Image: supplied.
Words like ‘improvisation’ and ‘body-voice-story’ usually arouse images of a Professor Trelawney-esque teacher pirouetting around a classroom in a Montessori school or a student production about the transcendence of raw creativity. Improvisation can be a powerful performance technique but the trap that too many performers fall into is thinking that it means unrehearsed. In truth, it is as much a practice as anything else and to avoid making your audience want to roll their eyes into the back of their heads and beat their foreheads on the chair in front of them, it needs to be a means of exploring a story or a feeling with which the performer is intimately acquainted. Thankfully Sounds of Planet SOL spares the audience this kind of self-indulgent nonsense and does more or less what it promises: it gets you out of your seat, singing strange sounds and smiling.
Admittedly, it’s a bit jarring at first. Charlotte Roberts a.k.a. Dr Lala Lulu is filled with an exuberance that she quite rightly states we are taught to restrain. It makes you feel self-consciousness and embarrassed because it’s the kind of conduct that if you were to do it in your daily life, even with friends, would be called weird. But it does something else. It made me jealous. It made me want to join in. So I did.
And lo, as soon as I let go there was a real feeling of release, of letting go of an unnoticed everyday constraint. I wasn’t the only one. Roberts has the energy and commitment to activate her audience and get them all to loosen up. From her first song/scene, we were out of seats and making sounds, gyrating in front of our seats but she didn’t overdo it. She brought the audience in often enough to feel included but not so much for it to become tiresome.
Her next number which I will call ‘The Chicken Story’ was excellent and proof that a story doesn’t have to have a point or traditional structure to be fun, entertaining and clever. From there though, the momentum and depth of the improvisation began to feel inconsistent. Roberts’ use of looping to create soundscapes for each number was consistently good but what went over the top was not always so. Having a microphone front and centre and the looping device to the side also meant cutting off from the audience often and affected her physical performance with the same inconsistency.
The sound healing style number for an audience member was another highpoint but the final number missed the mark. Perhaps it was a result of execution on the night but it lapsed into sentiment. Throughout though, Roberts’ energy never dropped and nor was her ability as a performer in question but as with any improvised work, the real challenge is sustaining the tempo. That doesn’t mean monotonous regularity but a constant creative flow that can build and release dramatic tension. Sounds of Planet SOL is fun and flows beautifully at points, but too often seemed to come up against a barrier which diffused what had been building before it reached its conclusion.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Sounds of Planet SOL
By Charlotte Roberts
The Butterfly Club
Wed 13, Thu 14 & Sat 16 Jan, 7pm
