To Traverse Water by IHOS, Melbourne Festival 8 November 1995

 

 

Melbourne Festival 1995

To Traverse Water by IHOS Opera

At Victoria Dock until Nov 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert on 8 November 1995 for The Melbourne Times

 

To Traverse Water, the contemporary opera by IHOS, is a veritable show bag of extraordinary theatrical images. It is like eating all four courses simultaneously over and over. It becomes impossible to differentiate individual elements.

 

The ambience of Victoria Dock Shed is stunning: ships at dock, a glowing sunset over water. In the spotlit "foyer" the audience's anticipation was tangible. This "location theatre" arrived with trumpeted hype. Unfortunately, the work fell short of expectations.

 

Part one augured well, combining some eclectic musical composition (Indian, Irish, Bazouki) with startling lighting, stark staging, simple physicality and chilling chanting and song. Spectacular machinery, pyrotechnics and technology are incorporated: floating rowing boats, a weird bicycle, a huge mobile Catherine Wheel and a suspended percussionist (a' la Stomp.)

 

But migrant displacement was oddly romanticised in a filmy, vaseline-lense representation of a Greece populated with mystical, saintly figures.

 

Part Two lost me. When they traverse the water to Oz, migrants evidently transform into complete dodos with no taste, indulging in hysteria and unneighbourly feuds. The Orthodox icons are replaced by the stereotypical Hills hoist, barbecue, concrete and back yard.  Didn't they argue, eat, grow vegies and wash clothes in Greece?

 

We have defied this simplistic, false image of Australia, the culture-free zone. We have a more sophisticated, less sentimentalised view of migrant experience now. Surely Tasmanians did not find this so new that they accepted it unquestioningly?

 

The message was preachy, and the whole lacked subtlety, suffering sensory overload with overstated, cluttered imagery. It allowed me no room for individual thoughts or emotional response, leaving me oddly unmoved. In the end, I did not care, which was, surely, the intention.

 

KATE HERBERT