Turbulent Flux@ Wellington City Gallery, City Cinema - 11-14 Feb 2004

Some friends opened their 'video-performance-music-text' show at the City Gallery's (very nice, very intimate) cinema space last night, and we were there to check out the first night performance. Now, generally, I'm pretty wary of things that are billed as 'performance' - it brings to mind images of loud and earnest acting and/or music students making random noises with pots and pans while making equally impenetrable monologues about the wavering state of their ennui. Perhaps while wearing purple togas. Anyway...

This wasn't anything like that. It was really good. I was moderately confused for the first five or so minutes - the show is one person - my friend Julie Hill - reading a monologue consisting of various people's recountings of lives filled with frequent changes of location: immigrants, an airforce child, a touring opera singer and many others. All this is accompanied by big screen visuals and musical accompaniment, and, as per normal straight-boy habit, I tried to make some sort of narrative sense of it all. But, of course, there was no narrative. Once I'd clicked to that fact, and given up on trying to 'make sense' of things, and started to let the stories just wash over me, it was fantastic.

The stories segued into each other with only subtle changes in the narrator's voice, so a story of immigrants finding their feet in New Zealand would slide into one about an adopted child meeting her real family for the first time, and then into Buzz Aldrin recounting his experiences on the moon. It all added up to a sense of dislocation, a feeling of being removed from the 'real' world: isolated and unsettled. Or, at least, that's what I felt. It wasn't just the spoken words that created this atmosphere - there was some lovely (and, at times, jarring) improvised music from local piano legend Jeff Henderson, who had customised an upright with a few handily placed screws to create a percussive section on about a third of the piano's range that he used to all sorts of weird and wonderful effect.

The third main performance element was a constantly changing montage of super-8 footage projected onto the cinema's screen, directly behind Julie (who, along with Jeff) was elevated by some handily stacked wooden packing cases. The images were of the classic 70s family variety: kids playing, kids crying, loading the Holden up for a holiday (or is that the start of a move to another town?), and, in quite a few cases (as per the still included here), a mum playing with her two young boys. The lads were so much an image of how I vaguely expect my two own sons to be in a couple of years that I was getting all emotional watching it - especially when the mum (again, a vague look-a-like for the wife) popped into view. The images weren't necessarily synched to the words (except for one notable section in which real-life Julie referred to a giant-sized screen version of herself), but again, as with Jeff's musical accompaniment, helped create another level of what I'd like to call 'brain-interface'. Ahaha, yes, I'll run with that one. Watching old footage, for me, always evokes conflicting emotions in me: happiness that the moment was captured, but also a sense of loss for the time that has passed (and the moments that weren't captured). There was one small scene of one of the blondie boys chasing a duck (such a wee boy thing to do, my lads do it all the time) that had me thinking 'what happened before that moment? what happened after? did they have a good day?'

Anyway, I found myself pondering all sorts of things as I watched and listened. Having my own brother in town for an extended visit, as well as the wee ones at home probably put me in a more-than-likely-to-be-affected group - and I got to reminiscing about my own childhood (much of it captured on Super 8 film in the same vein as the images displayed in this show), and the ongoing childhood of my own kids. Racing away, as my brain sometimes does, I had all sorts of happy and sad thoughts - as good as an effect a show can have you, in my book. Much better than the usual 'meh!' feeling I get when I finish watching the latest Hollywood movie-by-numbers. Thinking is good, I've discovered, and this show made me think.

And - my poor description here aside - it wasn't all melancholy and miserabilism (in fact, it was hardly either of those things at all, really - perhaps just a melancholy streak running through the show). There were a few good laughs, although I was too shy of being heard to actually let rip with a proper throaty laugh (an inhibition my wife and other friends who were there obviously didn't share - damn my ill-founded introversion). As a piece that made me think and touched my emotions, it worked a treat. If you're in town (Wellington, NZ, that is) on Fri 13 Feb or Sat 14 Feb, head along and you'll be in for a treat. Just remember, narrative is for squares.

note: Sven Mehzoud's review of Turbulent Flux is here (@ Scoop).
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