Fringe theatre in Sydney is thriving with the Flying Nun by BrandX at the East Sydney Community and Arts Centre (ESCAC). Upfront, outrageous, comedic and thought provoking, their current season of short run productions – 2 nights long – promises a fresh way of seeing entrenched issues within our society if Bonnie Curtis’ mixed media/mixed platform production, LIMITS, is anything to go by.

Curtis opens with a cliché and immediately subverts it. She is waiting for the show to begin sitting before her dressing table in her dancer’s leotard. When she raises her head and begins her beauty ritual we are stunned by the retarded speed she uses for her vocalisations. The sounds are loud but barely coherent, actual words that don’t possess the running flow of the English spoken word. Simultaneously, she pushes the jaw dropping contortions of a person applying make-up with eye-popping muscular scrunches and pulls on her facial features. From the get-go she prepares us to have our expectations challenged.

Using a pastiche of theatrical storytelling techniques emphasising dance and movement, but incorporating mime, voice over, disparate musical pieces and her own sounds she tells a story. She presents us with a body aspiring to the graceful fluidity of dance. Instead we see grotesque movements, overbalancing and distortion. Without perfecting the first move, the creature before us attempts another and another. 

The creature is a grotesque – an alien donning a human avatar but incapable of commandeering it – or a demon possessed – or simply a monster. Comfortable in distancing ourselves from the creature, we are challenged out of our complacency when Curtis in the perfect form of a silent narrator, drags her dressing table with its stately mirror before us. We see ourselves. Overhead phrases are repeated, “It’s no excuse.” Phrases that condemn the efforts of the creature.

A lighter side is infused into the performance when Curtis again sits at her dressing table to play with her Barbie dolls and her Playdough. Her phrases are cute and funny while she toils at improving the dolls and her own image with Playdough. Deep breathing and the clicking of a camera piped through the speakers incorporate a sense of the voyeur in this multilayered performance.

Mostly non-verbal the production is ambitious in the number of elements it’s commenting on. Thankfully, they are all connected by a theme – body-image, the obsession with perfection, trying to please the judgemental and how we are affected by criticism. 

Curtis, herself, shines in her metamorphosis into the creature. The distortion in the execution of barely recognisable dance moves, the way she carries off contortions, spasms and holds unnatural stances are a testimonial to her agility, dexterity and strength. Of the pastiche of scenes, some were teased out far longer than was necessary to drive home her point. They stretched unnecessarily the flow of the performance – its power would have been better served had it been trimmed a little.

LIMITS – SUBVERTING THE BODY BEAUTIFUL, inspired reflection and discussion on its possible interpretations. They all revolved around the same theme however the richness of the pastiche brought varying interpretations to the table. The performance extended itself beyond the theatre.

If Bonnie Curtis’ LIMITS is a good representative example of fringe theatre from The Flying Nun by Brandx, and if thought provoking theatre, commenting on our society by our own is your thing, check out their weekly offerings until season end, Saturday July 17, 2021.

Production photography by Cotis Cibilis