THE BRISBANE FESTIVAL

An Interview with Robert Gay, Penny Gay and Kathleen Olive

A performing arts festival is always a moveable feast, full of the vigour and vim brought by each year’s director. In 2022 the Brisbane Festival is helmed by Artistic Director Louise Bezzina, who directed the Mackay Festival when she was only 23 and was the founder of the Gold Coast’s Bleach* Festival. We spoke with tour leaders Penny Gay and Robert Gay to find out what we can expect of the performances that Bezzina is bringing together in September.

Penny Gay is Emeritus Professor in English and Drama at the University of Sydney, where she taught for many years, and an expert in theatrical performance history who has written program notes for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Opera Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company and Sydney Phiharmonia Choirs. Robert Gay is one of Australia’s best-known music educators, with thirty years’ experience teaching popular courses at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education and the design and leadership of over 100 cultural tours under his belt.

Penny, what will be different about this production of Shakespeare’s Othello?

I’m really excited about seeing Queensland Theatre’s Othello, which premiered with 4 performances at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair last year. This new production will be Shakespeare as you’ve never seen it. There’ll be major roles taken by Torres Strait Islander performers including the great Jimi Bani, and a setting that evokes the untold story of the TSI Battalion that defended the Strait from intensive Japanese attacks during World War 2.

So not only do we re-encounter Shakespeare’s familiar tragic story, we learn about an aspect of Australian history that has been hidden from most of us. And this illuminating ‘local’ context will encourage us to contemplate anew current discussions about racism, misogyny, bullying, and domestic violence.

Perhaps the single most striking aspect of this timely new production will be the spoken words: not only will there be Shakespeare’s incomparable 400-year-old Elizabethan poetry, but some passages of dialogue between characters will be in a language of the Torres Strait Islanders, Kala Lagaw Ya. At other times we will hear Yumpla Tok, the widely-spoken Creole that developed as a means of communication between Islanders and the European traders, visitors, and missionaries.

Given that a major theme of Othello is the power that language has, and the way failures of communication between different cultures can have disastrous consequences, I think the experience of watching this production will be extraordinarily stimulating. It’ll be a real re-thinking of the Shakespearean tragedy in a specifically Australian context. I can’t wait to see it!

AAnd Robert, what’s in store for us musically at the 2022 Brisbane Festival?

Rather than the usual grand masterwork by one of classical music’s giants, the Brisbane Festival is offering an adventurous double-bill of a brand-new one-act opera by an exciting, young, multi-award-winning composer, Connor D’Netto, teamed with a far from well-known one-act opera by a twentieth-century French master, Francis Poulenc.

Is there any connection between the two works?

Well, both feature a solo soprano – the charismatic Ali McGregor for D’Netto’s The Call, and rising young opera star Alexandra Flood for Poulenc’s La Voix humaine, which, incidentally, will be sung in French with surtitles. And both works use the device of a phone call to reveal details of the female protagonist’s inner life at a moment of crisis.

Tell us, Robert: did anybody famous write the librettos?

The great Jean Cocteau wrote the text for La Voix humaine, which is based on an earlier play of his of the same name; and Kate Miller-Heidke wrote the text for The Call, which is based on a true story about how a single act of kindness can transform an entire life. One text fairly confronting, the other uplifting!

At approximately 45 minutes each, they make up a perfect program, and I’m quite sure that this exciting double-bill, which for me represents the very best of what festival fare should be – imaginative, innovative and challenging – will provide us with a memorable and fitting end to our short visit to the 2022 Brisbane Festival.

Finally, this tour is accompanied by Kathleen Olive, who has a particular interest in Japanese history, culture and art. We asked Kathleen to tell us about QAGOMA’s landmark exhibition of work by Chiharu Shiota, to which we’ll have a curatorial introduction on tour.

While you might not know her name, you’re more than likely to have seen the dramatic images of this thoughtful artist’s work for the Japanese national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Shiota has an enduring interest in place, psychology and patterns of human movement. To some extent, this is personal, as she studied as an exchange student in Berlin and Australia and moved permanently to Germany at the end of millennium, where she explored an interest in performance art with Marina Abramović.

More recently, she has worked with objects gathered from family and friends or that have been abandoned in public places, weaving them together into large installations bound by cotton threads. From windows taken from East Berlin construction sites to thousands of keys to houses that no longer exist, Shiota works to connect objects and viewer with delicate but strong spider-like webs. The results have a quiet power and dramatic visual impact, suggesting that humans and the worlds they create are as resilient and inter-connected as they are delicate or vulnerable. QAGOMA’s exhibition is the largest ever dedicated to the work of this significant contemporary artist.

DR PENNY GAY

Penny Gay is Professor Emerita in English and Drama at the University of Sydney, where she taught for many years, and an expert in theatre and performance history.
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ROBERT GAY

Robert Gay is one of Australia’s most highly-regarded music tour leaders and educators. He has given popular courses in music history at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney, for more than thirty years and has designed and led over 100 cultural tours.
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Kathleen Olive

Kathleen Olive is a well-known cultural tour leader and has led groups to Italy, France, Spain, the USA and Japan for over fifteen years. She regularly offers popular lectures on art, history and culture, including for the Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society (ADFAS).

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