval songs by counter-tenor Tobias Cole and musicians Nick Wales and Llew Kiek. This time it is the men who drive the medieval music, which for me, provides an essential link to religion, to a belief system,” he says. “The importance of the men leading this music, sits satisfyingly in opposition to the women’s Bulgarian vocal songs.”

This blending of dance, movement and music has been something that Parker has been refining as a creative process since his days studying at the Victorian College of the Arts over fifteen years ago.

“I began my work with live singing in response to my childhood experience. I related to its form. However, as well as closing my eyes and listening to music, I was sure I could fuse it with the body, where they would co-exist within the same theatrical space. This led to my first dance work in 1992, at the VCA, where Duane Morrison and I created an original score for voice and piano. Then in 1996 whilst dancing with Australian Dance Theatre, I created Worldes Blis, in which I collaborated with an Early music ensemble and sang as a counter-tenor.”

Even Meryl Tankard used Parker’s amazing gift for music and utilised it as part of her creations INUK and Seulle.

This time, however, Parker is at the helm of his first full length work, and he clearly wants to bring all of his experiences together and strip them right back to the very basics. “I want audiences to feel something. To think something. That’s all I want.”

I imagine that little boy standing in front of the television at home, unable to express his thoughts, but able to sing from the heart. I imagine that that is what his piece will be like… a song from the heart.



Credits
Director and Choreographer Shaun Parker
Musical Directors Mara Kiek & Llew Kiek
Set and Costume Designer Robert Cousins
Sound Designer Peter Kennard

Collaborative Performers:
Anton, Matt Cornell, Marnie Palomares, Guy Ryan
Collaborative Musicians
Jarnie Birmingham, Tobias Cole, Sylvia Entcheva, Llew Kiek, Mara Kiek