Friday March 29, 2024
INNER GARDEN
Review

INNER GARDEN

February 7 2014

INNER GARDEN, De Quincey Co at Callan Park, Lilyfield, 6-8 February 2014 inclusive. Photography nicked from Penny Miles and the de Quincey website.

Callan Park, Lilyfield in Sydney's inner-west on an early summer's evening is an extraordinary place. The neo-classical sandstone buildings glow golden in the setting sun, birds twitter, humans tweet, selfies are snapped and overhead the intermittent roar of aircraft heading in to Kingsford Smith could drive the unaccustomed ear beresk with its mind-cracking inconsistency. It's a strange mix of heaven and hell - not unlike that experienced by generations of mentally-ill inmates of what was originally known in less euphemistic and more honest times as Callan Park Hospital for the Insane. It's this setting that Tess de Quincey saw and was inspired to use as the location for the company's new site-specific work, Inner Garden...

At the very least it's a provocative idea and then she and the ten performers and six creatives take that provocation even further. To start with, the audience gathers at a nondescript door set in an otherwise blank stone wall. What's beyond it, no one knows, then a young man clad in something that could be an item of experimental medical or interrogation equipment begins a lone and melancholy series of movements on the parapet above the wall. He is lit by the sun - and cunning lighting - and looks like an angel of the fallen kind. Water cascades from the green plastic that drapes his thin body and his grace is unnerving because of an underlying suspicion of torture and misery.

The door scrapes open, the man beckons, amazingly there is a rush to enter. Some hold back, perhaps thinking of lemmings, maybe just compelled to stay with the sad figure on the parapet for a little longer. On the other side of the door, beyond the forbidding wall is that dream and nightmare of childhood - the secret garden! Surrounded on all sides by high walls and storey-ed sandstone and peered down upon by barred but beautifully proportioned windows, the garden is unkempt and neglected. Formal pathways criss-cross the rough grassed areas and where they bisect there are old established frangipani trees in full fragrant bloom. There is also a dishevelled clump of would-be banana palms in one section and a series of modern, raised corrugated iron vege beds in another, but there is no evidence of cultivation or rational care happening. And that's when the shivers start despite the balmy evening.

Wandering into the garden the newcomer is suddenly aware of an odd and unnerving thing: choice. There is no one to suggest where to go, what to look at, how to react, what to do. It's up to you. Looking about, there are lights that confront and dazzle, others that throw glorious colour and shapes, and here and there a human body is revealed. Who are they? Why is she suspended from a rafter? Why is she in the banana patch? Does this one have the best gig - snoozing in one of the vege patches? Various unlikely structures punctuate the garden - a higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of institutional office furniture is identified on the "map" as - ha ha - table mountain. Beneath one graceful verandah stands a long table, painstakingly set for a formal dinner - but don't look too closely, this has nothing to do with Judy Chicago's celebration of female history.

INNER GARDEN

Percussion instruments are also set out around the garden and an improvised soundscape that approximates gamelan - but not quite - punctuate the seemingly random progress of each performer. They are present but not of now; we are with them, but not. It doesn't take an over-active imagination to conjure the ghosts of the troubled dead of this place. In one corner is a tiny building that could either have been an innocent gardener's shed or something not to be considered: massive shovels and a rake hang on the walls, but a tiny sink is hopelessly stained with something that could be Betadine - or blood. In the centre of this room is one of the most plaintive and chilling sculptural forms ever devised, it's an image of nightmare - and also as serene as the summer night.

Inner Garden rambles and allows rambling for about an hour, which is long enough in this arc-less, free-form version. While it clearly serves fans of de Quincey and her methodology and choreographic philosophy, it is also curiously mired in the sounds and forms of long-gone choreographic and musical ideas. This is made obvious through tantalising glimpses of soaring imagination and originality that occur here and there. Whether it would be possible to further develop Inner Garden is for its creators to decide. Personally, I would love to see it taken much much further - and definitely well beyond the understandable but nevertheless stereotypical images of "madness" that it currently inhabits.

Inner Garden is on the brink of something marvellous, but is not there yet.

 

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