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Sydney Contemporary: An Interview with Barry Keldoulis

Barry Keldoulis is an uncommonly busy man. When we speak, he is almost out of breath, having been run off his feet sourcing panel speakers for the 2015 iteration of Sydney Contemporary, the international art fair.

Regardless, he is gracious in both his time and his answers, and impresses with his almost encyclopaedic memory for the names of all involved.

This is quite a feat when taking into consideration the fair’s participants – a staggering 90-plus galleries from almost a dozen countries, as well as performers, musicians, video artists, printmakers and more. The sheer scope of the festival is all in keeping with Keldoulis’ aspirations for Sydney as the cultural centre of the entire Pacific.

“We’re looking at Sydney Contemporary being a celebration, not just of the marketplace that Sydney is for contemporary art, but also as a generator of contemporary art – so, looking at making people aware that Sydney has a very vibrant cultural life.”

As a man whose career revolves around international communications, Keldoulis is acutely aware of what the world as a whole thinks of our little city. “You know, our international advertising focus on Australia as a nation [is] basically on beaches and leisure activities – beaches and furry animals, if you will,” he says. “We’re looking at ways of showing off the depth and breadth of Sydney’s cultural life, not just its physical beauty.”

Our cultural capital is, of course, reliant on its global context. Keldoulis sees this as a great strength, and the fair reflects this by placing contemporary Australian works alongside those of our geographical neighbours.

“There’s a lot of interesting work going on around the Pacific Rim, and quite diverse,” he says. “But also there’s this disconnection to the traditional capitals of art (or contemporary art, if you will) in the Western mindset of London, New York and Paris.

“It creates an interesting dialogue between all of those places around the Rim, and I think an interesting set of connections and parallels as well as distinctions.”

Aiming itself at both the general public and more affluent trendsetters, Sydney Contemporary places an emphasis on its relationship with art collectors. Keldoulis is emphatic that giving these potential buyers access to international works engages them with that vital element of collecting: the aura of authenticity.

“One of the interesting aspects to collecting in our country is that we are a very young country, obviously that is also home of the oldest continuous culture on earth,” he says. “The choices that young collectors make help to create what we will, in the future, call our culture.

“Although you can see art from all around the world at the click of a mouse, you usually really need to see it in the flesh. Collectors can see the work of our artists in context with work that’s going on around the world, and that I think helps to lead to a maturity of judgement and more contextual information for collectors to start to build the confidence in their own eye about what’s good and what’s engaging the contemporary culture.”

While we’re speaking of context, I ask Keldoulis for his thoughts on the recent announcement of the National Program for Excellence in the Arts established by Senator George Brandis, and how it affects our cultural landscape.

“I’m also the chair of the National Association for the Visual Arts, and I do have concerns,” he says. “Mainly that the recent announcement seems to emphasise one particular section of the arts over another section that is actually integral to those majors maintaining their excellence over time.

“It’s not clear yet what the ramifications and implications of the recent announcement are, but certainly the worry is that the generators of a lot of the creativity that ultimately ends up in the majors are going to be starved of fuel. And that’s a big worry, and it should be a big worry for the majors as well.

“Yes, we want to celebrate excellence, but we want to maintain an environment in which excellence can be homegrown, and so that’s my personal worry. But I do appreciate also that any system over time needs regeneration, and any system over time can grow stale … I think that the biggest problem is the lack of consultation in this particular instance.”

Getting back to the festival, Keldoulis makes clear there is “a very healthy representation of indigenous work this time around” – including at Waterloo gallery Utopia – after concluding that 2013’s fair was lacking. He’s effusive in his praise of host venue Carriageworks and its director Lisa Havilah, this year’s Video Contemporary curators from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and every other contributor he can name.

He’s also extremely proud of the music and performance lineups curated by Emma Price and Connie Anthes of Redfern’s Bearded Tit – so much so that he calls me a second time to list his favourites in one stream-of-consciousness.

“We’ve got Sarsha Simone who’s a soul singer and DJ, a chap called Jake Meadows who’s a male harpist … the Alaska Orchestra, they’re all very accomplished classical musicians from the Con but they create and play experimental music … Jessica Lavelle, a young DJ, and at the afterparties at Arcadia they have Snail performing, which is a female duo that combine beat-boxing and folk music, and at The Dock there’s a chap called Nick Meredith who does a kind of improvised drum and synth tunes,” he says.

“There’ll be a little teaser on the preview day but the big explosion of creative expression will be on the opening night, leading up to the Trailblazers trail of performance through the streets of Redfern to the nightspots – including Bearded Tit, of course – and 107 Projects on Redfern Street.”

It’s a lineup that Keldoulis is sure will help Sydneysiders and beyond “reawaken their senses after the hibernation of winter to all the fantastic cultural life that we actually have here on tap in Sydney”.

Sydney Contemporary 2015 takes place Thursday September 10 – Sunday September 13 at Carriageworks and various Redfern venues, including The Bearded Tit. For the full program, visit sydneycontemporary.com.au.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://thebrag.com/arts/sydney-contemporary-0

Straight Outta Compton: An Interview with O’Shea Jackson Jr.

Picture 17-year-old O’Shea Jackson, the boy who would become the notorious rapper Ice Cube, and the image is one of a young man seething with rage, tired of the daily injustices of life in inner city LA and hungry for change – ready to show the world something it’s never seen before, whether it likes it or not.

It’s a picture that nearly 30 years down the track has been recreated with uncanny accuracy on screen by his son, O’Shea Jackson, Jr. But it’s not the picture conjured up when the younger Jackson answers the phone – his voice is smooth, confident and carefree. After the gruelling process of creating the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton, it sounds like he’s managed to release the anger and get some much-needed downtime.

“I love Australia, we’re always down there,” he says. “We’ve been to Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Darwin’s hot ass, Sydney – Australia’s kind of our second home. I was out there a couple years ago … doing Supafest with my father – jus sayin’, had a couple thousand there rockin’ out with me, so you know, that was really my comfort zone, being on the stage. All the acting, that’s what took a lot out of me.”

That’s not hard to believe, considering the weight the N.W.A legacy carries, and the transformation that Jackson (as a self-professed “rookie actor”) had to undergo to play his teenaged father.

“I went through a little bit over two years with three different acting coaches, going to acting classes and getting ready for the role,” he explains. “And then I had to do crossfit training to lose some weight, ’cause, y’know, I gotta look 17 years old. After that we had about two months or so of pre-production, making sure we got our mechanics onstage right, getting our scenes down pat, changing scripts – we had about four or five different scripts … It was close to almost a thousand days of hard work to get this role, to get everything right, and I’d do it all again if I had to.”

It was precisely this work ethic, along with Jackson’s striking resemblance to his father, that saw him cast in the pivotal role alongside the other actors who would make up the gang called Niggaz Wit’ Attitude – Dr. Dre (portrayed by Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.) and MC Ren (Aldis Hodge).

“My guys, my brothers,” Jackson says, and you can practically hear him grinning – there’s a whole lotta love there. “We’re a very tight-knit group, and that’s all because of [F.] Gary Gray [the film’s director] … We re-recorded the entire album together, trying to make sure that when you’re doing things like that, making sure that each other’s voices sound right on the track or things like that, you really start to build a bond with each other.

“[Gary] would have us prepare for a rehearsal to perform in front of him, and then wouldn’t show up for two hours. At the time you don’t know it, but during those two hours you guys are bonding, laughing together, building that brotherhood that has to translate on screen like you guys are lifelong friends, and that just all attests to Gary’s techniques as a director – that guy knows what he’s doing.”

The long and intimate process would certainly have formed some powerful friendships; add to that, the chance to work with an industry veteran like Paul Giamatti, and it all sounds like a dream.

“The best thing about Paul Giamatti is that he doesn’t know that he’s Paul Giamatti,” laughs Jackson. “He’s so down to earth. He would do things to build confidence in me – his father’s a famous baseball player and he used to tell me how he couldn’t imagine the pressure of playing your father in a movie.”

Jackson has carried that pressure admirably, especially considering the ‘crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube’ was right behind on set as one of the film’s producers. It was a rare opportunity for him to get a deeper insight into his dad.

“I would say this whole experience has given me a further understanding of my father’s realm of thinking,” he says. “He had a lot to do at a young age – y’know, being the youngest in the group and yet being the more responsible one, that speaks a lot to your character.”

Jackson’s time on set gave him a greater appreciation of his own circumstances – working on the film made clear the vast disparity between Cube’s upbringing on the streets of Compton, living among gang violence and extreme police prejudice, and Jackson’s own life as the son of a prosperous musician, actor and producer.

“I’m blessed with a father whose work ethic is legendary. He had a fire burning in him; that want, that need to get out, to better his surroundings, and through all his hard work I was able to grow up in a neighbourhood that was by far less dangerous than Compton. But at the same time, because of my father, because of my upbringing – y’know, it’s all about how you’re raised, that home, how you’re taught – and he had me well aware of the harsh realities of the world. And those who choose to ignore them are foolish.

“Those who believe that racism or harassment by law enforcement or things of that nature only subside in inner cities – that’s another foolish statement right there. It’s all about knowing reality, knowing the rules of the game, because if you don’t, you’ll lose.”

That reality, says Jackson, seems to have remained unchanged since the emergence of the Straight Outta Compton album in 1988 – galvanised by footage of police brutality broadcast over the internet, as well as the Charleston shootings and Ferguson protests, the world is finally getting a glimpse into what set N.W.A off.

At first, Jackson would rather leave the question of the film’s intentions to director Gray, but his passion gets the best of him.

“We want Straight Outta Compton the film to affect people the way Straight Outta Compton the album did – we wanna inspire people,” he says proudly. “We want people to be aware of the situation that they may unknowingly have turned a blind eye to. N.W.A was the social media back then, they were the ones letting others know what’s going down in Compton.

“Every continent has people in power abusing their power, and that is something the entire world can relate to – being oppressed, being backed up against a wall, having others make you feel like there is no hope. And you taking that energy, that anger, that sadness that you feel … and using it in a creative way to express yourself, you could possibly change the world.”

As for Compton itself, which Jackson calls “the jungles”, it’s as much a character in the film as he is, and its community carries the same resilient spirit to this day.

“We had people on rooftops with their families watching us, families coming out of houses bringing us food; it was just a surrounding of nothing but love from the city,” he says, that pride peeking through again.

It’s clear that, whatever your thoughts on the gangsta rap movement that N.W.A spawned, the music has had a profound impact on both its point of origin and the world.

“N.W.A was non-violent protest,” says Jackson. “If my father was here he’d tell you that they were constructive and not destructive, and that’s the same message we wanna embed into people’s minds.

“As long as you are teaching others how to better themselves or you’re speaking to inspire the people, I feel that you are walking in the footsteps of N.W.A.”

Straight Outta Compton (dir. F. Gary Gray) is in cinemas Thursday September 3.

Post originally printed/syndicated in the following publications:

– The Brag, available at http://www.thebrag.com/music/straight-outta-comptonstraight outta

– Beat Magazine, available at http://www.beat.com.au/music/straight-outta-compton

– Scenestr, available at http://scenestr.com.au/movies/straight-outta-compton-the-strength-of-street-knowledge

Holding The Man: An Interview with Ryan Corr & Craig Stott

The thing that makes any film romance work, much like any real-life romance, is natural chemistry – an affinity with another that can’t be emulated. It’s precisely this aura that draws us to one another, keeps us burning with curiosity and fuels our passions.

I’m reminded of this as I sit in the AIDS Council of New South Wales office opposite Ryan Corr and Craig Stott, the leads in the Neil Armfield screen adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s beloved memoir Holding The Man – particularly when I realise they’ve hardly taken their eyes off each other throughout our time together. They share such an easy camaraderie with each other that it makes them positively glow.

“That’s the sort of stuff you can’t act: it has to be there, and we had it sort of from the start of the audition process,” says Corr, mostly to Scott. “I remember looking up and going, ‘Wow, this guy’s looking at me, Ryan’ – you can really work towards creating fully grounded people if you’ve got that to start with.”

This magnetism alone, of course, wouldn’t be enough to sell the heady romance between Conigrave and his paramour John Caleo, the sadly deceased lovers on whom the biography is based. The intimacy Corr and Stott share on screen took months of work in order to make their affections read as genuine.

“We went to the bank as a couple, you know?” Stott says, grinning boyishly at his own recollections. “We’d go get lunch as a couple, holding hands –”

“We’d go to family dinners,” interrupts Corr, making Stott laugh.

“Ryan invited me as his plus-one to a family dinner,” Stott explains. “No-one had seen him in a while and he walked in holding my hand and –”

“I’d had an ex-relationship six months ago and we just came in as a new couple,” laughs Corr.

“Copped a few eyeballs that night,” says Stott.

This is likely to become a more common occurrence in their lives after Holding The Man hits Aussie screens – it’s a potent, paradigm-shifting kind of film with an inbuilt audience of devotees to Conigrave’s memoir. Corr shrugs off the ‘pressure’ of living up to both Conigrave’s book and screenwriter Tommy Murphy’s award-winning play. “In the end, we’re doing our job and we had each other to rely on. I mean, at least for myself, when I sorta got neurotic or worried, I had Craig to come back and rely on.”

“The fact that we developed such a strong relationship was the benchmark,” says Stott, attributing much of their success to the safety of the rehearsal environment created by Armfield. “It was conducive to learning and exploring, and there was never any talk about, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta do this and you’ve gotta do that.’”

That safety is vital for a film so uniquely physical, too – the film’s open sexuality and frequent nudity meant that Corr and Stott’s ‘getting to know you’ work was just the tip of the iceberg.

“He touched me – it was horrible!” Stott cries, making Corr laugh. “In terms of the sex scenes – honestly, it gets beaten around all the time, but it’s just another scene, you know?” he continues. “Except your balls and dick are wrapped up in a sock and you’ve got masking tape in your pubes.”

“It’s like a giant Band-Aid – Craig first came out, it looked like he was wearing a cabbage,” laughs Corr. “You can’t help but laugh at those sorts of things, at the absurdity. My first day on set was sorta like, ‘Hi Andrew, hi such-and-such, so we’ll be coating each other in baby oil and I’ll be biting your nipple, do you mind if I top you today?’ And the absurdity of that is never lost on anyone.”

Particularly not on Armfield, it seems. “There was one day I remember,” Corr says, “we came in, we’re like rehearsing one of the intimate scenes – I don’t remember – and he’s like, ‘OK, pants off!’

“You need trust, you need to innately trust each other, and I think that what Craig and I focused on most was developing a trust, and then… I pretended to like him,” Corr grins.

“I consider Ryan one of my mates – I’m always gonna look out for him, you know what I mean? That doesn’t just stop because the job is over,” says Stott.

Corr finishes his sentence: “We’re not playing pretend anymore.”

And they hardly were to begin with – as Conigrave and Caleo’s families are their living legacies, the rehearsal process had to focus on recreating them accurately.

“You find the essence of who these boys were,” says Corr, “and we had all these hands on deck to try and help us do that. And, you know, ultimately coming out and having Tim’s family come out and say ‘thank you’, or giving us their blessing – that was our job done.

“Scripts like this, stories like this, come along very, very rarely – if we’ll ever see one again – and I think we sorta felt like it was a blessing to be a part of this story.”

And what a timely story it is – with the marriage equality movement racking up a victory in the United States but pushed back by the Coalition government here, Holding The Man could not be more relevant.

“I think very rarely governments actually represent their people,” says Stott, “and there’s a broad consensus in Australia – 72 per cent of the population support gay marriage according to the Crosby poll … it’s coming out in an environment where people are open to equality. Unfortunately, our leaders aren’t, and they’re perhaps the ones that need an education. Love is love.”

“Love doesn’t discriminate,” says Corr, a sentiment Stott echoes.

“People discriminate, but love doesn’t. It transcends politics, it transcends Parliament House, it transcends senators, all of that shit, and hopefully one day our politicians will catch up with it.”

Holding The Man (dir. Neil Armfield) is in cinemas Thursday August 27.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://thebrag.com/arts/holding-man-0

Diplopia: An Interview with Matthias Schack-Arnott

As far as professional noisemakers go, Matthias Schack-Arnott is likely to be one of the most reflective and soft-spoken of his peers. At just 26-years-old, the Melbourne local has been referred to as ‘genre-smashing’, ‘virtuosic’, and a ‘consummate musician’, but you couldn’t tell it from his humble manner of speech. His passion for percussion, however, rings clear throughout our conversation: driven by a desire for invention and exploration, Schack-Arnott is almost singularly obsessed with the particulars of his craft, and it is this finesse and care that makes him stand out.

Schack-Arnott’s newest investigation, Diplopia, is a 30-minute experience in which the young percussionist uses 30 Chinese hand cymbals and an array of electronics to create an unparalleled binaural soundscape.

“There are two microphones in the piece,” Schack-Arnott says. “They’re both tiny lapel mics that are strapped directly to my wrists, so basically the work has become a kind of exploration of sound and gesture and how they’re linked. What I’m doing is working with harmonic resonances with these massed Chinese cymbals – these beautiful, complex harmonic resonances which are each completely unique from the next.”

The musician has made a special point of involving the cinematic notion of close-up in this piece – it’s an unorthodox approach that allows for the audience to experience the deep and variant pitch elements of his instruments with the same clarity as he does.

“Cymbals are very expressive,” he says. “If you move the microphone even slightly, it changes the combinations of overtones that you’re hearing, which would be the same if you put your ear right up against the cymbal and moved it around. It’s quite amazing, it’s quite surprising how rich and varied the pitch information is.

“I’m zooming in on different cymbals, sometimes moving rapidly between different cymbals so that the ear is taken on this kind of sonic journey through different metallic resonances.”

It’s a transportative experience, and well outside the realms of conventional melodic structure. What elevates the piece even more is Schack-Arnott’s adherence to ritual, as he forms cyclic patterns over his cymbals, conjuring and teasing out the nuances of his materials. He’s adamant that such rituals have no particular real-world reference point.

“I’m interested in resonances, the maybe subconscious resonances, that certain movements or performative gestures can have, but ultimately my work is very abstract,” he says. “What I like about the idea of a ritual is the idea of movement, action and those kinds of things having a deeper meaning that is expressing something greater than the action itself.”

Approaching the artform almost as a dancer would, Schack-Arnott’s visually arresting live style remains secondary to his intoxication with sound, especially when it comes to exploring new textures. Diplopia’s “fractured sonic patterns” are partly inspired by the musician’s own lived experiences.

“I’ve had vision defects where my eyes haven’t worked together,” he says. “I’ll see the one object but from two different perspectives that the brain is trying to understand as one image but it’s ultimately two images that won’t really align.

“I’ve got two mics, one on each wrist, and they’re hard-panned left and right through the speakers and a lot of the time they’ll be miking the one object, like one cymbal or a group of cymbals, but from two different perspectives… so you’re hearing this one object but it’s scattered across the left and right sonic fields.”

Matthias Schack-Arnott’s Diplopia is will be performed as part of Supersense on Friday August 7 at Arts Centre Melbourne.

Post originally appeared in Beat Magazine, available at http://beat.com.au/arts/diplopia

The Simpsons: An Interview with Nancy Cartwright

When it comes to professional longevity, no-one thinks of voice acting, and very few people can claim the staying power that Nancy Cartwright can. For 26 years – this author’s entire lifetime – Cartwright has been doing one job and doing it well: voicing television’s most notorious lil’ troublemaker, the one and only Bart Simpson.

Surprisingly for someone with such an auspicious and celebrated career, last year marked the first appearance Cartwright has made at a convention. “I’m fairly new to the comic-con experience – I’ve never been, certainly not to one in Australia,” she says. “But I thought I’d give it a go. I mean, what the heck, a trip to Australia, sounds pretty fun!”

At this year’s Supanova convention, Cartwright will be in excellent company. Appearing onstage alongside her are John DiMaggio and Billy West of Futurama fame, another of Matt Groening’s marks on the pop cultural landscape.

“Oh, I love Billy West! We’re gonna have a lot of fun,” Cartwright laughs. “You know, the idea of being mobbed by tens of thousands of people wanting my autograph and taking my photograph, that didn’t interest me so much, but after 26 years, I think it’s OK to go do this every now and then.

“And then, you know what? Because I’m just a voice, I can walk away from it all, catch an airplane, head home and it’s back to anonymity.”

Bart Simpson’s witticisms won’t be the only ones on display at Supanova, as Cartwright is also the voice behind Simpsons characters Nelson Muntz, Todd Flanders, Maggie Simpson, Kearney, Database and Ralph Wiggum.

“I can tell you this, the name of the game in voiceovers is you have to be versatile,” she says. “They are looking for people that can just do a plethora of characters… Dan [Castellaneta] and Hank [Azaria], they do like ten, 12 voices! That keeps it fresh and keeps it fun, especially when I have a scene where I’m doing dialogue with myself, so to speak, as other characters – that’s super fun!”

Unlike Castellaneta, Cartwright didn’t have real-life references from whom she drew her characters – the voice of Bart was decided on in her first audition for The Simpsons back in 1987. “It was a voice I had actually used,” she admits. “You know, for My Little Pony, I did a pony voice that sounded kinda like Bart, but when I did that for Matt Groening, it just resonated so clearly to him and it’s a simple voice that doesn’t take a lot of effort for me – ”

Cartwright’s voice shifts, and suddenly the person on the phone is Bart Simpson.

“ – to just start talking like that, man. It doesn’t take any effort at all! As opposed to – ”

Another shift, and Cartwright’s voice becomes gravelly and low: that of the owner of TV’s most iconic laugh.

“ – Nelson Muntz! If I have to do that for a whole show, my throat is pretty sore by the time I’m done,” she says, now back in her own Californian accent. “But Bart is really effortless, and that is totally the way to go in acting: it shouldn’t be an effort, it should be no thinking, you just do because you know what you’re doing.”

Thanks to her stint on the world’s longest-running cartoon series, Cartwright knows how to keep it interesting. “I keep it fresh by saying a prayer,” she says, before launching into Bart’s voice – “‘Dear God, hello, it’s me again…’ The writers are brilliant at what they do, and I just say what they write! It is fresh every time I do it; it’s a brand new show, it’s a brand new adventure, it’s a brand new surprise.”

Our conversation touches on Cartwright’s recent endeavours – a successful practice as a sculptor, and a move towards becoming a filmmaker. “I recently completed a sculpture that’s 20 by 12 [inches], it’s of Bart Simpson,” she says. “It’s called The Bartman … [it’s] installed at USC, the campus here in Southern California, permanently in the Steven Spielberg building, so I’m in great company.”

As for filmmaking, Cartwright has just returned from pitching her first screenplay, In Search Of Fellini, at the Cannes Film Festival, based on her own experiences travelling to Italy on a whim to meet Federico Fellini in the flesh.

“I went by myself and I couldn’t speak the language,” she says. “I’m a little blonde chick with long blonde hair and it wasn’t tourist season so I got a lot of attention, and I had this wild adventure! 20 years later and we’ve got the screenplay version of it… we’ll have the whole thing shot by the end of the year, and submitted to Cannes Film Festival next spring.”

Cartwright may have experienced a similar flashback moment as she performed her very own hit single ‘Do The Bartman’ to an audience of 18,000 people last year, the closing number of The Simpsons Take The Hollywood Bowl.

“It was the culmination of, at that point, 25 years of work, and it was just such a thrill,” she says. “Here I am, backed up by about 300 people including the LA Gay Men’s Choir and Yeardley [Smith] and Hank and Matt Groening and everybody in the audience up on their feet!”

With the live spectacular behind her, and now with series veteran Harry Shearer leaving the show, it’s clear The Simpsons won’t last forever. But Cartwright is unfazed by the line of questioning, her history of achievement buoying her optimism.

“I guess I can’t speak on [Shearer’s] behalf, but… we’re just gonna continue,” she says. “I have no idea how they’re gonna end it – I’m sure that they will come up with something someday, when it is all over.

“But I’m not ready to turn in those blue sneakers and that skateboard just yet.”

After this article went to print in the BRAG magazine, Nancy Cartwright cancelled her appearance Supanova Pop Culture Expo 2015. D’oh! Supanova is taking place at Sydney Showground, Olympic Park, Friday June 19 – Sunday June 21.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://www.thebrag.com/arts/nancy-cartwright

The Happiest Refugee: An interview with Anh Do

“You’re recording this on the dictaphone, right? My jokes don’t really work when people paraphrase, you know what I mean?”

The eternally honest Anh Do, as always, cuts straight to the point with trademark candour. Even over the phone, there’s a warmth to his voice, a comfort, as if we’ve been mates for some time.

It’s this friendliness, along with an undying devotion to the model of try/fail/repeat, that has seen Do become a beloved Australian figure, and a success in the worlds of literature, television, art and comedy. Naturally, it seems necessary to humanise the man and ascertain whether or not there’s anything he sucks at – take him down a peg, so to speak.

“Actually, I probably suck at most of those things you’ve just mentioned,” he laughs. “But you just keep going … My dad said, ‘Anh, you know what? If you give it a red hot crack, son, and you fail, you oughta celebrate that because at least you know you’re soaring near the edge of your capacity.’”

Do’s parents come up regularly in conversation – the core subjects of his acclaimed memoir The Happiest Refugee, they are clearly an inspirational force in his life. Nominated for the Archibald Prize in 2014 for his portrait of his father, Do is sure to acknowledge their influence.

“When I pick people to paint, I pick people who’ve had a really interesting life,” he says. “I’ve got mates who have had a good life and I’ve painted them and it doesn’t come out so good, but I’ve got other mates who’ve had a really up and down life and I paint them and for some reason it comes out a stronger painting.

“I started a bunch of self-portraits but I never finish – get sick of looking at myself in the mirror. I don’t have the best head around.”

Now taking to the stage with the story of his arrival in Australia as a refugee, Do has gained a lot of perspective on life. “I had an interesting childhood – it had ups and downs, and some of the downs were due to us being very poor and stuff, and I used to look at that and think, ‘This sucks,’ you know? But now that I’m older and I’m a comedian, I get to mine all of the experience for comedy, so I kind of have a larger well of material than if I had’ve had a really easy upbringing.”

His is a true rags-to-riches tale – decades after arriving in a leaking boat stripped of valuables (and engines) by pirates, he’s now able to recount his rather different travels of late to Italy, as part of his upcoming TV special, Anh Does Italy. During that trip, he and a mate roasted a chicken in volcanically heated sand.

“It’s the kind of thing that would go off in Australia, y’know? All you’d need is for the other end of the beach to have a glacier next to it, and then you can dig a bit in and keep your stubbies cold. That’d be awesome.”

Do’s life has a dual focus: luck and laughter. These traits, and his humility, keep his staged version of The Happiest Refugee buoyant, even through its darkest passages. As soon as the show is brought up, Do credits fellow comic Dave Hughes with the idea of making it a reality.

“He goes, ‘Make ’em laugh and cry.’ I’ve got Hughesy to thank for the fact that this show is so much richer and deeper than my stand-up used to be.

“I painted Hughesy! He’s got a great head.”

The Happiest Refugee Live! plays at The Star Event Centre on Friday June 19 and The Concourse, Chatswood on Saturday June 20.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://www.thebrag.com/arts/anh-do

KiDSHoW!: An Interview with The Umbilical Brothers

It’s been some years since last we heard from Australia’s favourite physical theatre fruitcakes, but Shane Dundas and David Collins are back on Aussie stages with a brand new show that’s distinctly kid-unfriendly. When I catch up with The Umbilical Brothers, they’re just stepping off from a photo shoot where Collins is convinced the photographer is more exhausted than they are.

“Either he was really high or the camera was really heavy, I dunno,” he quips. “Or just flicking the button with his finger was really taking it out of him.”

It must have come as a surprise to two performers who are very used to bouncing around at breakneck speeds.

“I seriously get no exercise outside of performing because that gives me more than enough exercise, right?” says Dundas. “I’ve gotta balance it up.”

“And we really should learn to stretch before a show or do some vocal warm-ups,” Collins continues. “We don’t do any of that. Almost 25 years in and we’ve never stretched before a show.”

“I think if we started stretching at this point, it could seriously injure us,” Dundas says.

Fresh from an extensive stretch of overseas touring, the boys have a wealth of experience with which to craft their new show. It’s news to us, as the performance history on their website hasn’t been updated since The Portal Of Uncertainty opened in 2010.

“We’ve been to Holland, and that’s where the Portal of Uncertainty tends to open,” explains Dundas.

“We spent three weeks in Amsterdam one Thursday night,” says Collins. “And that’s what happened, so we haven’t really updated. It’s either that or we’re just fucking lazy and haven’t gone back to our website since 2010. You can make up your own mind.”

In fact, they’ve been anything but lazy, having now travelled to 37 countries across the globe, including the Baltics and Lithuania. “We’ve never been to Lithuania before and we did two nights of 900 people,” says Collins, boyishly excited. “And that was a hundred people standing in each show.”

Dundas is quick to add, “And there are only 800 people living in Lithuania – ”

Collins laughs, “Yeah, where the fuck did the other ones come from?! They’re already fans because they’ve seen three minutes of us on YouTube, and now they get to see an hour and a half of us doing christy-wisty weird stuff that has a through-line and a story, and it’s kinda like their brains exploded.”

The Umbilical Brothers’ new work, KiDSHoW!, stemmed from ideas conjured up by the gruesome twosome as they worked on their television program The Upside Down Show, aimed at – in Dundas’ words – “five-year-olds and stoners”.

“Your comic brain is always thinking about what the evil version of that could be,” he explains.

Collins clarifies, “What is the wrong thing that could happen in this oh-so-right situation?”

And there are many, many wrong things at their disposal. I’m treated to an audience with Timmy, a young boy the Brothers have ostensibly kidnapped for the show; the voice of a certain very famous mouse who cops at least one blow to the face during our chat; and a recreation of the moment when the boys accidentally decapitated Kermit the Frog in front of his own operators.

“All the characters we do, the fluffier they are, the harder they fall,” says Collins, and the two spontaneously develop a show concept on the spot in which they’re put on trial by their imaginary characters.

“Well, what’s the jury consist of?” asks Collins. “If they’re imaginary characters, we’re fucked!”

The Brothers are convinced that KiDSHoW! may be the perfect show for a BRAG audience.

“It gets a bit sick,” says Dundas, allowing Collins to elaborate.

“We massacre the Brady Bunch, for fuck’s sake,” he says. “One by one. It’s still as shocking as anything you’ve ever seen.”

Even though you can’t physically see them onstage?

“That’s right,” says Dundas. “We’re completely staying away from any sense of responsibility on that.”

The Umbilical Brothers’ KiDSHoW! (Not Suitable For Children) runs Friday June 19 – Sunday June 27 at Roslyn Packer Theatre (formerly Sydney Theatre).

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://thebrag.com/arts/umbilical-brothers

Ruben Guthrie: An Interview with Brendan Cowell & Patrick Brammall

Making a film about high society disasters looks like a hell of a lot of fun – glitz, glamour, red carpets, pressed suits and endless champagne. But for a first-time film director and an actor who’s never led a feature, the task can be intimidating.

This is particularly true when a story requires the kind of moneyed look that a tale like Ruben Guthrie demands, and which an independent film can only hope to emulate. However, it’s a deeply personal story for writer/director Brendan Cowell – which is perhaps why we’re able to see it complete.

“It was a daunting task but it was one I really had my sights set on,” says Cowell. “I didn’t want to give up. Now we’re in such a great position with the opening night of Sydney Film Festival, I’m glad we fought that hard to make the damn thing.”

Ruben Guthrie started life seven years ago as a play, loosely based on Cowell’s own experiences and anecdotes with a hefty dose of creative licence. Now on the verge of the film’s release, Cowell shrugs off his personal association to the story.

“Little by little as you go into making a film, it becomes less about me and more about the actors and the characters we create,” he says. “In no way did I make it like it was even slightly biographical, you know? It was [the cast’s] story to tell. We told it together. I’m a collaborator, I want everyone to do their job and I want everyone to bring me freaky shit and I’ll decide whether it works or not.”

And boy, do they bring the freaky. The alcoholic advertising man Ruben bursts onto the screen in the form of Aussie TV darling Patrick Brammall.

“Patrick’s a revelation,” says Cowell. “He was [producer] Kath Shelper’s idea. He’d been onscreen so much in the two years leading up to Ruben that it was almost like he had his hand up saying, ‘Someone give me a big movie role, I could do a really good job!’ … My editor and I will attest to the fact that there’s not really one take in the entire film where he wasn’t giving me everything he had.”

On the topic of working with Cowell, Brammall is similarly gushing. “It was a beautiful working relationship,” the actor says. “I sort of gave him my soul for the duration of filming and he gave me his heart as some sort of safekeeping.”

Brammall, best known for his roles in TV’s Offspring and Upper Middle Bogan, says the weight of carrying the film didn’t often factor into his day-to-day work on the set.

“It’s just like any other job, really,” he says. “Except I was in every single scene. It took everything out of me.”

Not surprising, as not only is Ruben a very different beast to the affable Brammall, but one at both the peak of his career and on the knife-edge of addiction.

“It’s a funny film but it’s an inky black comedy,” he says. “That’s why we call it a black label comedy. So even though there’s laughs in it, to me the reality of it was finding essentially an alcoholic – so it was a very, very dramatic role to play, knowing that it was real. That was the joy of it, actually.”

Cowell is quick to assert that Ruben’s addiction could be to “anything” and that the film is not an anti-alcohol piece. “What I’m saying is a polemic – I use alcohol as a way of talking about human beings,” he says. “At the same time, alcohol’s a pretty serious issue in Australian culture.

“We’ve got to look at our relationship with it, and I think it’s the best thing in the world to punctuate incredible experiences, but if it starts owning you, that’s a problem. And I think there’s a lot of pretty serious binge drinking going on in our culture that’s not only accepted but in a way kind of [considered] heroic, you know? It’s almost like you’re a legend for behaving disgracefully. And that’s a real worry.”

The director’s statements mirror those of his lead, whose research took him into AA meetings and the lives of addicts.

“[It] was uplifting, strangely,” Brammall says. “These people have come of their own volition because they’re wrestling with something. They get up and share their stories and they listen to each other’s stories, and I thought, ‘If these are the broken people, we’re OK.’ It was a real kind of shot in the arm for me, that humanity.”

Brammall, too, avoids proselytising. “As an actor, I can’t afford to be thinking big-picture about what sort of comment we’re making here,” he says. “It’s just moment to moment.”

Darkness aside, the cast and crew found plenty of joy on set, from stunt shots that sunk Ruben to the bottom of a pool to improvisations with hidden cameras at the Randwick races.

No rest for the wicked, though – Cowell and Brammall are both intent on producing new, original Australian content. “I always think the more we can create, the better off we are,” says Brammall. “Whether we have money to market them or not, we should hear our stories. Local content’s the go.”

As for the name Ruben Guthrie, just where did it come from?

“You can look deep into it to find out what the writer is hiding in the name,” says Cowell. “But you won’t find anything. It just sounded good.”

Ruben Guthrie is the opening night film at Sydney Film Festival 2015 and shows at the State Theatre Wednesday June 3.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://www.thebrag.com/arts/ruben-guthrie

Mongrel Mouth: An Interview with Duncan Maurice

For a man running a theatre company whose guiding principle is to make “theatre out of control”, Duncan Maurice is surprisingly calm and assured. Perhaps one would have to be when in charge of cultivating the kind of chaos for which Mongrel Mouth shows are known, where audience members roam freely, shaping the action to their desire.

As a young company, it’s a risky dynamic to attempt, but Maurice is emphatic that this wrestling with form is what’s needed in the Aussie scene. “I see the proscenium arch-style theatre as quite autocratic, in that you’re told where to sit, you’re told where to look,” he says. “I think it’s a very dominating art form for its audience. I’m interested in shifting that relationship – so what if we let the audience do whatever they want, whenever they want? You can’t just hit your audience over the head continually with questions, you’ve gotta give them some delight.”

This anarchic form is core to Mongrel Mouth’s third show, Like Me – a roaming work set in an asylum that is populated by clownish versions of the I Generation’s greatest narcissists. Maurice links the form to our habit of surfing the net.

“It’s not a static journey; you don’t just sit on one page and stay there and read to the end. You hyperlink all over the place, and that’s the kind of theatre we make. You literally can hyperlink at any time you want from any room to any room, and for me that’s just more fulfilling.

“I don’t know how we do it!” he admits with a laugh. “I just think somehow, we do it. It’s a lot of work… for the last show we had eight rooms going at once; that’s over eight hours of theatre condensed into one hour.”

Add to that the intense physicality of their chosen performance style – in this case, the French clowning tradition of bouffon – and you have one exhausting show for the cast.

“It’s able to deal with such complex social issues but through this idea of play,” Maurice says of bouffon. “It’s almost the perfect irony that the bouffon clown is so savvy but so naïve at the same time. For me, that’s a really interesting dramatic conflict or dichotomy to explore.”

Of course, Maurice doesn’t want the show to be a moralistic scolding of any kind. “It’s just fun, it’s just madness, and I think so often as artists we take ourselves so seriously – and of course at Mongrel Mouth we take what we do seriously – but we also need to enjoy the process,” he says.

“I don’t want it to come across as, ‘It’s really heavy and dark and you’re gonna come and be lectured by three left-wing artists’ – it’s not that at all. You know, I think all really good comedy allows us to take a step, take a breath, have a laugh at the world and refresh.”

Much of the comedy stems from audience interaction and its inherent dangers. Maurice has a slew of anecdotes from when the relationship between performer and audience has dramatically changed.

“On the last show there were two big toy, red, glittery guns in the final scene, and it was basically up to the audience whether certain people should live or die,” he says. “And we had audience members break the guns – it was great!” he laughs.

“When they’re that involved, it’s exciting. You don’t know where you’re necessarily heading, but you’re all on the train together, so it’s OK. It’s a whole new level of flying by the seat of your pants, I guess.”

Image by Chris Evans, courtesy of Mongrel Mouth.

Like Me runs Thursday June 18 – Saturday July 11 at Merchants House in The Rocks.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://www.thebrag.com/arts/me

Fury Road: An Interview with Hugh Keays-Byrne

The madness of Max Rockatansky’s world is not unfamiliar to Hugh Keays-Byrne; after all, this isn’t his first time facing off against the Road Warrior. It’s been 36 years since Toecutter ate bitumen, and yet Keays-Byrne has returned to the scorched landscape of post-apocalyptic Australia in Mad Max: Fury Road. This time he portrays Immortan Joe, the dictatorial yin to Max’s yang.

“He’s not just a dictator, he’s a rebuilder,” Keays-Byrne is quick to assert. “He’s a Renaissance man; he’s trying to bring back a lot of beauty and culture to the world which has disintegrated around him. He’s trying to look after people – he has an outreach program, he goes out into the desert collecting boys and children and ‘blood bags’, and Mad Max [Tom Hardy] is a blood bag that escapes with a traitor.”

Max’s partnering with the ‘traitor’ Furiosa (Charlize Theron) drives the narrative of Fury Road as the Immortan and his War Boys pursue them through the desert in one explosive set piece after another.

“It was bliss,” Keays-Byrne croons in his urbane British accent. “It was bliss on wheels. It was like winning everything at once.”

Key to Keays-Byrne’s return to the Mad Max franchise was the actor’s relationship with director and creative mastermind George Miller. “Basically, we haven’t changed other than that we’ve aged 37 years,” he says. “We both think the same and George is a very open and interested director. He’s got a very broad intellect.”

Where the years have shown themselves is in the evolution of the industry and Miller’s own talents as a filmmaker. With its elaborate design and stunning, colour-drenched cinematography, the look and feel of Fury Road is a far cry from the series’ origins.

“It was George’s first and none of us had done a lot of stuff,” Keays-Byrne admits. “It was very scrubby; everyone shared rooms and we drove the bikes to work. On this [film] we’ve got the most modern equipment on the planet and a huge budget and a wonderful location, [but] it still had the same sense of darkness running through it, it still had the same sense of adventure, it still had the same vein of madness.”

A realisation dawns on him. “I think that must be in George Miller’s head as the actual creator of Mad Max, you know what I mean?” he laughs.

It seems apt given Miller’s choice of shooting location – a crew of hundreds took to Swakopmund on Namibia’s west coast to achieve his vision. “An extraordinary country,” Keays-Byrne says. “It can’t not affect you – it’s a very important part of the film.”

Equally vital was the relationships between the performers – so much so that Keays-Byrne would stage rallies with performer iOTA and the Immortan’s War Boys during rehearsal.

“They’re amazingly physically adept people, all of them. The Immortan is a god, and it’s only by [the War Boys] believing that that makes it true. I can’t be scarier than them, they make me scary.”

Keays-Byrne is equally complimentary of the “very powerful” performances of his colleagues, particularly his female co-stars. “They’re spectacular, aren’t they? The most beautiful women in the world!” he laughs. “A joy to behold.”

His pride is clear when he speaks of how Fury Road has come together, and of its relevance to today. “You can go to various parts of the world and it’s actually happening! There are warlords crashing about the hills and they’re chasing people, all of that’s happening,” he says.

He is careful, however, not to prescribe too much onto the film. “Like a good poem, it’s not really defined, is it – what people get from it.”

Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller) is in cinemas now.

Post originally printed in The Brag, available at http://www.thebrag.com/arts/mad-max-fury-road-0