She’s a ‘model, actress, whatever’. And in her first Australian gig, her charisma is undeniable

Her music documents her life in the spotlight. Model, Actress, Whatever speaks to the highs and lows of fame. Blackout Drunk talks about the messiness of infidelity spurred by the party lifestyle. It’s easy to understand how her indie-pop prowess draws comparisons to Mazzy Star, as sultry ballad On This Love brings out the huskiness in her voice.

A member of the audience screams her name enthusiastically throughout the show, often followed by indecipherable affirmations. At one point Waterhouse tries to interact with them to clarify their message, to which they don’t respond, and she jokingly responds, “They’ve gone quiet.”

Some fans flew in from interstate to see her, video calling friends and family members throughout the show. A Sydney-based fan is brought onstage to be serenaded with Johanna.

Waterhouse somehow manages to transmit “quintessential cool girl in the bar” energy in her stage persona with a down-to-earth personality. She utters a humble appreciation to her fans for making her feel “so good” and “so loved”.

She’s one to watch as she cements her career in music.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

DANCE
MONOLITH | Rising Festival ★★★★★
Arts House, until June 15

MONOLITH is a standout moment in contemporary dance. Part of Rising’s “immersive and ephemeral” experimental programme, Joel Bray’s new dance creation is nothing short of mesmerising.

The “Five, fierce Brown Women” of the ensemble commandeered the black box of ArtsHouse with resonance and intensity, drawing the audience into a force field of silent protest against colonial violence. The first glimpse we get of the dancers is their hoodies, contorted bodies, woven around a metal plinth, which slowly rotates on a smoky, floodlit stage.

The eerie industrial tones of composer Jack Preval wash over the audience; chimes and church bells ricochet to situate the dancers in a seemingly isolated terrain as an orange glow (a mechanical sun) rises stealthily from backstage.

The dancers unravel themselves from the frame, sinewy and tentacular, and the dance sequences from here follow a centrifugal force, their formation and technique often masterfully elliptical and magnetic. Even in moments of individual floorwork, the dancers seem perfectly spaced, moving at an identical tempo, automaton-like at first glance and deeply visceral on second.

Moments of breathtaking power include when Zoe Brow-Holten leads a kind of mutiny in dance, stripping off her billowy uniform down to Lycra and ferociously spinning into athletic poses, at one point being pushed around on the frame in air splits. She leads the dancers into a frenzied demonstration of strength, as they bark and bray, roll and spring from the apparatus.

The piece finishes rather spectacularly, with the dancers sliding fluidly in purple slime, a contrast to the ferociously punctuated movements of before. They soften into an embrace as the sun sets again, slowly over a tableau with an angular, compelling resemblance to proverbial scenes of women bathing, such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

There is so much strength, contrast and vigour in this piece, through dance, honouring the rebellion of those who dare to take their power back
Reviewed by Leila Lois

THEATRE | Rising Festival
Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare (Coriolanus) ★★★
Forced Entertainment, until June 15

I’ve seen a bit of no-frills Shakespeare in my time. Arts funding being what it is in this country, frills are rare, but never have I experienced anything quite so back-to-basics as the Coriolanus from Forced Entertainment’s Table Top Shakespeare.

This project isn’t no-frills, it’s anti-frills. You could argue it isn’t theatre, either, but simple, super accessible yarning: the complete works of Shakespeare largely stripped of poetic language, each play narrated by a solo performer sitting at a table, using only a miscellany of household items as props.

The result in Coriolanus manipulates scale in intriguing ways. Jerry Killick achieves a reductio ad absurdum that’ll amuse audiences (perhaps in inverse proportion to how often they think about the Roman Empire) and it’ refreshing to see all the toga-clad intrigue gamed out in miniature, like some table-top role-playing session.

Here, the titular Roman general’s a faded trophy cup, his wolf-mother Volumnia a stovetop coffeemaker. The enemy general Aufidius? A big bottle of what looks like domestic bleach. Roman senators? Shiny candlesticks and unused cheese-graters. Scheming tribunes? Two Duracell batteries. The plebeians? Tiny oddments collected from the bottom of someone’s mad drawer.

Killick’s downbeat retelling tends to clarify, and magnify, the play’s social politics while short-changing complexity of character. It isn’t formally contemporised at all, but his easy-going delivery is so direct and relatable that you can’t fail to see enduring parallels – from social inequality to cancel culture, from resentment at the cost of bread to the violent harvest of patriarchy – amid the understated shadow of satire.

Despite the odd needless hiccup (Volumnia is unaccountably pronounced Volumina throughout the piece, for instance) seasoned theatregoers will get something out of the experience – a forceful reminder of Shakespeare’s skill at plotting, at the very least.

And it may be that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps the effect of seeing the entire corpus of plays programmed at Rising might give a more expansive and profound take on the possibilities of radical reduction on Shakespearean performance, and theatre generally.

I only got tickets to Coriolanus, so I can’t say. What did strike me, however, was that this is an ideal format to introduce newcomers to the play, and I suspect the prime audience is probably children.

I remember first learning about Shakespeare, aged eight, through the Leon Garfield book Shakespeare Stories, which retold the Bard’s plays as short fictions in modern prose. Forced Entertainment goes one better by regaling us with the stories, aided by humorously lo-fi puppetry, live onstage.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC | Rising festival
Japanese Breakfast ★★★★
PICA, June 5

“It’s so cold here! What’s going on?” says Michelle Zauner, driving force behind indie darlings Japanese Breakfast. Yes, it’s cold in Melbourne right now, and especially in PICA, a big empty shed in Port Melbourne with uneven concrete floors and unlit portaloos. Everyone’s wearing massive coats and basking in our collective body heat, while cursing our friends at the Jessica Pratt show in the warm, acoustically luxuriant recital hall.

But I’m at a Japanese Breakfast show and thrilled about it. It’s been eight years since they last visited, and since then, they’ve put out the breakthrough hit album Jubilee and this year’s literate, almost baroque For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), and Zauner has written a bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart. She writes songs dense with emotion and pathos, and performs them irresistibly.

The six-piece opens with three songs from the new album, all dripping with Zauner’s great lyrics and the band’s rich instrumentation. She’s in a frilly shirt and torn tights. Saxophone dances with flute as the lights play with the stage smoke. “The breeze carries salt / And sipping milky broth / He cast his gaze towards the sea out / The Winnebago,” she sings on Orlando in Love. It’s dreamlike.

The sound bounces around indie genres. Honey Water leans into shoegaze. Slide Tackle – which she introduces with a cry of “No more melancholy!” – plays with disco. The guitar finger slide comes out for the country-tinged Men In Bars, with drummer Craig Hendrix sharing the vocals, a part originally performed by Jeff Bridges.

Throughout, Zauner’s voice is so expressive and full of intent, and her presence is tirelessly warm and breezy. She introduces Winter in LA as being about “being miserable in lovely places”, a contrast that could apply to the whole set.

It’s not easy to tour to Australia in the ’20s. As Zauner tells us, it’s so far away and expensive (“It is expensive!” someone validates from the crowd). But even with high overheads, Zauner wasn’t skimping on the massive gong at the back of the stage, used only for the chorus of Paprika in the encore. Correct decision.

Closing out the night is a spread from across her career: Paprika and the bubblegum pop of Be Sweet, debut album classic Everybody Wants to Love You, and the cruising psych-rock of Diving Woman.
Reviewed by Will Cox

DANCE | Rising festival
Kill Me ★★★
Southbank Theatre, until June 8

It’s said that all bad art is the result of good intentions. So what about great art – is it sometimes the result of bad ones? Self-serving, manipulative, maybe even a little cruel? Argentinian choreographer and dancer Marina Otero doesn’t answer that question, but she does ask it – loudly, shamelessly and with plenty of self-mythologising flair.

Otero tells us at the beginning of Kill Me that she had originally wanted to make a show about love, obsession, narcissism and delusion. About her ex-boyfriend, in fact. But who would fund that? No one, apparently. So she rebranded it as a show about mental illness. And look at her now: mad, bad and in high demand.

She is joined for the ride by four women, who remain naked throughout the show, and each gets the chance to share their experiences of psychic instability. Then there’s the marvellous Tomás Pozzi, cast as the reincarnation of Nijinsky. His rendition of Petrushka – all frantic hops and crushed velvet – is at once ridiculous and oddly moving.

There’s a lot of talk in Kill Me. Some of it’s serious, some of it’s not. It’s hard to know how deep the cynicism runs. The show is an undeniably entertaining medley of dance, music, monologue and sight gags, veering between raw confession and theatrical excess, but there’s an atmosphere of unreality to it all.

In a self-lacerating speech near the end, Otero lists her regrets: professional compromises, bad choices, a misspent life. Theatre doesn’t change anything, she concludes. So what does it matter if the intentions are good or bad? What does it matter if it’s true or not, so long as it’s fun?

That’s what makes her declaration of support for the people of Palestine at the end of the show so unexpected. Sincere, no doubt, and possibly spontaneous, but dramaturgically at odds with everything around it. Stranger still, she follows it with a half-hearted singalong to Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball. Once again, it’s the wrong song, completely the wrong song.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

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