Maude Davey and Anni Davey in Retro Futurismus; photo by Ponch Hawkes
From the opening political rap song to its dark conclusion, the vaudevillian ‘Retro Futurismus’ provokes the audience to consider, what version of humanity are we settling for?
The Davey sisters (Circus Oz, Finucane & Smith) collaborating with Anna Lumb (Pocket Rocket) and Gabi Barton (The Town Bikes) are joined weekly by guests providing ‘explosive interruptions’. The first week included co-conspirators Stella Angelico, wooing the audience with her lush siren sounds, Leah Shelton dramatically reiterating Laura Palmer’s (Twin Peaks) death through a variety of forms and Teresa Blake brought brutalist performance art to bare.
The Davey’s, Lumb and Barton are moving on from cabaret and pursuing variety, a form still fresh, but not yet mainstream. Now that politics is situated quite comfortably in much art production, this theatrical mix can agitate an audience, reminding us nothing is out of bounds.
There is plenty of politics on show as the pop culture references shift from hedonistic nightclubbing, with Pocket Rocket’s psychedelic hula hooping, to the Davey’s dystopian rendition of Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. There are haunting references to failed social experiments, space flight and Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, to a Laurie Anderson like digital media and David Lynch’s American gothic. On the surface its bright, but the Davey’s ‘Golden Years’ (David Bowie), delves into dark places. This assemblage of spectacles, sampling pop culture icons, is really taking stabs at societies malaise. This is political theatre, prizing open false hopes, sending a loud warning to reimagine a better future before a Goya like time when ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’.
Retro Futurismus delivers a chilling effect. The spectacle of pop culture is really pointing down the barrel to a spent world, an Australian ‘Lost Highway’.
After interval the performance literally tightened, with bodies being taped and bound. The staging, sound and lighting are deftly worked, creating an intimate space. In one piece, Pocket Rocket, Anni and Maude, weave amongst the audience with mobile phones, the video reforming a singing face. Throughout the show the performers moved amongst the audience, narrative shards forming, before splintering again.
Any slight disorder of opening night was usurped back into the performance. And while fragmented by design, I still wanted this futuristic vision arguing a little harder for humans to imagine a better future before it is dragged from our grip. This show captures minds over hearts with its pop culture politics.
Retro Futurismus is looking back from the future to a bleak nostalgic present. This is variety theatre challenging ways we have glorified our view to a fake future, which might just kill us.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Retro Futurismus
Cast: Anni and Maude Davey, Anna Lumb and Gabi Barton, with weekly special guests. ​
Fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane Melbourne
10 to 28 June, 2015​
