Directed by Callum Mansfield
Pro-am production
“Bigger than a swollen walrus on crutches, blacker than a burnt bit of toast, better than being slapped in the face with a soggy cornflake …” Not my words, but those of the publicist for this piece of dance theatre, which had its first run last year as part of Harvest Rain’s admirable Youth Initiative program.
How can a simple reviewer compete with such deathless/deadly prose? I have to admit I knew nothing about Big Black Box , but when I looked at the program and saw that the dancers were called Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth, Greed and Pride, my initial response was that we were about to be catapulted into a morality play, and when the Big Black Box appeared, more thoughts about Pandora’s Box, from a rival religious tradition, entertained my mind, so that I began looking for a syncretic blending of Christian and Greek philosophy.
Pandora, if I may jog your memory, was the Greek equivalent of Eve in Jewish mythology. Zeus, king of the Gods, punished Prometheus for giving human beings the gift of fire by chaining him to a rock for eternity, with an eagle eating his liver every day it grew back at night, thus ensuring the torture never ended. But an even greater punishment for the human race was to come Zeus created Woman! Pandora was a poisoned gift (‘twas ever thus), being beautiful, dexterous and musically gifted, but cunning, bold and in possession of a box which she had been warned never to open. Of course, being a woman, she did open it (haven’t we heard this somewhere before?) and released all the misfortunes that have plagued the human race ever since crime, illness, sorrow, poverty, crime you name it. Only Hope remained at the bottom of the box, and Pandora eventually released it as well, to sighs of relief all round.
What a story! And fraught with possibilities for a director, too. Was this indeed a Christian allegory, I wondered, with the Seven Deadly Sins the equivalent of the evils Pandora released from her box? Harvest Rain is, after all, a Christian-based company. But once the smoke from the dry ice started creeping across the stage, I realised I was in the wrong story, for surely no God-fearing evangelical theatre company would dabble with such Catholic heresies as incense smoke!
And the moral of this experience is that sometimes it’s not a good idea to over-intellectualise and read too much into things, for this turned out to be merely a skilful and witty set of dance routines without any underlying philosophy or at least not as far as I could make out.
There are six dancers, clad identically in frayed black dinner suits and white shirts, indistinguishable one from another except for the short one in a fat suit, whose name I couldn’t work out from the program notes. They perform all kinds of dance styles, from jazz ballet to bush-dancing to tap-dancing in sneakers holding cards with pictures of taps on them, and did some very witty routines with black and white Stop-and-Go balloons, reeling and writhing like the Mock Turtle – or like the damned in Dante’s Inferno or the fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost , bush dancing with pot plants, and ballroom dancing with you guessed it!
Very cute, very well done, and demonstrating what talent there is among young people in Brisbane, so top marks to Harvest Rain for giving them the freedom to experiment.
But don’t read too much symbolism into it, or you might end up thinking that the rainbow swathes of silk at the end are part of the Gay Pride movement, and the apocalyptic lighting is a pre-figuring of the eschatological End Time.
So NB: potential reviewers: leave your erudition behind and just enjoy this show for what it is seven kids demonstrating their undoubted ability to hoof it, and having a great deal of fun along the way.
Choreographed by Jack Chambers
Playing until 27 May 2006: Wednesday–Saturday at 7.30pm, Saturday matinees at 2pm
Duration : 55 minutes, no interval