BY MARK BOSCH, LEAD CRITIC
Mind Over Matter
The Song Company
ARA Darling Quarter Theatre, 20 August
I hadn’t seen any live events for CutCommon in a while, but The Song Company’s Mind Over Matter, which is set to tour seven Australian cities, was a really, truly, very, very interesting way to get back in the game.
In their opening remarks, Antony Pitts (the ensemble’s artistic director and composer of Mind Over Matter) and Leonie Cambage (Mind Over Matter director) echoed my thoughts when they suggested the audience had probably no idea what to expect from the program.
It’s true, I didn’t!
And although I’m usually ambivalent about going in blind, I’m glad I did so here. It’s hard to imagine “expecting” something so aesthetically unique, dramaturgically engaging, and musically polished!
Sleekly and colourfully dressed by costume designer Isabel Hudson for the program’s centrepiece, the five singers and Pitts (on piano and conducting) opened with some zesty arrangements of ‘80s hits including Steppin’ Out, Take On Me, Mad World, and Kate Bush’s beautiful Running Up That Hill, which countertenor Max Riebl lilted through with great sensitivity.
The Take On Me arrangement leaned into the song’s weirdly discontinuous structure, while the Mad World arrangement very effectively extended the disturbed (and clichéd) emotions of the original into harmonic dissonances a bit more pressing and appropriate for 2019.
Excepting an arrangement of Wang Chung’s Dance Hall Days, which served as the program’s finale and had a more easy and joyful character, these ‘80s hits were served with a stiff pathos that really suited the retrofuturist aesthetic of Pitts’ Mind Over Matter, a comic chamber opera in which steely office workers in a near-future cyber-corporation contend with threats of viruses, rogue AI, and one another. They work in a 127-storey tower with only two lifts; surely you’d imagine the lifts being an important dramatic constraint. So important, in fact, that the two lifts were played as characters by Maggie Chen and Pitts, who on piano four hands would now and then interject with announcements of “going, going up!” and “down, going down!”. All the ensuing lift-related comedy really tied together Pitts’ frenetic, tech-anxiety-fuelled score.
Mind Over Matter‘s second act was particularly confusing, though, not least because I could scarcely understand what was being sung, and the maniacal pace meant there was usually more than one narrative thread going on at a time.
Then again, if you watch opera for the plot, you’re probably doing it wrong.
There was plenty to watch, and even though I fell well behind the narrative, there was dramatic, vocal, and pianistic talent in spades to keep me thoroughly entertained. This is not to mention the really, truly, very, very much superb lighting design from Ben Brockman, which shrouded much of the show in what felt like screen-lit cyber-chiaroscuro.
This is a hugely compelling program, and I wonder how it’ll play out across venues. The longitudinally distended ARA Darling Theatre is not a personal favourite, and I’m glad the show won’t be returning here, because as it’s for a chamber group, The Song Company’s work I think would thrive on as much performer-audience intimacy as possible.
Oh, and maybe there was a missed opportunity to include an arrangement of Hall & Oates’ Maneater on this program? Or perhaps a bullet dodged. Mind over matter is, after all, a dangerous phrase. Although there wasn’t too much in Pitts’ score to destabilise the idea’s violent Cartesian legacy, I do think audiences will come away from this program with piqued interest in how matter and mind cannot truthfully be wrested apart. Just watch Chen and Pitts’ fingers on the keys for proof! Or, for that matter (so to speak), hear Anna Sandström, Pip Dracakis, Ethan Taylor, Nathan Lay, and Riebl’s exceptional larynxes!
Images supplied. Credit: Nick Gilbert.
