MASSACRE
- Stone/Castro & Colectivo 84 - La Mama Courthouse - Until
May 17
Local avant-garde outfit Stone/Castro have joined forces with Portuguese company Colectivo 84 to produce this wild and woolly protest piece, where the geopolitics and human rights violations surrounding East Timorese independence sit by side with devotion to thrash metal.
Local avant-garde outfit Stone/Castro have joined forces with Portuguese company Colectivo 84 to produce this wild and woolly protest piece, where the geopolitics and human rights violations surrounding East Timorese independence sit by side with devotion to thrash metal.
It's
worth comparing Massacre to Black Lung Theatre's Doku Rai (2012).
That work, rehearsed in an abandoned hotel in Dili and performed with a garage
band from Timor, bound its post-punk aesthetic to mythic architecture. Amid the
Dionysian release of music, it provided a narrative allegory that refracted the
cycle of violence under consideration through the prism of local legend.
Massacre is
a murkier affair. Its connections are less obvious and there are parts of it,
like the opening sequence, when the show seems to devolve into little more
than a mosh-pit for two. Not that that's unwatchable: Paulo Castro's demonic
energy makes the prospect of him slam-dancing with himself more entertaining
than you'd think.
But the sheer looseness of the conception leaves the audience all at sea. On a symbolic level, the interactions between Castro and John Romao (who appear to embody two aspects of Timor as well as colonial and regional players like Indonesia, Australia and Portugal) are utterly obscure.
The
situation isn't helped by flights of self-indulgence. At one point, Castro
invokes the administrative vagaries of running a theatre company, and goes into
a towering rant that describes avant-garde Italian theatre director Romeo
Castellucci creating a masterpiece
in which he's attacked by dobermans. (Castellucci has his revenge, later,
through a withering rejection letter.)
Such
in-jokes are amusing to those in the know, but dissipate the febrile impact of
the physical theatre and contribute to the feeling that the whole heavy-metal
filter is an arbitrary frame imposed by the artists, rather than something that
arises organically from the material.
Massacre eschews
any easy messaging and possesses a visceral urgency, but it too much embroils
us in chaos and confusion to critique events in East Timor in an intelligible
way.
The
Age – Photo: Massacre by Stone/Castro and Portuguese company Colective 84. Photo:
Supplied