Sarah Juli’s The Money Conversation
By Sarah Juli
Melbourne Fringe Festival
Arts House, Meat Market until Sept 25 to 30, 2007
Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Sept 25, 2007
In The Money Conversation, Sarah Juli tosses money around – literally.
From secret pockets in her clothing she extracts neat little piles of US notes of various denominations. She counts them out onto the floor then rolls about on them, stuffs them into her pockets, down her t-shirt, into her pants, drops them on her head or dances on them.
Juli calls herself a performance artist and a dance-comic. She is a charming, warm, snuggly sort of young woman who looks us in the eye and tells us that this cash is the entire contents of her bank account - US$5,000.
Her relationship with the audience is intimate from the moment she enters. She drapes herself full length on the laps of audience members and says to one, “There is money in my left pant pocket. It is for you. Please take it.” She holds out a handful of notes and offers it to an individual. Occasionally someone says no but mostly they politely thank her and take it.
She taunts some people by gripping the money between her toes and dancing away from them until they extricate the note. She asks us, “What is $20?” or $200 or $1,000. People shyly call out, “A pair of shoes,” or “The bike I want,” and even “The amount I owe my daughter,” and “Two grams of cocaine.”
She dances the story of her relationship with money. She replays, in abstract physical form, the conversation she had with her husband that triggered this performance exploration. What would happen, how would she feel if she gave away all her savings? She replaces her feelings and dialogue about money with gibberish vocal sound effects, explosions of emotion and physical reactions.
Juli, with her director and lighting designer Chris Ajemian, have already tested their reactions to giving away cash. We the audience are on an emotional knife-edge as we wait nervously for Juli to confront us, test our limits and out honesty and force us to examine our own relationship to money. Everything we do, see and need costs us hard-earned cash. Will anyone actually keep hers? Will the artist who received her final $3,100 slip it into the handy plastic bank envelope and slide it unobtrusively into the Deposit Box?
Stay tuned. There is another handover of $5,000 each night by the delectable Sarah Juli.
By Kate Herbert
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